jballou

There's some patching going on right now on the update servers.

Well, the key is to make much smaller steps, that each provide value. I've been on projects where they say "we're gonna make this huge thing", get 60% of the way there, and give up. But I've also seen where we make small steps, like the documents->videos->sessions->maps we did for Insurgency, so that each small step was useful. That let us make sure we were doing good work, and took feedback into account for the next step. I'd start by distilling down the Wiki articles into a couple core sets of information, so we can have the basics of play and core multiplayer mechanics described enough that an average FPS player can join a game and have most of the easy stuff down. Past that, maybe have an event where we show new players some of these things in action, and use that feedback to make videos to help illustrate the concepts. It's a lot of work, but for a game with as many moving parts as RenX, I think it sounds like a good use of effort.

I helped do something similar for Insurgency, although the end result wasn't as good as I'd hoped for. Something else we tried, for our community servers, was to have events where we turned on global voice and ran in-game training directly. We used some mods to allow things like instant respawning, kit changes, and ammo updates so that players could try scenarios using the different tools and mechanics. We logged the questions, recorded everything, and distilled it down to a series of 1-5 minute videos. Ideally, we were looking to make levels to demonstrate these things, but there simply wasn't enough time to do it all. I see you guys have an older campaign mode, putting a series of levels as a "campaign" of lessons, with cues and situations to try these concepts in game, would be a really nice feature for me as a new and overwhelmed player. Putting all the info down is the first step, the doc and the wiki in general have been really helpful for raw information for me. But if I had a way to learn by playing, rather than watching and then trying it in Skirmish or in a live game, would open this game up significantly for new players.