Player types -plz add or comment.

[smoth]

I propose a reexamination of the issue, indeed there are two types of gamers:

ME
Defining traits: CHAR RUSH OM NOM NOM

NOOBS.
Defining traits: MY ANUS IS BLEEDING!

fixed

[smoth]

I guess when I said wargamer I was thinking of the WH40k types. For them flavour and fluff is important since they are playing a game and a story. The ones I know don't like chess.

warhammer is about the hobby not the game.

LN, Your thread needs more substance to get people talking. Saying you posted something controversial to get conversation started is akin to flame baiting. Hence the LULZ you received in kind.

you over generalization is presumptuous and insulting. Sure I can relate to one or more parts of either character but they are over focused and show a lack of personal interaction with REAL people. Even among the two types that swift noted, within them are the casual and competitive players whom we have a lot of discussion about here. If you looked at the flame warrior site you would see many people that is because this isn't a black and white world. we have may different separations of color between that and some of them are not monochromatic at all.

The thread was moronic from the get go as it is some half assed social analysis which was poorly polarized to begin with.

[AF]

We already have a tonne of player types described from the OTA community, eagles, porcupines, octopus, etc

[Cabbage]

A very ~Special~ category

I'll let you in too if you give me a back rub

[smoth]

I'll WASH YOUR BACK!

[Argh]

I know genuine wargamers. What wargame did you publish? Me, I started wargaming a few years ago after reading a book by Mr. Donald Featherstone. Yeah, 1993. Had difficulty finding other gamers though. I was very much into Dune2 at the time. I guess when I said wargamer I was thinking of the WH40k types. For them flavour and fluff is important since they are playing a game and a story. The ones I know don't like chess.

Visit my website, both my game (and another one I didn't write, but happily support) are available, for free, in PDF format.

40K is not a wargame, imo. It doesn't attempt to model reality at all, nor does it claim to. It is fun, it has a wonderful backstory, but it's not a wargame, imo.

And Dune2's a RTS. It's not a wargame.

If you want to play a wargame on a computer, try shrapnelgames.com, they have several genuine wargames for sale.

Wargames are meant to simulate reality through statistics, and tend to have very detailed mechanics to deal with the complexity of the real world. For example, in a typical wargame, you typically have interactions between an attack and armor, relative movement speeds may factor into hit percentages, and damage is usually detailed- you don't just wear down some hitpoints.

For example, if your bazooka team engages a tank and hits it, you may have busted the tank's tracks, damaged it's turret, killed a crew member, etc., etc., etc.- it didn't just lose some hitpoints, and it no longer functions like it did.

Because of this level of complexity, wargames as tabletop games have always had a somewhat limited audience. They aren't for everybody, and tbh, I don't really like playing the more detailed ones all that much, they're too slow for me, and I am not into historical games, which tend to attract the guys that made Donald Featherstone write this, back in the day.

RTS games are strictly confined to computers, and tend to have much simpler mechanics, suitable for players who are more concerned with the results than the details, and also to keep the complexity of programming down.

You can make the case that this is a continuum of complexity, but I think there's a fairly sharp dividing line, tbh- wargames often model phenomena that would be very difficult to simulate on a computer with any reasonable speed (trust me- there are lots of things which you can express with words in a rule-book which are hard to do with computers), whereas RTS games cannot be played, by definition, without the aid of a computer to handle the turns automatically.

Before anybody gets grumpy with me, none of the above is meant to say that one type of game is "better" than another. They're just different. I've played, and helped make, lots of different genres of game. I like 'em all.

[SwiftSpear]

You wouldn't want to run as many wargame simulations in a real time RTS... but make it simultaneous simulation turn based and that problem goes away.

[Argh]

True enough, like X-COM, or several more modern games. There are a lot of problems you can solve, if you can use unlimited computational time on them, that just aren't amenable to real-time solutions (yet).

[REVENGE]

This thread is on topic.

Move or lock please.

[SwiftSpear]

Even among the two types that swift noted, within them are the casual and competitive players whom we have a lot of discussion about here.

Ya, Casual vs competitive is another split, definitely, IMO it's a little less revealing about the way RTS games work though. Ultimately, competitive players are just players that play at a really high level, who derive fun from playing well and winning as opposed to seeing units explode. Masterer players tend to work towards competitive play faster, but in the pro leagues of pretty much any sport or game you can find Thinker players as well, often in some of the top spots, because they outthink their opponents, which gives them an advantage past the tiny margins of skill difference from a really really really good player vs a really really good player skillwise.

Building a game for competitive players takes a really on the ball developer. To quote Sid Meyer "what makes a game fun is the number of options you give a player. The more possible things the player can do, the more fun the game is". Now obviously that's not universal, there are story based games that don't follow that forumla at all and are fun, but for multilayer action games, that tends to be VERY revealing a concept. So, to make a fun game for new players is relatively easy, just include a bunch of options they can make use of... That being said, the goal should be to expand the depth of those elements to the point where the competitive player can still use them. That is true success. You ever play an RPG or something, just to discover at the end of the game that the firemage is ALOT harder to beat the game with then the icemage, and your choice to go fire was ultimately a bad one? That's competitive gaming in a nutshell, any choice that results in a poor end result is not a viable option as a strategy, so it will not be used by competitive players. So in order to make the game fun, the goal must be to make every strategy viable, which ultimately requires increadibly fine tuned balance and expert conceptualization.

The thing is though, I really don't think that competitive vs casual is remotely mutually exclusive. The two types require very different things from a game, but there is a natural progression in many games from casual to competitive, and ultimately, because what the two types require is so different, it's very very possible to simply have good amounts of both in a game. Ultimately, we trick casual gamers into playing a game with features (# of units and whatnot) shinies (explosions and graphics) and story elements. When I start a new game the interface and experiance mean alot more than the design and depth, but as I get more accustomed to the game experience, design and depth are what will keep me playing. Comparitively, design is mutually exclusive to either a thinking player or a mastering player, at least at their purist states. A professional chess player might occationally play darts, but they'd much rather play chess, and a professional darts player might occationally play chess, but they'd much rather play darts.

[Forboding Angel]

I don't really consider it insulting as much as I simply think that it is misguided. Me for example, I fall rigt in the middle of the two categories, and while I don't like to play chess much, I still find it intriguing.

Where games like chess lose their flavor is when people map out the game to such mathmatical perfection that 9/10 they win based upon that.

I tried to design evolution so that there were infinite amounts of combos and counters to win the game with. I think I succeeded tbh. Hell I even held my own vs Daywalker for 40 minutes and came close to winning at one point, but the simple truth is I got tired and started making small mistakes which turned into big and fatal mistakes later. I get fatigued fairly easily when I am really really trying, however at that point if I've put up a good fight I'm perfectly happy with losing.

Of course Day was new to it, however Day is pretty much an RTS king no matter what he plays, so I was very happy with the way things went.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I don't really like gamer categories because at some point they get like the flamewarrior categories, where you have hundreds of them. THe synopsis would be that what yu are saying works like a horoscope. People can kinda bend things to make them fit, but just because ppl did that doesn't mean that they actually fit.

Someone please tell me that that made sense... I'm really tired :/

[SwiftSpear]

I don't really consider it insulting as much as I simply think that it is misguided. Me for example, I fall rigt in the middle of the two categories, and while I don't like to play chess much, I still find it intriguing.

Where games like chess lose their flavor is when people map out the game to such mathmatical perfection that 9/10 they win based upon that.

I tried to design evolution so that there were infinite amounts of combos and counters to win the game with. I think I succeeded tbh. Hell I even held my own vs Daywalker for 40 minutes and came close to winning at one point, but the simple truth is I got tired and started making small mistakes which turned into big and fatal mistakes later. I get fatigued fairly easily when I am really really trying, however at that point if I've put up a good fight I'm perfectly happy with losing.

Of course Day was new to it, however Day is pretty much an RTS king no matter what he plays, so I was very happy with the way things went.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I don't really like gamer categories because at some point they get like the flamewarrior categories, where you have hundreds of them. THe synopsis would be that what yu are saying works like a horoscope. People can kinda bend things to make them fit, but just because ppl did that doesn't mean that they actually fit.

Someone please tell me that that made sense... I'm really tired :/

Not to be condescending, but you won't really know if you've succeeded from one game, even with a good player. It's not until the real mastery of the game takes place that you discover exactly what you've done in terms of balance. Some games you get glimpses of it early, certain weapons just have obvious trumps (like quake railgun) but others it takes quite a bit longer.

[KDR_11k]

Yep, before people learn the intricacies of a game you won't see the formulation of fixed strategies that must be followed.

[Lord_Newbton]

We already have a tonne of player types described from the OTA community, eagles, porcupines, octopus, etc

This thread is on topic.

Move or lock please.

Blooodyell. I go to the trouble of posting this in "off topic", I specifically don't at any point even mention TA Spring, and still the whole flamming, spamming bunch of you go and read somehow through my message and think "this guy is saying there are only 2 types of TA Spring players in this world".
I know I should be angry, but I'm mostly very surprised.

I based my "disgusting" examples on the differences that might exist between left and right hemisphere dominant brain type players, only to be gang-snobed like this.. So, rather than face any other unpleasant replies, I'm off. Cheerio.

P.S. Thanks to those that found themselves capable of a decent reply.

[smoth]

welcome to the spring forum.

[Panda]

Having well-thought out player type catagories can be used as a good frame of reference when trying to make decisions pertaining to game design and when trying to think of which strategies to use in order to defeat the opponents. In this thread, there weren't enough catagories presented and the catagories weren't properly described or, in another words, they weren't well thought out.

[zwzsg]

Lord_Newbton, the reaction you had was not (only) because we are flaming haters, not because we disagree about the idea that players falls into identifiable categories, but because your archetype sounds like what would have written someone who never played an online RTS. While, here, most of us do regularly play online RTS. The form is okay, it's well worded and all, but the content is completly wrong, appearing as missing the point and abberrant to anyone who's used to playing RTS.

To the contrary, SwiftSpear distinction is very relevant. There's indeed a split between people who wins by being superiorly intelligent, who plays like no one else and often wins using never-used strategies, and that trait usually comes with good macro skills, and on the other hand people who wins by being superiorly trained, who use the tried-and-true buildorder but execute it with flawless perfetion, and that trait usually comes with good micro skills. The thing is, when saying that, I, and I guess everybody else who followed an RTS "player community" could name people.

While you made your archetype from wonky revelation and thinking by yourself, SwiftSpear's ones comes from long experience.

You should try to do the same. Don't attempt to determine what could be the types of player by thinking alone in your mind disconnected by actual games, instead plays a RTS or two for a few years, so that your next post may be a bit more relevant to what player kinds actually are.

RTS games are strictly confined to computers, and tend to have much simpler mechanics, suitable for players who are more concerned with the results than the details, and also to keep the complexity of programming down.

I disagree with that, at least for TA & Spring, because instead the computer remove all the burden of having to handle the complex details with ruleboook, pencil and paper, so they can have alot more details and complexity, for instance factoring unit's acceleration, unit's gun-mouth position at the instant of fire, shot's 3D trajectories, and much finer "turns", and uhm well ok since I actually have very little idea of what's playing a true wargame is like, maybe I'm wrong, but at least I know that if we had to manualy compute all that is going on during a Spring's game, a 1 hour game would take years or something.



The opposition between the hard core player trying to win at all cost, even at the cost of ruining the graphics, the funs, of ignoring 95% of the game, and using sploits, and the casual player, who just want a nice story, eye-pleasant graphics, pwetty explosion and will use units "because they look cool" disregarding how uneffective they are, is also one based of reality. Though it's a much more known and discussed one, so not as interesting to mention.

[Teutooni]

Yesh! Yet another guy driven away by the loving community! Congrats! Pat yourselves on the back, afterall, there's one less player on our overcrowded server now!

We already have a tonne of player types described from the OTA community, eagles, porcupines, octopus, etc

Got a link? Might be an intresting read for someone who hasn't been in from the beginning.

[123vtemp]

I hate to see broad categorizations. The number of variables which will cause gamers to differ from one another are far too great to even clump gamers. Creating a black and white is impossible as every player will have some amount of focus/attention on the many aspects of the game. To say one never thinks of how he is groining 2 have an income(look for valuable resource locations) is ROFL. To say that players do not pay attention 2 build que would mean... They do not chose to build any thing, but for some reason they decided 2 build a fact?

[zwzsg]

We already have a tonne of player types described from the OTA community, eagles, porcupines, octopus, etc

Got a link? Might be an intresting read for someone who hasn't been in from the beginning.

http://fu.luckz.de/Total_Annihilation_M ... tegy2.html

It's outdated, and for instance TRVE H4RD C0RE TA or Spring elite would howl at porc considered a valable strategy, but it's a piece of history.