ADR-064: Multiplayer keeps full difficulty; campaign is the onboarding ramp¶

Status: Proposed (exploration only — not committed to action) Date: 2026-05-22 Context: The May 19 RaidGuild playtest with Tay (1 game of prior experience) joining a multiplayer session with CoachJ (70+ games) and James (regular player) surfaced a long-running open question: how does the game handle wildly mixed experience levels in multiplayer? Tay liked the thin scenario served that round; the previous scenario they'd seen was "too dense, too much cognitive load." James and CoachJ have repeatedly converged on a different preference — they want hard, dense scenarios because that's where their DTAs actually learn. Six months of GTM iteration hasn't resolved the tension. This ADR captures one possible framing of the answer — campaign-first onboarding while multiplayer stays at full difficulty — so the reasoning isn't lost. It is explicitly not a commitment to build.

At a glance

What it decides: nothing yet — this is a Proposed hypothesis (exploration only, "maybe ever"). It frames one possible answer to mixed-experience multiplayer: leave multiplayer at full difficulty and use the solo campaign as the onboarding ramp.

Core mechanism — multiplayer stays hard for everyone; new accounts get a soft campaign-first nudge plus a skippable post-invite orientation. No gating.
Framing principle — multiplayer is the real game; campaign is the training mode (mirrors competitive games shipping a solo/tutorial path instead of dumbing down ranked).
Main rejected alternative — simplifying multiplayer or adding per-session/per-account difficulty ramps; both dilute signal density, which is what serious users actually want.
Cost/risk — any friction on the viral invite path could measurably cut conversion; the cost of being wrong is asymmetric.
Open question — is the real lever positioning ("why play at all") rather than path? And the campaign's ramp isn't validated as a cold-start onboarding path.

Decision¶

Hypothesis (not committed): The right routing is to keep multiplayer at full difficulty for everyone and rely on the solo campaign as the onboarding ramp for new players. New accounts get nudged toward campaign-first; multiplayer is positioned as the experience you graduate into.

Concretely, if this were built, the changes would be:

Multiplayer scenario selection stays unchanged. No difficulty ramp within sessions, no easier scenarios for new players, no per-player adaptation. The full ADR-061 + ADR-054 quality bar applies to every round.
Campaign-first onboarding nudge. For accounts under some threshold (e.g., < 5 games played or no completed campaign chapter), the hub surfaces a "start with a campaign" prompt before exposing the multiplayer invite path. The nudge is soft — invite links still work — but the default route for solo discovery emphasizes campaign.
Invite-flow signposting. When a new account joins multiplayer via an invite link, show a brief one-time orientation: "Multiplayer is the full experience. Want to warm up with a solo campaign first?" with skip and warm-up paths. The friction is opt-in, not gated.
No changes to the campaign itself. The campaign already ramps difficulty across chapters; this ADR assumes that ramp is good enough for onboarding without modification. Validating that assumption is a prerequisite if this ever moves to Accepted.

The framing principle: multiplayer is the real game; campaign is the training mode. That mirrors how online competitive games handle mixed experience — they don't dumb down the multiplayer game for new players; they ship a solo/tutorial path that builds skill before exposure.

Rationale¶

The decision space the conversation kept circling has three live options:

Simplify multiplayer for the lowest common denominator. Rejected by CoachJ and James in the conversation — "you get what you put in." Simplification dilutes signal density, dilutes the dopamine of divergent reveals, and ultimately gives serious users a worse product. This is the "Tay liked the thin scenario" path, but it makes the game less of what its target user wants.
Per-session difficulty ramp within multiplayer. Considered. Means rounds 1-2 in a multiplayer session would be lighter, rounds 3-5 harder. Rejected because sessions are already long, light rounds produce thin signal at the most-impactful onboarding moment, and the dopamine hit in multiplayer is divergence, not easiness — a thin round 1 produces low divergence and a worse experience for everyone.
Path routing: campaign-first, multiplayer at full difficulty. This ADR. Doesn't change the multiplayer mechanics. Doesn't compromise signal. Uses an existing surface (campaigns) for the ramp it was already designed to provide.

The third option has a few things going for it that the first two don't: - The campaign already ramps difficulty. No new mechanics to build, no new content to author. The work is in routing and copy. - It matches a pattern users already understand from other games. Tutorial → solo skill-building → online play is a near-universal video-game onboarding shape. Sync benefits from leveraging the mental model rather than inventing a new one. - It preserves the "you get what you put in" contract for serious users. Power users (CoachJ, James, eventually Beacon team and DAO governance contributors) get the full-difficulty product without compromise. The product doesn't have to choose between casual and serious — it routes them differently. - It addresses Tay's specific failure mode directly. Tay's first real multiplayer experience was jumping into a live session with a 70-game veteran. That's the analog of a brand-new gamer being put into a ranked online match against grandmasters. The fix isn't to make the match easier; it's to provide a path that doesn't drop people into ranked on day one.

flowchart LR
    NEW[New account] -->|soft nudge| CAMP[Solo campaign<br/>training mode, ramps difficulty]
    NEW -.->|skippable, invite link still works| MP
    CAMP -->|graduate| MP[Multiplayer<br/>full difficulty, unchanged]

Campaign is the onboarding ramp; multiplayer stays at full difficulty. The nudge toward campaign is soft — the invite path is never gated.

Alternatives Considered¶

Simplify multiplayer (lowest-common-denominator). Rejected — see Rationale. Compromises the signal density that makes the product worth playing for its target user.
Per-session difficulty ramp (round 1 light, round 5 hard). Rejected — session length and signal-density costs outweigh the onboarding benefit. Multiplayer rounds also already serve a different function than ramping: each round is a complete unit with its own reveal, not a step in a single arc.
Per-account difficulty ramp (early games on your account are easier, regardless of mode). Rejected — same signal-density problem as the in-session ramp, and it muddies the multiplayer experience for everyone in a mixed-experience session (whose ramp do we honor when CoachJ at 70 games plays with Tay at 1?).
Gating multiplayer behind campaign completion. Considered as a stronger version of this ADR. Rejected because it adds hard friction to the invite-link viral path, which is one of the few growth mechanisms the product currently has. The soft-nudge version preserves the path while encouraging the ramp.
External motivation layer (Tay's Crypto-the-Game-style mode). Different lever entirely — solves "why play the hard scenarios?" with prizes and competition rather than with positioning. Not mutually exclusive with this ADR; could be built alongside if there's demand. Out of scope here.
Do nothing; let new players grok the game through repeated multiplayer exposure. The current state. Functional but produces variance in onboarding quality — Tay's experience depended on which scenario surfaced in round 1, not on a designed introduction.

Discussion¶

This is explicit exploration, not a commitment. The conversation that produced this ADR took two days and circled the same tension multiple times before arriving at the path-vs-mechanics framing. CoachJ's own assessment was "I don't think we should action on this now (maybe ever) but it is a good idea to explore." The reason to write the ADR anyway is that the framing is non-obvious and the reasoning is at risk of being lost — six months from now, when the question comes up again, future-us should be able to find this and either pick it up or know why we didn't.

The reason the "maybe ever" hedge is real:

The campaign's ramp is not actually validated as an onboarding path. It was designed for narrative progression in reactive arcs, not for skill-building from a cold start. If we routed new players to campaign and they bounced at chapter 1 for unrelated reasons (campaign-specific UX friction, narrative buy-in problems, scenario quality variance), we'd have made onboarding worse, not better.
The viral invite path is currently load-bearing for growth. Adding any friction — even soft signposting — to the "click this link, play with your team" flow could measurably reduce conversion. The cost of being wrong here is asymmetric: a small friction increase might compound across every invite Beacon's team or a partner team sends.
The "small group willing to do cognitive work" worry from the May 21 conversation doesn't actually go away under this routing. If campaigns are also hard (and they're meant to be, with reactive arcs producing real consequence weight), casual users will bounce there too. This ADR doesn't make the product easier — it just sequences the cognitive load differently. That may or may not move the retention needle.
Positioning may be the real lever, not flow. Sync's GTM struggle for six months has been more about why play this at all than what should round 1 look like. The judgment-layer thesis, the human-to-agent trust framing, the governance use case — these are the messages that make people want to engage with cognitive load. A campaign-first ramp doesn't help if the user hasn't bought in to the underlying value proposition. Solving for positioning may yield more than solving for path.

What would trigger picking this up: (a) Multiple playtest sessions explicitly surface "round 1 was overwhelming for a new player" as a retention blocker (not just a comfort comment); (b) campaign completion data shows that players who complete a chapter have meaningfully higher retention than players who go straight to multiplayer; (c) a target team (Beacon internal, a DAO partner, RaidGuild) commits to using campaigns as their team onboarding and we get to observe the result; or (d) someone proposes a low-friction, high-signal way to implement the nudge that doesn't depend on the campaign ramp being validated first.

What would settle this in the negative: Evidence that the GTM problem is positioning, not path — e.g., if rewriting the landing page to lead with the judgment-layer thesis materially improves trial-to-play conversion without any onboarding-flow changes, then ramping is a distraction from the real problem.

Relationship to other ADRs: - ADR-031 (persistent dashboard sections for orientation) is the closest existing kin — both treat the orientation problem as a routing/positioning question rather than a mechanics question. If this ADR ever moves to Accepted, the implementation should align with the persistent-section pattern, not bolt on a one-shot modal. - ADR-049 (learning-gap scheduling) is adjacent but solves a different problem — it's about which solo scenario to serve next once a user is engaged, not about whether to route them to solo at all. - ADR-050 (agent permission tiers, deferred) shares the "two-population product" shape — different users get different surfaces based on where they are. The same framing applies here.

Consequences¶

If this ever moves to Accepted, the work is mostly routing and copy — small surface area, low engineering cost, but the cost of being wrong is paid in viral conversion. If it stays Proposed (the current expectation), no code changes; the ADR exists to be referenced when the question recurs.

Watch for: Playtest reports that describe the new-player experience as "overwhelming" or "lost"; campaign completion rates compared to multiplayer-first retention rates; positioning A/B tests that move the needle without flow changes (which would argue against ever picking this up).
If picked up later: First-pass implementation would be the soft nudge on the hub + the post-invite orientation overlay. No gating, no friction beyond a skippable prompt. Measure invite-conversion impact carefully.
Risk of staying Proposed indefinitely: The conversation that produced this ADR was the third time the same tension has come up in playtests. If it comes up a fourth time without action, it's worth re-reading this ADR and asking whether we're avoiding the work because it's wrong or because it's uncomfortable to add any friction to invite flows.

Key files (if ever implemented): - src/app/hub/page.tsx — soft nudge surface for new accounts - src/app/play/[sessionId]/lobby/page.tsx — invite-flow orientation overlay for first-time joiners - src/components/campaign/CampaignPicker.tsx — likely the campaign-discovery entry point the nudge would link to - docs/decisions/031-orientation-pattern-persistent-over-modal.md — pattern to follow for any new orientation surfaces