Gamebase Nobunaga's Ambition Online OB Contest

Gamebase Taiwan and Gameflier Taiwan organized a contest for the upcoming open beta of Nobunaga's Ambition Online (which has been postponed from 13 July to 15 July). A set of serial number would be given out to 100 selected winners in the suggestion and/or review writing contest.

Below is my entry, with a few of the points being quite generic.

Suggestions for NAO: - Clearer error messages This was my experience when I first created my character. No matter how I named my character, the error message "Cannot create a character with this name" was returned. Since at that time there were problems involving the Chinese characters input methods, I did not know that alphabets are not allowed. So I would like to suggest whenever error messages are returned, the cause, and even better, suggestions on how to overcome, would also be included. For example, "Cannot create a character with this name. Please use Chinese characters" would be much better.

- Better supervision and control on IDs
Although how to name your character is your freedom, and some humourous IDs such as "Big Fool" and "Cutey" are acceptable, but when other players see any obscene IDs, it really spoils the fun of the game. Therefore it is hoped that whenever any obscene ID is reported, the least the managemant could do is to delete the character. Better still, delete the user account as punishment.

- Provide better FAQ
After the revamping of the official website, the FAQ section is a really useful tool for the players. It could be seen clearly from the homepage and is further divided into subsections. I hope the management would keep up the good work on this and collect the frequent questions encountered by the GMs to be included into the FAQ section. This not only avoid wasting everybody's time but also improve everybody's efficiency.

- More friendly replies from the GMs
I suggest that whenever GMs converse with the players, do not use third person perspective. Although greeting the players as "Player" is to show courteousness, if it is changed to "You" it not only would still be as courteous, but would also make the players feel more welcomed.
(Note: The "You" I refer here is a more polite word for "you" in the Chinese vocabulary. At the moment I could not think of any English word that could serve the same purpose.)

- Record pop-up messages to the conversation window
Sometimes due to accidents and lack of time, the players would accidentally delete the pop-up messages. Therefore it is suggested to publish pop-up messages straight at the conversation window, or after popping up the messages, publish them at the conversation window again. This could avoid the players from missing any important announcements.

- More convenience for overseas players
I suggest to include the serial number into the online catalog and help overseas players to obtain more information. Even though online purchase through credit cards could help most of the overseas players, not all players own a credit card. Therefore publishing areas and regions that would import the physical goods could be of some help to overseas players.

- Publish reported bugs
If reported bugs could be published inside the game or at the official website, this could help players not to panic when encounter such bugs, and not to repeat reporting the same bugs. If safety reasons have to be taken into considerations, just publishing bugs not affecting safety reasons would also be enough.

Review for NAO:
For businesses, apart from competition, new market penetration is also very important. After participating in the closed beta, I feel that this is a game that could penetrate into the market of non-online game players. NAO emphasises the interaction between the players. Through this game, I got to know a lot of companions. Interaction with other players also added to the fun of the game.

However emphasis on the interaction between the players is a double-edge sword. The gigantic world map results in the wide distribution of the players, making teaming up and trading more difficult. Therefore to encourage more players to join the game is very important to the longevity of the game life cycle. The game completion percentage was already quite good during the closed beta, so I hope apart from focusing inside the game, the management would also pay more attention to other areas that would also affect game play.

The difficulty level for the players to join the game, local and overseas connection qualitiy, local and overseas sales convenience and quality, communication and interaction between the outsourcer and the developer, and so on all would affect the completeness of the game. Therefore I hope the management would strive for the best and aim for a win-win situation between the company and the players.