News Original From: Tobold's MMORPG Blog
Games giving feedback
As you might remember I've been playing in the Football Manager Live beta for some time during the summer. The beta ends today, and the game is going live, but I ended up not subscribing after all, in spite of a half-price for beta testers offer. And the reason why I didn't subscribe was lack of feedback. FML is based on matches which have to be played in a certain timeframe, and if you don't log on to play, an AI is playing the match for you. And when I was busy with other games, and didn't log on for a while, it turned out that the AI was playing exactly as well as I did, I remained at the same rank as when I played myself. So why bother logging on?
The guy who got me into the beta, and who knows the Football Manager series a lot better than me, has skills I don't have: When he watches the start of a match, he can see the tactics of the other player, and adjust his tactics to counter them. Me, I only see a bunch of moving dots, and could never really make out enough to be able to improve my tactics during a match. Thus I developed one set of tactics that worked "most often", and just let it run. Which explains why the AI can do that as good as I can. What I was missing was better feedback from the game: When I'm losing a match, why did I lose? Did the other team outflank me, or did they have the better midfield, or what? What could I have done to play better against them? I never found out, so I got stuck at a certain level, so I wasn't interested in playing more.
The experience made me think about the lack of feedback in MMORPG group combat. My first 3D MMORPG was Everquest, back in 2000, and since then most games I played worked with a similar tank / healer / dps trinity. I'm not saying I'm the worlds best MMO player, far from it, I'm not all that fast in reaction time and pressing buttons. But I *do* understand the concepts of aggro management involved in MMORPG group combat very, very well. Especially when I play my healer I have a better overview than anyone else in the group of what exactly happened, and why we just wiped, as I'm watching everyone's health bars anyway.
More details on next page.
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