I agree with most of what the article said, except for:
"We should not store the tutorial counters in the save file. We should allow for the fact that sometimes someone (the player's little brother, for example) might jump into the game in the middle. Or perhaps the player hasn't played a game in months and has forgotten everything."
It seems to me that we *should* store the information there, along with the time elapsed since the game was last loaded/saved. The fact that someone's little brother might start playing in the middle seems like a pretty fringe case -- why wouldn't he play on his own save, for instance? And even if he doesn't, how likely is it that he'll both know and use moves that the main player forgot?.
Now if it's been more than a few weeks since the game has been started up it probably makes sense to wipe the old tutorial counters and start anew. But there have been plenty of times when I've been stuck in a game and despite having no clue what to do I play the game for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, then save after having gained more experience/money/items/whatever. If you make all your counters session-dependent, the player may never play long enough at a stretch to trigger the pertinent tutorial, especially for rarely used abilities (i.e., the ones most likely to be forgotten) that have a high tutorial counter threshold (because having a low threshold for rarely used abilities would be really annoying).
TLDR: Session-dependent tutorial counters would likely lead to over-spamming of known information and/or under-informing of needed information.
"We should not store the tutorial counters in the save file. We should allow for the fact that sometimes someone (the player's little brother, for example) might jump into the game in the middle. Or perhaps the player hasn't played a game in months and has forgotten everything."
It seems to me that we *should* store the information there, along with the time elapsed since the game was last loaded/saved. The fact that someone's little brother might start playing in the middle seems like a pretty fringe case -- why wouldn't he play on his own save, for instance? And even if he doesn't, how likely is it that he'll both know and use moves that the main player forgot?.
Now if it's been more than a few weeks since the game has been started up it probably makes sense to wipe the old tutorial counters and start anew. But there have been plenty of times when I've been stuck in a game and despite having no clue what to do I play the game for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, then save after having gained more experience/money/items/whatever. If you make all your counters session-dependent, the player may never play long enough at a stretch to trigger the pertinent tutorial, especially for rarely used abilities (i.e., the ones most likely to be forgotten) that have a high tutorial counter threshold (because having a low threshold for rarely used abilities would be really annoying).
TLDR: Session-dependent tutorial counters would likely lead to over-spamming of known information and/or under-informing of needed information.