A week after taking in testers, I opened up the numbers.
Of the 13 people who got as far as saving, 11 stopped in the tutorial section.
At first I thought it was because the tutorial was long. So I measured it.
- Run by a bot, it takes 1 minute 24 seconds to the end of the tutorial.
- Even the people who made it to the end took about three minutes.
It wasn’t long. Most of the people who stopped left barely a minute after they first came in.
Where they left was always the same.
- The lobby after clearing the first run. A lot of screens they’ve never seen show up at once.
- The lobby where your level goes back to 1. The same explanation comes up three times.
- The Konkuk Univ. boss. Both people who got past the tutorial stopped here.
I had a bot fight Konkuk Univ. twelve more times. What killed it wasn’t the boss’s big move. It was ordinary attacks taken standing in front of it, and the minions the boss called in. But the tip shown when you died was the general “watch the area and dodge.”
One more thing. In front of Konkuk Univ. there was a level-up wall. I put it there on purpose, but to testers it was just a wall.
Search engines were in there too. Search bots opening the game had inflated the tester count by five. I took it out of search.
So here’s what I changed this week.
- Die at Konkuk Univ. and you get a tip that fits that boss
- Removed the level-up wall. The experience that was piled up at the wall is now spread evenly over the following levels
- Took out explanations given twice, and gear you receive is put on right away
- One line tells you that skills aim on their own
- Turn your phone sideways and it suggests fullscreen once
- It keeps more records of where people stay and where they close (only for those who agree to records)
I plan to open the same numbers again in a week.
My guess was wrong. Glad I measured.