The Player Experience for Bad Players

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Hello,

I have followed Bonfire since I saw a gaming talk that talked about its launch. I have followed Arkheron since its announcement and signed up to playtest. In signing up I said I am a bad player and will tell you if the cheese mechanics are fun. I am still bad. I suggested to have more than just one life per que on Reddit a few months ago and Spires is a big improvement. I may not have any chance of winning but in three rounds I have a chance to at least get a kill as a condolence compared to Ascension where you play for ten minutes, get stomped and sent back to que having to rebuild everything from scratch.

The most fun I have had is the tutorial. I have followed how that has been iterated on almost weekly for the entirety its been available. I really like how good the standard keybinds are. New features like sprint are cool. Changes in the UI for how many dodges you have are great. Now there’s three boss fights and they’re really fun. I remember when Bonfire got started it was described as everyone making and voting on pitches. The one you guys chose was because of how the tech stack could flow into other games. The tutorial is a very fun game.

I think Ascension is a brilliant idea. I think there needs to be tens of hours of gameplay before you really get into it. I think that could be a single-player or co-op campaign. I think Spires help. When I watch streams of the game I think that its very stratified of players who can stay alive and avoid lots of damage and those who get stomped. I think a team deathmatch, control point, and less punishing modes could get the stratification right where there’s modes for players who aren’t good enough to climb in Spires at least without hours of experience. Being able to respawn infinitely over 15 minutes, or first to 3, of capture the flag has always been fun in computer games.

In Mobas you can start by going 0/0/10 then 0/1/10 then 1/1/9 and granularly get better. What’s missing in Arkheron is a better baptism into getting better at the game. That’s the tl;dr of the post. My dream is outside of scope but it would be a single player campaign where everything can become second nature.

Thanks for all of your work

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I thought of this today. Single player or co-op ascension could be like Diablo 1. I liked Diablo 1 more than 2 because the combat was much more simple and meaningful than things like “shouts”. I’ve died to a lot and in training AI Echoes are very accurate. I used to Old School Runescape PK in my 20s and I learned a lesson that applies to Arkheron. You should never die with heals in your inventory. At least use all your heals, shield, etc. before dying. Not dying is so critical. I need to learn more lessons like that.