How to Truly Keep Novices

Sarapis

Nellaundra said:

You've sold lessons on the website before, was your revenue for that month significantly lower than the norm or something?

Yes. The lesson promos have generally resulted in our worst months revenue-wise.

Antonius

"I spent seventy years killing rats in Targossas, then I could finally start considering learning how to maybe fight because I had a few Transcendent class skills." is a shit story that nobody in their right mind would be interested in hearing, let alone living through.

There are a lot of things that older players lived through that newer players shouldn't expect to, and I happen to think that "killed rats for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on end" should be one of them. Along with all the actually cool things that take place like big world events, interacting with Gods that have been subsequently killed off, and living through eras that will never come around again (Guilds, the Church, Shallam, etc).

Quisse

The old "I walked uphill both ways to school" arguments coming from older players are really missing the point of the thread. The game isn't the same as it was 10 years ago, and, as Antonius pointed out, there's some perks to that and some drawbacks. If we want to keep people playing, we can probably do better than sending people off to auto-rat for hours on end.

Eta: I still think good old fashioned interaction is the ticket to keeping people coming back. Getting sucked into the storyline is what makes Achaea so exciting to play.

Makarios

A few comments sparked my interest here, so I did a quick run through of the skill trees to be sure.

7 of our classes require a single skill or less of invested lessons to reach maximum PVE capacity in terms of class skills. This assumes that you absolutely require maximum damage output and accuracy (most classes do not, the formulas reach a point where you won't miss against all but the highest level denizens). Several of these classes also do not require even that one skill to be fully transcended (magi, sylvan notably). That number rises to 9 if you're willing to spend around 90 lessons in your second skill, 11 if you're willing to get runes from someone else, 12 if you're willing to get spiritshields from someone else, and 15 if you're willing to invest around 150 lessons in said second skill.

Out of the 2 classes that remain, you can probably discard infernal off that list, as putrefaction is a luxury while bashing and hardly crutial for a knight to hunt affectively (and isn't actually too far into necromancy).
That leaves you with monk, which does require a higher lesson investment to hunt well. However, I'd say this is more than offset by how incredibly high their bashing potential is when they reach that point.

Just to clear that up.

Jacen

What about Daeir's idea, but only allow those lesson sales to apply to characters with < 20 hours play time, or something?

Mannimar

I'd like to say that before I was gainfully employed they only money spent on Achaea was money gifted for my birthday. Almost every Transed skill I have and surprisingly several artefacts were solely earned through questing, and deepsea fishing. It took a bit, but because of that and the availability of credits in game I was able to game CFS make a notable profit, while earning lessons and credits.

It takes time, but it's anything but impossible to get things without cash.

Paik

As a borderline newb (been playing for, what, three months now, I think?) I vote @Feral for president. I started quoting everything he said that I agreed with, but then realized I was just quoting everything he said.

In particular, his bit about skill-cost not being the barrier I hit most often. Paik is 1.5 trans and could be dual if I wasn't tossing lessons into fun RP-supportive skills, and I'm one of those who've never paid a dime (sorry, @Sarapis!). I just bash for an hour and then do fun RP stuff. What's the big?

It's the heavy reliance on Mudlet and its attendant scripts that almost made me quit a few times when I was lower-level. I'm in love with the HTML client since Mudlet refuses to play nicely with my Mac, but it doesn't yet have the broad community support for scripting that Mudlet has, and I have zero idea how to make more complex things like an herb-balance-queue for curing. Which means I just look like a monkey fucking a football when it comes to combat. That's no problem for Paik because he's in a relatively non-combat house. I feel really badly for anyone who starts out brand new and tries to play a combat-oriented character in a high-raid city, though.

The OP seems to be setting up a strange logic chain of: "novices don't stay because of few/poor novice helpers, who are few/poor because they don't get cash-equivalent incentives." Both of those cause/effect assumptions are incorrect, I think.The derail into "novices don't stay because credits/skill costs" also seems a bit flimsy. Transing is a goal you can meet for free IG, and constantly having new goals is a large part of what keeps me playing. The derail into "novices don't stay because combat unofficially requires a specific skill set and extra equipment" seems more on the mark to me.

Feral

Thanks for the awesome post @Makarios

Though this also brings up another thing that I suspect hurts new player retention. The documention on how your abilities work, and what exactly you need to be effective, is delibritly missing from the in game help files. You are expected to interact with other players to learn this. Yet this becomes very hit and miss. If you asked feral in game what you should learn to be great at bashing as a serpent I would have no clue how to answer. Only due to @sena's awesome thread do I know that unless I have better than X stats on a whip (plus trans subterfuge) I should stick to using camus.

This gets even worse when it comes to PVP. The sheer amount of knowledge you need to acquire (on TOP of building/buying a curing system) is crazy. Again you rely on the player base educating others. This gets back to the original topic of the thread which is how time intensive it is do to this education. On top of that not everyone is equal to the task. There is a lot about being a serpent that I can pass on but there is also a huge amount I have no clue about. Only a rare few players have full knowledge of their own class let alone other classes.

I realize that my opinion goes against the culture of the game but I strongly feel that if you had detailed mechanical information available to all (on every class) it would increase retention and increase the desire to participate in PVP and thus increase credit sales. Leave the secrecy to the RP aspects of the game not the mechanics.

Wynedere

While cost of play is a large deterrent, people will spend money on a hobby if they consider the investment worthy. Interaction is key here, even more so than all the wonderful features Achaea's admin have worked hard to provide. This is why I believe that seasoned players should be given incentive to work with novices more. Sure, you can say that helping novices is reward in itself. That is true, to a point. But, burn-out is a very real thing and happens more than some of you think. It honestly feels like a job to the people who do it frequently. Show them appreciation through some sort of reward system, and they will feel less like their time has been wasted when newbie #9873 decides not to return after a newbie helper has spent hours with him or her. Not to mention the fact that the newbies will ultimately benefit from all the extra attention. 

Yes, everything can and will be abused. My question is, what does it matter the reason why a player is helping newbies if the newbies are still getting tons of positive interaction and help?

Sarapis

I have to agree with @Quisse and @Antonius. It's not really relevant what people had to do 10 years ago. What matters is how people experience Achaea now. Just because people had to wait for a God to cure paralysis in the early days doesn't mean people should have to now (a rather extreme example, of course). It's far easier to get skills today than it was back in the day, as not only are credits much cheaper (credit prices with dollars used to be almost double, plus inflation makes credits cheaper to buy with dollars every year) but we also give people multiple times the number of lessons for leveling up (between lessons and bound credits) that we used to. That's also kind of irrelevant though, as novices aren't playing Achaea in the year 2000, or even the year 2013. They're playing right now, and having whatever experience they're having right now, not in the past.

Unfortunately, I wish that the newbie problem was around people being turned off by spending money, but it's not, or rather, it's a small problem compared to the far larger problem of losing newbies well before they get to the point of even considering what it'd take to, for instance, tri-trans. 

That's why we've spent and continue to spend  such an enormous amount of time/effort on the html5 client, the new novice intro, and the city tasks Tecton is working on. That work is flat-out the most important work we can be doing for the larger good of Achaea, so that Achaea will still be here in 10 years, in 15 years. 

Just as an example, we were losing 45% of our newbies just in character creation on the HTML5 client (how virtually all true newbies start playing). That's why we redid the entire sequence, and are now waiting to have enough data to see if it helped. Then there is the "what the hell is this huge wall of text" moment when they enter the game proper. We lose another huge chunk of people there, though the new novice intro has changed the numbers there some (though not as much as we had hoped, to be honest).  

In customer acquisition, people speak of your product's "funnel", where the top of the funnel is all the players hitting your site and the bottom of the funnel is people spending money, which is necessarily a smaller number of people than who hit your website. A lot smaller. A triangle with the point facing down, in other words, more or less. A graphical example is here. We track in a much more granular way than that example, and look at things like % that make it to 30 seconds of playtime, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, etc etc etc. 

So you might look at our general strategy regarding novices this way: Start at the places where we can affect the most newbies, and work down from there. We began on the client, though perhaps should have began on character creation within the client, but in any case the idea is to work on things that are higher up the funnel first. I doubt we'll be able to make character creation substantially better than it is now in client.achaea.com, though the novice introduction can be polished/added to/subtracted from forever, as can the transition into city stuff.

One big thing that affects people in the mid-funnel is having a system, and that's a place you're going to see more effort going soon. We'd like to provide a free system in our client that's good enough for most combatants, at least when they're starting out in PvP. As someone earlier pointed out, that whole side of things is a giant barrier to entry as well.

At some point I want to sit down and look at the entire reward structure (ie how rewards for players are paced out as they level from 1 to X). There's just so much to do. 

Paik

Sarapis said:

One big thing that affects people in the mid-funnel is having a system, and that's a place you're going to see more effort going soon. We'd like to provide a free system in our client that's good enough for most combatants, at least when they're starting out in PvP. As someone earlier pointed out, that whole side of things is a giant barrier to entry as well.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! All the work that's been going into the HTML client has been awesome, and has gone a long way to improving the game experience, for me at least. Huge raves for that, and I'm super excited to hear that this is on the to-do list.

Carmell

I have a protege that is building a system for priest totally with the HTML5 client.  I've been able to point him in the directions of the forums to get started and he got into contact with someone who was able to help him start scripting in it.  He comes to me every few days to let me know how he is doing on such and such and to find out what my recommendations are for things he should be building into his system for offense.  We need to make sure that the documentation is there for building the client correctly.  I know that my protege has gotten in touch with Tecton a couple of times when he wasn't sure how to set something up for it.  If we have more young ones that are able to use the client well it would be great.  But that only works for people that have a good idea about how to script.  I still struggle to make sure anything I do up works when I finish it and sometimes it can take me multiple tries to get it to work.  So making sure that there are very simple minded instructions I guess you could say would help.

Saeva

Before I made the switch over to the Achaea train, I spent $29.99 a month on a premium subscription and $12.99 a month for basic, switching back and forth, off and on for yeaaaaaars for a different MUD. MUDs just seem to be absurdly overpriced. I'm coming to terms with that. I guess I liken it to Walmart versus the small town family business. Walmart (your WoW equivalent) can afford to make their product cheaper because they are -masssssssiiive- companies. But the mom and pop store down the road has to scrape by while likely charging a bit more. I'm okay with supporting the little guy.

Other than having an Elite subscription... I've spent like... a couple bones on those globe packages around Christmas time with gift cards I was gifted (because that gamble of what's gonna pop out of that pokéglobe was really thrilling for some reason!) and none more (I have a complex about spending money for the most part. I really hate doing it.). And I have, in roughly 7 months, -transed- 5 skillsets (Have several with lessons invests but not transed) and gotten  Shield of Absorption and Tuning Fork artefacts by using my daily lessons/monthly credits/IG gold.... It has been slow going but I mean.. I'm making progress! And now that my character is in the higher 80s level-wise, I've found enough hunting areas/gold gathering grounds to make a decent dent when I focus on it.

The point is - Even when I had only transed elementalism and crystalism as a -novice- mage... it wouldn't have really mattered if I had transed 8+ skillsets because I did -not- know what the heck I was doing in combat anyways! I knew how to play MUDs but I had -so- much to soak in and try to adjust to and learn about Achaea that I couldn't be bothered with feeling sorry for myself for not being tritransed with survival and weaponry etc. So... maybe it's just me, but having to learn it all slowly along the way has created an environment where I actually know what my own personal skills are a bit more intimately. I don't see that being a bad thing for any novice.

I can understand how the need for so much time and or real money would prevent making effective alts, which is actually kind of stank tank. Having alts with different perspectives and interactions in a gameworld can be really enjoyable. But as far as really focusing on one character as an actual novice... it's not so bad if you're at least willing/able to get on a subscription.

And the HTML5 client was probably one of the more infuriating things of all, as a novice. To start learning how to use it and then to find out that it's nowhere near adequate and that I was going to need to use Mudlet and get a system in order to cure for hunting? I thought that was totally jacked up. If your game host can't provide you with the tools to properly BASH without having at least minor coding skills... Well, you can kiss any young or actual novices goodbye.

Edit : Oh...also, having to tell a protege that if they want to actually hunt/getinvolvedincombat that they should consider using a different client so that they can get a proper system... that's depressing and it's a big fat turn off.

Nakari

I will say that back when I was still pretty new, the little "log in for x amount of time a day for a credit" was actually pretty nice. I mean, it didn't impact all the lessons needed and such that much (I only started really getting skills transed when I got on membership), but it did make it feel that I was getting somewhere, however slowly, and that was a rather nice feeling when it felt frustrating how many skills I needed to get to trans.

Sarapis

Saeva said:

 If your game host can't provide you with the tools to properly BASH without having at least minor coding skills... 

Don't quite get this. I can bash just fine on a plain telnet connection using Achaea's in-game alias/target system. What am I missing regarding what you mean?

Sarapis

Carmell said:

I have a protege that is building a system for priest totally with the HTML5 client.  I've been able to point him in the directions of the forums to get started and he got into contact with someone who was able to help him start scripting in it.  He comes to me every few days to let me know how he is doing on such and such and to find out what my recommendations are for things he should be building into his system for offense.  We need to make sure that the documentation is there for building the client correctly.  I know that my protege has gotten in touch with Tecton a couple of times when he wasn't sure how to set something up for it.  If we have more young ones that are able to use the client well it would be great.  But that only works for people that have a good idea about how to script.  I still struggle to make sure anything I do up works when I finish it and sometimes it can take me multiple tries to get it to work.  So making sure that there are very simple minded instructions I guess you could say would help.

I'm thinking that the best way to get this done may be to pay someone to develop a system, with full admin support. It's something that's very doable without needing access to our code, so paying an experienced player-scripter just may be the way to go.

Paik

Saeva said:

And the HTML5 client was probably one of the more infuriating things of all, as a novice. To start learning how to use it and then to find out that it's nowhere near adequate and that I was going to need to use Mudlet and get a system in order to cure for hunting? I thought that was totally jacked up. If your game host can't provide you with the tools to properly BASH without having at least minor coding skills... Well, you can kiss any young or actual novices goodbye.

Edit : Oh...also, having to tell a protege that if they want to actually hunt/getinvolvedincombat that they should consider using a different client so that they can get a proper system... that's depressing and it's a big fat turn off.

Agrees all around until this part. Where on earth are you bashing that you need a Mudlet curing system? Even in places that afflict, you just make one round to find the affliction text for that spot, panic and TOUCH TREE like a hippy, and then make a nifty trigger. I'm the king of stupid-hunting-death, but still my omgwtfiscode triggers work just fine, and I've not really been overwhelmed with afflictions from denizens. Also, maybe, were you working with one of the earlier versions of the HTML client? The latest incarnation is pretty bashing-friendly, especially with the autosipper and balance queue. I'm on board with you about the combat part at the end, but hunting can totally be done typing out every command in full on a laptop in the garage with a cig in one hand. Truth.

Antonius

There's only one place I can think of where you'd possibly need a full curing system to deal with afflictions, and that's the scorpions by Ugrach in the Underworld. Nowhere else that I can think of has afflictions coming that fast or in such huge amounts that you couldn't feasibly manual using aliases or macros.

Kyrra

Antonius said:

There's only one place I can think of where you'd possibly need a full curing system to deal with afflictions, and that's the scorpions by Ugrach in the Underworld. Nowhere else that I can think of has afflictions coming that fast or in such huge amounts that you couldn't feasibly manual using aliases or macros.

Prin. Guardians are affliction whores, so are the spooks in the jungles, and the guards in the temple. Not to mention that weird midget that likes to sacrifice people. If you end up getting proned, you're pretty much fucked without a full curing system. I think even Penwize bashes better on Prin since he switched to Svo.

Saeva

Before Cidusii gave me a list of coded healing priorities and triggers for HTML5, I mean..even going to Xhaiden Dale, I was having to manually cure against the worms or striders or whatever it is that's there, that I needed to apply mending for. Or the acolytes that set me on fire. Or the random snakes I would pass walking somewhere that would afflict with voyria.

I don't know if HTML5 has included the triggers now for healing yourself at this point because for obvious reasons I don't use it anymore... but if they did not, as a NOVICE (I'm not saying someone who is familiar with the game and someone who knows how to cure and what cures what affliction)... I died quite a lot of times to random afflictions while trying to learn to hunt, simply because there was no reflexive healing. The auto-sipper was the only means of triggered healing I had at my disposal.

And you saying you can build basic triggers... that's where I get off saying that you need at least a minor knowledge of understanding how the coding works. And that's what I am stating is a turn off.

Paik

Saeva said:

I don't know if HTML5 has included the triggers now for healing yourself at this point because for obvious reasons I don't use it anymore... but if they did not, as a NOVICE (I'm not saying someone who is familiar with the game and someone who knows how to cure and what cures what affliction)... I died quite a lot of times to random afflictions while trying to learn to hunt, simply because there was no reflexive healing. The auto-sipper was the only means of triggered healing I had at my disposal.

And you saying you can build basic triggers... that's where I get off saying that you need at least a minor knowledge of understanding how the coding works. And that's what I am stating is a turn off.

Ahhh, gotcha. No, the HTML5 client doesn't have a built-in reflexive curing system. Would that be handy? Absolutely. Did I need to really cure anything as a newcomer? Not at all, unless you count oyster blindness, which was a great learning opportunity and rarely leads to death unless SHARK.

Personally, I'm sort of fine with the game requiring that folks pick up some very basic trigger-building knowledge. Don't all houses require some form of anti-theft reflexes and provide in-game support to help teach the basic principles of those triggers? Any game has its own unique learning curve, and making basic triggers is Achaea's. Once my housemates taught me how to make a trigger for hypnosis, it was pretty easy to build my own for being paralyzed by denizens.

Also, it's very difficult to compose a response here when I can't stop staring at the kitteh in your signature. I WANTS IT.

Eiredhel

This is my favorite topic, cause it brings back so many good memories.

When I started playing a around two years or whatever it was ago, the reason I stayed was purely because of the amount of time and effort I knew was put into my character. The first time I logged in, I had some glitch or error that wouldn't let me get into the city and House I wanted and a Juliet helped me by getting in direct contact with an Amb-aide in Hashan so I could get into the city and House. 

I was so flattered that even though I was confused and flustered I was determined to give the game a try. And then @Lacertix gave me an above and beyond orientation and literally sat there for four hours answering all of my questions, and helping me figure out how to emote, being patient with me and so on. I was literally so excited I forced about three of my friends I played mmos with to play with me. 

I didn't regret it at all. Even though the people I started off with left for various reasons, I spoke to them in depth about it, and basically they didn't have people to motivate them within their respect orgs, or have brand new players to grow with both OOCly and ICly. Competition is great, and having people go above and beyond to help with that realism really gives an extra incentive to keep working. 

I got really depressed at times because I thought I'd never be able to reach my goals or Eiredhel's goals, but literally, all it took was someone willing to listen to me cry about it when I got really frustrated, another to tell me to suck it up, and a third to offer roleplay with me and give me the pull to keep playing. 

As long as I felt that there was something I could do to contribute to my House and or City, I was on without fail every day. 

If I wanted to just pvp, just grind, just roleplay, just write, just craft, whatever, there are a lot of easier ways to get those fixes. And honestly the combination of all of them along with the population are what make Achaea so addicting. Time, financial costs, and what have you can be worked past and justified as long as you make sure the person feels the enjoyment is worth it. If people are having a blast, they are going to find a way to make that money. 

I now hang out and roleplay with new players and alts because I enjoy it, and it always makes me feel as though I'm experiencing Achaea for the first time all over again. I don't need a reward perse for helping novices, but having more tools, or just ways to keep them entertained would be nice, though I'm a terrible basher and would always be broke if I hadn't had help getting survival and seafaring trans'd. 

House programs that give novices gold, and competitions that they can easily participate in that focus on creativity to get credits also help. 

As cheesy as it sounds, for me personally, I stuck around because people gave me the confidence to believe in myself and to believe that I could contribute to the community. If I didn't have that confidence, I wouldn't stick around every time I had to work on anything that wasn't 'fun' to me. 

TLDR work out pain is nice but is far from the reason why people try to get fit or stop trying to get fit.

P.S. I may have totally missed the entire point of this thread. Maybe.

Tvistor

Exhausted after fencing comp, just going to comment that people are free to spend as much time as they want getting basic class skills, but the fact the game relies on people being okay with it easily explains why most people don't stick around. I think most Heads of Newcomers can attest that being unable to trans things does indeed drive tons of new players away.

Achaea's playerbase will always be tiny though, since most gamers will opt for a modern game like Call of Duty, and people who want the other end (more creativity and stuff) are better off with D&D. Because of that I doubt Achaea could afford to drop their credit prices anywhere near where a casual gamer might deem them reasonable.

Nim

Tvistor said:

Exhausted after fencing comp, just going to comment that people are free to spend as much time as they want getting basic class skills, but the fact the game relies on people being okay with it easily explains why most people don't stick around. I think most Heads of Newcomers can attest that being unable to trans things does indeed drive tons of new players away.

Achaea's playerbase will always be tiny though, since most gamers will opt for a modern game like Call of Duty, and people who want the other end (more creativity and stuff) are better off with D&D. Because of that I doubt Achaea could afford to drop their credit prices anywhere near where a casual gamer might deem them reasonable.

I know there's a bonus for the first 1000 unbound credits, and that bonus alone is nearly enough to trans a skill. I feel like it could probably be sharpened a bit. Effectively, it's 1500 free lessons that only new characters get - perhaps it could be spread out to the first 500, 250, or even 100 unbound credits. Just a thought, of course.

Tvistor

Maths is hard, just going to agree with you.

Jovolo

Nim said:

Tvistor said:

snip

I know there's a bonus for the first 1000 unbound credits, and that bonus alone is nearly enough to trans a skill. I feel like it could probably be sharpened a bit. Effectively, it's 1500 free lessons that only new characters get - perhaps it could be spread out to the first 500, 250, or even 100 unbound credits. Just a thought, of course.

1000 credits is 6000 lessons before the credit bonus. 1000 credits is at minimum 6,000,000 gold or $299.99. What relevance does that type of person have in the discussion of whether or not transcending being too difficult or not drives potential players away? 

I did the math before, and to transcend just class skills it would take either hunting all the way to level 90 and earning 2,000,000 gold along the way to spend on just credits. If you don't want to spend a large majority (read: pretty much all) of your money on credits to save them for required house items, curatives, weapons, armour and so on. That becomes level 90 and $140. Does Achaea require exorbitant time and/or money to gather your basic class skills (3 of a possible 19 skills)? Are any of you actually going to try to argue "No" to that? I don't get why.

People should really stop with the bullshit excuse of "Well you don't need your class skills to enjoy Achaea!" Well - you. Yes I do, and so do many others. If I wanted to just login and do nothing but roleplay, there are many, many other games on the internet that I can achieve that on. Take your holier-than-thou opinion and apply it only to your holier-than-thou self. I'm sure I'm not the only one that doesn't want it.

Antonius

I might be wrong, but I read @Nim's suggestion as being you'd get the 2500 (not 1500) bonus lessons for converting credits to bound credits across a smaller number of them; so if it was dropped to the first 100, rather than 1000, you'd be getting 25 bonus lessons per rather than the current 2.5.

Jovolo

Oh, I see that now. That is quite a good idea Nim, but I don't see Sarapis going for it for obvious reasons.

Tvistor

Yeah, I don't think IRE (understandably) would have any interest in getting more players in if it wasn't going to boost overall profits, and I doubt any changes would bring enough people to offset it.

Jovolo

@Sylvance @Shadrac ?