It's painful to watch new players.

[Esoteric Rogue]

It's painful to watch new players. This is a candidate worst case example. [edit: Haha! Ironically titled "First Look" -- that's great!]

https://youtu.be/svN3gwPjZDk?t=36m17s

Part of the reason I'm posting this is as a note to myself for future reference. Here's a demonstration that when players don't know what's going they often blame the game. Not that this guy was putting down the game. One of his thoughts was that he was invisible, because truly, his character could not be seen; he suggested it was a poor implementation of invisibility. I'm asserting that if he could fully trust the game, he might have dug for the solution -- but at the same time, I doubt very many of us can fully trust a strange program that we have just met.

To the player's credit, for sake of presentation he quickly enough decided he wasn't making progress, and started over. Even if he had started paging through the list of commands, that's not what viewers like to watch. We just have to admit the watching the struggles against the learning curve aren't entertaining in nature.

This example highlights what I fear when I recommend ADOM (and roguelikes in general) to other players. I just wanted to share because I find it interesting to consider aspects of game design, how to introduce new players to these games, etc. Right now I'm thinking if I made an introductory video, I would firstly stress reading every message ... and if you missed one, hit :m to find it.

Hmm, he should have had a status message saying "blind". I might put forth a couple RFE's derived from this play.