Originally posted by TheChoccoBiccy09:
Originally posted by Shurenai: We're talking maybe 5 dozen posts from different people tops who haven't caught onto it, out of a hundred thousand people on average (Out of 10,000,000+ owners of the game, even.) 0.06% of the population has this problem. Not even a tenth of a percent. Even less if you count every owner of the game.
And the majority of the people that have had this issue have been people with THOUSANDS of hours in the game already; Who come from past alphas when this icon system didn't exist. There's going to be a learning curve when approaching all the new things with all that old knowledge in their mind.
Lay off on the 'tude, dude. It is not as much of a massive dramatic problem as you keep trying to make it out to be.
Edit: And just to be clear, NO ONE has disagreed with the idea that something like an ingame tooltip or journal entry would be useful. Noone has said the icon system is perfect- But frankly, It is as close to perfect as one can get. Because every single thing in the entire universe is going to not make sense to someone, somewhere, at some time; You literally can't avoid it.
Someone invariably will not recognize something for it's intended purpose upon first encounter, regardless of how good the design is. That they have this confusion/lack of recognition pared down to a fraction of a fraction of a percent is astonishing, imo.
I’m just wondering where you got them statistics from Shurenai, has there been a poll or is it just an educated guess? It’s not like all players of 7DTD actually use the forums on steam, in fact I think it might be 10% or lower that use these forums. Anyway I completely agree with you on how if something is implemented it won’t be perfect and not everyone will agree on it, I just think that making it clearer would help that supposedly 0.06% of players, since I do think the open book and closed book symbols are VERY similar and can easily be missed
I do agree that it could be a bit clearer. I liked your suggestion in the other thread of making it green and red check marks for example. Or to add in a journal entry; Or to add a tooltip..Any number of possible improvements. I just also strongly contend that it is not nearly as much of an issue as that person is trying to make it out to be.
It is an educated guess, but it's backed by statistics of player counts and such. There's an average of 20k~ players at any given time over the course of the month, with peaks close to 40k; This isn't unique users but just any amount of random players from the total list of 10+million owners.
Educatedly, We can assume/conclude it is not the exact same 20-40k people playing this at any one time over the course of every month; Out of 10+million owners that's just incredible unlikely. (Edit: Sleeping alone pretty much precludes this- You'd need at minimum 3 shifts of 20-40k~ people to have 20k~ people online at any given time. Then you add in work and other stuff...the total count of unique individuals, in general, goes up the more you factor in)
People have schedules though, so it's very likely that the total unique user count monthly is at the very least in the ballpark of 50-150k; I chose 100k to be fair. But this is still probably lowballing it considerably
The average and peak numbers are just that, average and peak; Not unique users. It could be all 10,000,000 players playing monthly, and so long as no more than 40k are on at one time, and the average players at one time is low enough that the average doesn't rise, there wouldn't be a difference in these numbers. If we assume even 10% of the owners play this game once in awhile, it's still 10x my estimate.
And of course, you are right- Forum activity is indeed a fraction of the total playerbase.
As an example, if we take the 10% of 10 million mentioned before; Even if just 1% of the one million use the forums, that's still 10,000 players; And we've still only got at most 100 'complaints' (Which have, almost all, been just people asking if there was a way to tell if you'd read a book that they'd overlooked; and not actual complaints) 100/10,000= 1% -- And 100 is being overly generous. There's all of 3-5 topics of this on the forum, of which the unique count of people who said "oh wow i didn't notice this" is maybe 2-3 pages of comments at 15 a piece. Most of these threads have been people discussing whether it needs improvement or telling the OP that there is in fact a way.
As to the "newbie" vs "oldbie" count, it's just based on what I've seen crop up in topics like this one- I've seen maybe 3, 5 tops, newbies say "oh wow i didnt know this" out of that 30-100 users; so oldbies having issues recognizing the icon, at least in the vocal minority, is the majority.
So hope that clears up any question you had regarding the numbers chosen. Hope I explained it all well enough- rather tired atm.
Just to restate though- I do agree it could use a bit of polish. It's not perfect- But it's not unintuitive; The system works 100% as intended without much confusion at all
once you know about it; The issue lies in finding ways of making people aware of the extant system.
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