New player's experiences?

So we have been discussing a lot how to help new players stay and learn, and how to help the rift between poor players and good ones, but it has occured to me that there hasn't been much input from the new players themselves.

So, newbies (and others): What has been your experience picking up and learning Zero-K? Especially with regards to the teamgame experience.

I am one of those people who read all the manuals before going to 1v1 and then teams later, so have no real perspective on this.

Also I never thought to look at forums until quite recently, too busy playing game. Perhaps true for nubs generally? Maybe we need to have more prominent ways to get feedback.

I came in about 2 years ago, but only briefly glanced at the game (and Evo) until a year ago, at which point I decided to start playing after reading one of GoogleFrog's posts about the ZK UI in the Planetary Annihilation forums. Since I knew GoogleFrog from Achron it provided some familiarity and he basically showed me the ropes to get started.

However, in the period between finding ZK and actually learning the ropes, I did play around a bit with the IsisDelta sandbox tutorial to see what the units and buildings were, and read through the manual (though the terraforming section was intimidating and unfamiliar), and I tend to experiment a lot.

Learning the game was pretty natural having played SupCom casually (about 30 competitive games on GPGNet before it was defunct, 16-14) and StarCraft Brood War competitively (2 years for an hour a day, 3-4 days a week on iCCup, record is nowhere near as good as SupCom), so much of the concepts at play were not new. In fact, the big one that tends to take new players by surprise, that is, that fact that physical interactions between units and projectiles matter, was one of the big reasons for me to play ZK (having also played Myth 2 for a little bit and really enjoying that physics setup, but wanting some unit and base construction to go along with it).

In short, I'm really not a good person to ask except possibly to provide a data point for an relatively experienced RTS player coming to ZK. Also, I pretty much only play 1v1, since that's most comfortable for me.

The biggest annoyance for me was setting up my UI to a way I found comfortable. Given the sheer number of options I spent an hour just tweaking my UI when I started to play against people, and it took me several more tweaking sessions (much shorter, mind you) to get a comfortable setup. This is one of the main reasons I ranted about UI defaults some months ago, though having played around recently with the fresh UI for my tutorial videos, my only big intolerable is the chat window defaulting to the top of the screen.

quote: My only memories of being a newbie are getting a marker in my base, "at least learn to play even remotely before joining public games" and getting kicked for continuously unpausing because I thought the game was not meant to be paused and it was a bug.

Newbie experience is so traumatic that people suppress it.

As for me, i shadowed the game for months, absorbing every bit of manual; looking at the code, and learning to beat CAI 1v1 before i ever fired up multiplayer, 1v1. I also was experienced with strategy games beforehand, and i even played some BA ages ago.

That first duel still came as a shock, especially after i watched replay. I was all like "woah, is this ground control he's doing"?

If you want to idenfity the problems of new players then such a thread does not work. Anyone what had problems "picking up zero-K" is long gone.
In forum you only get comments from people who "shadowed the game for months, absorbing every bit of manual; looking at the code" or are with spring (or TA) since years.
Not representive of average player - not helpful.
Instead:

1) Go to replays page and filter for games that lasted for less than a minute.
There is large number of those. Try to figure out why that game did not work: Accidently set wrong ally teams? Badly chosen startpos got Com stuck on cliff or in lava/acid? Could not figure out how to do anything? Crash? etc
For example Ronum is a new player with 6 played games, all supposedly lasted 0 seconds.

2) Read forum carefully:
For example in http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/637 there is complaint about "rude players."
But the real problem is a technical one: "Spectators even can kill my Game"

3) Look at bugtracker, for exmple wrt above point:
http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/issues/detail?id=1551&q=spec&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary

4) See comments on missions, by new players.
Lots of "How does this work" there.

the game is boreing as hell when your new and the game is'nt “Persistent” (ex: leveling up Planet wars) to them it’s just some RTS game with nothing especially cool.

I think I count as a new player (level 6), so I'll comment.

I haven't played multi-player yet, because I mostly play in a state of 'may have to leave at any time, without warning'. (I tend to prefer to play alone, anyway, even when that wasn't the case and when playing MMORPGs and such.) I played TA a fair amount, and I tend to play defense heavy. In ZK, I've played way more games against Chickens than the normal CAI, because it fits that mode of play.

Compared to TA, I like the way energy and metal are done in ZK. I generally like the whole economy setup, actually. I haven't explored most of the factories to compare them.

I like the amount of information in the manuals (great guides to all the units!) and the ability to watch replays. I don't like being dependent on an internet connection to play. The Zero-K lobby loads/connects slow for me, and that was even back when auto-host was working reliably.

I haven't run into (or at least noticed) any serious game bugs (outside of the 95.0 version of Spring), although the auto-host problem is a serious annoyance.

Well generally I've noticed that getting to the first game is hard for some of my friends who want to join. For instance, we have no true "skrimish mode" that a noob could actually click to simply play the game. Although this is somewhat mitigated by hosting a private lobby, the setup for that is not entirely intuitive. It might help to have a button in single player or a tab that simply makes a private lobby and creates a random password to lock it. This way noobs would have a simple "click to play" sort of button instead of fiddling around with how to make autohost start.

On that note, the current autohost (or lack thereof) is actually making it hard for me to introduce players to the game. When I try to get a friend to join I usually open a private lobby so we can 1v1 or vs an AI so they can learn the mechanics. Unfortunately the autohost is finicky at best. Sometimes it opens in seconds and other times I have to leave the lobby open all day in order for it to start. I can't actually tell everyone that a lobby will be open at X time because I have no idea if the lobby can even be made.

Generally speaking, I think that the start-up process for Zero-K could be streamlined a bit or perhaps made to look more familiar to other rts games with skirmish mode etc. I get that I shouldn't ask for things I can't do myself, but generally speaking I think a smoother way to the first game would definitely help.

quote: I like the amount of information in the manuals

It is good to know that anybody actually reads the manuals. There is loads of content in there, but very few people bother to read it.

Only a small fraction of that content is on the site. You have to go to the wiki on the development site to find it all. Go to http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/w/list and look through the list to see if there is anything interesting.

"My only memories of being a newbie are getting a marker in my base, "at least learn to play even remotely before joining public games" and getting kicked for continuously unpausing because I thought the game was not meant to be paused and it was a bug"

Wow i think i am the guy labeling newbies, poor them.

Also i remember when i was a newbie and tried to ASK TONS OF QUESTIONS REGADING GAMES TO LEARN IT , that Dev comunity was sarcastic and funny with theyir words, making jokes after jokes. That was not polite and nice. I will remember that @Googlefrog. I didnt forget you dont worry, someday il give you a cookie.