How to Truly Keep Novices

Korben

I recently read a review of another game I play. One sentence that stuck in my mind was (not an exact quote) "There used to be all sorts of rewards for helping new players. Over the years and across version changes, most of these rewards were removed, but the playerbase had already got into the habit of being helpful and just continued."

What I get from this is that people respond to incentives. Whatever the game rewards you for doing (by design or not), that is what the playerbase's culture will gravitate towards.

In Achaea, one incentive is to be paranoid. Houses have a House hall, where all sorts of mayhem can be made by the wrong people getting in. In the past, even one's class was a House-given resource that could be misused. As a result, there is massive distrust of novices. I think this explains (or helps explain) the aversion to alts.

Achaea offers few incentives to be helpful. House and City favors are hit or miss, especially in smaller orgs, and you can probably get favored faster through other activities. While there are some people who enjoy teaching the 1001st novice just as much as they did the 1st, those are few and far between. The vast majority eventually gets tired of it and wants, as has been said above, to enjoy the game instead of getting home from work and doing what feels (and essentially is) more work.

To add insult to injury, Achaea has a horrible learning curve. New players come in all the time, but they don't stay. Helping them learn the ins and outs of the game is -the- most important contribution a player can make, because it might make the difference between a new player staying or not.

I'm all for giving novice helpers some kind of reward. Not because it'll get more people to help, or attract the right (or wrong) kind of people, but because over time it'll generate players who are in the habit of being helpful, regardless of incentives.

Adioro

One thing I've run into a lot both as a novice and as someone trying to help novices is that it seems like some players think that because there is a more intensive intro, they don't need to/aren't allowed to interact with novices until it's complete for some reason. Holy cow I really hope that's just some individuals being misguided. As someone not new to muds, but new to Achaea, it took me a solid hour to work through the Great Rock thing. I can't imagine someone fumbling through the basics for an hour without anyone speaking to them and being generally ignored.

All the mechanical things in place for novices are great and all, but personal, meaningful, engaging interaction is so desperately important.

Melodie

I don't think talking to them is a bad thing, you just shouldn't be directing them to other tasks is all. When they're fresh from the intro, their intro should be their primary focus, as that's what it was created to do.

 

Absolutely nothing wrong with interacting with a newbie and helping/encourage them during that, though!

Hasar

Give me a newbie with trans elementalism and crystalism, a mule, and I WILL MAKE THEM A GOD.

Anything short of that, I use them as meatshields.

Am I doing it right?

Nim

Hasar said:

Give me a newbie with trans elementalism and crystalism, a mule, and I WILL MAKE THEM A GOD.

Anything short of that, I use them as meatshields.

Am I doing it right?

Give them a web tattoo, and a list of people without buckawns (preferably enemies, but you might as well keep your allies on their toes too).

Saeva

Hasar said:

Give me a newbie with trans elementalism and crystalism, a mule, and I WILL MAKE THEM A GOD.

Anything short of that, I use them as meatshields.

Am I doing it right?

Wait... why am I still a meat shield? WHY AM I NOT A GODDESS!? FU @HASAR! FU!

Halos

Get drunk and touch the floor, @Saeva. Hasar will make you a goddess quick.

Nim

Halos said:

Get drunk and touch the floor, @Saeva. Hasar will make you a goddess quick.

Inappropriate. [-(

Melodie

@Halos - YOU GOAN DIE FOR THAT, EASTERN DWELLER. >:P

DEATH IS COMING!

Tarkanian

one thing i can think of is the monthly promos wherein the prize is a small token, item or reward. a lot of the promos nowadays require purchases. the promos themselves are quite rewarding already, i admit, but not everyone can fork out money, and some just won't at all.

Sarapis

Tarkanian said:

one thing i can think of is the monthly promos wherein the prize is a small token, item or reward. a lot of the promos nowadays require purchases. the promos themselves are quite rewarding already, i admit, but not everyone can fork out money, and some just won't at all.

All of the monthly promos require purchases actually, because their only reason for existence is to stimulate credit purchases. Those credit purchases are 100% what keeps us alive.

Kresslack

What about the life enhancing auras or temporary xp bonuses for those people who work tirelessly to bring in and walk through new novices? Also, how would such a thing be tracked?

Sarapis

@Kresslack See my earlier post. We give credit bonuses to organizations (3% bonus on top of purchases to cities, 5% to Houses) for that exact reason, since there's no way for us as admin to track it/judge it reliably. Organizational leaders are in a far better position to do so - we just reward the organization based on its performance in encouraging credit buyers as a whole. If this isn't happening, it's a problem.

Tarkanian

Sarapis said:

Tarkanian said:

one thing i can think of is the monthly promos wherein the prize is a small token, item or reward. a lot of the promos nowadays require purchases. the promos themselves are quite rewarding already, i admit, but not everyone can fork out money, and some just won't at all.

All of the monthly promos require purchases actually, because their only reason for existence is to stimulate credit purchases. Those credit purchases are 100% what keeps us alive.

sorry, i meant the one like, 21-log-ins-equal-small-prize-thing. or a lesson every 10 minutes, maximum of 10 lessons per RL day, which translates to nearly 52 credits every month.

i know that RL credit purchases are needed, but it's the little things that make them stay, in my opinion.

Korben

Sarapis said:

@Kresslack See my earlier post. We give credit bonuses to organizations (3% bonus on top of purchases to cities, 5% to Houses) for that exact reason, since there's no way for us as admin to track it/judge it reliably. Organizational leaders are in a far better position to do so - we just reward the organization based on its performance in encouraging credit buyers as a whole. If this isn't happening, it's a problem.

Orgs (at least in my experience) aren't in the habit of handing out credits directly to reward people. They hold credit sales, and the higher your rank, the better the deal for you. While this does reward novice helpers (since in theory they are being favored for it and gaining ranks), it is an indirect way to do it.

In addition, you need gold to buy sales credits, but every hour you spend helping newbies is one less hour to make that gold. The reward is not appropriate to the activity.

This is one of those situations where we all agree things could be better, but no one has a workable solution.

Feral

I understand that the Admin are not in the best position to reward those who help. I just disagree that in game Admin's are all that much better at it.

While I have not been an org leader for a long time I clearly remember when I was the difficultly and drama of being the person to hand out rewards. This is why the solution of just having credit sales at below market prices is done.

I still think the person best able to know if someone was helpful is the new player themselves. Giving them access to a quick survey (one question plus the ability to have the feedback be anonymous) seems like an easy thing to do that would also give you a lot of data on who was best at retaining new players.

Heck the person picked by the novice might not even be in their org. Like perhaps they wandered into Mhaldor and got such a rich and rewarding expeirnce of getting kicked out that they just had to keep playing.

Trey

Sarapis said:

Tarkanian said:

one thing i can think of is the monthly promos wherein the prize is a small token, item or reward. a lot of the promos nowadays require purchases. the promos themselves are quite rewarding already, i admit, but not everyone can fork out money, and some just won't at all.

All of the monthly promos require purchases actually, because their only reason for existence is to stimulate credit purchases. Those credit purchases are 100% what keeps us alive.

Honestly, the best monthly promo reward you guys have ever had (the pewter flagon on a chain) wasn't linked to credit purchases.

Tharvis

I liked the Altpromo, still have 100ish credits to randomly gift to people.

In unrelated news, anybody with a character made after 2011 have 100 unbound credits they want to trade for bound credits?

Sarapis

Korben said:

Sarapis said:

@Kresslack See my earlier post. We give credit bonuses to organizations (3% bonus on top of purchases to cities, 5% to Houses) for that exact reason, since there's no way for us as admin to track it/judge it reliably. Organizational leaders are in a far better position to do so - we just reward the organization based on its performance in encouraging credit buyers as a whole. If this isn't happening, it's a problem.

Orgs (at least in my experience) aren't in the habit of handing out credits directly to reward people. They hold credit sales, and the higher your rank, the better the deal for you. While this does reward novice helpers (since in theory they are being favored for it and gaining ranks), it is an indirect way to do it.

In addition, you need gold to buy sales credits, but every hour you spend helping newbies is one less hour to make that gold. The reward is not appropriate to the activity.

It does sound like we need to revisit the House and City bonuses completely if leaders are not giving them to people who are actually doing things beneficial to the organization. Being highly ranked doesn't mean you're actively contributing anything. 

I do understand the difficulty and unpleasantness, of course, of having to judge what size of reward to give to people in your org. It's a quick way to become unpopular, and there's not much reward for being unpopular.

Sarapis

Feral said:

I still think the person best able to know if someone was helpful is the new player themselves. Giving them access to a quick survey (one question plus the ability to have the feedback be anonymous) seems like an easy thing to do that would also give you a lot of data on who was best at retaining new players.

Heck the person picked by the novice might not even be in their org. Like perhaps they wandered into Mhaldor and got such a rich and rewarding expeirnce of getting kicked out that they just had to keep playing.

That'd be ideal if it were possible for us to distinguish alts from real newbies, but when you're talking any reward of real value, it will simply incent people to cheat on a dramatic scale with alts, and we don't really have any tools to deter that behavior.

Feral

Sarapis said:

That'd be ideal if it were possible for us to distinguish alts from real newbies, but when you're talking any reward of real value, it will simply incent people to cheat on a dramatic scale with alts, and we don't really have any tools to deter that behavior.

It seems like this could be handled by how you weight the feedback. An alt that was created and then abandoned would move the ranking very slightly while someone who remained active for a while would rank higher and if they both remained active and bought credits they would rank the highest. The feedback question could be triggered at multiple important milestones as well (along with a config option to never be asked again).

Heck you would not even have to publicly announce what the rewards would be, the data itself would help you know internally which players were having a positive impact on the player base and then you could reward them as best fit.

As far as the use of house/city credits, I can only speak to the past in detail but as far as I can tell the main use for them currently is to give out in sales (at least Shallam and now Targ publicly post very transparent reports of where they all go. @yen )

Sarapis

Hmm, that's actually kind of an interesting idea @feral. I'll give it some pondering. It's not one we've ever discussed internally, and it has the major advantage of being very resistant to gaming the system. Thanks!

Nim

I would love some sort of high level improvement to city/house credits. Currently, they function as a stable path for advancement, and usually reward hunting, questing, and city/house rank over the myriad of roles that players can undertake to make their organization and the game as a whole a better place, which does include people who help novices, although I do feel like there are other roles that potentially go undervalued.

I, of course, say this without having long-term alts in all of your cities, so maybe you guys do it better, but it's not like random Jackie McNewbieson will know to go to city X for a great introduction to the game.

Tvistor

To be honest, I've had a really high novice retention rate, and the biggest reason the people that went dormant on me went dormant was Achaea is just too expensive to trans things on. Most people don't want to pull out a credit card on a new game (let alone a text-based game, since for a true newbie it's often their first), and when you quote them a number on what they would need to spend or how much they'd need to bash up, it's almost inevitable some people just stop caring within 24 hours.

The game is often very 'eh' once you've gotten over that initial rush of 'Wow, everyone is in-character!' and you don't have all your class skills. You can't really try the PvP out since a lot of classes need tri-trans (+ horrific number of credits) ( + another 60 credits for SVO or whatever), when you do people reveal that Focus is pretty crucial ( + credits for Survival), then you find out you need tons of curatives ( + however much gold), then you --

Oh, actually, I'm just going to play any other game/football.

I'm about to go meet Berenene so I can't do the maths, but I think kitting out a low level character (assuming they won't want to bash for ages, because let's face it, they'll probably quit then too) costs as much as FIE-standard fencing gear.

Nim

Tvistor said:

To be honest, I've had a really high novice retention rate, and the biggest reason the people that went dormant on me went dormant was Achaea is just too expensive to trans things on. Most people don't want to pull out a credit card on a new game (let alone a text-based game, since for a true newbie it's often their first), and when you quote them a number on what they would need to spend or how much they'd need to bash up, it's almost inevitable some people just stop caring within 24 hours.

The game is often very 'eh' once you've gotten over that initial rush of 'Wow, everyone is in-character!' and you don't have all your class skills. You can't really try the PvP out since a lot of classes need tri-trans (+ horrific number of credits) ( + another 60 credits for SVO or whatever), when you do people reveal that Focus is pretty crucial ( + credits for Survival), then you find out you need tons of curatives ( + however much gold), then you --

Oh, actually, I'm just going to play any other game/football.

I'm about to go meet Berenene so I can't do the maths, but I think kitting out a low level character (assuming they won't want to bash for ages, because let's face it, they'll probably quit then too) costs as much as FIE-standard fencing gear.

Yeah, all my friends are aware of Achaea's cost of entry, and are just utterly disinterested in it because of them. Not just the monetary expense, but the coding knowledge required turns off at least one person who's generally interested in roleplaying and would probably otherwise have a lot of fun with it. x:

Tvistor

Yeah, it's just silly. Moving stuff like diagnose lower in survival was the right move, but unfortunately I think Achaea is largely dependent on people being willing to shell out huge amounts of money.

I've met quite a few Achaeans at this point IRL, and since it's something we have in common, we usually end up talking about it. The overriding theme has been 'Oh god, why did I spend so much money on that damn game?'. I don't recall how much I've spent, but it's definitely on the very low side compared to quite a few of the playerbase, and I've had to pay for that by being nuked in two stormhammers. Even my artie dirk was a gift or I would have quit the game very early on. (On that note, I think it's a very negative thing to have a community that, when being honest with friends, feel obliged to talk about Achaean spending the same way a smoker talks about his cigarette expenditure.)

Unlike most games where you can have fun then pay at a later date (sometimes much, much later) to get more benefits when you're ready, Achaea is like 'Give us an obscene amount of money and it'll be fun, I swear!'.

Just got back from meeting Berenenene (was really fun) and correct me if I'm wrong, but:

1. The credit --> lesson conversion rate is 1:5. (not including the free lessons because I've forgotten what the rate is)

2. It's something in the range of 1600 lessons to trans something.

3. 1600/5 = 320 credits.

4. That's like $112 assuming you get them all at the best price ratio of the 200 credit package.

5. If you somehow got Subterfuge and Venoms trans'd without resorting to anything else, you'd still have to do Survival and Hypnosis for $224.

6. I might as well just buy one of these or the equivalent for whatever other hobby a person might have.

(That was a really general, probably inaccurate calculation, but I think the gist of it holds up. I don't think an Iron Membership is an ideal solution for the cost because it takes quite a few months of waiting.)

Unfortunately I'm not sure Achaea would survive if it had a model where you didn't have to pay large amounts of money to get started. Lots of players would probably be quite comfortable not spending a dollar if they weren't held up at virtual gunpoint. I'm certainly not spending any more now that I've got what I feel are the basics.

Them's the hard breaks, man.

OH WAIT ALMOST FORGOT:

I really enjoyed training novices, and have rarely ever collected on mentor credits. I think just once, from Milenka? Rewards and all are great, but they'll have to be significant or people are just going to bash instead, and the moment you make them significant they're going to get abused. Them's the other breaks. There is nothing the Achaean community won't do for free credits. If everyone remembers the Facebook credits, then they probably remember befriending random people on Farmville in a merciless exploitation of the trust of strangers. 

Tharvis

@Tvistor there's bigger packages than the 200 credits one

Tvistor

Let's pretend I was right though.

Tharvis

yeah, you're right though. The prices to trans three skills with real money are insane, and with the prices the ingame credit market is at, that could be called equally insane

Nellaundra

Tvistor said this better than I ever could, but really, what's the point of having such a high entry barrier to your basic abilities that are literally necessary for something like 80% of the classes? I could go buy any multiplayer game for $60 if it's brand new, and within a month, I'd have near everything possible unlocked that I needed and I'd be able to keep playing and expanding. Bashing is an eternal grind that almost no one enjoys, and the gold drops outside of Minia and other newbie areas are terrible until you reach the endgame bashing zones.  And the quests are laughable WoW type deals that pretty much amount to gathering <x> thing from <y> location and giving it to <z> questgiver, but at least WoW has the decency to fucking mark their quests and show you what to do next instead of telling you to go spam emotes at every object in every room in every area.