[Joe]

Hi killraven,

I asked Liz to split off your post, because I wanted to get some feedback from you and potentially get others' feedback as well. I think this is better suited to a new post than buried at the bottom of another one.

Originally Posted by killraven

I'm curious to know what the Player's Edition looks like.

Does it look and navigate exactly like the GM's edition?

Yes. It looks and navigates exactly the same. This is by design. One important reason for this is that GMs who want to play as players in someone else's realm can use their existing Realm Works GM edition copy to do so, rather than needing to buy and/or run a different application. This also ensures that those using GM Edition and those using Player Edition have access to the same features when they are players together in a given realm.

Additionally, GMs can put GM Edition into "Player Mode" in order to see their realm from a player's perspective, with the appropriate information and functionality hidden. This would be much more difficult to do if GM and Player editions looked and navigated very differently.

Originally Posted by killraven

Is it more like a wiki interface with a series of searchable articles all liked to one another using the containing topic/relationships?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "like a wiki interface". Both GM and Player edition both allow searching, both allow link-based browsing, and both provide hierarchical containment and relationship-based browsing. It also provides other things which might not be provided by a wiki, such as filtering by tags, timeline, reveal history, etc.

Originally Posted by killraven

I'm hoping for more of the latter to be honest. (if not in the client, maybe the web version)
There seems to be a pretty steep learning curve for the interface. While it is completely worth it for me as a GM so far, I'm not sure my players would want to have to go through that just to see the content.

The web version will necessarily look and navigate differently from the Windows desktop applications. It will also (initially) be focusing on presenting content to players more than GMs, so it will be geared towards that audience from a depth/complexity/ease-of-use perspective. My goal for it is that anyone comfortable using basic modern web apps (Facebook, Twitter, G-Mail, YouTube, etc) will have no problems using the web app.

I'm curious about your statement "There seems to be a pretty steep learning curve for the interface." While I agree with this and we're working to improve it, I think the majority of the difficulty and learning curve of using Realm Works centers around content creation rather than reading and browsing. This is primarily because content creation, organizing, arranging, and interweaving are intrinsically complicated actions, regardless of the tools you're using. Players won't be doing any creating (initially), so a lot of that depth and complexity gets discarded.

I want to know a little bit about specific pain points you foresee your players running into. So do me a favor: open a realm that you have a decent amount of content entered for. You will need to reveal some starting information beforehand (e.g. the starting region and town, famous NPCs, kingdoms, history, etc).

Now put the realm into "Player Mode" and browse the content. Put your player hat on and just focus on reading and navigation. What parts are you (imagining) your players will trip up on? What will they try to find and be unable to? What dead-ends will they hit, and what ways will they get lost and not know how to get back on track? Are there some advanced features that might get in the way, or are they tucked away safely enough that most players won't be tripped up by them? Let me know what you think.