about 3 years ago - Ev1n_NA - Direct link

Thanks for the reminder.

This is a REALLY interesting point and a fairly good analysis. I would love to eventually have a shipopedia inside the game client directly. However, the problem here isn't that it's not there, but what you yourself mention at the end of your post. Some of the types of player we are talking about - who "should learn the game" - actually do not really care about those aspects and aren't sufficiently curious about them. It's not part of their gameplay motivation to "learn about mechanics", because they are already "having enough fun". Yes, putting this information inside the game makes it more convenient and therefore removes some of the entry barrier (makes required effort/motivation lower), so we would catch some players with that, but it won't solve the overall problem. At the same time it is very resource intensive, so we've been prioritizing other solutions over that for now. The type of player that you mention "likes to look up this type of info" is characterized by enough motivation (as a generalization) to look it up in a browser tab as well, on the wiki or a third-party resource.

We've been trying to do that for the last 5 years and tested multiple tutorials over time, but none of them really did the trick of bridging the gap between the extremely simple concept of angling and the ability to predict an average outcome by the player, based on the specific set of conditions like which specific ships are fighting, what the range is, what armor layouts they have, which ammo is being used etc. We did A/B testing on multiple prototypes, implemented some, scrapped most. It seems like we should just stop the game and give people a 20-30 minute video to watch (preferably classic Fallout\US 50's style) where we show examples of what happens in some of the most common situations. The problem is that we don't want to do that, because that might actually break a part of the acquisition funnel of the game, since it might be too strong a break in the "fun, shooty boat" early onboarding experience for some players. "Early" also lasts longer or shorter for different players.

Bottom line is that even now we have a small design team working on tutorial concepts for different parts of the game. As with everything, we'll evolve into enough of a web of tutorial elements that will be "just enough" over time.

That is a legitimate concern, though not the biggest one. If we figure out the mechanics of tutorial stages, updating them is "just workload" which we can plan for.