User-selected indicators for skill level and seriousness when creating games #481
Conversation
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Very cool |
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I love this! Even experienced players like to play more casually sometimes. And I know I personally feel guilty when I'm trying to hard-test a tournament deck and my opponent was just trying to have some fun with his home-made janky Gagarin or Ken deck. Curious to see how well people will self-assess their skill/seriousness levels. |
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👍 |
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I personally don't like forcing the player to choose a skill level or game type from a set list. What should he choose if it doesn't fit in the allowed options? In general, I also try to keep the interface as simple and as intuitive as possible. In this case I'm afraid new users might be wondering what's the meaning of E and F or the difference between "Serious" and "Tournament". Having to set these 2 options also increases the number of clicks required to create a game. As mentionned in #474 I feel features should be added parsimoniously so I'm currently in favour of letting the creator write remarks about the game in the title. But this feature seems to generate a lot of enthusiasm so i will put it on hold for now and ask users about their opinion on it. |
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I understand your points. I have seen some friction in chat lately between players with different ideas on how serious / fast they should be playing, and others who openly stress about bring new and feel intimidated about matching up with strangers. I thought these issues could be avoided pretty easily by communicating player intents when creating games. There is no objective standard for what a Beginner or Intermediate is, and I don't think there needs to be; the game types too aren't perfectly defined, but I think that's something that will organically come to a consensus in the community. And even if it never takes off, the default selections of Intermediate / Serious reflect what I perceive to be the norm for our users and wouldn't be any more clicks in most cases. But it's not a big deal if you think it's outside the scope of the client :). |
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I think the problem is the following: If you create a game "Please don't join - testing stuff" or "looking for foobarsomeone", people still join your game, because nobody reads the game title: The default is foo's game, so it's used in 98% of all games. You see games you can't join, and read even more foo's game titles; so you become blind for the game titles. Compare that to OCTGN, where you only see games that not already running, and you have to type a game title yourself; and even new players get after 2 minutes that you usually type LF Corp or LF Runner (beginner welcome) etc. I think we could create a default game title by dynamically. When you use the default setting (Intermediate/Serious), the game title generated is Serious game or something like that. When you select e.g. Beginner/Friendly the generated title is Friendly game for beginners, Expert/Serious generates Serious game for experts etc. That would make it more clear what you're looking for, and you don't need the icons. No need to put the user name in the game title, it's redundant. So neal's game example from above would look like this:
I think that would make the whole thing clearer, and you really don't have to make more clicks if you just use the default options. |
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I like that idea, Dom. A second hybrid could be what you suggest, but still allow custom titles. Use the game type selectors in the client only to generate a name; let game creator change to something more specific if desired. |
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@nealterrell Yes, that was my idea. The generated title is just a suggestion; you should still be able to change it e.g. when you look for a specific player or want to do a league game. |
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@mtgred: I pushed the changes suggested by @queueseven. Removed the colored icons on the game list; use the game type and skill level lists to auto-create a game title instead of the default "nealpro's game". The format for auto-generated game names is:
The default selection is Friendly/Intermediate, with a game title of "Friendly game". This can easily change. You can ignore the two lists completely and type out a custom name as before. The implication is that the average user is an intermediate player looking for a friendly game; exceptions to this will cause longer game titles and draw attention in that way. We do not necessarily need the "Tournament" type, or perhaps it can be renamed -- my idea was that there is indeed a higher tier than just "serious" play, and by calling your game Tournament you might be more likely to get opponents playing Tier 1 decks (which chat users often request). New image: |
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@nealterrell I think the "Tournament" type can stay, because there are already tournaments run on jinteki.net |
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See #755. |
Add options for "Skill Level" and "Game Type" ("seriousness") when creating a game. This information is displayed in the game list with colored icons that can be hovered over. Addresses #179, #345, and #355, giving a simple visual cue as to what type of game a player is looking for. Attempts to be nonintrusive by setting default options to "Intermediate/Serious", which is probably what most site users look for.
Skill options:
Game Type options:
Game lobby list:
Hovering the icons shows a descriptive popup message, along the lines of "Looking for Expert opponent" and "This is a Friendly match".
I used built-in CSS color names "red", "green", and "yellow", which obviously can be tweaked.