Thanks for bumping this. I have been out on a business trip for a few weeks.
I just want to take something from another thread that ChaseChair said regarding an inconsistency in game mechanics.
This is hitting the nail on the head for a lot of outstanding problems.
As part of my day job I put together strategy decks, help companies focus on highest impact cases and stuff like that to help them succeed.
Last week I had a case very closely related to Orbus’ situation (but for a different industry). It was simply put, an issue of post-conversion-funnel (getting the user in to the game and past level 10 lets say) retention.
The issue was a lack of user empowerment through transparency of feature set that is simply put; What the user sees is not what the user expects…and this seems to happen in many places throughout the game.
It really rung home for me with Orbus as a good example. Here is the gist of it;
For example in boss 5 you might have… multiple pools showing up and the non-broken implementation where there are only 2 pools showing. If you can provide both transparency to the user of what a features intention is and also make sure that users are empowered to take advantage of that, than you hit the sweet spot of an excellent experience. If it sits on either the far left (broken) or far right (it works but its not clear why), then you are failing at empowering your users.
The result of incorrectly getting this balance is 1) anxiety, 2) negative emotional stimulus causing negative responses
