Suggestions to be more user friendly (not less dangerous)

[neXib]

Hi all,

Let me start off by saying this is no "it's too difficult" post. I don't think the game is too difficult, I never played the original Elite games much, and I like the fact that there's some risk in big dangerous space. Besides I think these things would bring more people into the action quicker.

With that out of the way. I'm enjoying the heck out of this game, but I started in beta where it's expected to lack some details. Now that the game is released I feel Frontier made one big mistake, and that is not to follow the player along for a bit in the start. If you lose a player now, it's not very likely they'll come back even if there's 200 new features in 2 years. It's very different to lose a player who's never interested in this game compared to one that loses his patience because of what he sees as a bad game due to unfairness.

I come from a background where usability and user testing is becoming more and more important. One example I'll make is that I made a simple form where attention was led to a text that said people needed to register before signing up as otherwise they wouldn't get full membership benefits. Less than 50% registered first. There's many reasons for that which we need not touch upon, but there's many surprises when you think you know how people act. Perhaps the most scary about that is that nobody lets anyone know, they just complain 1 month later after they quit in anger.

So my suggestion for this game would be simple and subtle context sensitive helper text/notices that could be turned off, much like the orbital lines. Afterall who would get into a spaceship with no clue how to fly one. I think this could be in open play or solo play too, so it doesn't matter if they take the tutorials.

- When you go to land for the first time, helpers tell you about the most likely place to find the opening in a space station and when you are about to land it tells you about the GUI showing you which way your ship should face.
- When you get to a star a helper can tell you that with a fuel scoop you can get fuel from the stars for free
- When you get to an anarchy system you can get a text that says this is a more "unfriendly" system and that you should be more careful here, unless you want trouble
- When you are about to purchase something that makes your balance less than the rebuy credits of your current spaceship you could be alerted, having to confirm taking the risk.
- Give some information about power management when it would be beneficial

I feel that the benefit of something like this is that it's relatively simple to implement, but it helps so much for the first frustrations some seem to be feeling. Many of them won't visit the forums, so you don't necessarily know the volume of them either.

Feel free to add any suggestions.

 

[Kramster]

I think all this is covered in a combination of the FD video guides and game tutorial missions
The very fact you are in an 'anarchy' system sort of atready points to the fact that it may be, well anarchic and dangerous
As for finding the slot in a station, target it and look at your 3D target indictor, it has arrows on it
.
The request for a warning when your credit balance is below insurance level is valid and has been asked for several times

 

[neXib]

The point is that people don't look at those videos before playing the game, that is my entire point, people are "stupid", they always go for the simple. But you want stupid people as customers too

Knowing which key to press at the right time in the start of the game would be a much more user friendly way of guiding a player than him having to look through videos. Doing it is a simpler way of learning than looking at guides.

 

[Helvellyn]

You want stupid people as customers too - up to a point. The tutorials are built in though and IMO cover quite a bit of that. It's interesting that you mention UI design because (admittedly as someone who doesn't do it) all too often it feels like it's moving towards making it easy for the beginner to do something without really understanding much at the expense of treating the expert like an idiot and getting in the way of what they want to do (Microsoft I'm looking at you). It would be a pity for ED to go down that route - learning to use something properly, rather than just making it easy to do the basics, is a direction I want to see more of. Perhaps I'm getting sidetracked there though since your suggestion isn't to actually change anything.

 

[neXib]

As long as it's only shown once in the right context I don't think it dumbs down the UI, but it's already quite busy of course.

The tutorials don't mention many of the "Aha..." things. And those are also much more useful to get when you are right in the moment imo. Especially with all the buttons this game actually has.