Thoghts about our game learning curve and more..

[heyitsmee]

so now and again i post in israeli gaming communities about our game
ill throw nice pictures explanations tutorials and so..

http://www.gamer.co.il/gamer2/php/re...TopicID=913014

must reactions are of people saying this game is too hard
i feel like 95% will play this game only few times and give it up being our game is one of acquired skill with an improvement curve of years

you can see it right here in our site , with 1.5 mil registered users and an average of 4000 people online at the peak there are still only few hundred players that you see on the lists

FFR a game of the few?

[Blue Bird]

LOL at your sig. xD

And yeah, most people will think this game is too hard, but that's just because they're probably aiming too high. I mean, what do they expect? To be able to play Vertex BETA after just a few hundred games? It doesn't work like that.

It's the same with any fighting game out there. You need to master it, and that takes A LOT of hours of practice. If they give up, then it's probably because they don't think it's fun anymore. I always found FFR fun when I started. Doesn't matter if I got 30 misses after the end of a Standard song. It was nice to try and I noticed I was getting better.

Besides, the game's learning curve is OK. There's plenty of easy songs to get new players used to the game. If they play all the easy songs and work their way towards the harder ones, they will get better. They won't get better by constantly mashing FMO songs, which a lot of people do, and then say the game is too hard and that they'll never be able to do those songs.

[Tasselfoot]

the thing is, if people practice for even a short period of time, they likely will improve fairly rapidly. i'm pretty happy with how many easy songs we have... by the time a user can enjoy and appreciate all of those, he's ready to move on the the vast sea of harder material.

[Sir_Thomas]

Originally Posted by Tasselfoot

the thing is, if people practice for even a short period of time, they likely will improve fairly rapidly. i'm pretty happy with how many easy songs we have... by the time a user can enjoy and appreciate all of those, he's ready to move on the the vast sea of harder material.

Your rooster is a vast sea of harder material.

[heyitsmee]

beginners get intimidated by all the perfects averages boos
i think something like a beginner mode with only hit and miss stats would help mentally
a beginner could say ok ill ignore the perfects goods averages ill only go for the combo
but that will still make him feel a little lame

like that game Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3 if i'm not mistaken there are no hit stats only hit miss not saying its good only saying for for an opening spot maybe its better

a full combo in this theoretical beginner mode with only hit and miss could still count as a full combo to the stats bar

just a thought i'm pretty sure all those averages are annoying and confusing to new players maybe i'm just making a big deal of nothing

[devonin]

I think you misunderstand how many people are -supposed- to be good at the game. I have like the 600th best average rank on the site, I've been playing fairly actively for about a year, and my best AAAs are 5s and my best FCs are 8s. This seems perfectly logical to me.

Look at a game like WoW. There is more game content for level 70s than there is for the entirety of level 1-69, and as a percentage I bet as few as 30% of all players have ever had a level 70 character.

There's so many 9-12 songs on FFR because once you -are- that good, you need more and more challenges to keep you sticking around. But the number of 1-8 songs is more than large enough to content everybody who doesn't want to, or doesn't have the skill to, get to where they are AAA'ing FMOs

[Tasselfoot]

also, FFR is, deep down, a DDR-based game... all the DDR-esque games have timing windows and will fail you if you miss too many notes.

[immawhiteguy]

honestly, I got my friend Steven into this game and he's playing anything from easiest to difficult and is doing alright in them. he's only been playing for 3 days though.

Have the noobies learn spread and use spread from the get go. lol.

[Xx{Midday}xX]

Originally Posted by Tasselfoot

the thing is, if people practice for even a short period of time, they likely will improve fairly rapidly. i'm pretty happy with how many easy songs we have... by the time a user can enjoy and appreciate all of those, he's ready to move on the the vast sea of harder material.

Agreed. .5 years was enough for me to tackle the seas of harder material.

Originally Posted by Blue Bird

LOL at your sig. xD

And yeah, most people will think this game is too hard, but that's just because they're probably aiming too high. I mean, what do they expect? To be able to play Vertex BETA after just a few hundred games? It doesn't work like that.

It's the same with any fighting game out there. You need to master it, and that takes A LOT of hours of practice. If they give up, then it's probably because they don't think it's fun anymore. I always found FFR fun when I started. Doesn't matter if I got 30 misses after the end of a Standard song. It was nice to try and I noticed I was getting better.

Besides, the game's learning curve is OK. There's plenty of easy songs to get new players used to the game. If they play all the easy songs and work their way towards the harder ones, they will get better. They won't get better by constantly mashing FMO songs, which a lot of people do, and then say the game is too hard and that they'll never be able to do those songs.

I seem to be an outlier or something. My learning curve started with Seven. I still do think that songs like Story of the Snowman and Sunshine Girl are harder than songs like Seven... o.o

Also, I think that there are many harder songs which are more pleasing to the ear than the easy ones. You can't find a song that has a stream-like sound quality to it (Midnight Dragon for example) in the easy ranges... ap19 told me once that he stopped playing FFR for about 2 years, because he couldn't pass any of the songs he liked. Maybe if some more popular songs (Midnight Dragon is widely appreciated amongst various music communities) had easier versions of stepfiles, people would stay? I can't really talk about this because I didn't have this experience.

-Midday

PS: After ap19 came back from his long term break, he could FC every song. Who would know why? O_o

[rushyrulz]

My take is that when you show them a whole bunch of awesome screenshots and lots of skill tokens and FC's and AAA's, they think they should be that good from the start. When they can't, they think it's too hard.

[Xx{Midday}xX]

Originally Posted by rushyrulz

My take is that when you show them a whole bunch of awesome screenshots and lots of skill tokens and FC's and AAA's, they think they should be that good from the start. When they can't, they think it's too hard.

Haha, good point. I play FFR in school, but the only FFR that the audience watches is me. So basically, they think that I'm the norm and think they suck when they can't do as well... They don't know what 2 years of experience means to me.

-ap19

[awein999]

Originally Posted by heyitsmee

beginners get intimidated by all the perfects averages boos
i think something like a beginner mode with only hit and miss stats would help mentally
a beginner could say ok ill ignore the perfects goods averages ill only go for the combo
but that will still make him feel a little lame

like that game Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 3 if i'm not mistaken there are no hit stats only hit miss not saying its good only saying for for an opening spot maybe its better

a full combo in this theoretical beginner mode with only hit and miss could still count as a full combo to the stats bar

just a thought i'm pretty sure all those averages are annoying and confusing to new players maybe i'm just making a big deal of nothing

SCGMD 3 was the game I played before I heard of ffr. People who just start ffr are often turned off just because there are songs they think are nearly impossible but people can play them and get AAA's. They never think they will be good enough. The others like me and most of the people that play regularly embrace the challenge I would always think to myself "ok, for my overall rank my average rank is really good," and that has gotten me to where I am today

[heyitsmee]

Originally Posted by rushyrulz

My take is that when you show them a whole bunch of awesome screenshots and lots of skill tokens and FC's and AAA's, they think they should be that good from the start. When they can't, they think it's too hard.

i tried my best to suck enough in that thread i made i talked about full combing rather then being focused on all the hit stats

[dore]

I always looked at the top players and thought that if they could do it why couldn't I? So I practiced and practiced until I got better and I was a Tier 1 player. I realized that the only difference between me and the top players was music game experience. Practice and a little competitive encouragement got me to where I was.

People who play the game and see the community of elite players should realize that when they haven't played thousands of games they can't be an elite.

The learning curve is rather higher than a lot of games these days (to be considered "good" at least) but that is more because of the overall reduced learning curve that's now in games to suit the needs of "casual" gamers. The same is true for most music games. (how many people have you seen play DDR and become amazing within a few days? Exactly )

[silvercomet1525]

A lot of it is based on a commitment to practice also. Chances are that most people who play this game well didn't start off too good anyways and got discouraged. And the Brag Board's fairly frequent VD-VC AAA's don't really help either.

When I first started, I was incredibly far away from what you would call "skilled", considering this really old score. I just simply wanted to be better at this game, and look at where I am now after some practice.

Scores on the Brag Board seem to set the standard of being skilled. The thing is, you don't see many scores like AAA'ing a "Tricky" song posted there, but you couldn't exactly say that it's really easy for most people to do either.