>>2144
>discerning whether you suck at explaining things to players or whether the playtester is actually braindead
Sometimes there's just no ambiguity. If the player shoots a shield-holding enemy and the bullets just make "clink" sounds and the enemy just won't die, then they try melee and the shield flies away, then the player says, out loud, "oh you can destroy their shield with melee", but then continues to shoot at shielded enemies and losing for the rest of the playtest, there's no other way to interpret that than the player not being a human.
>i'd only help them if they explicitly asked
That's exactly what you're NOT supposed to do. You're only allowed to talk to the player if they're getting blocked by some bug or obvious game design mistake or ambiguity that you'll fix/improve later and already know how you're going to do it, that blocker would not actually happen in the final game so watching them struggle with it isn't useful to anyone.
The player isn't going to have the developer giving them advice or comments in a real gameplay scenario, the moments of struggle are exactly what you want: to learn what the players struggle with and how, and what kinds of things they try to do as a result, for example there might be a specific menu where they try looking at. There's a lot of things that players don't understand at first and it might seem like a mistake from your part, but that's just because they're new and they'll soon learn as they play more. The more you interact with the player the more you distort the whole playtest into something unnatural and unhelpful, in fact the ideal playthrough would not even have you watching because people act differently when they know they're being watched.
Also, as soon as you start helping the player, you're conditioning them to think less and pay less attention, and they become more likely to rely on you. This is why streamers suck at games despite playing them all day every day, because they condition themselves to look at the chat for answers instead of using their own brain to problem solve. It's also why yellow paint and quest markers and minimaps are counter-productive, because you're teaching players to be handheld through the game instead of learning to pay attention to the actual game world.