Brassx Wrote:...I hear you loud and clear. When I developed DarkRP and TTT for a community I spent the time to make some easy to digest guides. Nice pictures, videos etc. Tons of people ignored them of course. I can't blame them for not wanting to read a user's manual one very server they join. The closest to a solution I came to is the same I used for RDM, try to remove the elements that lead to these situations. So in this case would you consider auto-equipping starter weapons? Or a round-by-round non-intrusive notification saying "You haven't equipped your weapons yet. Open your inventory by pressing I to equip them!"?
Brassx Wrote:Also, when you first join, it does tell you that you have been given 2 starter weapons, and you can press I to open your Inventory to equip them.
Is that a one time thing? As someone coming to a server for the first time there can be a LOT to take in. New interface, rules flashed up, MOTD, new guns you've never seen, mid-round yelling by players etc. It's really easy to miss a notification that you don't even know the relevance of. "I have weapons? Well... yea don't we all in TTT?", "Welcome to FRG! Press... Shit round start don't want to die" if you get what I mean. I'm mostly mentioning this stuff because I come from the viewpoint of a developer. Being in the seat of a new player I can finally see how, understandably, tunnel-visioned I was. Things become second nature to you, it's just how the game works after a while. But to a new player it's completely foreign and likely overwhelming.
I'm not necessarily suggesting this for the people who would ignore it. More for the people like myself looking for information without drudging through forum posts that all blend together from my perspective. For example the crystal guide was on page 3 and the patch notes all look the same from the sub-forum's index. I have no idea if this inventory system was added last week or last year. To learn about the crystals I ended up just running searches on the client side lua cache until I found some relevant strings.
New players are also jaded as hell from all of the copy+paste servers out there with broken/dead forums. Once you waste enough time trying to search an outdated and inactive PHPBB with 60 second search timers you start to lose motivation. This isn't your fault obviously, and I like to think it wasn't mine when I was active. But the GMod community is what it is for better or worse.
I think this is, for the most part, a good example of what is helpful for someone like myself:
Quote:"You can use this menu to charge Crystals.\nCrystals are items that have special properties, and can be used to give the user various buffs, or properties.\nTo charge a Crystal, you must have a weapon that has the Crystal's Required stat. That stat is added to the needed charge value of the Crytsal. Once the crystal has a certain charge level, it can then be equipped and used in game."But I had no idea how to find that until I dug through the lua cache.
Dreadark Wrote:although the problem with this is that it probably wouldn't be as easy to edit and change around as a forum post would be and then people can't post ideas or input on it.Not necessarily. GMod's Derma has some handy elements for displaying HTML. You could just show the forum post itself to take advantage of the BBCode formatting or something as simple as showing a text file. I always found the most difficult part to be making it fit with the HUD and not just look like a big tacky browser.
But I think a problem that Brassx kind of touched on shows up here too. A lot of this comes down to the information being easily digestible. People are more likely to read a tooltip than a paragraph. It's like Diablo III Vs. Path of Exile. One is shallow and easy to jump into while the other can be insanely in depth and complex. Guess which has a larger player base?
But remember, these are just suggestions from one person. I could just be a weirdo noticing things that aren't there. Just hoping to offer some feedback from the viewpoint of an ignorant player.
Edit:
Brassx Wrote:http://forerunnergaming.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=2958Looks great so far! Thanks. I had no idea about viewing a weapons' stats with J, ordering sections of your inventory, refreshing your inventory, re-equipping your inventory, and was clear about the meaning behind how full a stat's bar was filled. Going to read Terran's guide now.
Thanks again!
x1