Teaching a new dog old tricks - Page 5

Savanja · 08-17-2007, 10:43 AM

I totally agree with Jenarie. Player style varies, and letting someone find their own is key to enjoyment. I'd hate it if someone tried to fuck with how I do things. I never use WASD, always arrows. Default UI after dicking with Fetish for the 3rd time for update issues.

I tell ya though, the first time I died in EQ1 was when I was trying to swim across from Halas to Everfrost. I couldn't stop dying trying to get up that god forsaken ladder in Blackburrow, and my boy at the time made swim around in BB until I got the angles right. See, I always play in 3rd person until he screamed "WTF Jamie! 1st person for swimming. 1ST PERSON FOR SWIMMING!!!". I thought he'd hurt himself from frustration. He was the hardcore CS competitor type, and I stopped playing with him shortly after that for fear that I'd have to kill him for being a control freak.

Since, when getting noobs to play with me, I let them figure things out for themselves first. Once they are comfortable, then we are gtg!

Cupcake · 08-17-2007, 02:27 PM

My left hand is in a permanent claw, I don't think it'll ever recover. Although, I use ESDF, instead of WASD because it gives me more keys around my hand that I can bind.

Hurri · 08-17-2007, 05:08 PM

Let her learn at her own pace in her own way.
I always use the mouse for movement, and sometimes spell casting, she uses the arrow keys and I cannot for the life of me do it.
As far as the nausea from movement,try upping the refresh rate on the monitor or moving it further away, my wife had the same problem and it helped alot.

Illuminator · 08-17-2007, 05:29 PM

Remap the arrow keys. Sink or swim. Ha!

drychnath · 08-18-2007, 09:36 AM

Get her a Nostromo, and paint some arrows on. The nostromo is a good tool for teaching people new to 3d to play 3d, worked on my kids.

for mouselook, she may benefit from inverted axes from what you use. It may seem unnatural to you, but to her it can make a lot of sense. my kids prefer a different mouselook from the one i use. theirs always gives me a headache.

And start her out on a simpler game... City of Villains is a good simple one. as a mastermind, you only have 4 buttons to push 90% of the time. She can grow into eq2.

MadLordOfMilk · 08-18-2007, 05:20 PM

If it's 3D movement in general she needs to get used to, you could always try a console game

Controllers are about 40x easier to get used to than the Mouse + Keyboard assload-of-keys-and-options overload, IMO, but it varies from person to person.

Faxon · 08-19-2007, 03:55 AM

the first game i ever played was starsiege tribes. it was an FPS about the same time that quake came out, one of the less none but more influential FPS out there. reason being? it had the most versatile movement system in game. not only could you walk around like in any other FPS and aim, but you had regenerative jetpacks and vehicles that you could use to fly around in, only the jet packs werent infinite. so, you had to learn how to fly and fall with the terrain (skiing) WHILE shooting down your enemies. played tribes 2 (came out in 2000) for years and even still a bit after EQ2 came out. try downloading tribes 1 and having her play through the tutorial, the t2 tutorial, and see about picking up tribes vengeance,which is actually a bit tougher IMO because the engine is unreal instead of tribes1/torque based, so camera and movement is way different. if she can get the feel for playing those games she will be capable of playing ANY game that comes to her computer.

on a side note, most of the projectiles in tribes are slow moving small radius explosive charges, so having good aim is even more important than ever. imagine moving at 300KPH up and down a hilly area with light armor and an energy pack, while trying to get an enemy flag carrier, and all you have left is a grenade launcher (grenades fall on an arc with gravity). you better aim those shots perfectly in the air or for where he is gonna land or your match is done. wish those type of games were still popular, but because the learning curve in the games was so super high they never took off the way games like CS did. funny too because i can hop in any FPS game out there now and have never played it before, but make anyone who has played the game for years look like a noob. CS? pff, try headshotting someone with those guns while flying

Morara · 08-19-2007, 04:01 AM

Console games are definitely the way to go for picking it up, because it's easier to relate to two sticks than WASD/mouse movement.

I suggest starting with something stupidly easy like Half-Life 2 (Xbox version has been out for a while, 360 version comes out in October) to get familiar with it.

EvilIguana966 · 08-19-2007, 04:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Faxon

the first game i ever played was starsiege tribes. it was an FPS about the same time that quake came out, one of the less none but more influential FPS out there. reason being? it had the most versatile movement system in game. not only could you walk around like in any other FPS and aim, but you had regenerative jetpacks and vehicles that you could use to fly around in, only the jet packs werent infinite. so, you had to learn how to fly and fall with the terrain (skiing) WHILE shooting down your enemies. played tribes 2 (came out in 2000) for years and even still a bit after EQ2 came out. try downloading tribes 1 and having her play through the tutorial, the t2 tutorial, and see about picking up tribes vengeance,which is actually a bit tougher IMO because the engine is unreal instead of tribes1/torque based, so camera and movement is way different. if she can get the feel for playing those games she will be capable of playing ANY game that comes to her computer.

on a side note, most of the projectiles in tribes are slow moving small radius explosive charges, so having good aim is even more important than ever. imagine moving at 300KPH up and down a hilly area with light armor and an energy pack, while trying to get an enemy flag carrier, and all you have left is a grenade launcher (grenades fall on an arc with gravity). you better aim those shots perfectly in the air or for where he is gonna land or your match is done. wish those type of games were still popular, but because the learning curve in the games was so super high they never took off the way games like CS did. funny too because i can hop in any FPS game out there now and have never played it before, but make anyone who has played the game for years look like a noob. CS? pff, try headshotting someone with those guns while flying

Tribes was very popular in it's heyday, which BTW was a "generation" after Quake I, (it was contemporary to Quake 2 and Unreal). I played Tribes, though it was difficult sometimes being on a 56k. Tribes 2 failed not because of any fundamental gameplay problems, but rather because it was extremely buggy and had crappy netcode that made it basically unplayable on a 56k. Most gamers were still on 56ks in 2001. And while it advertised offline gameplay with bots, the bots only worked in a small fraction of the levels, and didn't use vehicles at all.

The thing about net connections is that they weren't something you could just upgrade like RAM or a video card. Most people used 56k (or worse) not because they couldn't afford DSL/cable, but because those options were not available because the telecom infrastructure hadn't been built yet. Dynamix shot itself in the foot by releasing a game that the majority of potential customers just couldn't play.

Back on topic. It is my professional opinion that mouse and WASD is the best setup. If you do NOT use it, you will not play as well as someone of otherwise equal skill who does. This point is pretty much non-negotiable. Now, some classes, priest and mage archetypes primarily, will not be as heavily penalized by alternate setups, but that does bot change the fact that they are still not playing to their potential.

A long time ago, I was a WASD refusenik. Back in 96, I played a game called Dark Forces. I did so with a joystick, that item being familiar to me through flight sims. Dark Forces was a Doom-ish 2.5 D singleplayer game. I used a similar config for it's late 1997 sequel, Jedi Knight. Rather than using the Y axis to move I used it to look up and down, and used to hat button to move forward and back. I still used a strafe button to sidestep. When I started playing the game online in 1998, my first online game ever btw, I was forced to adapt. I went through a number of configs, each slightly better than the previous. I became pretty damn good too. Even with the joystick, there were only a few players I'd met who could beat me. The nice thing about JK was that accurate gunnery took a backseat to fluid movement and hopping around like a rabbit on crack. Still, the joystick held me back, and I did make the change to the mouse. It took a while to get used to it, but I'm glad I accepted the WASD/mouse config. Once you learn it, you realize that there is no better way to navigate a 3d world.

And if you don't switch over to it, you will continue to be the guy who fails to make the little jump in MMCC and has to go back to the ladder again, or the guy who can't position mobs without stopping his attacks, or any number of other guys who do little things that make people like myself have to wait on you to catch your ass up or call off a group because you fell and can't get back to us.

Mortred · 08-23-2007, 12:54 AM

Just calm down, let her play HER way NOT yours or you will only annoy her. If she runs around insane like a drunkard let her.. If she finds it more fun decorating her room for 3 hours than killing a single mob, let her.. You need to remember its a game, let her play it her way then maybe she might play your way.