At present, the new character experience is a little lacking in quality and variety. You are pretty much thrown into character creation with no real useful hints or information on how to proceed with making your character. Once you’ve made your character and completed the tutorial, you are automatically forced to run the introductory missions that force you to align with Zion.
This creates a few problems:
> Players may make incorrect choices when selecting their character attributes.
> RSI creation process is not as user friendly as it could be – and could cause problems for people with lower performing graphic cards.
> Increased chance of players not going to other organisations once introductory missions are complete – causing unbalanced organisation bias towards Zion due to a serve lack of organisational promotion for Machines and Merovingians.
Here are some proposed modifications that could be made to alleviate these problems.
Provide players with more detailed information for attributes
>Provide information on what each attribute affects when you mouse over it’s name – using the details shown when you allocate attribute points on levelling up.
>Provide example classes that best suit attributes.
Ie: Focus best suits MA
Reason best suits Hacker
And so forth so players have a basic idea of which character trait to select based on the class they would primarily like to play.
Apply numbers or names to the graphical options when creating RSIs
> Each item, such as body type, hair color etc. Should either have a number or a name displayed to allow players to better determine which they are currently viewing. It will also help players remember which ones they like best when viewing all options – allowing for more user friendliness when creating a character.
Ie: For body types, either:
Type 1, Type 2, Type 3
Or: Small, Medium, Large.
And so forth for each item. Should be displayed either in the lower right corner of the screen or (especially in the case of numbers) near the selection arrows.
Non-biased introductory missions
There are two options for this:
> Create a new Neutral organisation and a controller for that organisation. This organisation is only used for new characters while running the Introductory missions. The problem for this option would be creating the new organisation, Neutral tag, and programming in precautions to avoid player abuse (mainly concerning PvP) – ie, players cannot create crews or factions while Neutral and lose the Neutral status as soon as they join a crew.
> A better option: Players will have a choice of the three current controllers to start the introductory mission from. Once they play the first mission with one of the controllers, the other two are no longer displayed until the seduction missions are available.
Ie: A new player decides to run “Welcome to the Matrix” with Agent Gray as their controller, Zion and Merovingian controllers are flagged to not display until they “contact” you at the start of the seduction missions.
This option allows player diversity from the start and could be useful for RP too. Upon being offered seduction missions, the dialog boxes shown could be changed to include more promotional information on the organisations – to try and convince players to play for that organisation. The only problem is that a little programming work will need to be done to display the three organisations at the start and allow them all to offer the introductory missions, then more programming to flag two of them to no longer display and finally, the creation of the seduction pop up window for Zion.
Thoughts and comments welcome.
This creates a few problems:
> Players may make incorrect choices when selecting their character attributes.
> RSI creation process is not as user friendly as it could be – and could cause problems for people with lower performing graphic cards.
> Increased chance of players not going to other organisations once introductory missions are complete – causing unbalanced organisation bias towards Zion due to a serve lack of organisational promotion for Machines and Merovingians.
Here are some proposed modifications that could be made to alleviate these problems.
Provide players with more detailed information for attributes
>Provide information on what each attribute affects when you mouse over it’s name – using the details shown when you allocate attribute points on levelling up.
>Provide example classes that best suit attributes.
Ie: Focus best suits MA
Reason best suits Hacker
And so forth so players have a basic idea of which character trait to select based on the class they would primarily like to play.
Apply numbers or names to the graphical options when creating RSIs
> Each item, such as body type, hair color etc. Should either have a number or a name displayed to allow players to better determine which they are currently viewing. It will also help players remember which ones they like best when viewing all options – allowing for more user friendliness when creating a character.
Ie: For body types, either:
Type 1, Type 2, Type 3
Or: Small, Medium, Large.
And so forth for each item. Should be displayed either in the lower right corner of the screen or (especially in the case of numbers) near the selection arrows.
Non-biased introductory missions
There are two options for this:
> Create a new Neutral organisation and a controller for that organisation. This organisation is only used for new characters while running the Introductory missions. The problem for this option would be creating the new organisation, Neutral tag, and programming in precautions to avoid player abuse (mainly concerning PvP) – ie, players cannot create crews or factions while Neutral and lose the Neutral status as soon as they join a crew.
> A better option: Players will have a choice of the three current controllers to start the introductory mission from. Once they play the first mission with one of the controllers, the other two are no longer displayed until the seduction missions are available.
Ie: A new player decides to run “Welcome to the Matrix” with Agent Gray as their controller, Zion and Merovingian controllers are flagged to not display until they “contact” you at the start of the seduction missions.
This option allows player diversity from the start and could be useful for RP too. Upon being offered seduction missions, the dialog boxes shown could be changed to include more promotional information on the organisations – to try and convince players to play for that organisation. The only problem is that a little programming work will need to be done to display the three organisations at the start and allow them all to offer the introductory missions, then more programming to flag two of them to no longer display and finally, the creation of the seduction pop up window for Zion.
Thoughts and comments welcome.