IRE wants to make money, right? That's a major thing I've seen in this whole guild overhaul thing or whatever, I'm not entirely sure, but, I would have been more inclined to spend money on a game that actually seems to want me there and want to help me be part of it.
It seems like, based on all the replies here that the player base wants to help, but the staff make that harder than it should be. It's a mechanic that shouldn't exist. You can be playing here for X years and still learn something new, or, with a company as big as IRE is and how large their resources are, I'd definitely hope they're putting things in the game for players to keep discovering, otherwise it's no better than MKO.
Yes please to a way to speedup or skip the tutorial. Just add in a big warning/confirm before hand that only established Lusternia players should skip ahead.
I've been here for like...3-4 years? And I just recently learned how to do aetherflares, OLDBIES NEED NEWBIE TOO MODS
3
SylandraJoin Queue for Mafia GamesThe Last Mafia Game
I dunno man, you've had an admin step in and say he would look into your concerns. Doesn't seem like they're trying to "make it harder" to me, seems more like a poorly considered mechanic has been left around longer than it should have. Which, if you aren't playing a character but instead working as an admin, would be easy to miss until it was brought to your attention.
Also not sure IRE has resources as big as you think it does? The things you're mentioning specifically are likely handled by Lusternia's tiny mainly-volunteer based staff. There's always more things to do and address than there are people to handle them, and most of those people are not paid to do so.
Re: new things to do and explore, Lusternia tends to put out new content, at the very least via a year-end event culminating in a new area for the game.
"Oh yeah, you're a naughty mayor, aren't you? Misfile that Form MA631-D. Comptroller Shevat's got a nice gemstone disc for you, but yer gonna have to beg for it."
in addition to all that's being said, can be please have a look at
concussion. When I started playing, I had a similar problem to Alseid and if I wouldn't have had @Taevyn to literally drag me around till we
found a healer who cured enough on what I head to my m&m could do
the rest, I would likely have stopped playing. Concussions really _need_
to tell you that you have something instead of just ignoring your
command and giving you nothing in return. Even the amnesia message is
more helpful because you can guess _something_ happened to you.
It is not at all the case that players want to help and admin do not. The vast majority of the administrative team are volunteers, and our focus is almost universally on keeping things running and making the game better for players. Often, this is in ways that cannot easily be seen: helping the mortal reviewers process designs, building new areas, preparing future events, fixing bugs, you get the idea. It is not the case that we sit up in Havens pondering how best we can make money; that's not why we became volunteers. We did that because we love Lusternia, its community, and creating things for it.
If you have been given a different perception of this then I apologise. Just because we do not seem to reply to things on the forums as fast as players do does not mean we are not listening, or do not care. In fact, we started discussing your thread almost as soon as it was posted, and were universally in agreement that newbie needed changing so that people could use it for longer. And as Ieptix has already said, we are now looking at changing the restrictions to involve played time so that newbie is accessible to you for a lot longer than it is right now.
Because we work as a team we often have to discuss things amongst ourselves before we can bring them to you guys, which can make it seem like we're not listening when in fact we are. I'm sorry for that, and hope this explanation helps fix that a little.
Sylandra is right - we are not players, and a lot of us haven't been players for a long time. We don't always know, or remember, the things that are problems for you. That is why threads like this are invaluable to us; thanks to you coming forward, we know there is a problem and we can fix it for you. Please always feel able to do that. It really helps.
Also - thank you everyone who has offered to help Alseid. You are all wonderful and the game would be very different without you.
in addition to all that's being said, can be please have a look at
concussion. When I started playing, I had a similar problem to Alseid and if I wouldn't have had @Taevyn to literally drag me around till we
found a healer who cured enough on what I head to my m&m could do
the rest, I would likely have stopped playing. Concussions really _need_
to tell you that you have something instead of just ignoring your
command and giving you nothing in return. Even the amnesia message is
more helpful because you can guess _something_ happened to you.
Diagnose?
I'm just saying this is really hyper specific, and not really a larger game problem. Admin have to find the balance between people willing to quit and storm off over any little thing, and an interesting, deep, dynamic environment which might include afflictions you haven't encountered yet.
There's nothing wrong with a learning curve.
Also, why didn't Taevyn just hand you the cures. Weird.
The problem is that when concussion eats commands, and it will, there's no indication that's happening if I'm remembering correctly. When you hit diagnose, and nothing happens, it's fairly confusing. May not be a bad idea to have some sort of indicator that your command got eaten, a la amnesia.
Even if it's the same indicator you get for failed commands a la "Huh?" "I don't recognise that command." etc. it'd be a step up from just silently eating commands like a lag monster or a gagged prompt.
The problem is that when concussion eats commands, and it will, there's no indication that's happening if I'm remembering correctly. When you hit diagnose, and nothing happens, it's fairly confusing. May not be a bad idea to have some sort of indicator that your command got eaten, a la amnesia.
I go back to my whole, "Internet is broken" comment because it says nothing at all. You can say say "Diagnose?" If you have to @Celina and I'll keep that in mind now that I know that command and affliction exists, but the point here is I was a brand new player and I'm still not familiar with all the cures and didn't know to use diag, and there was no message at all.
I totally agree there should be things you haven't experienced, right now almost everything is something I haven't experienced, but it's still good to get a message such as, "You forgot what you are trying to do," or something along those lines so you know what's happening, because I didn't.
Also, in rebuttal to your "storm off over every little thing" comment, I counter with I'm new, and a learning curve should still have a message to let you know "Hey, this is happening, you've got 2 days played time, I'm letting you know I'm a weird little mechanic." It's not so much the traditional rage quitting as much as its frustration because you want to enjoy the game.
Now, I didn't "storm off over every little thing," and that's mostly due to the players here and the response to this thread, and I appreciate everyone's input, offer to help, and their opinions. Thank you guys.
1
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
Hopefully they'll implement some changes in the quality of new players' experience before the guild overhaul comes to pass. Another thing I noticed that may be helpful -- maybe the collegium scrolls should be referenced by the college denizens??? And other helpful resources like LANDMARKS.
Especially landmarks. I know a lot of cities have CHELP DIRECTIONS but unfortunately, the directions often require you to be standing at the city's respective nexus. I feel like maybe if CHELP DIRECTIONS referenced LANDMARKS and/or were even meant to be used alongside LANDMARKS, they'd double in value as navigation resources for newbies.
Yarou was helping a Mag novice the other day with the power quest and they actually teleported to the Megalith and then walked to Tunika. There's nothing wrong with this, of course -- if it works, it works! -- but I also thought it might prove detrimental to their grasping the city's geography in the long run ..
Just a thought. I'm proposing some edits to Magnagora's own collegium scrolls as I write this ..
EDIT: Ugh, I just realized another facet of this issue. We encourage our novices to learn the geography of the city without using landmarks, right? Magnagora's collegium scroll on Geography is actually really versatile in its instructions .. hmm ..
0
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
It was in the old intro. I believe that is what you are thinking of, Celina.
Also knows as the helpful intro.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
Concussion is great as an affliction because it confuses both systems and players, and can hilariously get you comments of "YOU ONLY WON BECAUSE I WAS LAGGING, YOU POS" with the less... "discerning" combatants. I like it the way it is. It is, however, very rare as an affliction because of how difficult it is to actually give, and how little classes have access to it (for good reason).
Perhaps just remove it from dropping out of skies/trees. Newbies hardly ever come across the affliction as it is, and if you do away with accidental applications like that, there'll hardly be any newbies who will need to be troubled again.
Yes, do that - also give my class concussion I can spam, please. I promise I won't use it too much.
I don't think anyone touched on it, so: The ostensible point of locking non-newbie, non-mentors out of the Newbie channel is to keep the blind from leading the blind with bad answers. It's certainly something I struggled with as a guide, trying to keep well-meaning but confoundingly wrong 'helpers' from confusing new players. I think the original thought was that by the time you're ready to be a mentor to a newbie/novice, you're ready to provide quality input to newbies over the newbie channel.
That's not an endorsement for the current setup, just some input to what the potential merits of the existing mechanic.
- It doesn't really require a lot to become a mentor, just time and some bashing. Becoming a mentor doesn't really mean you know the answers.
- There's a gap between mechanical novicehood and mentoring (and people who are mentors!) still having questions and things to learn. Lusternia has a pretty steep learning curve (which is both neat and frustrating).
If people are abusing the Newbie channel to intentionally confuse people or chatter at them, that's something that could be stepped in on on a case-by-case basis, rather than blanket limitations on being able to seek help.
I don't think anyone touched on it, so: The ostensible point of locking non-newbie, non-mentors out of the Newbie channel is to keep the blind from leading the blind with bad answers. It's certainly something I struggled with as a guide, trying to keep well-meaning but confoundingly wrong 'helpers' from confusing new players. I think the original thought was that by the time you're ready to be a mentor to a newbie/novice, you're ready to provide quality input to newbies over the newbie channel.
That's not an endorsement for the current setup, just some input to what the potential merits of the existing mechanic.
I'm pretty sure there are mentors lately who have to be corrected on a constant basis, and it's horribly embarrassing to have to explain to a newbie that no, Player X really has no clue what they're talking about despite being a mentor and/or guild leader.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Yep, it's really frustrating to have to correct wrong (but well-meaning) people who promulgate incorrect details and factoids. I agree that the "must be a mentor" factor doesn't really filter out those problems in the long run. Again, I don't really agree that it's something that should be kept, there were just a lot of "I can't understand what this is possibly intended to do" comments, and I think that's the answer: That's what it's intended to do, even if it doesn't work.
EDIT: It would be useful for guides to have a syntax to flag people who might need a Newbie channel muting. IIRC, guides can't force a novice to namechange, but CAN flag a novice's name as potentially inappropriate, alerting admins who can then deal with the problem or remove the flag if it is unwarranted. This would work similarly, the guide would flag the person with a short reason and timestamp of relevant NEWBIE messages, alerting any administrative overseers who could then apply said mute or not at their discretion. That would be a better fix to keeping (well meaning but) serially incorrect people from confusing newbies than the current setup, without the need for players to be directly policing or confronting other players.
@celina the problem is you think your character / internet is broken. With the heavy concussion I had, I tried for an hour doing the same thing. Sending 'diag', sending 'firstaid', telling random people 'help me'. rinse and repeat. And all I got back was blank prompts. you are willing to give up by then, because there's no way of you telling what was wrong. I even sent forum messages to people because I literally didn't know anymore what to do.
@synkarin I'm not sure anymore, there was a healer looking at me and a little later, I got a diag through, which caused m&m also doing some stuff.
It's not just some random nieche, as alsaid said, you literally think your internet/char is broken if you don't know this thing exists.
just a little thing I want to add... learning Lusternia can be really rough, but the community has been really great and newbie friendly. And... a friend I might have roped into trying the game said she felt the same, even though she started somewhere completely different... um, basically, thank you to everyone that helps make the game so and please don't let this part of Lusternia ever change.
And an improved newbie channel will be really neat
beep
7
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
@celina the problem is you think your character / internet is broken. With the heavy concussion I had, I tried for an hour doing the same thing. Sending 'diag', sending 'firstaid', telling random people 'help me'. rinse and repeat. And all I got back was blank prompts. you are willing to give up by then, because there's no way of you telling what was wrong. I even sent forum messages to people because I literally didn't know anymore what to do.
@synkarin I'm not sure anymore, there was a healer looking at me and a little later, I got a diag through, which caused m&m also doing some stuff.
It's not just some random nieche, as alsaid said, you literally think your internet/char is broken if you don't know this thing exists.
I guess I understand that now, command eating can be a variety of issues from system to lag to an affliction.
Pardon my gruffness, I'm a crotchety old player and I lean towards "school of hard knocks." I got the stuffing kicked out of me for years, often not knowing how and wanting to quit over it, and it made me a better PKer in the long run. I understand the frustration though.
Concussion is great as an affliction because it confuses both systems and players, and can hilariously get you comments of "YOU ONLY WON BECAUSE I WAS LAGGING, YOU POS" with the less... "discerning" combatants. I like it the way it is. It is, however, very rare as an affliction because of how difficult it is to actually give, and how little classes have access to it (for good reason).
Perhaps just remove it from dropping out of skies/trees. Newbies hardly ever come across the affliction as it is, and if you do away with accidental applications like that, there'll hardly be any newbies who will need to be troubled again.
Yes, do that - also give my class concussion I can spam, please. I promise I won't use it too much.
One thing Lusternia could do is have additional text helpers for mortals. They could implement more hints. 80th may seem like a high cut off, but it really may not even take a real newbie a week to get to 80th.
Oh, for clarification, I won't have any problems with concussion being part of combat. It just shouldn't be an affliction that you get through random exploration ( in my case, I got it by following someone scaling up a mountain while I didn't have 'scale' as an ability ).
First time concussion should give you one of those helpful one-time alerts, explaining what it's doing and how to fix it, regardless of level. Heck, make it an achievement to cure your first concussion.
Comments
It seems like, based on all the replies here that the player base wants to help, but the staff make that harder than it should be. It's a mechanic that shouldn't exist. You can be playing here for X years and still learn something new, or, with a company as big as IRE is and how large their resources are, I'd definitely hope they're putting things in the game for players to keep discovering, otherwise it's no better than MKO.
I digress, however.
Also not sure IRE has resources as big as you think it does? The things you're mentioning specifically are likely handled by Lusternia's tiny mainly-volunteer based staff. There's always more things to do and address than there are people to handle them, and most of those people are not paid to do so.
Re: new things to do and explore, Lusternia tends to put out new content, at the very least via a year-end event culminating in a new area for the game.
in addition to all that's being said, can be please have a look at concussion. When I started playing, I had a similar problem to Alseid and if I wouldn't have had @Taevyn to literally drag me around till we found a healer who cured enough on what I head to my m&m could do the rest, I would likely have stopped playing. Concussions really _need_ to tell you that you have something instead of just ignoring your command and giving you nothing in return. Even the amnesia message is more helpful because you can guess _something_ happened to you.
I go back to my whole, "Internet is broken" comment because it says nothing at all. You can say say "Diagnose?" If you have to @Celina and I'll keep that in mind now that I know that command and affliction exists, but the point here is I was a brand new player and I'm still not familiar with all the cures and didn't know to use diag, and there was no message at all.
I totally agree there should be things you haven't experienced, right now almost everything is something I haven't experienced, but it's still good to get a message such as, "You forgot what you are trying to do," or something along those lines so you know what's happening, because I didn't.
Also, in rebuttal to your "storm off over every little thing" comment, I counter with I'm new, and a learning curve should still have a message to let you know "Hey, this is happening, you've got 2 days played time, I'm letting you know I'm a weird little mechanic." It's not so much the traditional rage quitting as much as its frustration because you want to enjoy the game.
Now, I didn't "storm off over every little thing," and that's mostly due to the players here and the response to this thread, and I appreciate everyone's input, offer to help, and their opinions. Thank you guys.
Especially landmarks. I know a lot of cities have CHELP DIRECTIONS but unfortunately, the directions often require you to be standing at the city's respective nexus. I feel like maybe if CHELP DIRECTIONS referenced LANDMARKS and/or were even meant to be used alongside LANDMARKS, they'd double in value as navigation resources for newbies.
Yarou was helping a Mag novice the other day with the power quest and they actually teleported to the Megalith and then walked to Tunika. There's nothing wrong with this, of course -- if it works, it works! -- but I also thought it might prove detrimental to their grasping the city's geography in the long run ..
Just a thought. I'm proposing some edits to Magnagora's own collegium scrolls as I write this ..
EDIT: Ugh, I just realized another facet of this issue. We encourage our novices to learn the geography of the city without using landmarks, right? Magnagora's collegium scroll on Geography is actually really versatile in its instructions .. hmm ..
I'm pretty sure there are mentors lately who have to be corrected on a constant basis, and it's horribly embarrassing to have to explain to a newbie that no, Player X really has no clue what they're talking about despite being a mentor and/or guild leader.
@synkarin I'm not sure anymore, there was a healer looking at me and a little later, I got a diag through, which caused m&m also doing some stuff.
It's not just some random nieche, as alsaid said, you literally think your internet/char is broken if you don't know this thing exists.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."