4 replies to this topic

[PhDGreg]

The "new player experience" is regularly a hot topic around these parts, and ties into a few critical aspects of the game - in particular, it's survival (F2P games need a steady stream of paying players, and people only pay for things they enjoy/plan to spend time doing) and the whole "PUGs vs Premades" debate.

So... How about a coaching system? It's no doubt been suggested before (no luck finding it via a quick search).

Such a system was implemented in Team Fortress 2 when it went F2P for the very reason of helping new players get up to speed and enjoy a game which has a relatively high learning curve. And imo, while TF2 has a ton of nuances and subtle complexity, it's a much easier game to pick up and play than MWO which has a lot of in-your-face complexity.

How would it work?
The general gist of it would be similar to that of TF2 system.

Something like the following:

• Experienced players can register as a coach.
  
  • They can toggle their availability as desired and specify which mech classes they feel capable of coaching for.
• Inexperienced players can press a button to call for a coach.
  
  • This triggers a process where an available coach is matched to the player and their chosen mech.
• The coach spectates the match from the players PoV, with a private comms channel between them (voice or chat, whatever works).

Gotta run, but that's the gist of it.

[Eddrick]

I haven't seen this suggested yet. But, I have only been here since December.

This idea doesn't overlap with any other suggestions for new players I have seen. So, it could be added onto of what ever other gets added for new players.

Most of this can already be done on the forums. The only thing that can't be done already is spectating them without killing yourself.

I'm sure it is universaly agreed that this game does have a steep learning cruve. But, they did tone it down a little compared to the earlyer MechWarrior games. In a simlar way Armored Core did. Armored Core 2 and 3 takes a long time to learn and master, too. Both, MechWarrior Online and Armored Core 4 made it a little easyer to pick up by makeing as much of the controles mimic first person shoter game controles as possible.

[MavRCK]

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A JOB FOR KAOS!!!

HELLO CARTMAN!

[machine]

I can already see where this is going.

OP: Good Idea, but there are a ton of YouTubes out there already.

[PhDGreg]

Glad the idea seems to be well received so far - had to pinch the post off and head out the other day.

To flesh it out a little more:

• Players who are seeking a coach would find games and play as normal, with the only difference being that they request (and are matched with) a coach before launching.
  
• Coaches that are set to "on duty" would probably be best off idling in the client while they want to coach, but I guess if they launch into a game it could set them to be off duty until it's over.

The obvious statement is "This sounds like a burden on coaches / why would anyone coach?"
If that's how you feel, then coaching probably isn't for you. It's something people would do for a number of reasons - maybe they want a break from playing but still want to be doing something / seeing a match. Maybe they just want to be helpful and have a vested interest in seeing new players stick around. Maybe they just like having the opportunity to show off how knowledgeable they are.

The idea of a rating and/or reward system for coaches is possible, but hard to implement without being exploitable. That said, if the coach/player matching is done automatically and a rating system is implemented it could work... e.g.

• Players can rate their coach at the end of a match.
  
• Ratings for each coach are averaged to a value between 0 and 1.
  
• Once a coach has been rated by at least 5 different players, they become eligible for rewards.
  
• The reward is a proportion (based on their rating) of the C-Bills earned by the player they coach.

The numbers could easily be tweaked - this system would potentially give coaches as many C-Bills as the player, and such systems tend to attract generous ratings so I expect most coaches would earn >= 70%... The rating could be a value between 0 and 0.5 if needed.