I guess I qualify as a lost player. I haven't logged on in about 6 months, and don't feel any urge to do so. But I am impressed with the PlaneShift project, and would like to see it succeed even if it isn't in a form that engages me as a player. So with that in mind, here is what did (and what didn't) contribute to my departure. No one thing was "the killer", just the negatives outweighed the positive. Please forgive the size of the post, I felt to include just one or two things would give them undue weight.

I think the biggest problem for me was the frustration. It seemed that I couldn't just play, I had to keep asking a guild mate or a stranger how to do something that I thought I should be able to figure out on my own. I know some people claim a "no spoiler" atmosphere forces interaction and in theory builds long term ties, but for me it drove me off.

I don't mind asking for advice occasionally, or if I'm in a chatty or curious mood holding an in depth conversation where I ask how to do stuff. But sometimes I want to just play and the fastest way is to look on-line for a quick answer to my stumbling block so I can get on with it already. As Lehjr said "New players aren't going to stick around if they can't even figure out how to play the game." I couldn't so I didn't.

I also really took exception to the idea that someone else had to tell me how I'd enjoy something most. I'll enjoy it most if I have to learn it all the hard way? I'll enjoy it most if I start out a lackey, running errands for change, and have to work my way up to first class citizen? No. Plenty of other games manage to be fun having first level characters be heroes. And second level. And third level. And up to 100th level. I know that's not for everybody, but Heroism is one of the things that makes a Heroic Fantasy game fun for me.

Derula said "Many of the 'spoilers' should be information publicly available before even joining the game" and I agree but would take it even further, I'd enjoy it more if all of the spoilers were publicly available but some behind "Spoiler Alert" masks. For the people who enjoy the discovery don't read it, and those that enjoy knowing all the facts and looking for interesting ways to combine them can read them. Who's to say jigsaw puzzles are a "better" form of entertainment than Sudoku? Yet PlaneShift could easily be both if everything were public with spoilers clearly marked as such.

Roleplaying *required* - one of the things that drew me was roleplaying *encouraged*, but oddly enough rolplaying *required* made me uncomfortable once I was here. I was afraid to speak out for fear of wrecking somebody else's fun or causing a scene. I don't want to be nervous about playing a game.

The Grind - Wow, the game is grindy, and in a way very unfriendly to new players. To spend hours for a few dozen ore, and then not be able to get forge space to refine it (because somebody running a bot came in after me and could fill the forge before I could place a single ore) and all for a few skill ranks out of 100? or 400? I don't even know, after months of playing I don't think I had anything over 20.

People minding other people's business - This thread has been fairly civil, but some other forum discussions have been a real turn off. The forums are the most public view a potential player has for the game, and since PlaneShift I've read big chunks of forum chat before joining a game. To see people arguing that limits should be put in place so new players can't get X and Y and Z but have to choose one, for example, is the sign of a real problem. It's a video game, it doesn't hurt you if somebody has cool things or awesome abilities unless that enables them to beat you up and take your stuff. If they enjoy collecting it, let them. That doesn't affect me personally because that's not what I play for, but trying to keep someone else from getting something is a sign of an attitude I'd prefer to see left in the real world.

So what didn't bother me?

Well, I didn't mind the graphics - I read books and the graphics there are worse. At least in the books I read. I don't care if the graphics in PlaneShift aren't State-of-the-Art, they are recognizable and my imagination can take it from there.

I didn't mind the tutorial. In fact, I thought it was mostly helpful and if anything would have liked it to provide more information, though I would have liked the rate of information to be much faster - let me click a button to advance to the next paragraph, don't make me wait through long pauses and slow voice.

Bugs - Yeah, I encountered many, but it says it's beta, they didn't bother me. Restart, continue.

Illysia said "I told myself I would stop doing forum dissertations here but oh well. Even if I don't play the game anymore, I still seem to care about it." and that's true for me too. I'm not trying to rant or insult anyone, I'm trying to provide some honest feedback from a perspective I think is difficult to collect data from.

I'd love to see PlaneShift prosper, I admire your hard work and determination.

However, as a new player or when starting a new character, you should not worry much about doing all on your own. You can do well without any ranks in the repair skills, as you are likely to find somebody to help you with your worn gear.

I'm grateful for your advice, with this post I could easily have been a new player stuck with broken gear and frustrated by my inability to kill rats and unsure what to do, I appreciate that you reached out to help. Fortunately, I already have had numerous friends offer to repair for me, and I'm grateful for those generous offers.

But they come at a cost to role play - I had a character concept of someone from an small outlying farm, full of independence and dreams of fame and fortune, eager to prove to himself and his parents that he can make it on his own. The gift of an axe and a small horde of Tria was the seed to start his career, and I dove in... only to have my role play shattered by the mechanics.

I could have one of my friends repair for me. I can also support myself on mining, and buy repair or simply buy or forge new gear as mine wears. It's just ironic that a game that purports to place such an emphasis on role play implements mechanics that so thoroughly destroy it for me. I can make it just fine with the current mechanics, it's just that my character dies a little bit every time I have to back off and think how I'm working around the mechanics rather than playing my character.

Right now I'm just playing a MOFRPG (at 30 players on any given night it doesn't really qualify as an MMOFRPG) and that makes me sad because I think the game could offer a lot more.

I'm not a fanatical role player - I like it and I think it makes FRPGs better, but I would and do play games with very little RP. My wife and I started playing DDO when it went free to play and we play together, often in character, a couple of nights a week - but not more than 10% of the people we group with want to RP. I'd gladly play PlaneShift if the RP were removed entirely, provided it was otherwise fun.  But RP remains a stated goal of the PS project and I'm trying to fit in and contribute, so I'm pointing out what breaks it for me and trying to propose some solutions.

Please modify the weapon and armour repair/wear mechanics to bring these skills in line with other skills and remove one of the major boring unnecessary grinds new melee characters have to endure.

The current repair weapon (and armour, and probably tool) mechanic forces a huge redundant grind on new characters and is a significant barrier to new players. Currently, to become reasonably self sufficient, which is required if you play on off hours or if you want to RP a self-sufficient character, you must go through a hugely boring cycle of rats and chickens.

You start with clubs, because that is all you can repair. You have to work up your club skill until you can kill them in less than a game hour per rat, meanwhile selling their meagre treasure to buy hugely expensive repair kits and pay exorbitant training costs. The price to train club is reasonable, but the price to train repair is horrendous. And every repair is s l o w.

So after hours of grinding, I can finally kill a rat with a club in a reasonable amount of time, and can repair my club. What's next? Repeat the whole miserable cycle with a dagger, but this time with increased costs because I need to get repair from 2 to 4, which costs more than 0 to 2. Rats don't drop better treasure, by the way.

So finally after many more hours of grinding, I can kill rats with daggers and repair them. What's next? Repeat the cycle with sabres, starting from skill 0 again, and still on rats and chickens because that's what I can kill with skill 0 sword.

So finally after more hours of grinding, what's next? Repeat the cycle yet again, still with rats and chickens, because that's all I can kill with level 0 axe. Only now leveling repair takes forever, because the number of points to get to rank 10 (out of 200?!) is ungodly. And those rats still don't drop any better loot. Oh, and by now my armour is shredded so I have to start leveling repair on that too, and undoubtedly the cycle will repeat training heavier armour, but at least I'll be able to move to tougher opponents if I haven't died of boredom.

I have some specific suggestions to improve this, and realistically all or most are needed, though a few to start would help considerably.

1) Make weapon repair work on all weapons starting from rank 1. Let it repair only a little damage per use if you must, but let it repair whatever weapon fits your character concept. If I start my character as a woodsman, I should use an axe and be able to sharpen an axe right from the get go. Like Novocadian's smith alt, leveling repair would be part of normal character "life" not an out of character grind to satisfy quirky mechanics.

2) Make weapon repair kit usage be proportional to amount of damage repaired - If I only restored 10 points I only use 20% of a kit. If I repair 100 points, I use 2 kits. This makes the cost proportional to a character's ability to pay - higher level characters with Q300 swords use more kits than lower level characters with Q50 daggers. Right now it's worse than equal, it's actually backwards!

3) Make weapon wear proportional to damage dealt - or better still, (damage-hardness)*wear factor because let's face it, if you gave Andre The Giant an axe and told him to hew a bison to death, he'd put more nicks in the blade than if you gave Pewee Herman a Sabre and told him to kill some chickens. Even 100 chickens. Probably 1000 chickens. Poor chickens. Poor Peewee.

4) Make weapon repair time short and constant (5-10 seconds real time per repair?). If an experienced and invested player wouldn't put up with 4 minutes to make one repair pass on a weapon what makes you think a new character would? And if it is going to take 20 passes to repair a club, they must each be short enough to manage - you're still getting 4 minutes to repair the club (which is still too long IMHO) but you are making progress along the way and you can do a bit now and a bit later, rather than being stuck staring at an unmoving screen for 4 straight minutes.

5) Lower the training and practice requirement for repair to bring it in line with other skills, at least for the lower levels. I don't care if you think it's realistic to take more training to sand a splinter out of a club than it takes to learn to make puff pastry (I've done both, by the way, and it's not), it's a game and something as simple as being able to maintain your gear has to be accessible. If you make the game too much like the real world people will prefer the real world, because at least there you don't have to worry about network latency and if you meet a nice girl she probably actually *is* as girl and ...oh, well, anyway. (BTW - that's just a joke, I'm trying to make the Wall-O-Text at least amusing)

If all, or at least most, of these suggestions were implemented it would greatly improve new player retention and enjoyment for a large segment of new players, and probably existing players as well. And would do no harm to the players it did not help. Some of the changes would require non-trivial work, and temporarily adjusting wear rates and/or repair costs would be a good stop-gap measure.

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my proposal
Tlok

The problem is you can't make a game predicated on the charity of more advanced players. <snip> Practicalities aside, I don't even agree with the premise, that newbies should be rendered helpless then exploited for the enjoyment of higher level chars. <snip>

Really well said, and I'd like to add support from a different angle - think about why people play games in the first place. While S&M clubs prove that a percentage of the population enjoys being in a submissive or dependent role, the majority of people do not and will not come play a game that forces them into that role. They come to FRPGs to be heroes (or powerful villains), to be the ones helpless townspeople come to for salvation or mercy.

People will roleplay when they feel confident enough to engage with the characters around them, which will be faster if the system isn't busy kicking their ass. Sorry, but I keep hearing RP answers to technical problems.

Exactly this. People want to play on an equal footing with their peers, not as lackeys or charity cases. Let them come up to speed before you make them merge with traffic.

Making new players depend on established players may shorten the time it takes some of those players to get acclimated, but it will drive many more away. And the ones whose acclimation period is shortened likely would have become acclimated very nearly as quickly if the game simply encouraged and reminded rather than required interaction with established players. So this forced dependency seems like an approach with slim profits and huge losses for new players, yet it appears, on the forums anyway, to be widely espoused.

And I'd like to remind the developers that a potential player evaluating the game will have access to the forums but not to resources like the "meet the devs in the guildhall" events, so even if you're clear about your goals there it's worth posting summaries or reminders here.

Thank you,
Tlok

Note that Gossip is the universal OOC chat channel while main is the restricted distance IC channel. You can also create your own channel if you want a more limited group than Gossip channel or you can form a group if you just want to have a chat with a few friends.

That's good, I don't recall seeing that in the tutorial, but that's definitly an aid for assimilating new players - training wheels for RP.

Repair times are based on how much damage you are fixing.  Fixing a weapon that is in 1/300 condition will take a lot longer than fixing an item that is in 285/300 condition. I think the Min repair time is 20 seconds if you are fixing a small amount of damage. The higher your skill the shorter the repair times can be, with the exception that the min repair time is 20 seconds.

The problem isn't the min time, and it isn't the time at max skill, it's the max time at min skill. Mechanincs that work at the top of the scale might fail miserably at the low end, which I maintain is the problem here. In fact, the whole repair mechanic, not just the times, is very unfriendly to new characters, and is a critical part of a new player's experience for a large segment of new players (melees).

I love the role-playing and community aspect of the game (that's why a MMORPG instead of a CRPG after all). But the truth is, nobody wants to walk around pan-handling for items and information.

I whole heartedly agree with pretty much every word of Thalaric's post - well said and dead on. But this line in particular. Even if everyone was stellar, which they certainly are not, what fun is there in getting somebody else to play the game for me? Give me enough clues and resources in game to figure it out on my own, and lighten up on the disclosure restrictions until those in-game resources are fully up to the task.

In real life if you beat hundreds upon hundreds of bone bearing mammals eventually your axe would need replacement, There are only so many sharpenings on a blade.

If by "hunders and hundreds of bone bearing mammals" you mean a dozen or two rats, then maybe the current settings are realistic. Otherwise, not so much so.

And I have a sad anecdote about a player I tried to recruit to the game, but I think it's slightly more relevant to this post so I'll leave it as a reply there
http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=38763.msg446959#msg446959

I'm a new player too (4-6 weeks?) and like the idea of providing some focused feedback. I'm a software developer in real life, and I know I have a hard time seeing my creations through the eyes of a new customer, so feedback from someone who is both new and an articulate observer is very valuable to me. I make this post in the hope that my observations will be helpful to you.

I also want to be clear that I'm probably not the ideal PlaneShift user, but think I rank fairly high on the list - not ideal because Role Play, while enjoyable and comfortable, is not my primary focus in playing a game. I favor games that include it, but combat, crafting, and exploration rank higher on my required features list.

But I am a long time role player - I've played and DMed RPGs for more than 20 years (current group playing semi weekly since 1996), and have even done a little amateur stage and film acting. I'm a professional software developer. I strongly believe in Open Source software, and one draw of PS was the hope that one day I might contribute. I have a strong imagination and have no problem working with something that isn't visually perfect or has glitches - my mind is perfectly able to fill in the details or shift to a different task.

So if you're still reading, I guess I'll do until the perfect players come along - so here's my "new player" take on the game.

It's hard to get into, and has a lot of things that break immersion for me. Here are the big ones -

1) Lack of transparency - if I grew up in the world, I'd have an intuitive sense of "how things worked" - I'd know from stories and probably even experience roughly how much damage a club does, how race and profession affect average stats and skills, and what level of skill is required to accomplish a certain task. The fact that I have to rely on trial and error in this game, as opposed to looking up (or better yet, mouse over) is frustrating and disruptive. If I can get the information nearly effortlessly then my mind can ignore it and it was simply part of my character recalling something known but perhaps not familiar. If I have to go try to look it up, or set up experiments to test, then I am clearly interacting with a computer and not living in the world. This goes for all kinds of rules type information, from how character creation choices affect stats (you show the stats later, why force me to create and destroy a dozen lives to test how the alternatives affect them?) to skill ranks needed to perform certain tasks. And even combat - show (somewhere) what numbers make up the damage taken/done. Something like a combat log or information popup you can enable or disable that shows what my attack roll, strength, weapon type, skill, monster DR, etc. contributions are. I don't want them on all the time, just long enough to transfer the knowledge my character has to me.

2) No mental map - when I go to a new place, I immediately start building a mental map of where I am. Feedback from my senses combine to impress upon my memory paths, spacial relationship, and important features. Peripheral vision, ambient sound and smell, and signals from my inner ear are all blocked by the computer interface I experience Ylikum through, but are necessary for that map. I totally agree a map should not show areas I have not yet been, nor the position of moving enemies (or friends, though I wouldn't mind that for convenience, especially if they were in shouting distance), but it should show where I have been, and show notable features (buildings, NPCs, resources) as they were when I last saw them. When I have to tab out of PS and look at screen shots I've taken, or search the web for a map, it really breaks role play. You can't give the full interface of sound, smell, inner ear, etc., but you could give a map that my imagination would use as a proxy for the mental map my character would certainly build.

3) NPC stonewalling - The world is full of NPCs ... who won't talk to me. That's just frustrating. I'm fine with not handing out quests until I have a chance of doing them, but the NPC should at least tell me what he requires as a prerequisite and what he will give me ("I can help you gain status among the smiths, but Harnquist must train you to work with metals first"). I currently have to run around and talk to all the NPCs, do a quest, and run around to all of them again to see what opened up. This is an acceptable algorithm for a small set of NPCs, but it doesn't scale.

4)Unreasonable delays - so my character concept calls for someone self sufficient enough to make basic repairs. No problem, I'll train a few ranks in repair weapons and repair armor. I save some Tria, buy some kits, and start to practice. 247 seconds?! For one attempt?! Guess what - I tabbed out and checked my email, and got caught up in a discussion about something totally modern. I don't expect to build a sword in one click and 1 second delay, but this was worth a single PP and I couldn't play the game for 4 minutes (and it didn't even work, Lol!). I know you can't grow a fig in a day, but you've made plenty of other compromises to "reality" for the sake of play-ability, this is a prime candidate.

5) Forced social interaction - Maybe you really do want only extroverts and would like to exclude shy people. After all, extroverts are more likely to initiate role play. But in case that is unintentional, you should be aware that forcing people to walk up to strangers and ask for help is a barrier. In fact, even publicly admitting that I find it hard is hard, and I'm defensively shifting it to the 3rd person. OK, I admit, this one is painful to me personally, and I've deleted and re-written this one repeatedly. I've bared my soul in the interest of honest feedback for a project I really hope works, please don't come back with the trite and obvious "but it's a social game, you really should just meet people". It would be an easy thing to have NPCs provide the information you need, and leave "ask other players" as an encouraged but optional choice, not a requirement (where is iron ore?)

6) Weapon/armor repair - Maybe other skills are grindy, but these two really stand out for me - you are forced to fight rats endlessly, first with clubs, then with daggers, and finally with what you want for your character concept because you have to use simple weapons and damage and repair them before you work on more complex weapons, but then you are not able to do any damage with the complex weapon because you haven't trained so you repeat the cycle, still on stupid rats, seemingly forever. And the kits are hugely expensive for a new character, and do almost nothing, or have a high rate of failure. If you let a low repair skill repair any weapon but repair only a little damage, and use a part of the kit proportional to the points repaired then new players could pick a weapon that suited their character concept and work on getting better with that and repairing that. Even if they progress  slowly, they are advancing the character they want, not one they are forced into by the rules mechanic.

Thanks for listening and thanks for putting together a really interesting game. I realize what a tremendous amount of work this is, all for love not money. My comments here are given with the hope that they will help you expand your audience, not to belittle your accomplishment in any way.

Sincerely
Tlok