Henrik has talked about the statistics on player retention and how an overwhelming majority of people quit after only a very short time in game.
I'm willing to give SV the benefit of the doubt that the data/feedback they have on why people quit so abruptly means a tutorial Island will improve that retention rate.
The difficulty is the depth of what players can do, and the limited feedback they get while doing so. There aren't a ton of tool tips or straightforward ways to explain every system in MO, a lot of it has to be figured out by the player.
If they decided to explain systems like taming, do we want tooltips that say "in order to tame you need taming skill and lores. You need to cook carcass to raise your lores or read a book, and not everything can be tamed"
Thats the kind of hand holding i expect to see in other games that doesn't let players figure things out on their own, which is part of what makes MO special.
And I think thats what SV is looking at, players who would otherwise enjoy MO and figuring out the different systems, but get frustrated upon being murdered before they get a basic understanding of the game, they just give up on it.
I dont know how a UI design can compensate for that without sacrificing a large part of what makes MO special.
I think Godkin answered your first point adequately. Putting the poor retention rate on the lack of a tutorial is easier than admitting that they made a game that was crappy in terms of UI, AI and virtually every system a new player had to interact with. Those that stuck around, stuck around dispite all of those problems.
Actually all information a new player needs is already in the skill description. How is a tool tip over the taming icon explaining how the actual mechanic works hand holding? That´s exactly what a game should tell the player. Ideally everything is so intuitiv that very little explaination is needed, but I think we are past that point in Mortal design.
Let´s say someone learns mining (or it might just be activated from the start). Here is the tool tip:
When close to a stone resource press R to begin mining. The amount of resources you get with every 2 swings is dermined by your mining skill and the lore skill of the resource you are gathering. After a while the source you are mining will be depleted and you have to move to another if you want to continue mining. Sources slowly refill over time. Any material mined can further processed by using extraction machine like a crusher.
!Be careful not to gather too many resources, since that will slow you down!
!Be mindful that mining exposes you for being attacked by someone who want your rocks!
I´m sure a native speaker could condense this even more. This gives you all the information you need to understand how mining works but leaves a lot to be discovered.
Yes, players will be discouraged when being killed. That´s part of the game. I´m actually not arguing that they should all spawn in Gaul Kor.
I would love a questionaire that answer me how many players actually read the basic information on the game, paid 40 bucks and then quit out of frustration because of being killed while they learned to mine a rock. It does not sound very credible to me tbh.
What I think is credible is someone falling through the world after teleporting to the priest, because they drowned in a childrens swimming pool.
@barcode
Player have stayed on Haven. That is a fact.
If you make Haven fun enough to stay on, players will do so. Those that stay will argue that they should have more content. Depending on SVs desperation levels at that point in time they might grant it. Again, this is what happened with similar systems in Mortal Online 1.
Desperation levels might be high, because a bunch of people quit because swimming was still broken at launch. Because no one had time fixing it because the tutorial interactions had to be worked on.
That is the reality of SVs resources at the moment. Deny it at your own peril.
