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What the Quabbleball community can do to help Quabbleball

Qudditch Knight

New Magician
Minecraft IGN: DeanKnight
Honeybadger
#1
You may possibly know our controversial broom flying game; Quabbleball. Why can some consider it controversial? Possibly because at first, they didn’t have fun. They joined a game and were confused on how to play, they might’ve been looking for guidance, for help. Then they get queued up for defender because they didn’t pick their role. The game that then ensues for this new player is clunky, unintuitive, highly competitive. The new player is constantly taken advantage of their ignorant playstyle by far more experienced players. Not always, but sometimes these highly experienced players take this moment to see how high they can score at the expense of the rookie newbie to feed their egos or inch higher up the leaderboard. The newbie might have issues rendering the quabbleball, learning their controls, all while constantly being scored on, left out, and hit by bludgers.

Certainly if you try to queue up for any games of Quabbleball lately you’ll realize things seem to for all manner of reasons have gotten out of hand. We can fix it, and certainly begin mending the wound that was created by unintentional design. This post here, our post, is here to address the issues that new players experience and to start to fix them, Now. You are probably asking what these issues are. I’ll list three here I believe are both large and solvable issues: Game Mechanics, Graphic Settings, and Sportsmanship.

If you played much of quabbleball you might have had a similar experience to what I’ve had. This was my experience: Get autofilled into defender, the game goes by and I can’t figure out the controls, I didn’t know I could catch the ball, I didn’t know how to block the middle ring, I flew into the defender zone and fell off my broom again and again. All the while volleys of red quabbleballs sailed by and into my goals, racking up the score and leading to a humiliating defeat. I felt like any moment people could start singing “Weasley is our King” for me. I was utterly defeated and down. I didn’t play again for six months.

Now, you can laugh at my experience. I love Quabbleball and believe it is an amazing game. It is. You can possibly see what I’m saying is that a bad start can really dissuade new players, and commonly, the issue comes from the game mechanics being hard to understand and play and the result of that being a very rough and unfun game. Later I learned to love Quabbleball, so what can we do? By taking a moment to pause when we realize the game has some new players. For us to politely teach and encourage them on their basic abilities, tell them it’s ok to struggle and they’ll certainly get better. Will this affect the outcome of that game? Almost certainly. Might we, players who want the best for Quabbleball, lose a game because we took a pause to help new players learn their skills and reassure them we all started somewhere? Yes. And the result of that helping hand, the encouraging word will have ripple effects that one game of Quabbleball could never have alone.

Next we come to the Graphic settings. It is widely accepted that settings with No clouds, Fast Graphics setting, a render distance of 32 is an ideal place to sit. This is information that took me over a year into the game before I learned this. Furthermore it can’t be understated that while the quality of computers always increases that some of us players are truly playing on older computers and optimizing their graphics is a must solely to play. We as a Quabbleball community need to mention and disseminate this information much more commonly and freely. There are many reasons why; We show new players what to use and therefore they gain the chance to truly appreciate the game, we help lower the barrier of play for players who normally were too laggy or had bad settings to play the game at all, we foster a whole group of players that are running at the peak graphic settings and therefore they become better players and we heighten the skills of all our best players and gain high level players at a higher rate. Generally the highest skill players also are the most committed and therefore we are growing the community in multiple ways.

How do we mention and disseminate the information about graphic setting for Quabbleball much more frequently? We can talk shop about Quabbleball much more in the /chat games chat for starters. For instance, why not talk to other players about the game as you’re waiting in the queue? It’s the perfect chat to talk about it, and if you happen to mention your settings, or ask others what they play on once a day or so… well then many players learn just by reading chat and being around. As well we should make more posts on the forums. Even short posts can get the job done.
Lastly we come down to sportsmanship. It was covered earlier when talking about how talking a moment to pause and politely help and reassure new players. This truly is an act that pays tenfold because with every player you help and reassure instead of taking advantage of their weakness is another player who can fall in love with the game. More players, bigger community, more games. Even in rats it is common when play-wrestling that the big strong rat loses on purpose at least 30% of the time, thus letting both of them have fun. When teaching a very little kid to play chess you do not simply pick them apart and checkmate them in the smallest amount of moves. When playing super smash bros with a friend, and one is clearly a stronger opponent it’s not abnormal to soften the play to make the game closer.

What we can do here as a community that wants to see Quabbleball succeed, grow, and become more inviting for new players is, adopt this attitude. Knowing truly, the whole time that in the long run it means more games, better competitors, and more fun. How this can be implemented is, in games against clear beginners allow them a real chance to play, even at the expense of a single winning game of Quabbleball. You're playing against an inexperienced passer who can’t ever get the ball? Let them steal it from you on purpose, pass it to them, let them get a chance to shine and get in some practice they could’ve never got against someone as highly experienced as you naturally. Playing against an inexperienced defender? Make obvious shots from afar, fly close to let them steal the ball, ‘accidentally’ toss the ball to where they are. Playing against an enemy bruiser? If you’re another bruiser maybe let them hit you, or avoid knocking them out of the skies every moment they fly right back up. If it’s your own team, try to help relieve their weaknesses or give them a chance to shine. Your teammate is a passer but never gets to grab the ball? Pass it to them!

Now is this going easy on them? Absolutely! It’s perfectly alright, good, desirable even to go easy on them! After all, they’re new- they’re inexperienced, they went out on a limb and discovered one of the best minigames ever invented in minecraft. Yes they are bad at it. That’s okay. I was bad, we were bad, we can still deeply love this game. That’s why to bring the community together we need to pause and politely explain how to play, mention what graphic settings to use often, and lastly let’s be realistic when we have a chance to go easy on some new beginners and decide to take the highroad, the right path and help them get their experience without punishing them for being new and not obsessing over winning to the point where we miss what our real goal is. Creating a bigger community of Quabbleball players because after all, it’s an amazing game and personally, I think you’ll agree with me. Now: I want to share it with as many people as possible.
 

Honey_Dwarf1

Archivist
Minecraft IGN: Honey_Dwarf1
Phoenix Raven
#2
i think I (just about) understood what you were saying here but let me summarise to make sure

Summary
Problem: people are disheartened in their first games because better players use the opportunities to score as high as possible, the functions aren’t that intuitive, and as defender you feel very left out
Solution: have people stop a bit at the start of a game to teach new players how to use the functions

Problem: peoples graphics aren’t good enough, which causes playing to be difficult
Solution: players to spread more information about optimal graphics settings for quabbleball

Problem: lack of sportsmanship (ie people using the opportunity to challenge themselves to get as many goals as possible when there are new players)
Solution: have players go easy, to provide some chances to have a go and learn

Main issue
Onto what I think - the main problem here is that they are all reliant on the players. I think this was probably the idea judging by what you said about talking about these problems more, but it does mean that there’s ultimately nothing that staff can do about it, unless they try to set an example themselves. This would, I think, be very difficult to pull off but i’ll get to that in a minute.

Idea 1:
stopping at the start of a game
i’m sure you recognise some of the downsides to this idea, since older players would not want to not play the game that they might have spent half an hour or more queuing up for. Another issue is that just one player could ruin it by stealing the ball even if everyone else is trying to help. It’s impossible to moderate because there’s no rule against playing the game.
It’s worth noting that if you hover over your glove, you can read the different functions and play around with them a bit.

What I do agree with, though I don’t think you fully mentioned it, is that being cast as defender is a bit boring for new players in particular. Either your team is winning, in which case you do nothing for the whole time, or your team is losing, in which case you spend it all failing to stop the ball. I think this speaks more to defender being the position people don’t generally want to play. The functions are a bit odd (particularly the offhand slot one) but I honestly don’t know how it could be improved. It’s been tried in the past but a solution hasn’t yet been found.
Something that was around in the first couple of weeks of QB was a practice area, where you could learn about each position and practise using the gloves. It’s been suggested since, but never implemented. I liked that suggestion and I think it should make a reappearance. Do you think that would help with the problem?

Idea 2:
spread information about optimal graphics
To be honest, I don’t fully understand what you mean here. Do you mean that a 32 render distance is something every computer should handle as long as other settings are reduced? Because that’s definitely not true. 32 is a big render distance, especially on a server like PW where the resource pack and plugins all add lots of extra lag. Personally, I had to play for a year with no resource pack in order to get it running smoothly, which involved watching diamond goes flying over the pitch and learning by heart where every spell was in my inventory. And I still couldn’t get 32 render distance. What i’m trying to say is that people have bad computers and it’s very personal as to what settings are needed, so i’m not sure how much this would help. Graphics differences is definitely a problem in QB though. Unfortunately it heavily targets newer players who, on average, have worse computers combined with lack of experience.

Idea 3:
Sportsmanship - helping new players feel some accomplishment
The problem here is that I would never want anyone to lose a game on purpose because they were helping me. Especially in QB, where it’s not only them but also their entire team losing, and wins contribute to the leaderboard. That being said, I agree with the idea that it’s perhaps the right thing to do to go a bit easy, so even if new players don’t win they still get the experience of a game. But this is another thing that just can’t be ‘implemented’. This is where I get back to that point about staff setting examples. This would be throwing the game, or at least the lines between the two would be a bit blurred. If staff were to do this to set an example it would be very confusing to other players, who may have been previously punished for doing very similar things. I realise there is a difference between helping new players out a bit and losing to get your friend to win, but it’s difficult to draw the line.

Anyway I think that’s everything, worth bearing in mind that I haven’t played in a while though.
 

Aglyn

Graduate
Staff
Minecraft IGN: Aglyn
Auralock Dark Follower Staff Phoenix Serpent Vampire Werewolf Class Design Arena Grandmaster SPEW Poltergeist Academics Advisor
#3
Hiya, @Qudditch Knight

I have arrived with quite a longer explanation to your feedback.

We really appreciate the explanation of the trickiest parts for players to get into QB, and this is something that we focus on in our recent QB Beta Testing. We have made many changes and adjustments in hopes that newer players find the game a lot easier.

We have gone ahead and changed the order of autofilling newer players, so that the game attempts to autofill players who did not select a role as a bruiser first instead of defender. This is because we really believe that bruiser is an easier position to learn for someone's first game, than defender. Players are also now sent a message when the game begins telling them to hover over their player items to know how to use them. Moreover, players can use the new command /help while in the game for more information on their positions.

Furthermore, there is now the QB Practice at the Flying Pitch where players can practice the positions, and read more about how they work. We discussed adding a 'games played' requirement to this pitch to encourage people to play QB, but instead wanted to open this up to all of the newest players, and anyone can access it.

In terms of ideal graphics, we have added a disclaimer to the /games menu stating that for QB we recommend a render distance of 20. While we don't recommend influencing the game negatively to help others (described as throwing), we hope that these changes make it easier on newer players. We also appreciate any efforts made by players to encourage others to take part in Quabble Ball!

Thank you for taking the time to write up all the feedback and suggestions. We're always looking for ways to improve our game play.

I hope you have a wonderful day/night!