Player Testers Report

[jaysoyer]

Hello all,

Mike asked me to test out this game which I did a bit ago. Just never got around to writing this report until now. I played the game for several hours and came up with a list of things I liked and disliked. I'm a very avid gamer and hopefully this may help bring an outside perspective to aid yous. I played an earlier build, but quickly messing around, I didn't see anything too noticeable to the build I played. Which I think was 15.

Dislikes:
1) This is my BIGGEST MOST ANNOYING gripe with the game. The camera. Mike assured me I'd get used to it, but after several hours I did not. In fact I ended with a severe headache and didn't want to return playing. Having a fixed camera would be more desirable. Sorta how the tutorial is now. I was elated when I saw that change but cried when I teleported into the main world and saw it unchanged. The constantly rotating camera not only makes my head spin, but easily makes me disorientated, and makes battles a pain.

2) Battling leads into my next issue. Controls. I applaud the attempt on making this a mouse only game, however as I felt myself invest more time into this, I yearned for a keyboard and mouse control setup. Getting specific sides of my shields to align in combat was very annoying. Add in that camera and everything was just painful to do.

Now, you can certainly keep the camera and mouse setup, it'd just be nice to give users the option of changing things. I like what Chris Pruett of Replica Island said about this:
That said, one of the most dramatic lessons I learned after shipping Replica Island is that users want customizable controls. Even if you have added perfect support for every phone, many users will want to go in and tweak it. Or they prefer the hardware keyboard over their phone’s dpad. Or they prefer tilt controls over trackball controls. My advice: plan on providing customizable controls, both so that you can support phones that have input configurations that you didn’t consider, and also so that you can allow users to tweak the experience to match their preferences.

Granted its about mobile games, however I think the same can apply to any gaming medium.

3) Saving game state! Boy was I pissed when I signed back in after playing for a few hours to learn I lost everything. I highly recommend an option to locally save a users game state. Cookies are too volatile and if I'm investing time and money in an MMO, I don't want to loose my progress because my browser cookies were wiped.

4) After completing the tutorial, I'm teleported immediately on top of a socket which drains all my money. When first coming to the Grid 12 world this infuriated me as I lost accumulated money. After understanding the world a bit, I realized it was no big deal however it yielded a negative reaction for a first time player.

5) The hovering for more info doesn't feel right. Maybe it needs to be more opaque, but it certainly needs to popup quicker. The delayed affect just doesn't settle well with me.

6) Some kind of indicator for my weapon range would be nice.

7) An indicator showing the health of the enemy I'm attacking would be nice. Its annoying to constantly hover my mouse over whatever I'm attacking to monitor the attack's progress.

8) The duration of dropped items needs to be longer. In rather large fights, I tend to miss them because I'm too busy mopping up. It'd be nice to let that stuff lay about and then collect my rewards once all the fighting is finished.

9) Wave points. It'd be cool to drop a wave point or flag down and have that show up like the North or town indicator. Would aid in keeping my orientation, especially with a constantly rotating camera.

10) Name Headers over the tanks of other players. If it displayed somewhere on screen, I couldn't find it.

11) Indicators for players. Every play Terraria? I love how they show a player whose off screen. As their name, general direction, and distance from you. Makes finding other teammates far easier.

12) Too many resources. If they each provide a special ability...ok. But as far as I can tell, there's no difference to each. Should have 3 or 4 at most and make filling that the goal. It's too confusing trying to track what's what and where's it at in towns.

13) Number 12 leads into this next complaint. General confusion. The buildings look like just random designs with nothing that stands out as easy to remember. If there were less types of resources, there's less building looks to remember. Then I can easily identify the buildings I'm looking for. Especially in large towns.

14) To continue from 13, color coordination. There's a vast array of colors all over the place which makes it very confusing to associate game objects as floor, enemy, building, etc. I'd suggest categorizing game objects with a set of colors. For instance, the floor will always be this set of colors/hue. If I ever see an object of color/hue X, Y, Z then I know it's an enemy. Making things colorful is a great idea, but throwing too many random colors all over the place can be bad.

15) Bug: Trying to hover over a loot bag (items thing on the right) while a resource is underneath it, causes the hint dialog of the resource to appear instead of the item in my loot bag.

16) It'd be nice to always display the technology/resource info for a town and allow me the option of toggling on or off. It's annoying to keep zooming in and out to see that.

17) Have an option for toggling whether indicators appear on the screen for current building in a town. It's no biggy finding an established resource in a small town, but when it gets bigger then my viewable area, its annoying trying to find specific resources.

I think that covers everything. This post is getting long. Will post again for my likes.

[jaysoyer]

Alright, here's what I liked. Unfortunately it's not as long as my dislikes. Don't take that as a big negative. Its just that #1, and #2 of my dislikes REALLY prevented me from enjoying the game as I otherwise would have.

1) I liked how my loot bag (prisms thing) was automatically handled. I hate micro and anything that automates something for me is always a bonus.

2) I liked the idea of directional shields. Makes the combat a bit more tricky and challenging.

3) I like the old school arcade look. A modern day blast to the past.

4) Sockets took a little getting used to but I started to really like them once I understood the concept.

5) I loved the idea of going out, finding areas to start and build towns. In fact the most enjoyable aspect was this building part. I found myself simply farming for money so I could keep building up a town. It'd be cool to keep expanding on that so I could build defense structures and things.

6) I like the different types of tanks. Granted I didn't do any team fighting however I can tell how all the tanks would compliment each other for team fights.

7) I LOVE the idea of only collecting XP from depositing money and not straight kills. Plus that molds right into the town building. I always loved any "building" aspect of games but the down side to that is lost time in leveling up. By making the XP come from depositing the money which is required to build a town, you're in essence rewarding me...even if all i want to do is build build build instead of fight fight fight.

Think that's everything. In typing this up, I remember one more dislike. Numbers for stats! I'd like to see an actual number or percentage for shields, health, damage receiving, damage handing out, etc.

[rob]

Jaysoyer,

This is absolutely fantastic feedback. Thank you so much!

The camera should now be fixed throughout the game. I'm interested in how you think this changes things. You can use 'c' to cycle between the 3 control schemes.

Rob

[amitp]

I agree, this is fantastic feedback. And I'm not just saying that because I agree with it. Although maybe that's part of it

Comments on dislikes:

• 1. I got somewhat used to the camera and I was optimistic that I would, but once I tried the non-rotating camera, I realized that's the way I'm going to play. Not that I wouldn't get used to rotation for battles, but non-rotating is significantly better for overall navigation — knowing where enemies, other players, and towns are.
  
• 2. Yes, I was frustrated with the original controls. I'm now playing with the various options Rob provided recently (with the C key and also with double click). One advantage the mouse has over keyboard controls is that you can control speed of travel and rotation. That can be very handy at times. In the end, for a browser game where some people have mice, some have trackballs, and some have trackpads, you'll probably need those options even if everyone had the same preferences.
  
• 3. I too have lost my game state. I blame myself, for wiping cookies often. I assume account registration will come eventually.
  
• 4. Maybe a different UI would help here. For example if both the yellow gridshard count and the blue leveling bar were at the bottom of the screen, next to each other, some animation showing the grid shards being put into your level bar would help the player understand that it's not lost, just transferred.
  
• 5. I agree, hovering is something to eliminate if they can.
  
• 6. Agreed.
  
• 7. Agreed.
  
• 8. I too have noticed this but didn't know if it was intended to be this way (i.e. maybe I'm supposed to mix looting and fighting, to make the fight harder).
  
• 9. Love this idea. However, where would you plant it? I can see this being useful for communicating with others.
  
• 11. Yes, this seems to be one of the things I keep telling Rob every game ;-)
  
• 12. Agreed. Unless the resources actually do different things it's not that interesting.
  
• 13. Agreed.
  
• 14. Agreed.
  
• 16. I agree there's a problem; I had instead suggested seeing economic data when in town but not while in the wilderness. I guess the real question is, when is the player expected to use that information? That's the time to show it.
  
• 17. I agree there's a problem. I think the underlying problem is that the player is expected to make a decision, and the sockets are too spread out to make a reasonable decision. Putting all the sockets in the middle of town would help.
  

Comments on likes:

• 1. Yes, I like not having to manage an inventory. I like that things are automatically picked up.
  
• 2. I love directional shields. The Tesla is my favorite tank so far. The left side is stronger than the right side and it makes me think.
  
• 4. I like the idea of having my ship be something to do something. I don't like the way sockets are laid out but I like the general concept.
  
• 5. I too was more motivated by building towns than by fighting enemies. I wonder how many other players are like us.
  
• 6. Yep. Nice variety.
  
• 7. It's interesting. I've several times gotten too greedy, collecting too many shards without depositing them, and losing them all…
  

[rob]

Hey all,

This feedback and discussion is invaluable. Thank you.

Today I implemented an attitude control for use in the non-swirly click-to-move control scheme. Click yourself and drag away -- this makes an arrow appear from your tank to your mouse. The tank will rotate to align with the arrow. The idea here is to give the user direct control of the tank's facing.

Tim is working on simplifying the research system, taking it down to a single resource type and a single lab type. We'll see how that goes and build up more mechanisms from there.

Once both of these changes are in, we'll push the next build.

Rob

[jaysoyer]

Ok. Here's my report since you did all those changes. In short, seems like you have yourself a great functional foundation to really start adding substance too.

First up bug reports:
1) Running into the walls during the tutorial caused some funky things to occur.

2) Towns too close to each other is causing buildings to spawn on top of each other.

3) Suffered really sever lag on 10 Sept. Only one other player in the server. It was so bad I couldn't play. Not sure why, but there are certainly a ton of buildings all over the place. Too many buildings maybe?

Now to the dislikes. These are all minor things really. Btw, some of these might be repeats:

1) Instead of a cycle button for camera angles, perhaps individual keys for each? I found myself using fixed camera angle the most, but occasionally wanting the 3rd for battles. Was annoying to continuously cycle thru.

2) When switching camera views, show the rotation to the new camera angle as opposed to just jumping to it. This caused me to get disorientated often. Especially if it was a radical jump. IE, I'm facing southwest in fixed then cycle to next view. Made worse when I was already in battle.

3) Since white sockets go to lab and extractor, not sure about making their shapes different to indicate owner ship. The matching colors works great. Maybe have lab and extractor be triangles? As the triangle seems to be pointing to the building it belongs too.

4) Visually show a buildings level. Meaning as you level up the building, add more designs to it. I found myself wanting to level up towns with the lowest level buildings first. Once a town got fairly large, it became annoying to keep hovering over each building/socket looking for any ie "remaining level 2 buildings"

5) Show me socket status as I deposit money. Will make it easier for me to time when to click off the socket. As mentioned previous, I kept trying only level a building by 1 or 2 levels and then move on to the next. Better ROI i figured.

6) Really really really wanted to know how much I was being buffed from the research/buffed buildings. Not only globally for the server but also each town.

7) Would be cool to see distance from town along with that yellow arrow.

8) When fighting the Ground Fortresses, the health circles seems pretty pointless. The red circles are so powerful, that once my shields are gone, it pretty much one shots me. Maybe have the green health circles give shields instead?

9) When in a town, it'd be cool to see all the stats for that given town. IE all the research buildings and how much buff stat's it's pumping out.

10) Not sure if this was updated to last longer yet, but the drop times still feel too short to me. They should persist longer to allow me plenty of time to collect it. Right now, I feel like it's a race to collect everyone. Especially when using the Tesla tank where I could suddenly kill 5 enemy units at once.

11) Enemy drops seem too random and it doesn't feel like the hard kills are rewarding me more powerful drops then the easy kills.

12) Seeing the numeric value of damage receiving and handing out would be cool. As well as maybe a health bar over the enemies' I'm attacking.

Now to the likes:
1) The fixed camera made Grid 12 about 10x more exciting and I found the hours ticked by fairly quickly.

2) Generally I used fixed but that third camera angle was great for fine tune adjustments during battles.

3) Love the arrow point my tank control. This combined with #1 and #2 basically removed all desire to use the keyboard. Felt like I could easily and comfortably get all the controlled I required.

4) Color coordination and overhauled research buildings = F***ing awesome! I felt like I could stroll into a town and instantly know what everything was/doing.

5) I LOVE the idea of research buildings adding a buff to all players server wide. Definitely brings a more team play feeling. It also really drives me to seek out new towns to find more of them. Without any real quests defined yet, I felt that was my quest. Build to buff my tank out like a madman!

5a) Also I like how its only two resources now that are needed to up the server research level.

6) Like how all that research info is now permanently displayed at the top of the screen.

7) I think some things were removed from under the tank? I don't remember what, so I gather that's a good sign as I'm not feeling like I need to see more under it beside health.

8) Am so happy that those annoying holes in the floor are gone.

Think that's everything. Hope it helps!

[rob]

Wow Jay, this is a seriously awesome report. Thank so much, again!

We are currently fixing tutorial wall collision and adding a display of global buffs due to resonator buildings.

Your other gripes are totally legit and we plan to address them as we get time and figure out good approaches. Especially stuff about showing progress/status of towns, sockets, buildings and enemies.

The cycle-control-scheme button wasn't really meant to be used in the course of playing. Your use of it totally took me by surprise. I figured people would pick a favorite control scheme and stick with it. That's why the transition between schemes is so abrupt.

Would it be helpful if the yellow arrow showed the name of the town it was pointing to?

I was thinking of ditching the Ground Fortress health circles and just going all red circles. And having it drop them right on top of you. Bwahaha!

Drop times are short on purpose -- it is supposed to be a race to get to them. Also, since many people share each loot bag, we wanted to make it a little harder to mooch loot by following a group of real fighters 30 seconds after the battle just collecting loot bags. But that's just our thinking -- if you hate the short loot bag expiry times, we need to know that.

We haven't spent much time on loot drop balancing yet, sorry about that.

I'm really interested about the details of using camera 3 in battle. Why do you use it then? In what way?

Have you figured out double-clicking yet? If so, does it help with fine control? If not, should we teach it explicitly in the tutorial?

We moved the gridshards and XP indicators out from under the tank over to the sides of the screen. I think they work better there, out of the way. We left hitpoints in the middle because we figured you'd want to look at that during battles.

Yay, holes are gone. Good riddance.

[jaysoyer]

Would it be helpful if the yellow arrow showed the name of the town it was pointing to?

Yes, and distance. I'm a big numbers guy. The more stats the game enables me to look up, the happier I am.

Drop times are short on purpose -- it is supposed to be a race to get to them. Also, since many people share each loot bag, we wanted to make it a little harder to mooch loot by following a group of real fighters 30 seconds after the battle just collecting loot bags.

In which case, the duration is perfect.

I'm really interested about the details of using camera 3 in battle. Why do you use it then? In what way?

So I went back and reused all the tanks and tried to break down when and how I was using cam 3. I wasn't exactly sure. Here's the breakdown. When I used cam 3 was based highly on the tank, followed by the circumstance. All was only during combat.
1) Mustang: Used the most with.
2) Silver/Corsair: Moderate usage
3) Homer/Ash: Occasionally
4) Tesla/Bluto: Rarely if ever.

For #1, in battle I try to maximize every gun being fired. In addition, I'm constantly adjusting for shield exposure as well. With the 3 layers of directional shielding, I really wanted to align them correctly. Its a very micro situation, and cam 3 gave me the sensitive fine tuning controls needed.

For #2, the lack of wide angle, mixed with single direction, and being generally weak tanks made me want fine control for dodging and shooting. Many times also just keeping my distance from enemies maximized. Once again, a micro situation.

For #3, Having a single directional attack required a bit of finesse in aiming sometimes. Though generally I didn't need cam 3. They are powerful enough to overcome the need to micro.

For #4, No real aiming is required and being multi-directional my tactic was to simply drive circles around enemies with no real regard to what side of the tank is exposed.

All the above is in the general sense. I noticed I used cam 3 in the very beginning. But as I acquired bonus loot and the overal server buffs increased, my need to micro was reduced. Less micro = less cam 3 usage. The only contradiction to this was when Mike and I were farming Ground Fortresses. It was fast paced enough, that even though I was using Ash, I needed lots of micro to dodge the red rings, maintain the max distance...all while keeping up the pace.

So my overall conclusion is that cam 3 is great for micro situations. Cam 1 is great for general combat and traveling the world.

Have you figured out double-clicking yet? If so, does it help with fine control? If not, should we teach it explicitly in the tutorial?

So I didn't understand it until you actually explained it in server. That was me being an idiot. I tested it out with all the tanks with cams 1 and 3. I did not like using it with cam 3, no matter the circumstance. Cam 1...yes but only with using #4 tanks mentioned above. It made life great for just running circles around enemies. Otherwise I did not prefer to use double click for any other tank.

In all I'ld like to say I really like all the different types of controls schemes yous came up with. I like having options. Allows me to play around with things to find what works for me. ;D

[linkshot]

Found a distance that Silver and Corsair can shoot super tanks from and not get noticed by them. Drones have only provided minor distraction so far. This may prove to be more difficult in deeper regions. Will stay vigilant.

Okay, so Rob talked to me about that and I tossed a suggestion back.

My newest issue is that farming around Origin is probably the best thing to ever do. As soon as you've got a decent number of Level 1 towns scattered around, Origin is your farm for expanding those, since the rewards are no less than at the edge of the map. You can either buff the rewards at the edge (150k Fortresses giving something like 10k Gridshards), or nerf the rewards near Origin as Origin gets levelled up, if you see this as an imbalance.

[amitp]

BTW, some RotMG players love the swirly world / rotating camera: forums.wildshadow.com/node/141017

[zuboki]

I find that the biggest boon of rotating camera in Realm was the ability to see (and use abilities!) farther ahead of you- the option of zoom levels in Grid12 makes this less of a concern. Also, in Realm, dodging had no pivot point- you cannot strafe as easily in Grid12, particularly with the front-firing tanks like Homer and Ash. This gave screen-rotators a simplified dodging mechanic (w + q or e advances, a and d dodge, and s retreats) when compared to fixed-view players like myself (where each of the three actions could require any combination of wasd and are limited to the 8 cardinal directions).

In both games, I prefer fixed view- "swirly cameras" in overhead games tend to disorient me. I feel the advantage that screen rotation had in Realm (as noticed by the responders to that post) isn't present due to the lack of pivot-free strafing and the availability of zoom levels.