Why new players ACTUALLY struggle with VHS...

[Yoshi Huo]

The lack of a strong tutorial is why new players struggle to pick up, get into and understand the game. Being able to read what weapons and monster abilities do does nothing if they can't understand or find the situations to actually apply the knowledge they've gained in a match without having failed multiple matches prior.

Yes, that goes for any game, but the difference is the premise of these other games are usually easier to understand (Shooting games: shoot the bad people, Even if the game has insane movement tech, you can pick up and play easily without needing to understand all of that right away.) than the actual amount of effort required to do BASIC things in this game. New players should not need to rely on watching hundreds of hours of old youtube videos or twitch streams to learn, practice and play (which is how I learned).

I believe a more in-depth tutorial system that shows the actual application of the weapons and abilities would help with this. For example: show that WART leap can be used both defensively and offensively by having a tutorial where a teen runs at them with a cross on hotel and force them to out maneuver the bot using leap as their only ability, then have the bot run out of ammo and show them how to use it in chase with the leap shockwave to slow the teen.
And for the teen side, have a bot running from a monster, pinging it's location and have the player run to find and help their teammate. Maybe make the AI monster a wolf and have it howl to show the teen player how to space outside of howl range.

It would take an INSANE amount of work but I 100% believe that this could help the new player experience more than simple tips and tricks. Having a more in-depth tutorial/training room with missions like this can help teach positioning, kiting etc. in a way youtube videos do without needing to go find sources outside of the game to help them.

I say all this from a place of love for the game, as someone who understands how this jarring skill floor to ceiling ratio can be having come from primarily the fighting game genre. Having to go to outside sources to learn isn't anything new to me, but for people trying to casually enjoy an asym party game (that is free), they shouldn't need to do that to understand the basic gameplay, only to improve upon the basic building blocks that they start with.

Thank you for reading, just needed to rant and get this off of my chest :)

[Popfuse]

I don't think it's a lack of tutorial that is hurting the game though I think it would help keep monsters on a bit longer. Monster is just more stressful than teen. Explaining why something happened that was unfair or unfun only dulls the unfairness so much before it reaches the same level of. "I'm getting screwed over while these other people are having a blast." That causes so many monster mains to quit or switch to teen.

Every corner is a trap waiting to be sprung.
When it's 1 teen vs 1 stigma monster monster has to control rift, crafting station, botd if it hasn't been used, and locating the teen. All the while the teen could be behind any corner. Or crouching around making no noise. Teen just needs to get a lucky ambush on monster.

Teens didn't even have to aim until recently. Enigma could hit a monster that the player couldn't see. Staff was able to hit through 2 fork lifts or tiny gaps in boxes with almost 0 aim needed. When a teen gets a shock spear they literally get the monster chase experience without any of the stress and no way to be CCed or slowed down. (One of the biggest kill joys for monster)
Teens get candy to fix health damage, sodas to prolong chases,(and until they nerfed it teens had enough to survive 30+ hit games) and BOTD to come back if they died. Monster gets zero mechanics to regain stigmas once lost. But there is a mechanic to instantly lose a stigma in the form of super rifts.
Up until recently monsters had to choose their respawn location blindly while teens got advanced warning where the monster will spawn. Causing double stigmas that the monster had zero ability to counter. I saw a streamer run across the map and spawn Infront of a teen with a flame thrower. No way for them to know. So free stigma. I tucked into a corner room after losing a stigma. Teen was behind me and pre-threw a Molotov on me. No way for me to know. No way to escape once I spawned. What was the monster equivalent? Nothing there is no way for the monster to remove two of the four teens from the game in 15 seconds. The game is riddled with these horrible lopsided balance choices that made monster feel bad. Not weak. Bad.
And don't even get me started on the fact that monster has nothing that is similar to a teen getting an across the map slingshot or Molotov. Or a satisfying shock sphere chase, or a flamethrower/cross ambush. There was nothing in 30 hours of play that could have felt that good as monster. I was looking at teen montages it was all of these things. Monster montage? "Slowly walking towards teen... Slowly ducking behind corner... Slowly dodging teen's horrible aim... One swipe... Teen runs away... EPIC MONSTER MONTAGE!"
Is there an amazing monster montage somewhere? Maybe. But fun fact even looking for monster montages gives you TEEN montages.

[ForsakenM~]

This topic has already been done to death, and no manner of trying to push a false narrative is going to change the truth, which is that Monster isn't hard to play but simply isn't fun.

Let me challenge your ideas, albeit it they come from a well-intended place, by asking you this: If it was only about how hard the game was to grasp without better tutorials, with the all the social media that Hellbent has in their favor directing people to lots of videos on how to play better, why are we averaging under 200 players on weekends? The EA launched with 6k-some players, so you would think that over 6 months, at least 1k of those players (likely more) would have figured out the secret sauce to playing well in both roles and enjoying the game via content creators and would have stuck around to keep playing. So...why is the playerbase so low when you can access creator content for tutorials from these Steam forums as well as the Discord server and the nearly-dead subReddit on top of normal people actively searching for content on games they enjoy?

Let me challenge you with a different question: Do you believe that 5,850 or so players of VHS were ALL newbies who didn't learn the game and quit, or is it much more plausible that players of all skill levels have given up the game? Did players who were winning 75% or more of their matches stop playing as much or entirely because they suddenly forgot how to play the game? If not, why would players who were really good at VHS quit playing?

Yet another question: Why is it that multiple Rewinders are playing VHS less than other games and aren't meeting their quota? Shouldn't they be playing it more often and enough to get good enough to win most of their games, which would be double the incentive to play as they are winning AND it is basically their job? Why have Rewinders left the program of their own desire to not have to meet the quota of playing the game as much and stated they were doing it to make their lives 'less stressful', especially someone like TricksterShadow who had a very high winrate?

The answer of course is that Monster is stressful, and unlike other games that cause stress, the role doesn't balance that out with the fun factor. Because of this, most players left in wave after massive wave until we are at the bottom of the barrel of players. A good share of those who are left proclaim that they love how Monster players, and even if that is true, they are the minority and the majority have described it as painful or as doing physical labor as a sentencing for a crime and moved on to play better games. That doesn't mean that those who think Monster is fine and fun are right: it means that you all enjoy or tolerate flawed gameplay, which means that regardless if you enjoy it, it still needs to be fixed so that MOST people can enjoy it.

Now, what does a post like yours ACTUALLY do for the game and it's community? Well, it lies to people and makes them believe that the gameplay is fine and that just having better tutorials will fix everything on launch, which is a massive negative because that feedback to a dev team that already runs every change by how it affects the Teen experience makes it less and less likely that the changes needed to fix the game will come. The game has been in beta since late 2021 and despite massive requests for the same changes for Monster that have been asked for since the beginning of beta, only now moving into February (and reportedly on the 10th or something like that) will a change to give a minor visual indicator to the Monster when an armed Teen is within 15 meters finally be applied to the game.

At a certain point, you have to face the music.

[Yoshi Huo]

This thread was supposed to be focused entirely on bringing new players into the game in current day and has nothing to do with the experience of the current players, the players who picked up the game on day one, nor the amount of players on the game.
I wanted to say why I think bringing new people into the game RIGHT NOW is so difficult and I stand by the things I stated in my original post.

People cannot learn without being taught
People cannot self teach without failing
People cannot fail if they do not try
And they will not try if they are not taught

[Ront]

Originally posted by Yoshi Huo:

This thread was supposed to be focused entirely on bringing new players into the game in current day and has nothing to do with the experience of the current players, the players who picked up the game on day one, nor the amount of players on the game.
I wanted to say why I think bringing new people into the game RIGHT NOW is so difficult and I stand by the things I stated in my original post.

People cannot learn without being taught
People cannot self teach without failing
People cannot fail if they do not try
And they will not try if they are not taught

Adding onto the difficulty is that anyone who decides to do a little research into the game will inevitably see that the steam charts show the game lost over 90% of its players as well as the posts about long queue times for teens.

Here's to hoping the upcoming update will change things for the better. 🙏

[Popfuse]

Originally posted by Yoshi Huo:

This thread was supposed to be focused entirely on bringing new players into the game in current day and has nothing to do with the experience of the current players, the players who picked up the game on day one, nor the amount of players on the game.
I wanted to say why I think bringing new people into the game RIGHT NOW is so difficult and I stand by the things I stated in my original post.

People cannot learn without being taught
People cannot self teach without failing
People cannot fail if they do not try
And they will not try if they are not taught

In that light, you are right. HB needs to work on their onboarding process. A tutorial or bot mode that gives reduced rewards would make it much easier. It reminds me of this tweet a few years back.

"In Gears, found out 90% of first time players don’t play a second multiplayer match if they don’t get a kill.

That first game’s important…

— Lee Perry Yo! (@MrLeePerry)"
If you throw players into a situation where they could possibly not even get a single hit I can see a 90% abandon rate. Whether that is by lack of tutorial or match making.

[ForsakenM~]

Originally posted by Yoshi Huo:

This thread was supposed to be focused entirely on bringing new players into the game in current day and has nothing to do with the experience of the current players, the players who picked up the game on day one, nor the amount of players on the game.
I wanted to say why I think bringing new people into the game RIGHT NOW is so difficult and I stand by the things I stated in my original post.

People cannot learn without being taught
People cannot self teach without failing
People cannot fail if they do not try
And they will not try if they are not taught

You can stand by the things that you have said all well and good, but when things are wrong they are just that, no matter how hard you stand by them.

You can be politely wax-poetic about it as well, but it still doesn't change the truth.

Over 6,000 people already tried and failed and learned from failure with this game, and many of those went to outside help to get better, and they ended up leaving anyway. You could have a tutorial made for VHS that is better than something like Guilty Gear Xrd or Skullgirls gave where they break down LITERALLY every single mechanic of the game as well as the character-focused deep dives and people still wouldn't stick around to play this game.

This is because, no matter how you slice it, 50% of the game isn't fun to play in a game that forces two sides to combat one another with human players on opposing sides.

Getting new people into the game right now isn't just an issue of onboarding or a better tutorial: it's called fighting a losing battle when you had all the tools to win due to overestimating your capabilities.

Why can't VHS keep new players in 2023? Well, let's break it down.

1. The first barrier is word of mouth: no one outside of a small minority is praising this game, and everyone else is saying that it isn't worth playing at this time or ever. As much as the Yes Men in this community hate it, human beings tends to inform themselves before they make decisions, and investing in a video game means that you listen to what others are saying about it. At this point VHS is almost totally forgotten outside of no-name content creators, so for a new player to find it they either have to get introduced to another asymm and find VHS via the vine of competitors or just stumble upon it by random chance.

Outside of their friends who don't know the game, 90% or higher of their friends who have played the game will tell them not to play it. If they break through that and go to the Steam page, they will find a game that has Mixed for it's review state which tends to make people back off, and looking at reviews on Steam they will see the the positive reviews are often memes or begging for more people to play if not just spam while the majority of the negative reviews are well-thought-out statements on the state of the game. If they go to social media, either no one is talking about VHS, or they go to VHS's social media to find none of them being very active (even the Discord has well slowed down and isn't in it's prime) and they will find even more statements about the same issues. A human being with average intelligence and some dedication can tell right away this game has a lot of problems and that they are taking forever to be fixed, if they will be fixed at all.

2. If our new player manages to get through all that, VHS itself is the second barrier. Countless times I've seen posts about how many issues have even getting the game to run, so this new player could easily have hours of difficulty trying to fire up the game and give up before they start. But if they are a trooper, then VHS still goes against this new player with what the Yes Men always describe as a 'lackluster tutorial' which is really just a term for 'figuring out the meta to play this slog of a game', but once they get through the tutorial they will then have to fight against queue times taking ridiculously long unless they go into the Flex Queue once it is available...and even then they could be waiting for a long while due to the lack of players. Once they manage to finally get into a working match, they have a new barrier: VHS's own community.

3. VHS's own players are the third barrier for a new player, and this is because now that the game averages under 200 players at high traffic times, all that is left after over a year of the game being playable via Beta or EA are meta slaving try-hards...for the most part. This means that the new player, good tutorial or not, is immediately being matched with players having as many hours as Nickado Avocado has calories per day and they are ready to play as optimal as possible to win. This new player will get smeared over and over with really no chance to go against players more their level because there IS no one their level...and their only option if they still somehow enjoy VHS after all that is to watch YT tutorials and just keep losing games over and over until they get the hang of it...sounds fun, right?

4. That final barrier is once again the community of VHS, but this time it's outside of the game, and includes the devs. If they stick around long enough and also have critical thinking, they will join the rest of us out here pointing out the problems the game has. They will have people that agree with them like myself and others here, sure, but a lot of those left still think everything is fine or shift the blame to other areas...you know, like blaming the tutorial! This is when the new player will learn, if they didn't already, that the community left for this game doesn't really want the changes needed for success and that the devs make snails and tortoises look like they can compete in the Indy 500 with how incredibly slow even the most minor of changes come in.

By being told more than not that they are wrong about the game and having a host of folks inevitably tell them to stop saying anything about it because it's been done to death so much or attacking them and telling them their opinion doesn't matter for X absurd reason...I mean, if they are still here after all that...well then, they aren't new players anymore are they? Plus, the odds at this point are that they would either already be part of the minority Yes Men group that sing VHS's praises, or they will fall to the 'Dark Side' with folks like myself around here who still are around and try to make sure others know the truth about this game.

You should have been worried about the tutorial 6 months ago. Now the problems are much more than that.

[LazyJoeBeard]

I just find the monster play to be quite boring even while on a win streak, but to be honest my only experience with the game is playing during the closed beta but from what I read via patch notes and comments not much has changed, the new monsters could possibly be fun but I would rather not spend hours on the boring ones in hopes that the new ones might be better and I refuse to spend money on it for the same reason, I am not a gambling man.

[Chan]

Originally posted by Yoshi Huo:

This thread was supposed to be focused entirely on bringing new players into the game in current day and has nothing to do with the experience of the current players, the players who picked up the game on day one, nor the amount of players on the game.
I wanted to say why I think bringing new people into the game RIGHT NOW is so difficult and I stand by the things I stated in my original post.

People cannot learn without being taught
People cannot self teach without failing
People cannot fail if they do not try
And they will not try if they are not taught

The devs could have brought new players in when it was ya know, a new game? By advertising a little bit? You can type a novel about why the tutorial sucks it's irrelevant because most if not all people know the game is dead and no amount of tutorials or anything is going to change the fact that the game isn't fun or appealing for one side. The game isn't difficult to grasp it's just bad.

[GingerSnaps]

No amount of tutorials will change that Monster isn't fun. Once it is fun there will be a chance to grow

[ForsakenM~]

Originally posted by Chan The Man:

The devs could have brought new players in when it was ya know, a new game? By advertising a little bit? You can type a novel about why the tutorial sucks it's irrelevant because most if not all people know the game is dead and no amount of tutorials or anything is going to change the fact that the game isn't fun or appealing for one side. The game isn't difficult to grasp it's just bad.

Just to add to this a bit, HB DID do advertisement, and did so via Twitch streamers and asymm content creators. This is theoretically the BEST way to do this, and people are missing the fact that the VHS Discord used to have 20k+ super active members chomping at the bit to get into the beta.

It wasn't that they never advertised this game, because they did. What happened is the mishandling of sending out beta keys by not rewarding those who followed early and waited longer, the silence while recovering for their security issues, and bringing back the beta with limited players instead of going straight into EA made them lose the interest of many.

After that they lost those who stayed because of the awful gameplay.

[Green Skeleton]

DBD didn't have a tutorial when it launched and even the current one isn't very good, but what got me back into it was youtubers who explained what the worthwhile perks were (and how to get them), how flashlight timings worked, what changes the current meta was undergoing, etc

Tutorials for games are typically half-baked & leave out a lot of information and expect the players to figure it out, or after several patches, make certain game mechanics outdated. Youtube content is ever-changing and can account for those changes.