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Comments
My beef with the current tour is as you said, it's so structured, so buffered from the actual goingson in the game that when you're done, you've already spent so much time alone that you feel like a stranger in your own city.
Older players generally have instruction to leave these task/tour-doing newbies alone. I get the feeling that a good portion of this was also meant to accomodate players from offpeak timezones by removing a dependency on players for learning and progress, but it's also separated the new player from (one of) the biggest selling points of the game: the community.
An experience would largely be like this:
The newbie tour and the city tours don't mesh well at all, causing a player's 'introduction' time to be a protracted period of relative isolation. I would have rathered that the majority of the newbie tour take place in the city proper and have a chance to interact with other players rather than the pygmy kidnapping syndicate thing.
Compare this to when older players like myself finished the tour and ambassador and guild aides were swarming over us to give us gear, talk shop, give us the tour and take the time to ask us if we have any concerns. If I'd popped out of Loom and I got was yet another bunch of tasks before anyone would really speak to me, I don't know if I'd have stayed at all.
My concern is that this puts a lot of barriers in the way of players meeting other players and getting involved in social interactions/rp (particularly given the long list of very impersonal tasks before one is even able to join a house), and that this is maybe overall not conductive to engaging people into the game outside the intro itself.
I know what got me hooked was when someone took some time to take me hunting and show me around, as well as making a good friend in my house. At the moment, I feel like this would be much harder, as I'd have to get through the trial, regular tasks, and city tasks before getting placed into a group where I might be able to meet people/gain more context for what the game's about. Anyone who pays even cursory attention to the newbie channels knows that often times these tasks can be their own challenge when it comes to finding certain items/people/running into some bug or another, and I think that putting all of these as walls to engaging with the social aspects of the game that people often seem to site as their reason for sticking around can't be productive.
We created a more structured intro (and I want to emphasize that it does actually convert better than the previous intros) mainly because people weren't really going out of their way to help newbies enough. We'd see way too many newbies just struggling without any help from older players, and not just in off-peak hours either, or just get pointed at help files, which is a good way to get people to quit as few people like reading lots of help files when they're getting started.
So sure, I agree that it's better if older players go out of their way to help newbies, but it's much rarer than you might think. You experienced what you did and stuck around. Lots of other players didn't get that warm welcome, and didn't stick around.
Another factor that I think comes into play: older players have been playing a lot longer now on average than they were when you started, and have seen many more newbies start and leave. People just get jaded after awhile due to the newbie turnover and lose interest in new players until said new player proves he/she is going to stick around and so be worth helping. Of course, the sad flipside to that is that just guarantees less newbies will stick around.
I've seen (and experienced it myself, from both sides) that same phenomenon in other games and in other sorts of organizations/groups besides just games. It's a shame, but motivating people to help truly new newbies consistently over a long period of time is just really hard if the flow of newbies is anything but a tiny proportion of the membership of the game/org. For instance, onboarding people when you hire them in a company is a lot easier because a company of, say, 1000 people that's not growing quickly is still probably only hiring 200-300 people a year. Or a fraternity, where they onboard, say, 1/4 of their population every year.
By comparison, in a year, Achaea, which isn't much bigger than 1000 people (and considerably less than that if you're counting the people here a lot who are the likely to have the time/inclination to help a newbie) has somewhere around 6-10,000 newbies (new newbies, not alt creations) a year. Let's say around 50% of them completed the trial. So if we have, say, a population of a 500 older players really capable of helping newbies, and 3-5000 newbies a year, that means that instead of four people to one newbie during the year like in the above example, it's one person to 6-10 newbies. So 24-40x as many newbies per member of the group as compared to the above. And unlike in a company or a fraternity, you guys are customers, and have no obligation to do anything.
It's not hard to see how there's no way to depend on older players to take care of most newbies until they get past a certain point.
I've had lots of proteges because I like helping newbies, but have very rarely received any mentor credits even with proteges buying left and right. I had one protege who bought some promotion and asked me if I got anything when he did. When I said no, he got upset and issued himself to find out it wasn't a bug.
There are so many safeguards in place to prevent abuse of the mentor system that it leaves little to no incentive for people to help newbies if they wouldn't already.
When I've made new characters, I've found that sometimes people are not just uninterested in newbies, but are actually mean to them. As a regular player, more than half of my character attempts have logged off permanently because of the way they were treated by older characters. One was given a filthy nickname by one of their house secretaries, and no, I hadn't done anything to earn it. I would like to see people be more welcoming of newbies, but I think they like their world and don't want anyone to come in and possibly influence it.
My issue, and I think I explained it poorly up above, is that newbies are currently prevented from joining a house until they've finished quite a few tasks. I think this serves as a barrier both between newbies connecting with a more focussed group of players, as well as for players who want to help newbies to find the ones who really need help (this is particularly true in both cases with a large city like Cyrene, where it's much harder to find and check in with players who need help then it was when they were in your smaller org.
Under the old system, players would often be put into houses immediately, where, under the more organized houses, they'd generally undergo an orientation of sorts. This of course has the potential to be a problem if there's no one around to give it, but in good cases it could put players in touch with someone to ask questions to, give them an early introduction to the broader game, and often provide them with early equipment and the like.
The new system does quite a lot of this very well, and without the need for players to be around/able/excited to help. But it's now pretty easy to get through the first several hours of playtime without ever interacting with another player. If a newbie isn't vocal over CT, it's fairly likely that this could be the case, it seems to me (or at least, the last few times I've gotten people to try it this has been the case).
Currently one has to grind to level 10, finish a handful of small quests, follow the intro story through a number of steps, THEN do a series of city tasks before they're even able to enter into a house. While I think these tasks are very useful, they're also quite impersonal, and setting them up as a series of chores/hurdles before one is able to engage in smaller, more focused groups and meet players that they can rely on after the tutorial.
Basically, I just don't understand why it's set up this way. I can understand wanting to shift the burden of novice introductions so that it's not complicated by a lack of available/interested players, but why prevent newbies from entering a house while they're still getting through the intro. A house is going to be the best source of a mentor that falls within that player's interests and who can provide interactions/resources for a while into that character's career (ideally), but mentors are useful far sooner then when players are allowed to join houses. Perhaps there's a really good way for the system to be exactly how it is now, but I don't understand it, if it's there.
TL;DR: Why are newbies prohibited from joining houses for the first several solid hours of their Achaea experience, and only able to join them when they've already had to work quite a bit of the game out?
For example : The parking for my local library is beneath the building, it has a rather big grey wall with pretty much nothing on it. Think it would be pretty bitching to have something like
"Carpark of <town name> Library
Pristine white lines sector the night black bitumen into parking spaces between the monolithic concrete columns that hold the library overhead. What would be dreary grey poles are banded at eye-level with the surprising dash of colour from naive murals. Built into the northern walls is an elevator and a set of stairs, both leading upwards to the library proper.
A curious bystander is here, reading a paragraph of graffiti. Free from the novel that once held it, a tattered page flutters about. Forgotten by their owner, a pair of keys sit lost on the ground.
You see exits to the up, out and through the elevator doors.
What will you do?
Achaea.com"
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Would be pretty damn cool though.
Think they would contact you about sticker tagging as well?
There was once the 'take pictures of place that could be in Achaea and we'll give out prizes' thread. You could do something similiar to that again. Get people to chose a real world location, write a desc about it. Post a picture of the location and the desc hanging up in the location.
Think of all the cafes, bars, uni lounges you could hit.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
Back then we don't have any if these. We downloaded out own client. Made our own curing, remembered the huge map.
Newbies nowadays are pampered. I wonder how we oldies got so far.
I don't think the phone has an easy go-to "Vote for Achaea" button in it.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
I'm guessing that a lot of people will drop out on the basic premise that it is a text game.
After that, there is a lot of tediousness to the game. At least now there is serverside curing so you don't need to find people who enjoy reading AND coding (as much). But you still have things like outrifting inks for tattoos, small but annoying. Also decays =( I've walked away from some characters for months at a time and just the sheer expense of "starting over" is off putting. Redoing vials alone would help 1000000%. Get rid of them/make nondecay vials easier to obtain (and fun to collect). I understand one issue there is having billions of vials taking up space, but I also know that when I see a vial has >10 days left I just put it in a pack (screw Rufio's 12 gold) and buy new ones. (I should humgii them. I'm horrible, I'm sorry).
I am one of those people who is a jerk to newbs. Not a complete jerk, but I'm really hesitant to get involved with them. I usually assume they're just trolling me. I answer whatever questions they have and try to point them into the right places (Yeah, read HELP WHATEVER because that's going to give you more complete info than I could, and all I would be doing is summarising that anyway. And if you can't read through a help file, you're going to have a rough time overall.)
If you'd rather focus on marketing and bringing in more new people than retaining them: Stick flyers on windshields at the nerdiest places possible (libraries, anime conventions, game stores). - People will wonder what is so great that someone has actually stepped outdoors to try and tell others about it.
QUOTE 1: Bro, I incinerated the Tyrannus man! The key is to ignore people who say you'll die, and inform them "I am coming if you like it or not!" and if you die, then you die haha. Its all good fun.
QUOTE 2: In the MUD I recently left to go look for a new home (Which I think I have found.) One thing they did with regards to new players and guilds, was set up a guild specifically for new players. Older players with a genuine interest in interacting with the "wNewbros would essentially be able to join as a "Guide" and they were given basic commands not given to other players specifically aimed at dealing with the confusion and chaos MUDS can cause. The newbro would then have the ability to interact with people. They gave them tours and tips and stuff, introduced them to roleplay etc. This went on for a series of levels before the newbro is asked to consider a guild. To get into the guild he chooses he then is given a list of names and places and with the aide of the guides contacts them to begin a really short but story driven process to join the guild. One guild modelled after the Roman Legion would essentially require them to go through a 1 hour "Basic Training" with a member of their recruitment team. Patrolling and finally he had to basically gather as much stuff to help him kick the experienced soldiers behind in a bout to the death. (The experienced soldier was generally seriously handicapped so the newbro stood a chance of winning. He could not heal for example.)
Not saying this is how it should be, but just chucking in my badly worded and written comments!
I think what he's saying is that you can just hit 'return' and proceed. You don't have to vote.