Games such as Final Fantasy, Maple Story, Secret of Mana and many others employee a visual effect each time you deal damage to a unit. Specifically, it either drops a big, fat damage number, or a bigger, fatter MISS. Very interestingly, this effect seems to provide a wonderfully powerful 'fun' effect to the end user.
BBG games suffer from a lack of visuals. For many cases, I believe that story or interesting descriptions can fill the void left behind by graphics. But in the case of damage output, I've always struggled with how many BBG games give but a single, lengthy battle report. I've always found the majority of battle reports to lack key information and, frankly, to be boring. This leads to players fatigue which results in disinterested users.
However, I recently found the solution Mafia-Wars used to combat the problem which I believes is rather interesting. Specifically, it displays a report that reads similar to as follows:
You fought against ANOTHERPLAYER with 66 thugs, a sawed-off shotgun, a revolver, a machine pistol, 3.9 MM semi-automatic rifle, a grenade, a butterfly knight, 16 colt pistols, a flame thrower, 12 bazookas and a hairpin.
Then it lists the players weapons along with text declaring if you won or loss.
The idea here is that drama was introduce through the report. Instead of just giving raw numbers and bonuses, it describes the fight in concise details that instantly give you a feeling of how epic the battle was, then provide you with your fate.
I believe this is a great lesson learned, and I'm curious what systems others have found.
