Test Discussion GU95: Tutorial

Will do when the test server is back online.

How long will it take the server to get back online?

we're getting an improved tutorial?

Oooohh.. updated tutorial..can't wait to test that.

Guess it will be awhile before the test server is unlocked.

hopefully we will be able to test it tomorrow.

Hmm, I don't know what to say. Cool to see iconics jump on the ship, the instance is abit longer but not as boring and dragging as it was before, but it still don't teach the players much about the game, in my opinion at least.

And to add, you removed the most important part - that teach how to counter, how to interrupt. There is no part to teach about this now.
Players will come out clueless.

Ran through it tonight.

1) Superman from the get-go. Iconics show up throughout. Pretty cool. Being able to follow Superman through the ship gives it a more tutorial feel.

2) You start out with no superpowers, just like back in the day. That would be ok if there were some kind of explanation of how they work when you get them.

3) You're not in super-movement mode when you start. And you're never told about it. That's bad. I'd actually switch the ship back to the old layout and have you switch into movement mode and follow superman into the tunnel. I liked it better that way. Even if you don't go that way, you absolutely, positively have to tell new players to press "f" to fly (or whichever movement they've chosen).

4) "You still have your weapon..." says oracle. Was there supposed to be more than that? Your superpowers are disabled but you still have your weapon maybe? That aside, there's no explanation of how to use your weapon, and there should be. Something as simple as: "Right-click for melee and left click for range. Holds hit harder than taps. Some attacks hit one target and some hit an area. Experiment and find out."

5) I'm guessing that on the live server I'm not going to start out with 171 skill points. But I don't remember an indication of how to use them. I don't even remember a "skill point earned, press k" message-- though I've more or less learned to ignore that on live so I may have missed it.

6) OK Overseer time! Gone is the message that skull=block. Really the tutorial needs that.

7) Beating the Overseer gives you level 2 and your first super power. But there's no explanation of what it does. Nothing to indicate what the blue bar means. Your ability tray was empty and now its not.

8) You follow Superman down the tunnel. Like a typical player, he rushes ahead to fight the adds instead of waiting for me. Excellent glimpse of end game! There's no more treasure chests.

9)In the next room or so of adds, you hit level 3, and Oracle talks about your new ability, which you should use against the next group of adds. I think that was maybe supposed to come after the Overseer fight. Still nothing about the fact that they cost power to use.

10) The fight against the lunger, channeller, and blocker is gone completely now. That always seemed like the essential part of the tutorial for me. The tutorial should really cover the basic parts of combat. The barrel room with the exploding barrels is also gone. There are items to destroy, but nothing to interact with other than superman in the first room.

11) more Iconics show up. Spoiler Alert! All 3 mentors now appear in the tutorial mission! This is excellent. They're more or less background eye-candy, but it's much better with everyone there.

12) the final boss fight is now against brainiac. His attacks do almost no damage. You are in absolutely no danger of needing a heal barrel, or a soda. I know you're trying to not discourage people, but this is an extremely boring fight. He skulls, but it's an AOE orbital-strike type of deal that you can roll out of instead of blocking. Or not. It doesn't seem to do much damage anyway.

13) Afterward, in the police station, you're told to explore, but not reminded to check your mail. Oracle still sends you a mask. Checking my inventory, I found I had a few pieces of starter gear equipped. Seems like the tutorial should have told me to equip them, and maybe how to manage my inventory screen.

Hmm...

It is cool to have some of the members of the Justice League help you out, especially the core members. However, this feels more like a solo than a tutorial; I only learned that my powers expand and grow as I use them. I also think that 30 soders are too much to grant during the tutorial when there are boundless heal barrels around; those should be granted when you first teleport to the safehouse.

The first 3 rooms of enemies should have been dedicated to basic combat skills taught by your Justice/Hall of doom leader as he leads you to freedom. Or, when you teleport to the safe house from the ship, you should be told to go to a combat simulator area/room to run though basic combat skills.

Not having the tutorial teach basic combat skills reinforces the mindset of many players that only the leaderboard matters, not skill, in my opinion.

much like everyone else, i am THOROUGHLY disappointed by the new tutorial. when i said we needed a BETTER tutorial, i WASN'T talking about visuals i meant we needed a tutorial that actually TEACHES, you know? LIKE A TUTORIAL. not only did the many visual additions to the tutorial (even with it's lengthening) NOT add any helpful hints or sequences to help the player learn the basics of roles/combat, it took out any PRE-EXISTING helpful tutorial parts. the tutorial stuff might come in later mentor missions, but so far i don;t see anything different about the new tutorial that's actually helpful, in fact i ran out of the station before i read this thread so now i'm going to have to go back and answer the mail terminal. if you really want to see a tutorial done right, just look at WoW's death knight tutorial or the one for monks.

All the counter mechanics taken out of the tutorial is a MASSIVE mistake and disappointment. These are foundational mechanics that the game is built on, players that are new to DCUO shouldn't be worrying about what a game designed in 2010 looks like graphics wise and character model wise it should be gameplay experience.

My kid started his dcuo career when he was 4 or 5... he never had issue with the tutorial, including the counter-mechanics of the robots.
He's actually complained to me a number of times about how easy the game is now

i think a tooltip should be displayed at some point about the uses of the minimap.. yes, there are players that play this game that have no idea what the upper right corner is for.

General Feedback

I actually really enjoyed the new tutorial, there were parts of the previous tutorial that did honestly feel rather clunky and messy, especially the "garbage room". In terms of combat instructions new players either ignored a lot of that stuff and slowly worked their way through i, given you could outright ignore it for some time now anyway; or they simply quit, which is not constructive for any of us. This whole tutorial is also about introducing and attracting new players, not entirely pleasing veterans.

There is definitely a balance to be had between doing what you can to captivate new players, teach new players while also not making things so over whelming that you drive new players away through an overload of early information.

I think when starting to play an MMO you have to be careful to find a balance with this and there has to be a healthy expectation that players will, as they progress, start to use a little bit of common sense and self exploration to learn new things about the game, you can't spoon feed them everything and at game entrance I don't think you should either... With that being said, I'm almost inclined to think the game should have two tutorials, this one at the beginning and perhaps another one developed that could be inserted into the game mid leveling at say level 15, it could be a compulsory mission regardless of mentor where a player is instructed on how to block, how to lunge and how to block break if they haven't already figured it out on their own.

A second tutorial like that would be far better placed and suited to harness the information a new player has already learned and put it to use without discouraging them in the first 10 minutes of entering the game.

Specific Feedback

I really enjoyed some of the attention to detail, the windows that looked down to Metropolis, the really big window in the new room with all the robots and that big room in and of itself was a nice new addition that was really engaging. I also really enjoyed the hallway where you're looking at the Brainiac invasion force and you've added a cool Brainiac spider crawling up the window, that would be cool for a new player.

I thought for a second you'd include the players specific mentor as the primary guide, but upon running it a few times I see that's always Superman, although it would be awesome to have your actual mentor be the primary guide I understand that would require programming and creating several different variations of the instance.

Also the final fight with Brainiac was way better than just fighting some generic Brainiac robot at the end, this was very cool, I enjoyed that part.

At Approximately 7:00 of my video you'll see it took Superman a reasonably amount of time to open the door, that probably wants to be sped up a bit to ensure a new player doesn't get lost or confused as to where they're heading next.

The other option could be to have the player manually open this door, so as to progress, although I imagine you've removed that for reasons I've already discussed where some players simply miss the instructions then are not really sure what to do next, You could just leave a permanent red message on the center of the screen alerting the player to interact with the door, this would also teach the player how to interact with items, which they'll probably need to know in most early content. [edit - actually in saying this, I forgot you make the player interact with superman in the first room so this doesn't really matter]

At 9:30 of my video, I know that it says to destroy the AI console in the centre of the room but it doesn't actually remind you of this task and a new player isn't necessarily going to be attracted to the lightning bolt in the center of the console, it's quite small. This was actually my second run through the new tutorial and the first time I just fought the adds for a while and there was no reminder, perhaps a red message could come up in the center of the screen reminding/altering the new player to attack the console in the center of the room.

Recommended Automatic Stat Point Allocation

I notice that a players weapon points are not automatically allocated and there is no messaging around this at all, I notice on live server when running the tutorial a player is automatically granted 10 stat points, I wonder if perhaps a good idea is to automatically allocate these to weapon attacks when a player first loads in as they'll have no idea how to allocate these unless purposeful messaging is put in place or when they eventually figure it out a bit later in game.

A failure to do this, although not horribly detrimental, will limit their weapon attacks quite a bit unless they're automatically placed. They're not really needing to be placed elsewhere at this early stage in the game so I see no issue with automatically allocating them to weapon moves in the first instance.

Conclusion

Overall generally speaking I felt the tutorial felt a lot smoother and I think would be more streamlined for a new absolutely inexperienced new player to simply get a quick taste of the game and then move on to the main leveling story missions. I enjoyed it overall and found it to be far more engaging generally speaking than the previous tutorial, a lot of improvements in my opinion except for the feedback points I've outlined above.

https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Death_knight_quests i couldn't place this in a prior post, so i'll leave it in this one. this is what i meant when i asked for a better tutorial, one which walks a player through the steps but allows for some trial and error in the step by step process. the thing i like about WoW'S race/class starting tutorials is that they are tiered and walk the player through their class and or race's abilities one at a time and truly demonstrate them. i agree with proxy star, while the brainiac ship shouldn't be too over whelming, the mentor missions from 2-28 would be an excellent place to put an extended tutorial or even just a mandatory one post 30.

Something I forgot to comment on is character creation. The names of the body types are different. Gone are brute and striker... now we have large and athletic. What would really be good here is a height meter or something obvious to compare the size of your character to. Edit: maybe your mentor standing next to you?

The new skins REALLY jumped out at me. I instantly noticed how good they looked, and I wound up staring at all the inspired-by options for various body types. They look good, though for the female Mera ones I think that yellow lips are maybe a mistake.

I must say that the new on ship tutorial is an terrible disappointment. First it feels way less fun because of the changes made that have you meet superman from the start and have him lead you through the place. it was way better the way it is currently with only oracle and then you meet superman at the end and he helps you fight all those robots then. It feels way less epic and fun, than it did before when your character managed to get to the end by yourself fighting alone against Brainiacs machine things. Before it felt like an display of how cool and though your characters were while learning the game. Now it feels like the game says this way little kid we will help you through this super dangerous place. My character feels way less cool after the new tutorial and made me want to not test the other leveling changes after it because of how uncool my character felt after completing the new tutorial. And it is also no longer an tutorial you are no longer actually taught anything about how to play the game at all, whatsoever.

MY Ideas: if you want to update the on ship tutorial. keep it as it is on live right now, but change the last boss robot to be Brainiac like on the test server. and keep the windows that actually show you the outside of the ship, and maybe have the last fights be with your actual mentor, but otherwise it would be way better both in learning you to play the game and in feeling like an strong super hero or villain if you just tweak bits and pieces of the current one based on my suggestions than if you change it as completely as you have currently done on the test server.

The tutorial is obviously nicer looking. However, whoever removed the counter mechanics tutorial from the tutorial made a HUGE mistake. Players need that so they understand that there is countering in this game. PVE and PVP. Yes, Daybreak has ignored PVP sadly but still, countering is a key mechanic to many aspects of PVE and should be included in the tutorial so players at least get a taste of it and understand that they can't just button mash their way to victory as the game gets harder. Sure, you can button mash your way to Level 30 while half asleep and still succeed but once a player starts raiding and getting into the higher levels of the game they are going to be a little lost when their team mates tell them to block the lunge, lunge the interrupt-able attack, or don't block against the block breaker.

So overall, the tutorial is pretty but not a very good tutorial. It is literally, follow Superman, left click your mouse a bunch of times, leave the Brainiac Ship.

Just using your footage to give feedback.

1:52 - Says to use weapon to clear debris. No on screen message is shown that square and triangle (or pc clicks) are how you attack. That needs to be there for every new command like blocking or using a powerset ability. Let them spam square and or triangle for the beginning adds.

P.S. - Also agree with the auto skill point allocation for all weapon combos so that new players can test them on the ship.

2:40 - Brianiac Overseer has low health. I'd recommend buffing it and using this fight to introduce players to combos. Start him off with a shield that requires 3 weapon combos to be performed that knock it off, and then you can lower his health. Something like:

Oracle: "It's an Overseer. They have a strong shield that stops them from taking damage. Do weapon combos to do increased damage to break it."
*on screen message*
- Hold Square/click to do a weapon combo after performing 1 or more taps. -
- There are multiple combos for each weapon so experiment. -

3:40 - 4:20 - Having a large room of adds just to spawn extra adds at the door is too clunky in a small space. Get rid of the adds at the door.

4:54 - Have the Arachnid's do one skull attack each at the start that damage you for 30% of your health. Give them a little more health.
Oracle: "You've taken a lot of damage, look nearby for an orange health barrel. You can break it to heal yourself up."

5:17 - Brainiac theme base item pack. Dormant drones base item. Several dormant drones as sparring targets for league halls. City view wall base item. 7:36 - giant ship in the middle base item. eradicator and arachnid drone base items. Brainiac themed weapon style base items.

6:50 - I felt that after watching this fight, this should've been the end of the ship section for the most part.

7:39 - This was the old counter room that now does nothing. From this point until 10:06 is non-benefitial add fighting. Move Brainiac into the room at 7:39 to teach counters and boss mechanics.

Brainiac scripting:
- Change the meteor skull attack. Have him skull and start channeling with the destination icon under the player (have it a wide area though and several meteors.
Oracle: "He's about to do a strong attack! Block or roll out of the way!"

Have the skull attack damage the player for 40% health so if they don't avoid it, they are punished a good amount and this would be a reminder to go to health barrels to heal up when possible. This allows a player to be reckless for 2 phases tops. Even if it doesn't kill them, they learn that not blocking strong aoe moves is going to get their health chunked early on.

10:25 - Change this mechanic to a block check 1shot. When he starts:
Oracle: "It's Brainiac's strongest attack, you'll die if you don't block it!"

Give him actual weapon combos and not taps. Make him block, bb, etc. like regular bosses.

Actual fight play out:
- Brainiac starts -
He has a shield on him. He starts doing melee weapon combos with weapons other than Hand Blasters or Dual Pistols, so that the 2nd phase described below can actually work properly.
Oracle: "Block his weapon combo to knock him down and break his shield. You'll gain a temporary shield after knocking him down."
- 25% health depletes -
He adds the meteor skull attack into the mix.
After the first meteor, he comes back with melee taps showing the yellow strips around him, going into block break's afterward.
Oracle: "He's trying to fake you out, don't block him, lunge and knock him down!"
- 25% health depletes -
Brainiac goes into turtle mode and does melee weapon taps and starts blocking alot.
Oracle: "You have him on the defensive, do a hold range attack while he's blocking to knock him down!"
- 25% health depletes -
Add a slight damage absorption shield here to make him slightly tankier.
Do the 1shot mechanic where they have to block once.
Have him behave as a regular boss for the rest of the fight.


Overall, cut the add fights and improve the teaching and informing parts of the tutorial. A new player after running this should be able to:
- do a weapon combo
- block regular weapon combos
- block break blocking opponents
- lunge enemies doing ranged attacks
- move around to avoid boss aoe attacks or block them
- learn that skull moves are dangerous
- know that weapon combos do more damage overall than spamming taps
- use health barrels


There are TWO GLARING ISSUES RN with the current tutorial.
1. As others have said, without teaching countering, you are condemning every tank to fail when they get to actual content in the tiers. Hitting random powers only works so long. They should at least learn how to counter now so that they can practice while ranking up. When they have access to Area 51, that would be a good time to teach them how to pull adds, rotate defensive powers, etc. (I said a long time ago to teach support roles in the alert, let them know what stats they need, what they're responsible for, etc.) Not showing how counters work is also going to have people wondering why they're being knocked down in pvp matches randomly.

2. The ship and the rank up missions give new players the belief that weapons and powers work together in a complimentary way. The issue is that, that's a hybrid playstyle, which is significantly behind other playstyles in damage out. When they rank up and start playing with other members of the community, they're going to completely abandon that way of playing and have to start from scratch or go to youtube. If they knew they were going to be forced into WM or PftT from the start, that would've been extra time for them to try things out.