Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Tagentially, I've been working on how to best to explain Destiny raid mechanics to new players.

Background: Destiny 2 is a co-op multiplayer FPS, and its pinnacle activity is 6-player raids, which requires players to combine fast-paced FPS gunplay, split-second reaction to mechanics, and coordination and communication with other players. This can be a daunting and overwhelming challenge for players new to the raid, even if they already are experienced in FPS gameplay.

Challenge: explain to a player, familiar with Destiny gameplay but new to the raid, the mechanics of an "encounter" in 5-15 minutes, live. It must be as concise as possible so as not to confuse or overwhelm them, and not stretch the patience of the other players already familiar with the encounter.

Too often I've see players start from the immediate aspects, working forwards towards the later/broader aspects of the encounter, but I find that in the firehose of information, by the time the explanation is complete, the player has forgotten the first, immediately important details: "wait, tell me again what am I supposed to shoot first?"

So the approach I've been experimenting with is to work backwards from the goal of the encounter, so as to finish with the most immediate, tactically important information, so it's freshest in their memory. I don't yet have enough data points to conclude whether this is a better approach ;)

In any case, I'm just barely wading into the immense topic that people have spent decades, careers, and PhDs on: teaching, but it is fascinating the breadth of choices one has in how to approach an explanation.

(I also play a fair bit of board games, and learning a new board game is the primary obstacle of adoption, so I really appreciate the OP author's points)

I personally prefer to learn it from the front. I only teach the very first phase and tell the group to expect to wipe after the transition.

If there are key enemies to shoot or whatever I will send a screenshot into discord because the game has no good way to mark targets besides shooting them.

The main reason I like this method is because trying to do the whole fight in one go is just too much to infodump on someone. By the time they are ready for the phase 2 info, they will have enough confidence in the p1 strategy that you dont have to worry about pushing any knowledge out of their active memory.

I was also the raid leader for my WoW guild so the method does scale. You do need people who are able to learn from their mistakes though... Some just never figure out to move out of the fire.

> the game has no good way to mark targets besides shooting them.

It's such a shame the mobile version is getting pings before desktop

It's so bad. Only saving grace is the the total enemy count is usually manageable but I missed being able to just call for a focus swap and watch them melt like you do in WoW.

These days I just play monster hunter. No comms needed but you have to learn a weapon up front.

Me and my friends started comming recently on some harder monsters in Monster Hunter but it's completely unnecessary as you said. Stuff like, "mount finisher" "setting trap", all stuff that you could visually observe. The main benefit has been I'm much more cognizant of my teammates than I ever was in the past. Now I actually look at what my teammates are doing instead of just tunneling on myself.

My point is that explaining d2 raid mechanics gave me the chance to iterate on teaching in a targeted, globally understood (so there's a benchmark to compare against), and immediately actionable setting, which allowed me to practice these teaching essentials:

1. Be Concise! More information is not better, in fact it'll just overwhelm your students

1.a. Some details can be skipped entirely, until they become relevant

2. Repeat The Essentials! Repetition helps memorization, and highlights what's important. Some aspects are more important than others.

3. Visual and practical examples a essential! It's almost entirely useless to explain a subject without context or area to experiment in. Polite nods are your best outcome.

3.a. counter-example, the infamous "sudoers" manpage, so bad there's https://m.xkcd.com/1343/ about it. Start with examples, then generalize, not the opposite!

You may notice some contradiction between points 1 and 2. Yes! Finding the right balance is an art.

The challenge for ADHD geeks like me is to avoid the "train-of-thought" infodumping approach, and filtering for what's really the most relevant.

Something i like to do on top of this is separating the goals from the actions. Explain what, not how, we are trying to accomplish at a big picture level. Then, give concise, actionable instructions for how to accomplish the goal.

I very much dislike guides that combine goals and actions in one large, linear instruction set. As soon as there is any deviation, you don't have the high level knowledge to adapt. Sure, I'm supposed to stand on this plate and shoot these 3 things when you say so, but why? Someone died, now the timings are all off. How do I adapt?

Summary: For me learning by doing with good callouts and short, high point briefing before worked great. I also usually use a similar style of prompting people to do things when I am teaching people IT stuff instead of doing it for them or only talking about it (family tech support, might be a chaotic raid, but usually less twitchy /s).

As a datapoint in a similar situation, I played in a guild in Lost Ark that was quite competitive (more than I was). This game has mechanic heavy raids, but I do not know how they compare to Destiny 2. I went into early raids essentially blind and learned mostly by doing and listening to good calls during it.

A few minutes before we went in, and during the straightforward way to the bosses, someone familiar with the mechanics explained the general idea, e.g. "there is an instant kill in all phases, in the first 2 you need to stand on the whitish spots, in the 3rd phase on the reddish spots". During the actual encounters, and before the switch of mechanics, they would call out in short what to do, e.g. "stand in red" or just "red".

I personally liked this way. It gave me a rough idea what to expect and refreshed my memory enough to not screw up in the heat of the moment. The explanation itself was also quite short, because we didn't go through the play by play, only covering the important stuff and relying on in the moment callouts. Plus, some briefing happened during the run to the boss. This method might only work with a somewhat competent/disciplined group. We played like this as a guild with good raid leaders and during crunch time we had good comms discipline. In addition we went into training raids with inexperienced players, with the expectation that we might not make it, but still try our best, and usually won. There also were more or less fixed raid teams that grinded these bosses without any explanation, because everyone had done it multiple times already.

I played another game with lightly mechanics based bosses and I, or someone else, explained in about 3 chat messages what to do when we went in with randoms. It was simple enough "I do X, shoot adds when I do X, if I die, do Y". The experienced players took care of the harder/mechanics parts, everyone else covered the easy parts. If you have a semi-fixed group for this, everyone learns all mechanics at some point by observing.

Edit: Typo

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