Hangups preventing adoption

Hey guys, I'm sure these topics have come up before, but I wanted to get your thoughts.

I saw the discussion about limiting room sizes to help with the fact that the player population struggles to fill games. And it got me thinking about why the game is having trouble gaining traction. It's an awesome game. But, I think there are some things that make people drop out too early and never come back.

I don't have any stats or anything to back this up, but my guess is that new people download the game, play a few rounds online, get stomped a couple times and bail before being able to even experience the rich strategy and gameplay this game offers.

I know these may be unpopular opinions here, but maybe that insular thinking is not helping the game reach a broader audience?

I think there are a few contributing factors to this:

1. In 1v1 games, the early game is incredibly unforgiving and very snowbally.

That's kind of par for the course for most RTS games. But ZK in particular is super unforgiving for the inexperienced. Most people who test out the game probably don't even survive to actually experience the game since it's so easy to screw up at the start. I don't know if providing some free defensive structure attached to your first factory would help. But, I think something to help prevent games ending prematurely would be good. There is probably nothing more off putting to a new player than watching a single glaive slowly tear down their factory because of some dumb luck in maneuvering or awkward llt placement.

2. Don't build factories if you want more units, build caretakers...

I absolutely love this game, but this is just a weird design decision. For someone jumping into the game for the first time, they would NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER assume that building caretakers instead of factories would be the standard way to increase unit production. I understand that the factory system is supposed to be an abstraction for a proper technology system. But, it's unintuitive, that's unarguable. In every other context in the world, more factories = more tanks. Something as basic and fundamental as increasing unit output in an RTS should NOT be this unintuitive and I'm sure that this alone has been the culprit to the game just simply not "clicking" with many players because they didn't take the time to read the wiki.

Maybe factories should have an upgrade or two to increase their build power to downplay the importance of care takers? The upshot to this is, it kind of nudges players to diversify their forces. After they have upgraded their factory, they will need to build a new one for more output, they may opt to go for a different tech. Instead of now, where it's common to have like 5 caretakers managing a single factory for the whole game. Also, it's going to make the world feel more realistic, having many factories pumping out units instead of just one.

3. Flow-based resources.

This one is difficult. I'm sure we have all seen this. A noob builds like 10 builders. Their logic is surely, "This is taking to long to build, I guess I need more builders?". Who can blame them? It works like that in almost every other game and in real life, more "labour" force, more output.

The resource flow system of ZK is largely invisible unless you play close attention to the numbers. There is a UI/Graphical disconnect between the inputs and outputs of resources. It's not obvious that metal is evenly distributed to all builders, and building more builders is probably hurting more than helping.

Perhaps just changing the colour of the nanolathe streams and construction skeletons to indicate how rich the resource stream is would give a more solid visual indication? Maybe something like, a red skeleton and or stream if it's getting barely any resources. And the stream gets greener as it gets closer to the builder's max build rate. Then if a builder hits it's max build rate, it will have a green stream with red flecks in it or flashing to indicate that you need more build power to fully utilize your input resource flow.

I don't know, maybe that's not the right approach, but something to give the players, especially new ones, a solid intuitive visual feedback around what is going on with the resources. Resource management is perhaps the most important thing in an RTS. So, the game should be provide an unambigious and unignorable feedback to players about what is going on to help them understand the "affordability" of something. Think about any other RTS, if you can't afford something, it's obvious, it'll be greyed out, or you'll get an in-your-face message "not enough resources".


Anyways, Thoughts??

Also, don't take this criticism as a knock to the game. I absolutely love it. It's out of love that I try to help with getting more people into it.

It's hard to think of a way to make the economy more intuitive without big changes to the game.

Maybe a hint system that's on by default would be useful. The hint system could tell players, "Caretakers are a much cheaper way to increase buildpower than making another tank foundry" when they place their second tank foundry. And it could warn players, "adding more buildpower doesn't help without more metal income" when they assign more buildpower to a single task than their total metal income, while their stored metal is at 0.

Of course, it would be better if such explanations weren't even necessary.

It would be more transparent if each nanoframe, and each factory, had a large font display when you click on it or mouseover it, telling you how much metal it's using per second. The display must be prominent so new players don't miss it. For factories, metal drain would include all caretakers+workers that are helping the factory. It could say "Metal drain: 15/s (83% of income)."

i'm right here..

keywords patterns and this thing that I never stopped doing with my foot.

Those stats are interesting GoogleFrog.

Updating the main menu may actually go a long way to increase the "perceived" quality of the product. I know as an engineer that this type of talk may sound silly. But, after some experience in product development, perceived quality is actually very important. When it comes to engagement, it may be even more important than "actual" quality, sadly...

Spend the week or whatever it takes to make the main menu look sexy and as silly as it sounds, it may actually help a lot in retaining people.

Do you have stats on how many people install, but never actually jump into a multiplayer game?

I think something that could be improved with the menu very quickly is simply the button sizing and placement. The balance is off in terms of button importance and screen real estate and positions. The buttons needed to jump into a game are small and off to the side compared to the massive community section that dominates the main menu. I know when I first installed the game, it took me a second to get my bearing in terms of how to get int a game. Also, colours and iconography can help a lot to focus people's attention to what is important.

Also, when you click the multiplayer button, I think the battle list should perhaps show by default? Having an extra click needed there to get to the battle list is pointless. Matchmaking often has 0 players, and the phrase "battle list" doesn't mean anything so many people may never even click on that button before clicking back. They may just click on the match making, see there are 0 players online, and then just hit back. Maybe the battle list is always present on the bottom of the main menu? That way, it's hard to miss.

However, this is all conjecture. Maybe there is a way to get more granular data on this stuff? As they say, if you can measure it, you can manage it. If there is a 70% drop off due to issue with the main menu, either the interface or the branding. That seems like it could be a quick fix, relatively speaking.

I don't know what your guy's budget is, but have you considered consulting with a designer or anything? I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, but some of the artwork that is chosen for loading screens is inconsistent in terms of quality...

Anyways, do you have more stats to share? That may help finding some hangups.

Strife40k there is no budget. Zero-K is just worked on by anyone who feels like working on the game, it's basically a fan-made game using a fan-made engine. GoogleFrog does a lot of the work but everyone who wants to see anything changed is free to consult with people currently working on the game and submit their own work for changes. I don't think that there's anyone working on zero k who has much of a design background these days so if you know someone who wants to fill the niche...

Ok, thanks for the heads up Bakuhatsu. I am a programmer. So, maybe I can try my hand at updating the menu when I have some time.

Shadowfury333 yeah, those sound like good ideas. The current spray density fluctuations I think are a little too subtle. It doesn't really scream to the player: "you can't afford this right now! You need to go out and get more metal before trying to build this! Also, in the last 30 seconds, you just dumped your entire metal reserve into this thing, which will probably never complete before you get killed."

I don't want to clutter the UI. But, I'm wondering if an icon system may help? Similar to how the default setting for metal patches uses icons to indicate value. Maybe in addition to showing the build time for something, there can be some sort of icon(s) indicating affordability? I'm just spitballing.

I think something like this would help not just newbies but mid-level players too. One of the toughest learning curves for this game is getting that instinctual "feeling" of when your economy can afford a particular unit of building. Maybe that's just part or learning the game?

One of the challenges I see is that all of the values are relative and time dependent. So, it's kind of hard to know, when the UI should be displaying a warning or something like that.

It would also be nice to get a more visceral feedback to when you are excessing.

Honestly, it's hard to talk about this. Since I'm already so familiar with the UI and the game and everything that it's hard to go back into the mode of a new player seeing everything for the first time. One of the challenges with stuff like this is understanding the pain points while being so familiar with the systems. It would be nice to get some direct feedback from newer players about this stuff. I know when I first started playing, looking at the metal costs felt meaningless since it takes a long time to develop a context for how much X amount of metal is worth.

You know, I don't really care that much, but..

quote: I don't think this would do much and it would break an assumption about the build menu.

That's an assumption a new player wouldn't have.

quote: Why would a player look at each option in the factory tab when they are trying to increase their current unit production?

1.Because caretakers are mostly used alongside factories.
2.Because I have seen noobs make Strider Hubs to increase production. Yes, multiple Strider hubs.

This whole caretaker thing is probably not an adoption issue. For like my first 2 games I built a second factory of the same kind, but the campaign quickly told me it's better to use multiple caretakers instead of multiple factories. If I had started with multiplayer instead, my teammates would have told me immediately not to make two of the same kind of factory. You learn pretty quick.

Although, even after the campaign told me to make caretakers instead of factories, it did come as a surprise later when I looked on the wiki and found that build rate == sum of buildpower of factory and workers given sufficient metal. In 0ad and I think Age of Empires as well, adding more workers to a single building has diminishing returns.

If any issue needs solving, I think it would be best to give facs greater buildpower and make them a little more expensive. Give them 40 buildpower and make them cost 1000. That way, the game works the way players from other RTS games expect it to work. They have no inclination to make a second factory because their first factory has all the buildpower they need. Although there is a potential issue with balancing the flow of metal - you don't want the 40 buildpower factory to be drawing 4x as much metal from the first minute, preventing players from building expansions. Perhaps that could be tweaked on the backend so that factories are just slightly lower priority builders.

Berder: The flip side to that is that it makes that factory even more all-or-nothing in raids. Right now Caretakers can be bombed or raided to slow production, but killing the factory is usually not worth it. If the factory was a 40bp target, there wouldn't really be an alternative for smaller raids, and losing it would be an even more deadly blow.

Greatly reduced player retention in one year period - 30 days retention has dropped slightly from 27 to 23, in the same time first-time players have almost doubled. Trending shows way more players but even less retention.