I wasn't trying to be funny or insulting, but actually trying to step into and understand and express the casual perspective. Looks like the post hit somewhere on the Unintentional Comedy Scale instead. LoL never came to mind. I don't get any sense of hilarity from seeing such efforts, what I get is a drive to go show them how to do it right but know it would fall on deaf ears.
I can actually understand not knowing at first that crew can repair something on fire. In stuff like the various Facebook clicker games, if a fire destroys something and the game doesn't prompt you for a response, it's just gone and you were never expected to do anything about it. The prompting approach has even filtered into Civ, in Beyond Earth that tells you ninety times a turn what you're supposed to do. I'm not being insulting, just descriptive, in saying such babysitting has had to become standard behavior for games to get and sustain mass casual appeal.
FTL in particular is very trappy with mechanics that aren't what you might expect. Weapon autofire is a huge trap - of course you always want to fire each weapon right away after that big long charge time, right? Ions are another as we've discussed. And crew skill. I remember one particular discussion on Reddit where someone was complaining about how much damage they took even with maxed shield skill. Nobody could get through to the guy that shield skill hardly matters - how often does a laser get through in the 0.1s between the skilled recharge and when an unskilled shield would. Nor that shields don't do anything against missiles. He just had it in his head that "SHIELD SKILL IS DEFENSE" and couldn't understand anything to the contrary, probably coming from some game where defense is indeed wrapped up into a single skill stat.
There are a lot of ways to do things wrong in FTL and brutal punishments for them. Both possibly more so than in any other game of its popularity level. So it really stands out for how much we see of it in unskilled play and the harsh reactions to it. Nobody is ever going to blame themselves for a miserable failure rather than blaming the game.
I can actually understand not knowing at first that crew can repair something on fire. In stuff like the various Facebook clicker games, if a fire destroys something and the game doesn't prompt you for a response, it's just gone and you were never expected to do anything about it. The prompting approach has even filtered into Civ, in Beyond Earth that tells you ninety times a turn what you're supposed to do. I'm not being insulting, just descriptive, in saying such babysitting has had to become standard behavior for games to get and sustain mass casual appeal.
FTL in particular is very trappy with mechanics that aren't what you might expect. Weapon autofire is a huge trap - of course you always want to fire each weapon right away after that big long charge time, right? Ions are another as we've discussed. And crew skill. I remember one particular discussion on Reddit where someone was complaining about how much damage they took even with maxed shield skill. Nobody could get through to the guy that shield skill hardly matters - how often does a laser get through in the 0.1s between the skilled recharge and when an unskilled shield would. Nor that shields don't do anything against missiles. He just had it in his head that "SHIELD SKILL IS DEFENSE" and couldn't understand anything to the contrary, probably coming from some game where defense is indeed wrapped up into a single skill stat.
There are a lot of ways to do things wrong in FTL and brutal punishments for them. Both possibly more so than in any other game of its popularity level. So it really stands out for how much we see of it in unskilled play and the harsh reactions to it. Nobody is ever going to blame themselves for a miserable failure rather than blaming the game.