recklesscoder
commented
2 years ago I would love something like this, even if it's just another block of running text under a new subheading on each game page. Removing any of the uncertainty when trying a new game is great imo.
Some general knowledge hints like these might also be a good fit:
- (Super Mario 64) If you know how to BLJ, you can always shortcut to the goal once you receive the Second Floor Key. This makes this game rather flexible in terms of time if you play with the default setting of
forfeit_mode: "goal". - (Subnautica) You are guaranteed to be able to find two Seaglide fragments not requiring any unlocks in your starting area. Knowing this, you should never waste longer periods of time slow-swimming.
Continuing the discussion from #558, one of the challenges for people trying out Archipelago for the first time, especially if they don't have a more experienced friend to tell them this info directly, is matching the game lengths and item counts across the group, which is especially important for smaller groups (~2–5 players). It's no fun (well, less fun) to be the only one left playing your game for 2 or 3 hours after everyone else has finished, or to be BK'd for an hour waiting for the FF1 player to finally reach the volcano, or something like that. And it's also often less fun if the overwhelming majority of the items available in the pool are for a single game.
Some documentation to set expectations around these things would help new players to make informed decisions and avoid unpleasant early experiences in that regard. To clarify, this problem is twofold:
The challenge is, of course, that both of these are highly variable based on players' settings and, in the case of game length, skill. Also, some games' completion time is a lot more sensitive to the random seed than others, and the group composition has an effect, too. (As a general trend, I think Archipelago pulls game length towards the midpoint in the group as players who are progressing faster get BK'd more often and players who are progressing slower get more boosts from other players.) So there's no way the documentation can cover all cases and possibilities, but I don't think that's an excuse not to set some baseline expectations for people using recommended or default settings.
The Final Fantasy Randomizer Beginner's Guide sets a—in my experience, fairly accurate—guideline that your first run will probably take about 5 hours. This is great information to have because it lets you schedule your group accordingly. Obviously, it's better if you've completed a randomizer solo before you play in a group, so then you can estimate your time based on that, but you can't realistically expect everyone to do that. We can't expect everyone to read this documentation, either, but it's a lot faster for someone to tell their friend how long to expect than for everyone to actually test it.
Regarding item counts, my proposal is to add documentation to each game page clarifying:
This information will need to be kept up-to-date if changes to the defaults or player settings change these numbers, but I don't think that should be too complicated. And even if things get out of date, the exact numbers are less important than the ballpark amount—20, 100, 200, 500? It might be possible to collect this information automatically by generating games with min/max YAML settings and testing the result, though that could be challenging. But at the very least, the numbers the Multiworld Tracker displays for each game are a good start and it would be fine to put those somewhere that you don't have to generate a game to see.
As for game length, I don't know what we could do other than collect a bunch of data on game length. I suppose, for games hosted on archipelago.gg, it might be possible to programmatically measure the median time between a game starting and being completed, although I don't know how useful that metric will be if things are skewed by a lot of plays using a specific non-standard settings, plus the difference between sync & async sessions, etc. Personally I'm more for surveying a few people for their impressions of how long a game took when they were new at running it in Archipelago and how fast they are at it now.