Do you notice any "Foot Guns" & "Soft Fails" for noobs, or even for elites?

For those that don't know, a foot gun is a feature added to a product that makes it easier for the user to shoot themself in the foot. I don't know if that's too American, I don't know what the origin of that is, but basically, the idea being: if a gun is too easy to fire, you put it on your hip and you're trying to show off and it goes off and you shoot your foot. Things should be safer than that. You should try to make it hard for someone to actually do something that terrible.

And finally, avoid soft fails. So, soft fails might be something that you're not familiar with. But basically, a hard fail is something like—no, you're not allowed to access this. I'm definitively telling you no, that's not allowed.

The opposite of this, according to "Designing Interfaces" by Jenifer Tidwell, is "Safe Defaults."

I was watching a game, recently, and saw a new player build a singularity instead of a regular fusion. It was killed quickly.

Many such cases.

It's one of the reasons I think it's good that the strider hub has some prerequisites to build, beyond just avoiding the excessive "drollfests".

There's a reason, in UI design, that choices that entail more risk are left behind an "advanced" button.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17393292

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/footgun

"Soft Fail" are also cases where it's easy to make mistakes that don't give quick feedback.

What are your favorite "foot guns" and "soft fails" that you've seen? Mistakes that are easy to make.

My "soft fail" has always been building too much E. And sending in attack forces without micromanaging them.

My foot gun used to be building heavy units and not "guarding" them with raiders or riot units, or just not manually kiting in general.

foot gun : efficient but explosive economy (namely singularity reactors and adv geothermal)
[Spoiler]

I disagree that it is a flaw in design, though. It provides an interesting trade-off between efficiency and safety.

quote: Lobster selected with army can lauch army unintendedly by issuing attack command or set target command.

This is not only a foot gun for new players, I suicided like 2 or 3 grizzlies this way during that past month (wasn't that familiar with a lobster before).

> This is not only a foot gun for new players

Implicit in the definition of a "foot gun" or "soft fail" is that the feedback loop is not there, and that it affects new players most, who aren't as wary of such traps.

IMO the "Avoid bad targets" thing I found was a massive help for me with my Racketeers and Impalers.

I can't think of anything the physics engine has done to me that'd count as a bad default, but maybe I just think in terms of a Valve-style physics engine, now.

They'll catch me reflexively arranging my marines in a line in StarCraft, next, I guess, so that they all have line of sight to the target.

Or pressing shift on SCVs and cursing.