#27 - March 20, 2013, 4:29 p.m.
Usually I always side with arguments that have to do with helping to make any game more intuitive for players, but the addition of a confirmation box would just serve as a warning sign, it wouldn’t really provide any new, more intuitive description of the item, so chances are you would probably go back and read the tooltip more carefully or just right-click it and ignore the tooltip for the 2nd time anyway. So, sure it could help, but is it the ideal solution?
Shan'ze Ritual StoneThe tooltip text is there and it’s pretty straightforward
“These summoned opponents will require a group to defeat.”.
You can try to make a case about tooltips (in general) not being the best design to convey information about any item but the text itself seems intuitive to me.
“Click first, read later” might be a consequence of two things, bad design, or players’ laziness, and I’ve got to say I’m leaning more towards the latter (not criticizing, I do exactly the same thing).
Although I’m sure that tooltips have room for improvement, I think players tend to be quite lazy when it comes to reading any kind of textual information, this is a consequence, in my opinion, of WoW having 5+8 years of continuous development, making it an extremely extensive game with daunting amounts of text, players have simply learned to ignore it, except for those that are heavily interested into lore.
Sorry if I diverge, but I'm particularly interested in what this subject might lead into.
There are many other reasons for this kind of behaviour; for example, in the old days players would read quests from start to finish, essentially due to 2 reasons:
- Quest texts had a flow, they were displayed almost at normal reading speed. (there is still this option, but most players turn instant text on)
- There was much less information on the web, it was a lot harder to get quick solutions, more often than not, players would read the quests, try to decipher the riddles or puzzles by themselves and when they couldn’t solve them fast enough they would either turn to thottbot or ask friends for help.
Nowadays players end up on Wowhead before they even open the quests, which kind of makes you wonder why this is happening, is it the competitiveness, the rush to 90, the feeling of being overwhelmed with information, are quests no longer fun? Are they too many? If so, what changed, and what would make them more captivating?
Quests are a huge part of the game, they can be either really boring if you choose to “skip to the last page” and look at the answers on 3rd party sites, or they can be super fun and exciting if you solve them by yourself. There’s also lot of creativity, subtle and witty humour going into these quest texts, so you’re also skipping on a whole lot of good laughs if you don’t read them.
What is your opinion on what can be done to compel players to become more interactive with the game and stop this behaviour of fetching for quick solutions and skipping any in-game reading, is this a consequence of the game environment or just typical human behaviour in this day and age?
I’m only dwelling on this subject because I think this is quite a big issue as it makes players miss a lot of the fun and entertainment that is locked inside WoW, and to unlock it players just need to go back to a more relaxed play style, take their time to level and experience the full adventure.
There have always been players whose sole interest was getting to max level as fast as possible, and that’s totally fine, but it feels like that play style has managed to spread into a more standardized and common practice as players now seem to think that it’s the “normal” way to play the game, and adopt that very same play style from the very beginning.
