EPTStarCraft 2 Leveling system: your input needed! - Page 12
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shockaslim
United States1105 Posts
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Dasairi
United States1 Post
I propose the idea that one of the main reasons the number of players has dropped is that new players don't feel a connection to the SC2 community. I work at a public university where we have no trouble attracting new students, but struggle to retain them past the first year. What seems to be making the biggest difference in retention rates is getting the new students involved in clubs and organizations on campus, where they can make a connection with a lot of people and feel like they are an important member of the community. Students who don't make those connections feel separate, unwelcome, and often scared. I give major props to our community for having some of the friendliest people in it, but it is still very intimidating for a player who is new to SC2, and RTS in general, to participate in forums, make friends, ask questions, or even ladder often. I never played any RTS until Wings of Liberty came out and this is my first time posting on any SC2 forum. I know how difficult it is to push your way into this community and struggle to feel welcome and useful. It feels like being at a big party where everyone knows each other, except you don't know anyone there. Everyone else is having a blast while you either try to force your way into the conversation and feel awkward or sit in a corner waiting for someone to talk to you. If new players don't feel a connection with the community quickly they will likely not want to play much and eventually will give up on SC2 entirely. I think one way to fix the retention issue is to have more communities specifically for newbies and lower league players. Current communities, like this one, don't need to change, as long as they continue to be kind and patient with newbies, but the SC2 community in general needs to have more opportunities for newbies to get involved. Day[9] does a great job with Newbie Tuesdays, but newbies deserve more than just one day per week. We need sites dedicated to casting lower league replays, lower level analysis, giving tips on mechanics and play styles for newbies, and creating dialogue among the newbie community. Get them involved! There are some sites like that already, but you have to really search for them and newbies aren't likely to work that hard to find something that they don't even know is available. Will they really care about game rewards that much if they are involved and have an emotional investment in the gaming community? | ||
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FreshNoThyme
United States356 Posts
On July 29 2011 06:33 akaname wrote: errrrrr.... WoW? also, a lot of people think it is still fun, which is pretty f***ing rare for a game 1 year after its release. While I admit that the "carrot on a stick" is a huge part of WoW, leveling itself does not take long. Even in vanilla, it wasn't a huge timesink, and the majority of players kept playing because of endgame (and continually added content). Nowadays, it is easy to hit 85 in 2 days (IRL, not /played) with RAF abuse. Even casually, max level doesn't take more than a couple weeks. It isn't what keeps people playing. Not that what ACTUALLY keeps people playing is THAT much different, but leveling isn't really the reason... at all. | ||
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aksfjh
United States4853 Posts
On July 29 2011 07:35 Dasairi wrote: It sounds like an interesting idea that deserves exploration because, hey, rewards are cool. However, I'm not convinced that a better reward system is what is needed to retain players. I think that we should look more closely at the SC2 community to improve retention. I propose the idea that one of the main reasons the number of players has dropped is that new players don't feel a connection to the SC2 community. I work at a public university where we have no trouble attracting new students, but struggle to retain them past the first year. What seems to be making the biggest difference in retention rates is getting the new students involved in clubs and organizations on campus, where they can make a connection with a lot of people and feel like they are an important member of the community. Students who don't make those connections feel separate, unwelcome, and often scared. I give major props to our community for having some of the friendliest people in it, but it is still very intimidating for a player who is new to SC2, and RTS in general, to participate in forums, make friends, ask questions, or even ladder often. I never played any RTS until Wings of Liberty came out and this is my first time posting on any SC2 forum. I know how difficult it is to push your way into this community and struggle to feel welcome and useful. It feels like being at a big party where everyone knows each other, except you don't know anyone there. Everyone else is having a blast while you either try to force your way into the conversation and feel awkward or sit in a corner waiting for someone to talk to you. If new players don't feel a connection with the community quickly they will likely not want to play much and eventually will give up on SC2 entirely. I think one way to fix the retention issue is to have more communities specifically for newbies and lower league players. Current communities, like this one, don't need to change, as long as they continue to be kind and patient with newbies, but the SC2 community in general needs to have more opportunities for newbies to get involved. Day[9] does a great job with Newbie Tuesdays, but newbies deserve more than just one day per week. We need sites dedicated to casting lower league replays, lower level analysis, giving tips on mechanics and play styles for newbies, and creating dialogue among the newbie community. Get them involved! There are some sites like that already, but you have to really search for them and newbies aren't likely to work that hard to find something that they don't even know is available. Will they really care about game rewards that much if they are involved and have an emotional investment in the gaming community? That is a very good point. For a majority of the newbies out there, there's not a lot of content designed to help you out. Sure, you can post asking "what do I need to do to get better?" but you get a bunch of vague and scripted responses ("Work on your macro!" "Don't cheese!" "Learn from your losses!"). One thing to keep in mind, however, is that there is a valid reason why there isn't much content targeted towards low level players. Many times, when a discussion is had or help is administered, the recipient tunes out before anything is actually done. It makes a big difference when you're trying to help somebody and they stick with the plan long enough to see how the more targeted advice works. On the direct topic, however, I think a little more complex features could go a long way to bringing newer players to communities. I, myself, found communities like TL (and others) looking for help on topics that I needed clarification on. Stuff like FAQs and guides that are hosted on many websites bring in these players that normally don't go looking for groups. This is what a leveling system could do, give people a reason to look up ways (and thus communities) to get XP faster. Maybe they learn that they could get their Carrier that launches fighter jets faster if they stick to a strat and get into gold league instead of trying to grind it out in bronze with 1 base mass carriers. In this way, we create a steady demand of people who want cheap rewards from XP at various skill levels. It creates a branch of the community that wants to achieve something at their own skill level instead of always being concerned with promotion, which creates a steady demand for content at that level. Can you imagine if every Zerg started hatch first expanding into roach push because it was the easiest build to get the most points out of? On one hand, that's annoying to deal with, but on the other, you're motivating tons of people to stick to a build in order to get that coveted XP, and all because either the community said it was the "right" build or a popular guide/FAQ did. | ||
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BigLighthouse
United Kingdom424 Posts
People might complain that its catering to a "lower class of gamer" but that opinion is pretty petty and short sighted given the competative scene's reliance on a healthy player base (see quake for evidence). | ||
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reverb
United States41 Posts
On July 28 2011 13:34 Emporio wrote: I feel like a more straightforward approach would be to implement battle.net run tournamnets automatically within the game client that would match up people of the same mmr or league and give point based prizes based on how far you advance. This is a really awesome idea. +1 | ||
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Giwoon
Korea (South)431 Posts
but after reading it i think its a great idea for the casual players or people who are really shitty at the game but just need some more motivation for them to continue on playing | ||
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Gladiator6
Sweden7024 Posts
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-XSV-
United States23 Posts
I love the idea of customizable units. Another think that might be good to add would be as you level up, you can unlock a secondary design (or "skin") for a given unit. I'm sure blizzard has alternate concept art that did not make it into the final product for most units and maybe a person would prefer one over the other. This might spruce up mirror matchups because not all units would look exactly the same. This is provided you can still tell that a marine is a marine. | ||
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Twish
Norway92 Posts
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Gorvin
United States22 Posts
- With the achievement system, you're given rewards (new portraits) as your number of wins increases. - With the leveling system, you'd be given rewards as your XP increases, which would mostly just come down to the same thing (winning games). If your problem with the achievement system is that the rewards aren't frequent enough or that new portraits aren't good enough of rewards, Blizzard could fix that by adding in more achievements with different kinds of rewards (although I object to anything that could have an effect on gameplay, like extra map vetoes). For example, instead of being achievement rewards at 50/100/250/500/750/1000 wins (or whatever it is), there could be achievement rewards every 50 wins up to 1000, or something like that. A whole other "leveling" system seems completely unnecessary and a waste of development time. | ||
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Ryzu
United States369 Posts
On July 28 2011 13:44 Qzy wrote: Custom units can screw up e-sports. We need constants in order to evolve the sport. One set of units, one set of rules. But yes I agree that you need something to transition from season 1 to season 2... "XP" or whatever. Like a rank, ie. the same as in bad company 2, but meaning nothing. I think he means custom skins. Like slightly different models, similar to what Blizzard did with the Collector's Edition Thor. It's just a graphical change that only the player who has it can see. | ||
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CptCutter
United Kingdom370 Posts
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WArped
United Kingdom4845 Posts
Well, I have no idea why they don't have this implemented already. WarCraft 3 had this if I recall. | ||
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Atarirocks
36 Posts
It may be a good idea, but that doesn't mean that Blizzard will accept it any time soon, if at all. So us, the players, would really need to work hard to get this to blizzard if you/we see this as a good thing. | ||
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MonsieurGrimm
Canada2441 Posts
On July 29 2011 10:23 Ryzu wrote: I think he means custom skins. Like slightly different models, similar to what Blizzard did with the Collector's Edition Thor. It's just a graphical change that only the player who has it can see. the other person would be able to see it as well I think. I want my hydralisks to spit acidy things like in Brood War >:[ | ||
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aksfjh
United States4853 Posts
On July 29 2011 10:17 Gorvin wrote: I guess I don't really see what advantages this system would have over the achievement system. - With the achievement system, you're given rewards (new portraits) as your number of wins increases. - With the leveling system, you'd be given rewards as your XP increases, which would mostly just come down to the same thing (winning games). If your problem with the achievement system is that the rewards aren't frequent enough or that new portraits aren't good enough of rewards, Blizzard could fix that by adding in more achievements with different kinds of rewards (although I object to anything that could have an effect on gameplay, like extra map vetoes). For example, instead of being achievement rewards at 50/100/250/500/750/1000 wins (or whatever it is), there could be achievement rewards every 50 wins up to 1000, or something like that. A whole other "leveling" system seems completely unnecessary and a waste of development time. The problem with the achievement system is that it is very rigid in implementation. You can only give out achievements once, and any other way cheapens others. Eventually, you run out of sensible ones and all that is left are ridiculous achievements that take workarounds to obtain. XP is different. You can constantly gain XP without doing anything special beyond investing time. That's something that appeals to everybody on some level (getting rewards for effort instead of results). | ||
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Qzy
Denmark1121 Posts
Any aren't small tournies in the game already? | ||
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Gorvin
United States22 Posts
On July 29 2011 11:20 aksfjh wrote: The problem with the achievement system is that it is very rigid in implementation. You can only give out achievements once, and any other way cheapens others. Eventually, you run out of sensible ones and all that is left are ridiculous achievements that take workarounds to obtain. XP is different. You can constantly gain XP without doing anything special beyond investing time. That's something that appeals to everybody on some level (getting rewards for effort instead of results). I don't see how it is (meaningfully) different than the plethora of "win X number of games" achievements, other than the frequency of the rewards. Yeah, the leveling system could be designed so that you'd gain XP even when you lose games, but the match making system is designed so that you should be winning games 50% of the time, so you should be steadily making progress toward the next "win X games" achievement regardless. | ||
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Xevious
United States2086 Posts
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