Forged Alliance Forever

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-24T10:03:10+02:00

VoiceofReason wrote:
pza, your comments are great. I would love you get together with you so you could help me create, "Simple, effective, tutorials." I agree with everything you've said, and some of it I was thinking about as going through the video, all the while trying to be "somewhat entertaining." Hard making these decisions during the video and trying to act on them, like a short video - being succinct. Realising now, preparation is a large portion of the battle.
Again, that was my first try and anything like this, and never having really watched tutorials I have some problems delivering everything people would expect..

thank you, I'm glad to hear the feedback is useful. i'm sure though you'll manage to improve on your future tutorial(s). if anything, you can find me in aeolus sometimes. colonel sheppard also brought up some good points, so i bet he'll be glad to help you, too. keep us up to date here!

Statistics: Posted by pza — 24 Jun 2015, 10:03

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-23T11:04:52+02:00

If i may leave a short note:

The most important thing about making a Tutorial ist ultimately keeping it short and contained to one topic. 13min is too long already, i know that there is a lot to talk about, but the first few things someone want to learn is:

1. How to add a friend (you can explain that in 1min)
2. How to join a game/find a game of a friend/How to autoplay (you can do that in another minute)
3. Something about the factions (The irony is of course that nobody actually wants any in depth informations about how factions work, so you can just tell them some meta stuff, like that UEF looks quite human and is therefore a reasonable faction for starters and that Aeon are hard for newbies.) (also 1min)
4. perhabs a like 30s note about the map/mod/replay-vault nothing to fancy, just say it exists and that the downloadbutton is a bit hidden

That would be a 4min dens video that most people will probably watch till the end. You can then make seperate written or recorded tuts about hosting games or the ladder or whatever.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The thing is, for that to do you NEED a transcript and that means work, the problem i have with many tutorials for many games is that it's just clicking and talking with a random plan on what you want to cover. This is acceptable if I click on TAs video and want to learn something about Airmirco in specific, this is little to not acceptable for a video for people that just ran into FA.

For Concept i found this very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFO0U7ilNwI
For multiplayer you need a crashcourse i'd say no long that 20min, which opens the question how the f*** you explain multiplayer in 20min, the short answer is: You don't. Once uppon a time i had the idea for a spinoff tutorial series that would feature 4 videos from T1 to T4 in a 1v1 game, but i did it because i was laking time and frustrated by peoples refusement to contribute. I had very positiv feedback about this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozRcglfzicU
But it has many problems:
- it's terrible res
- it had no transcript
- it was a stream
- it only covers T1
Now, infact if i had time i would have to redo this completely, that means repeating the whole prozess, recording it in HD, speaking while playing and the cutoff the sound and respeak it fluently and with no unessesary pauses becaues i was busy at a certain moment.

Statistics: Posted by ColonelSheppard — 23 Jun 2015, 11:04

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-22T23:54:56+02:00

Was showing a friend that video, and a couple minutes later they came back telling me they learned something about FAF they never new! The user search function. And this person has been on FAF longer than myself!
...Little bit of gold.

Statistics: Posted by VoiceofReason — 22 Jun 2015, 23:54

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-22T22:48:38+02:00

I agree a new player might feel totaly lost!

Statistics: Posted by Lu_Xun_17 — 22 Jun 2015, 22:48

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-22T20:42:14+02:00

pza, your comments are great. I would love you get together with you so you could help me create, "Simple, effective, tutorials." I agree with everything you've said, and some of it I was thinking about as going through the video, all the while trying to be "somewhat entertaining." Hard making these decisions during the video and trying to act on them, like a short video - being succinct. Realising now, preparation is a large portion of the battle.
Again, that was my first try and anything like this, and never having really watched tutorials I have some problems delivering everything people would expect..

Statistics: Posted by VoiceofReason — 22 Jun 2015, 20:42

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-22T09:24:21+02:00

hey VoR, really nicely done. If you want some feedback tho, here my thoughts on where you could improve:

-The value of a tutorial depends on a few factors:

value of Information * number of viewers / length of video

- value of information means how much relevant information are you delivering.
- number of viewers depends on how good it is advertised/visible. If no one knows about it, it's not useful. If you have to know about it to find it, it fails its purpose as a tutorial for most newbies. It also depends on how many newbies are WILLING to watch, which is directly proportional to quality, like sound quality, clarity, simplicity, does it have a summary, etc.
- devide that by the length of your tutorial, whether the guide is written or recorded. noone likes to waste too much time reading or listening, especially if they don't care too much.

so basically you could add some things to your tutorial:
- a few words on what the tutorial is about, and why you should watch it as a newbie "FAF is where the community around Supreme commander: forged alliance is at. If you just downloaded FAF or are interested to do so, this is the right place for you" (or sth similar, really up to you, just be short )
- quick summary on what information this guide will offer (also make clear this is not a gameplay tutorial, if that's not made clear in the title)
- "how/where to get FAF/get faf going"
- how to start a normal game vs AI to get used to commands
- what is coop mission?
- provide information on where to get more help. chat, wiki, forums, tutorials on gameplays

keep it as simple and short as possible. its rather difficult to say, but i can imagine 5 min would be certainly possible, the shorter the better.

i like that you already made your thoughts about what you want to explain in before. its important that you dont lose your words or talk about unrelated things that noone cares about (no offense, but people wont care where you're from exactly, this is something i would mention when i'm casting a game(=entertainment) to get people comfortable, not in a tutorial)

i'm sorry if these tips sound any demotivating or something, because i really dont mean so. I greatly apreciate that you simply took the iniciative to do this and it's already somewhat decent.
hope this helped.

Statistics: Posted by pza — 22 Jun 2015, 09:24

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-22T08:47:13+02:00

Good video, You skipped how to actually add friends but I think most people can work that out. We should put this somewhere

Statistics: Posted by Deering — 22 Jun 2015, 08:47

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-22T04:58:00+02:00

http://youtu.be/XFhvKPSdreg Intro to FAF...
Thoughts? ...Also, let me start with - this is my first time trying to do something like this.

Statistics: Posted by VoiceofReason — 22 Jun 2015, 04:58

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-19T05:39:38+02:00

Just to clarify, Im super nice to new people, but I got sick of all those repeating questions, so me and retard rewrote the whole wiki for them. Now Im just linking wiki pages everywhere to save time.

And to actually say something to topic, there could be some introduction to faf ui, why not. Something you could unclick "Dont show this again" and then it would be accesible through some menu. And wiki links everywhere.

Statistics: Posted by speed2 — 19 Jun 2015, 05:39

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-19T03:52:37+02:00

I think there is tons of people that are willing to help player (newbies).
In games there is lots of chance of having (good) player to give harsh remark to newbies, Because of frustrastion, since they often have to give them after the newbies made the mistake, and f*** up the game.

I feel like it's way easier for newbies to have access to information, than 1 year and an half (when i started playing). We have more tutorial videos (brnk's ones for exemple) and a good wiki. I had to figure out on my own with testing a lot of thing (and by playing to).
Btw, in this game you can still learn tons of thinks, even at tops level, you can discover usefull feature.... Being curious would help lots of people complaining about the lack of teaching/ way of learning in faf.

We should maybe promote the wiki more easily than with a simple link in the topic of aeolus. Moreover we can improve the wiki way to access at the information. I feel like i've difficulties to find the pages i want in the wiki, even if i know them. So if you aren't even aware of them, it's really easy to miss them. (kind of sad, since there is tons of interesting information.)

So improvement can be done, but most newbies can't blame other people (for not telling them information), if they aren't curious to search for a wiki or test thing by themself.

Statistics: Posted by keyser — 19 Jun 2015, 03:52

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-19T02:36:01+02:00

Blackster wrote:
I am not complaining, just reporting my experience and expressing my surprise of some comments here.
I noticed the existing mentality of some saying "if they cant figure out for themselves, they won't be any good to play with anyway" (not neccessarily here but in aelous). Thus, I think its impotant to not give new players a hard time (just saw it today in aeolus).
The time before this one today I pm'ed a new player who had gotten a harsh answer. He was grateful for it and told me he was dissapointed in the reactions and thought about not coming back. It was all cool once I explained a little more in detail how the system works.
To this day he is still around and enjoys playing here.

Agreed. FA has a rather steep lurning curve. The documentation is also pretty fragmented and incomplete. There are 1000-rated players who never heard about overcharge doing 12K damage to units.

But it's not just some people behaving rude to new players. It's also the reverse. When 30 minutes into a game a newbie has t1 mexes and I ask them "pls upgrade mexes" I get about 50% "STFU you moron!"... I guess general assholeness is present about everywhere.

Statistics: Posted by E8400-CV — 19 Jun 2015, 02:36

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-19T02:04:44+02:00

Well to me that's just the internet. Your going to get rude childish people in whatever community you are in and maybe faf has a bit better community than others out there but it still has its share of rude childish people.

Statistics: Posted by Reaper Zwei — 19 Jun 2015, 02:04

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-19T01:51:15+02:00

I am not complaining, just reporting my experience and expressing my surprise of some comments here.
I noticed the existing mentality of some saying "if they cant figure out for themselves, they won't be any good to play with anyway" (not neccessarily here but in aelous). Thus, I think its impotant to not give new players a hard time (just saw it today in aeolus).
The time before this one today I pm'ed a new player who had gotten a harsh answer. He was grateful for it and told me he was dissapointed in the reactions and thought about not coming back. It was all cool once I explained a little more in detail how the system works.
To this day he is still around and enjoys playing here.

Statistics: Posted by --- — 19 Jun 2015, 01:51

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-19T01:20:03+02:00

Blackster wrote:
Ya, ya, good answer, thus be annoyed by questions. Here is a serious piece of advice:
If you get annoyed by questions in aelous (NOT directed at YOU): ignore it. There is so much sh#t on aeoulus anyway, and u get worked up by some questions...
And ya, some are lazy, and ya, some dont even try. But imo its worth giving everyone some credit before making them never come back. Some will learn, some wont. If you think its not woth the effort: dont complain about lack of players. If you think it is worth - stay nice and FAF may grow by another new player.

Just feels like you and pza are complaining about a nonissue. Many people in faf are courteous to new people and help them out when and where they cross paths. There are some people that have a hard time with figuring out how to navigate faf but your always going to get that no matter how easy the system is to use. Maybe downlords system is easier to use and thus when he's done we will all transfer to using that system instead but no matter what system you use there will always be complaints and people who don't know how to use it.

Statistics: Posted by Reaper Zwei — 19 Jun 2015, 01:20

Re: Tutorials in FAF, new councilors task?

2015-06-18T22:20:52+02:00

cause Im the guy who's pressing all the buttons first and burns manual later

Statistics: Posted by speed2 — 18 Jun 2015, 22:20