Requesting Feedback on Improving the New User Experience

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

Hello all!

The Issue

For a little bit of background on this project, it’s been something I have been working on with a general goal in mind of uniting a series of different skills in an older MMORPG style. In the last few months I’ve focused on refining the gameplay mechanics into simpler forms to better serve the variety of age and skill demographics on Roblox. While I believe the gameplay mechanics are easier to understand now, I’ve found that as I start to bring in new players, they tend to leave within the first 30 to 50 Total Levels gained, which is extremely early into the game’s content. This has turned my focus toward the new user experience, as many users seem to just leave without saying anything, which is understandable if they have become confused or bored. However, this indicates that I may be missing something about the Roblox demographic that my playtesters and I missed during our various iterations of the new user experience, likely due to us being so familiar with the gameplay.

The Goal

My goal for this thread is to hopefully get some new perspectives from fresh users who can help to describe what parts of the game are confusing, boring, unenjoyable, or that actively break the flow of the gameplay.

I’m mostly looking for critical feedback to help me to improve the ability to retain new players, but any feedback about any part of the game is welcome.

Solutions I Have Attempted

So far the solutions that I have attempted consist of streamlining the tutorial to directly move the user to the area of the map intended for the skill they chose to learn, in hopes of utilizing the element of choice given to the player to better guide them to content they may enjoy.

I have also tried breaking the introduction of skills into smaller parts that are introduced as the player finds new skilling locations to avoid frequently breaking the game flow by interrupting the player with suggestions of other skills to try.

In addition to the above, I’ve also tried modifying the way that the Repeatable category of quests are assigned to remove the back-tracking that was previously in place, instead opting to use these quests to guide the user to the highest resource they can gather, helping to guide them through the progression of resources in a more natural way.

Extra Information

While I think the above will hopefully be steps in the right direction, I’m hoping that having some fresh eyes on the problem will help to turn up alternative solutions or problem areas I could focus on addressing.

Game Link: ⛏️ [RPG] ⛏️ Alderra - Roblox!

Thank you for any feedback you can provide!

#2

I tried it for a little bit but some thoughts.

  1. Load all the detailed content before you load the character into the game. (You could add a skip button)
  2. Change the greeting sound when going to the NPC dialogue you should make multiple different ones (When I went to chat to an NPC it was very repetitive with the same clip)
#3

These are some good points I had not considered!

I will set it up to load the major parts of the game during a loading screen with the option to skip the loading for players who don’t want to wait for it. I find the loading screen a bit annoying for repeat visits, so I may include an auto-skip option for users who plan to return and know that they wish to skip the loading each time.

For the NPC dialogue sound, I just have the one sound for now, so I will add a bit of randomness to the playback speed to give it at least some audible variety for now, until I have time to get additional sounds. Do you think that would be a decent solution, or perhaps I should just disable the sound effect for NPC interaction until I have more variety to choose from?