The New User Experience (Landmark)

Warning: this is probably going to be a TL;DR.

I'm guessing that the choices above are the top 5 things you saw from the feedback. While I went with 'clear, established goals', I can see where trying to do all of this at once could get quite cumbersome. Understanding this is Alpha and knowing that this is still fairly rough, I appreciate the opportunity to give my thoughts. I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who has never used any kind of building tools at all. I'm also not saying we should 'easy button' this at all. This is such a different (to me and anyone who had never worked with tools like this) concept that it can be very daunting. Once you get the hang of it, however, Oh My!

The order I would work on this list is:

1. Establish the goals - Show folks what they are doing. Need resources, need better tools for harvesting, need to work toward the additional building tools and need stations of your own. While a new person is following along with the 'story line', make sure the controls are more intuitive and are customizable.The controls go hand in hand with the explanation of what you will be doing. These things should come first.

2. Show all the resources that can be harvested with the available tools from the start. Give an example of what you can't harvest - and a quick explanation as to why. This will help to reinforce why you need better tools. This is going to be trickier when everything is underground and there won't be node glimmering from the distance so that needs to be taken into consideration for later, as well. Or developed might be a better word. Once that shift is made, the 'tutorial' for how to find resources would need to be updated.

3. Building in general needs to be streamlined and/or explained better. Also, a hot key with a cheat sheet for all the commands in game would be very nice. Also, while you don't NEED the other tools, they do make building substantially faster and more fun. Getting the tools into the game / accessible sooner would assist in getting to building faster (and some folks are more "I just want to build things" vs. "I want to find all the ore!") Examples of clarification would be:
a. Understanding that the line tool is great for either a quick, single voxel straight line placement AND a larger voxel slope will cut down the amount of time for the 'learning curve' aspect.
b. Clarify that the selection tool is amazingly powerful and works with most of the other tools you have or will make.
c. Explain about templates. Right now, my understanding is there is a limit of voxel storage space per person. This is across all templates you make. If you hit this limit and don't realize it, you could have to rebuild something that took a long time. (I just make sure it saved before I delete the prototype, right now).
d. Paint tool works with the environment if you use alt.
e. All the commands you can use with the different tools. I like that it's already been stated that a unified use of the tools is coming. This will make things much simpler to maneuver and manipulate the tools while building.
f. While the smooth tool needs some finesse, it does make things smooth. It also 'shrinks' items and then they don't react any way you think they should afterward. Not sure if this is intended or a neat side affect. However, once you play around with it you can make some really cool things! I have a hard time understanding how the voxels mesh together still (is that the right term?) so I can't predict what will happen when I smooth something down and attach it to something else. That's part of the fun for me.

4. After all that, then give us some more customization. Now, if we are going to have only humans and no other races, a lot of customization so we don't all look alike. (Clothing options will help with this also). If other races are going to be added in at some point, then not so many options across the races will be needed; this isn't to say to stick with the 3-5 options we have available currently if there are more races added. *grin* People like individuality as much as possible. While the creations will be unique and varied, character creation assists in the immersion of the game world and can help to get into the mindset for creating.

Just my 2 cp. I am enjoying building things and stretching my creative side to include 3 dimensions. Looking forward to the changes and how things change from where they are now. Thanks for reading.

More character customization options

When I get any new online game, the first thing I'm excited for is making my character. I put a lot of thought into this process. If the game has weak character customization, I find it a huge turn off and will likely lose interest in the rest of the game quickly. I'm happy to work the other elements out on my own. WoW had terrible character customization and it was the nail in the coffin for me. I'm hoping EQN/EQNL will have a vast array of choices so my character can look unique.

Voted for more customization. I don't think that any MMO has ever given us too much.

What I've seen cause players both new and old more stress than anything else is the fear of making wrong character choices. Deity implications in EQ1 would be an example. It's fine if we need to make hard decisions at character creation or in our first EQL and EQN sessions but make them informed decisions.

I think the clear goals would get the players involved more quickly. Just a quick series of minit-quests: dig some copper, chop some wood, craft a copper pick would lead them through the most basic functions and make them aware of the variety of things to do.

Or, down the road, instead of making the copper pick, step through gathering the materials to make the claim flag.

Better controls would be nice, but most of what I needed was in the the tutorial FAQ. (Would have been nice to have a link to that on the launch screen maybe...)

Character customization is nice, but that does not on its own lead to better engagement. The "prettiest" character in the game is still useless if the player doesn't know what to <do>.

Better identification of resources and improvements to crafting are also nice, but if you haven't discovered the basics yet, they're not going to mean much.

THE JOURNAL SYSTEM is one of the most interesting elements I've seen teased in previews for EQN. Here's how I'd like to see it used to create a perfect new user experience:

1) The first quest chain should take you from having nothing to having a claim with a stone forge ASAP. This is where the game actually begins. You should have specific goals, like mine 1000 copper, that congratulate you when you are finished and give you the next quest in the chain to complete each of the requirements for building a forge.

2) Choosing your OWN GOAL should be the very next thing you do. The system should break that goal down into a quest chain and give you specific objectives which lead you toward the goal one step at a time. For example, if you chose a crafting table as your next goal, you should have a quest for burled wood, then a quest for stone, then a quest for copper, etc. leading you towards your own goal in small steps.

3) You should be able to set any craftable item as a goal, and the system should generate a series of quests that guide you toward that goal. You should never be required to use this Journal System, it should be there to make the openness of EQN seem simple and inviting.

Since this is for landmark I guess it would be the Clearly established goals, for the first couple of minutes. As most MMO players will be totally new to this style of game. Minecraft people might know what to do. The rest of the MMO community may be totally confused by the main goal being to collect resources so you can build.

It might be easier for most MMO fans, if the first things you do is kill rats, and collect pelts for resources to build a tent

Where is the "all of the above" option when you need it? hehe

Honestly?

All of the above.

Maybe a quick tutorial showing you how to move your camera, how to move in the world, where to go to craft, and what sort of tools are available would be helpful for some players.
For example, when you first log in, there's a quick popup telling you how to move, and then a "quest" or lit object to click on (like the forge at the portal). When you click on the forge it shows you the different tools you may want to make (a copper axe, a better pick, or a forge for your own claim). Then a glowing trail (like in EQ2) leads you to your first vein of ore and shows you how to mine.

But other than being shown/told how to move my camera, and being able to customize my character a little more, there wasn't really anything else I personally needed direction with.

I knew it would be a sandbox MMO, and I knew that it was all about exploration and crafting, so that's what I did. I equipped my Founder's Pickaxe and I went to town! Then, eventually, I wandered back to the forge and looked at how much I would need of which materials to start upgrading my gear and making my own crafting tables.

Well, since there's so much we can do in landmark, why not just go all out with character customization? Oh, and there definitely can be too much freedom, but there are ways in which you can give a hell of a lot of it. I'm not expecting any of this, but these are ideas I've been brainstorming about over the past 8-9 years.

My wish-list of customization:

Character:
-Character height, build, facial features, proportion scalers by muscle group (pectorals, forearms, biceps, triceps), shoulder width (this might make armor fitting a bit annoying)
-Customizable hair (you could have some pre-made, scalable, rotatable hair pieces and pieces that you just put together onto your character's head to make your own hairstyle)
-Customizable armor (again, start with premade pieces that you simply rescale)

Weapons
I had an idea, a very long time ago for a weapons and armor system, and this would be the perfect game to implement it.

Your weapon would have "physics" based on its shape. That is, you calculate the amount of time it takes to swing it based on the total torque it takes to move it, and you calculate the swing range based on the length. That is, you would still have some stock animations just take different speeds to swing, and have the damage output changed based on how you swing.

So, you build strength and you can swing bigger, longer items faster.

As for crafting them, you get preset pieces (looks like thats sort of what is happening) and various ornaments/decorations that add stat value, as well as color. So, crafting then gives you a sales advantage if your are a good artist.

More in depth design:

Different preset handles and "business-ends" (i.e. the blades, hammer heads, axe heads, staff crystals) change the way the weapon is used. Maybe you put a big claymore blade on the end of a halberd: no one can use it because it is too heavy. Putting an upper limit prevents silliness.

Using pre-made pieces also allows you to prevent any phallic looking weapons (thought, I'm expecting to see at least a bit of that in EQN when live hits).

Finally, materials/enchantments would modify damage output and density calculations affecting swing speed, the force at impact affecting the damage.

Armor

This is something I've thought about and I think it might still be fairly difficult since a piece of armor has to be useable on any race, and on any character with dramatically different proportions.

So, my thought on this is that you could have pieces of things that you stick onto armor (like spikes and gems), but the main pieces of armor are pre-made pieces that already scale properly.

Player Fortress/Housing

Since you need to keep a set theme, in EQN perhaps you don't get the massively open customization tools from Landmark, but you could get a lot of pre-made pieces, and players entering competitions in EQN could be put to the task of designing modular components and set pieces which you can purchase in the game to build your house/fortress.

That is, if the actual map is large enough to allow for it. I don't like phasing/zoning, so if that exists, then I'd leave housing to probably not exist at all, or exist as a small thing you can do in a city.

It would be fun to have to deal with PvE and PvP threats in your own outpost way out from anything.

Summation

These are loose suggestions, not really things I'm necessarily asking for or am saying is necessary, but, I've been dreaming about an ideal MMO for YEARS, so I've got a lot of ideas packed in, and I've thought about the problem of having too much freedom and too little.

So far, what I've suggested basically amounts to everything that I would consider would be the pinnacle of MMO customization (for now, in this day in age), and there isn't too much freedom in any of these suggestions, though implementation is the more difficult part here.

Make sure to code the game so that things like these remain options. You don't want to end up like WoW where you can't even get rid of the starting backpack for a bigger bag because of how it was coded at launch. That game is a nightmare as far as being able to add new ideas since that engine can handle so little. Every expansion is more of the same crap.

cool another landmark question dumped into the eqnext forums.

I bought the trailblazer pack, attended the SOE event here in San Diego and started Alpha with everyone and after 8 hours of game play, called SONY up and asked for my money back. Let me explain what I saw and why I made this decision.

I feel like I had absolutely 0 accomplished for 8 hours of running around picking at shiny colorful stuff in the ground and seeing "You cant harvest this". I am watching and following all the EQ Next stuff and hear of people that have legendary tier 4 pick axes and all this great stuff in 2 hours of work. I dont know how that was possible. I looked at the menu's provided for the crafting and didnt understand any of it.

I could care less about character customization at this point. Controls? I dont know whats so hard about forward, back, left, & right.

Here is my suggestion: Give me an axe with enough guidance and resources that I can make another axe or something better within the first 30 minutes of playing. I started this game to get in there and build something. I can understand gathering the resources to build something, but spending hours running around not being able to harvest anything and not even understanding what I should even be looking for is FRUSTRATING!!

I played EQ1 from 2000-2003. I played 8 hours a day at least, 5-7 days a week. I simply do not have that kind of time available to devote to playing. I have a career now and 2 kids. If I cant figure something out in the first hour or two, I'm done.

I get that the question is asking if we could pick ONE thing what would it be, but to be honest, I am saddened that yet again it's the type of question where multiple choices are often needed. The two most important in my book for a new user experience is that I clearly know what I am able to do, and that the building tools I start with are flexible, easy to use and fun to work with. If I start into a game and am bored with intuitive controls, clunky tools and a lack of visual indication on what I can interact with or how that interaction works/makes sense, then the game gets shelved pretty quick. So far the controls for EQNL are pretty straight forward. Jumping needs some tuning but other than that, we're pretty ok.

TL;DR version: All of the above.

I felt the number one thing that impacted me on day one was lack of ability to "drive" my way around the game world. I despise WASD with a passion I have difficulty describing adequately using mere words. But combined with navigation, we must also consider ease of identifying what to do and where to do it in the first few minutes after logging into the game. It's sort of all one thing because one must go away from the hub to obtain the initial resources, find some claimable land and start gathering/building/crafting.

I'm trying to write this with the foreknowledge that after Alpha we won't automatically have a claim flag in inventory and wont have Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 islands to deal with, that ores, gems and stones will be distributed by surface, mid-layer and deep-layer while woods and plant products will be distributed by biome. That said, there will very likely still be some resources on the surface, near the hub, that new players with their stone axe and stone pick cannot harvest yet. There will likely be no claimable land in the immediate vicinity of the hub. There currently exists no means of finding out what to do until by lucky chance you click on the forge at the hub and see the recipes to improve your tools, make building tools, make other crafting stations, etc so some kind of quest journal system or NPC guidance will be necessary when non-Alpha players come on board.

I want the game to be very open-ended rather than being another "race to the end-game". I don't want to feel as if I've been tossed into a goal-less wasteland with little or no ability to find my way to somewhere interesting or useful.

More character customization options

This is something that I personally would just like to see more of. The level you currently have is very limiting, but the framework is there. Honestly, I would like to see something a little more evolved than the standard track bars. Perhaps something along the lines of what EVE online has, but obviously that is a lot of work. We can easily live without it for now, but a more refined way of expressing ourselves could really help people get into the game.

Better and more clear controls for character and camera

This is currently a large problem I feel. The camera is very difficult to work with, and some of the controls and game mechanics are a bit odd.

Camera:

To move the camera around to change my character's direction, I have to click and hold my right mouse button, which is fine and fits in the standard MMO control scheme, but the left-mouse button does the same when it normally just moves my camera leaving the character headed in their normal direction. First person is also extremely difficult to work with, especially in tight spaces where the FOV is very small(feels like I'm staring down a tube).

For the first issue, the solution is obvious; making the left click manipulate the camera, but not the character would solve that problem.

For the FOV problem, it would be nice to have 2 FOV sliders, one for 3rd person view, and another for first person view. This allows us to adjust both and make them comfortable on our own.

The the first person view, it would also be nice if the camera just followed my mouse, which would make it feel much more natural. For the tricky bits, and convenience's sake, ALT could toggle between the two modes of having it follow the mouse and not(much like it does in other MMOs). This way I can easily navigate in tight spaces without being limited by a camera.

Controls:

Honestly, this category is pretty rock solid. It's fairly easy to build upon the previous systems that have existed to know what works and what doesn't. But there are a few gripes that I have.

For building, everything is relative to where I stand, but I can't always get a good look at what I'm doing. Halo(Xbox 360) had a great system for this in it's forge mode, where your camera would revolve around the item you were manipulating, allowing you to move on the X and Z axis easily, and Y was just another 2 buttons. This could work great in EQNL as well, especially for things like pasting, or fine tuning. Obviously, it doesn't work everywhere, but it can be of great use here as well.

Alternatively, color coding could be of great use. When pasting, the hardest thing to do(for me so far), is to line stuff up, or make sure it's not colliding with anything it shouldn't. If the silhouette would change colors depending on how it is interacting with the world, it could better let us now what is going on. For example, any surface that isn't touching anything could be white, but if one edge of the thing we are pasting meets another, that surface could show up as green(even through the objects that might be blocking our view of it, and when a part of the thing we are pasting is actually in the same spot at another block, it could be red/yellow. This way, we can easily tell what our item template is doing, so we can tell if we haven't fully lined up with an edge yet(via some white still on the surface that should be completely aligned), or if we have gone too far because at the back there is some red/yellow.

Clear, established goals for your first few minutes of play

You guys also did very well here, I thought. I knew that I had to mine minerals/ore, and I figured I could only mine copper, and sure enough there was tin attached, but I immediately learned that I didn't have a tool advanced enough to mine it. So once I got my copper pick, I went right back and tried it, and sure enough, I could. The one part that was difficult for gathering, was learning what the material looked like. Perhaps something as simple as mousing over the name of the mineral(when reading the pick's details) could display a photo of it, or at least an image of the texture.

Easier to identify resources and improvements to crafting

Same as last section for resources. You've already made them look unique enough. It's just about teaching the player what they look like.

For crafting, it was definitely awkward. I'm never sure which machine to go to. Maybe it's just that I haven't played enough but I think there is still room for improvement.

Refinement of building tools

I would only add that the Cylinder tool be put in, allowing us to adjust it's radius, and height. It would also be nice to have more material options, but that's a given. Other than that, I think it's all pretty good, but it would be nice if we could have our claims line up with the grid(unless I'm missing something here) so we don't have to worry about that.

SOE, I couldnt find a place to post this, so I will post it here. Since EQN will be free-to-play, will you guys allow players to pay a subscription fee just as Bioware did for SWTOR? I know your team needs money to pay your staff that is constantly creating content, so I would gladly pay $14.99 a month to support a game I love!

All of the above are important, im sure everyone would like to be able to be as detailed as possible when making their characters.

As for the controls and camera I would like to see a smooth control system that doesn't require me to learn a million hotkeys: keep it simple yet diverse. As for the camera I dont want to see it cluttered with a whole bunch of boxes/health bars and other objects that block the environment from view.

As far as goals within the first few minutes it would be nice to have a few long term goals set infront of you that makes you want to work towards that goal. Not just some menial task to learn the basics but something that leads into an epic quest or objective.

Unrelated, but have you tried holding down shift as you hit F12. Some keyboard settings come like by default.

Also I'm a character customization guy. I've never player a game that had customization up the hiss-haw like EVE or anything, but I find I'm always a bit frustrated with how limited character customization is. Always. It looks like EQN has such a gorgeous art style so far and I would die if a deep level of customization with a relatively intuitive interface came with that. So long as there isn't a mandatory trek through ten pages of the dials and options that alienate those more goal-oriented players who just want to start playing.

It's vital that new players of any game, especially mmos, have a clear idea of what they're doing. A newbie flailing around, or wandering around in circles is never good for the game. I'm not suggesting prolonged handholding, but perhaps teaching a new player on building their first structure and crafting.

I would like more character customization options and perhaps some more refinement to the building tools.

However I think a "New User" would benefit from a few simple but clear goals and a clearer explanation of the controls (Especially zoom control and shortcuts like undo).

character customization and crafting improvements. I'm not big for hand-holding, so the clearly defined goals for beginners is not high on the priority list for myself. I prefer to figure out for myself what I want to do.