[MUD-Dev2] [Design] A rant against MMORPG installs and initial user experience

[Tess Snider]

On 2/15/07, Mike Rozak <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:
> 12:00 PM - Get home with the vanguard install disks. (After doing a 2 hour round-trip to
> the game store. I live in the outback! I also picked up groceries and ate lunch while I was
> in town, otherwise I would have started the clock at 10:00 AM.)

It's 2007.  Everything should be downloadable.  No more excuses.

> - I'm then asked AGAIN what language to use. I select English, again.

Because, you know, you might speak Warumungu, or something.

> - By the way, I search vanguard's online troubleshooting FAQ and see no mention about
> setup problems. I search for "install" and "setup" and find nothing related to my
> experience. Could I be the only one with these problems?

Heh, who knows.  My Vista upgrade was so hair-raising, it drove the
other witness to vow he was switching to all Mac.

> - Right away, I'm asked if I want the $29.95 station pass to play all SOE's games. I say
> no. I'm then asked if I want to Spend $0.99 on some random feature. I click no. In the
> next dialog, I'm told that I'll be able to trial those features for free for a month, even though
> I clicked no in the previous one. This sort of marketing strikes me as really bizarre.

10 records for 99 cents!  Cancel at any time!

Way to make your players think of you as a bunch of polyester-suit
wearing scumbags!

> - I'm asked for CC details, etc. Setup asks for my state, despite the fact that I select
> "Australia" as my country... Australia has states too, but the US states are still shown in
> the combo box... (And by the way, Windows knows I'm in Australia, so why doesn't
> Vanguard use that info to default to "Australia".)

Ah, good old down-home American myopia!

> - Vanguard then spends 10-15 minutes rescanning the 17 gigabytes of files that it just
> installed in order to see which of them was out of date.

Ooh, sloppy.  Should only do that on a repair.  Maybe they waited
until the last minute to write their patcher?

> - Apparently, 500 MB(?) of them were. (A mere month after the golden masters were
> made.)

If the client had been downloadable, like it should have been, you
wouldn't have to patch, because they'd (presumably) have the latest
client available to you.  On the other hand, two DVDs worth of
information could take a while.  Still, you could've started it the
night before, and you wouldn't have had to nursemaid it for hours.

> - For some reason, an hour and a half in, the download decides that someone pressed
> cancelled, which they didn't, and then decides to hang.

It was the parrot.  He's on to you man.  Bad install means more play!

> - Vanguard asks me to log in again.

This is something I hate about WoW, actually.  Why do I have to keep
logging in over and over again when I'm patching?  If you've got more
than one patch to install, it gets completely insane.  And the EULA
and the ToS!  Over and over and over.

> - I re-run vanguard, re-logon, and get to a page where I can "Create a character" or
> "change my settings". I have no characters, of course, so why would I want to do
> anything except create a character?

Because you have to change your settings. :P

> - I go to change my settings since vanguard has decided to set my resolution to
> 1280x1024 DESPITE the fact that I have a widescreen monitor. (How many people would
> notice the the aspect-ratio mismatch? Most would notice it subliminally and think that
> vanguard's graphics suck.) Widescreen monitors are NOT uncommon. It would only have
> taken a developer 10 minutes of coding to check the pre-existing monitor resolution
> (CM_SCREENX and CM_SCREENY) and use that! (Many other games have done this to
> me too, and I have no idea why no-one in the test team picks up on this.)

Widescreens are getting pretty ubiquitous.  Though, I think most games
don't bother to scan your desktop resolution, because people don't
always want to run in the same resolution as their desktop (especially
if they have an older video card).  *I* prefer to run in desktop
resolution, because I'm usually either A.) on an LCD that has exactly
one native resolution, or B.) on an HDTV where I need it to use my
custom resolution to prevent overscan.  However, many gamers adjust
resolution based on performance for a given game.

That said, I agree that it would be nice for it to autodetect if
you're in a wide screen resolution, and at least attempt to give you a
proper aspect ratio, going in -- even if it's not your favorite
resolution.

> - Furthermore, assuming that the video had been properly set up, I should have been
> asked to create a character right away. There's no point in asking questions when there's
> only one answer.

I like being able to fix up my options right away, so I don't have to
watch any introductory material with ugly settings.

> - I am then thrown into a race/class selection page that is lacking documentation and
> would be fairly confusing to anyone who hadn't played a MMORPG before.

Oh, now this is a major pet peeve of mine.  Let people know the
consequences of their decisions, for heaven's sake.

> - My first quest does NOT involve killing rats! Yay! Instead, it involves PICKING CLUMPS
> OF GRASS! I'm excited now. (Sarcasm.) Compare this to Oblivion where you escape
> from prison by following the Emperor, and then watch him die.

At least if you were in ATitD, you could dry the grass, and make
bricks, or something...

Tess