I'd certainly agree that the CGT channel shouldn't have any cutoff points. I don't know how the newbie channel works, I turned that one off shortly after starting and never actually looked back (I know, bad form).
Having CGT be a constant in-org help channel with no exclusivity would also be a pretty solid workaround to the issue.
The divine voice
of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations,
Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Are you sure CGT is? Because I'm pretty sure I was still using it to ask questions long after finishing with the collegium, and before I was made a professor.
Then somebody was mixed up. Those are the restrictions for the Newbie channel, but you can definitely speak on cgt after newbiehood and before becoming a mentor.
Then somebody was mixed up. Those are the restrictions for the Newbie channel, but you can definitely speak on cgt after newbiehood and before becoming a mentor.
Nono as in when I tried to speak there it wouldn't let me.
So unless something has changed since a year ago when I was a newbie I'm pretty certain said restriction exists.
The divine voice
of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations,
Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Human interaction is the key to keeping novices around. Alot of people in this game are anti-social or have their own cliques already and suck at interacting with novices (i.e they don't at all). It takes five minutes out of your day, to talk to one. All you need to do is find out how they are going and either: a) Handball them to someone, that cares a bit more than you or b) take it upon yourself to help them out.
Coming back from a long stretch of inactivity, it has quickly become apparent, that peoples attitudes here have declined (suck). If I was a true novice and their were four to five people in my city/commune and not one person talked to me, to guide me on what scroll to read or to mentor me, I would be screwed. I dont blame true novices for not coming back. Their are some rare people out there, that made my return quite enjoyable though*cough* Svorai and Valonah *cough*
So for a fail safe, in the event of a bunch of people "missing" the entrance of a novice, a NPC should announce to them after a minute or so, the basic scrolls to read, specific to their guild.
1
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
I disagree. Having an NPC announce to the newbies everything they need to know will only further discourage players from actually talking to the newbie. The entire introduction is mechanically spoon-fed to newbies, and even after, everything they would need is magically given to them with no player interaction. Now, you want an NPC to take the last remaining spot players have in getting acquainted with novices.
If player interaction is what keeps newbies around, these decision to constantly take the players out of the equation "just in case" is extremely detrimental.
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.
that said, this picture is among the most helpful pictures I know for thinking about the planes. Your abilities from Planar will let you travel from one plane to the next, but only between planes that are next to each other.
You know, I actually usually prefer to describe the planes as something not dissimilar to a fruit of sorts. On the very outside is the Void, in which the 12 Astral Spheres are embedded. The next layer in, the fruit is divided into four sections, the cosmic planes. Each is separate from one another, but together they encompass the rest. A layer down from that are the elemental planes. They're still divided, but those divisions are much fainter here, with an occasional path creeping from one to the other (like the Taerin passageway). Further in from that, even those distinctions vanish, leaving the ethereal plane. Unlike the layers further out, ethereal is a single plane, can be seen across, teleported across, summoned across, etcetera. There are currently four accessible areas (unless I'm missing one) Faethorn, Eth!Glom, Eth!Seren, and the Catacombs. Further in from that is Prime, where more or less everything is contiguous (save for the undervault being a seperate continent.) And last are the pips, the spirit plane and the plane of Flesh/Duum.
As to the current skein of conversation, as Syridean I remember actively discouraging aquamancers from auto-greeting novices. It bugged me to no end to see: (Spouts): GuildNPC says, "Please welcome Newbiemancer, who joins us as a freshman Novice." (Spouts): Aquamage Bob says (from an unknown plane), "Welcome Newbiemancer. Please read GHELP Spouts." (Spouts): Newbiemancer says, "Okay, I read it, now what?" followed by absolute silence from Bob, since he was AFK in a manse anyway. Pretty sure we nearly lost more than one that way, and I can't see having an NPC do that sort of announcing being any more helpful.
It might be better if the GNT is set to a different colour, or a different background colour by default, but that's more on the player side of things.
Well, I understand why people hate auto-responders, but I have to ask if they're really making us lose more novices than the alternative. If Bob in that instance were indeed AFK and did not greet the novice and no one else was around to help, then what? I imagine the novice would still have felt completely abandoned.
I certainly agree that player interaction is the key to retention, but who is doing the interaction? We can have any number of novices coming in on a given day and very often it's down to one or two people helping them out on a consistent basis. Let's be frank - it's tedious and repetitive work after a while and pretty time consuming and taxing especially when you just wanted to relax or do other things during that session. It can quickly turn into a second job trying to keep every novice happy and you burn yourself out as well.
I semi-automate. I have an alias that will send that automatic greeting (so it doesn't fire when I'm afk), and have a basic orientation - complete with an explanation of each of the relevant important skills learned, so that I can copy paste in things when appropriate, instead of writing them from scratch each time there's a novice.
However, I think there's an important distinction to be made here. I think player interaction is the best way to retain new players, but it has to be the right sort of interaction. No matter who is doing it, an NPC or a player, most basic orientations are exactly the same and don't really present engaging content, it's mostly learning skills and being packed off to Newton/The Collegium/Whatever. Without the setting background learned in the collegium, the historical and planar data, there isn't enough to provide context for any sort of meaningful and engaging RP.
How to fix that is the question. One thought would be to skip a portion of the "learning lessons" orientations for novices that directly join a guild. The game could auto-allocate the appropriate lessons learned by every novice, set by the guild administrator+master. Perhaps an option could be presented to novices, to go ahead and take the 'default lessons' (With some note being made that this is a good choice if you're new), or allocate them personally. That way, orientations could focus more on teaching about the role- and game-play, instead of slogging through a hundred+ lessons.
That could help too. I know when I did the orientation, even with the 15+15+15+7 etc. lesson sections I made a point to familiarise myself with the skills that would actually give a newbie and talk about those skills and how they were used, as well as some important tidbits like "...and you can get a good idea where your relative skills are if you think ABout it. If you think ABout a <skill> you can see what abilities..." or basic syntaxes and lore.
I LOVED doing the planar quest, since it gave me the opportunity to gush about the plane of Water and the Tide Lords, poke around Celestia and the Supernals, and try my best to keep the newbie alive on Astral for the, what was it, 12 seconds they needed to drop the thing and regain it so they could PORTALS back to Prime. My point was more that I'm not sure having an NPC that says "Greetings novice, here's your required reading and here's what you need to LEARN. If you have questions, save them for someone who's awake or pose them to NEWBIE."
0
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
Again, the more we take the players out of the equation, the less retention there will be. Why is the solution always to automate everything? Yeah, we could auto-allocate every novice's lessons, but then what happens when (if) the novice suddenly discovers that they have all of these new skills/abilities and has no idea how to use them? We could either a) encourage players to help explain how things work, or b) automate again, with handy little popups that explain all of the abilities. But what about the next questions, like 'Where do I go from here?' We could a) encourage players to explain where to go next, or b) create another automated popup that tells them where to go (which we already have, so why isn't it working?).
The system merely perpetuates itself. We have to come to grips with the fact that player interaction is required at some point if we are going to keep new players. And there will be times when new players won't have anyone around to explain things to them, especially during off peak. And we have to accept that we will lose players once in a while because we simply cannot always be there and no amount of automation can replace our presence.
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.
Woah, jeeeze. I need to start re-reading my posts before making them. I lost an entire half of the last sentence, which would have more or less agreed with you. It should have read:
My point was more that I'm not sure having an NPC that says "Greetings
novice, here's your required reading and here's what you need to LEARN.
If you have questions, save them for someone who's awake or pose them to
NEWBIE." is going to help keep a newbie around.
I see your point about the auto-allocation, especially now that only one or two skills would conceivably break the 100 lesson limit these days as far as newbie intro lessons are concerned.
I do like the idea of bringing back or at least expanding on the intro (which covered a few nice things like learning lessons, using AB, and Flame sigils in addition to just giving newbies stuff.) and had a thought about changing the colour of the "novice out of the portal" message to something else by default so it stands out more for players wanting to pay attention to that sort of thing. Or better, give it a colour coding based on starting org :drool:
Comments
Having CGT be a constant in-org help channel with no exclusivity would also be a pretty solid workaround to the issue.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Once you play x number of hours and reach level 50, you're able to advise in it again IIRC.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
So unless something has changed since a year ago when I was a newbie I'm pretty certain said restriction exists.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Coming back from a long stretch of inactivity, it has quickly become apparent, that peoples attitudes here have declined (suck). If I was a true novice and their were four to five people in my city/commune and not one person talked to me, to guide me on what scroll to read or to mentor me, I would be screwed. I dont blame true novices for not coming back. Their are some rare people out there, that made my return quite enjoyable though*cough* Svorai and Valonah *cough*
So for a fail safe, in the event of a bunch of people "missing" the entrance of a novice, a NPC should announce to them after a minute or so, the basic scrolls to read, specific to their guild.
If player interaction is what keeps newbies around, these decision to constantly take the players out of the equation "just in case" is extremely detrimental.
You know, I actually usually prefer to describe the planes as something not dissimilar to a fruit of sorts. On the very outside is the Void, in which the 12 Astral Spheres are embedded. The next layer in, the fruit is divided into four sections, the cosmic planes. Each is separate from one another, but together they encompass the rest. A layer down from that are the elemental planes. They're still divided, but those divisions are much fainter here, with an occasional path creeping from one to the other (like the Taerin passageway). Further in from that, even those distinctions vanish, leaving the ethereal plane. Unlike the layers further out, ethereal is a single plane, can be seen across, teleported across, summoned across, etcetera. There are currently four accessible areas (unless I'm missing one) Faethorn, Eth!Glom, Eth!Seren, and the Catacombs. Further in from that is Prime, where more or less everything is contiguous (save for the undervault being a seperate continent.) And last are the pips, the spirit plane and the plane of Flesh/Duum.
As to the current skein of conversation, as Syridean I remember actively discouraging aquamancers from auto-greeting novices. It bugged me to no end to see:
(Spouts): GuildNPC says, "Please welcome Newbiemancer, who joins us as a freshman Novice."
(Spouts): Aquamage Bob says (from an unknown plane), "Welcome Newbiemancer. Please read GHELP Spouts."
(Spouts): Newbiemancer says, "Okay, I read it, now what?"
followed by absolute silence from Bob, since he was AFK in a manse anyway. Pretty sure we nearly lost more than one that way, and I can't see having an NPC do that sort of announcing being any more helpful.
It might be better if the GNT is set to a different colour, or a different background colour by default, but that's more on the player side of things.
However, I think there's an important distinction to be made here. I think player interaction is the best way to retain new players, but it has to be the right sort of interaction. No matter who is doing it, an NPC or a player, most basic orientations are exactly the same and don't really present engaging content, it's mostly learning skills and being packed off to Newton/The Collegium/Whatever. Without the setting background learned in the collegium, the historical and planar data, there isn't enough to provide context for any sort of meaningful and engaging RP.
How to fix that is the question. One thought would be to skip a portion of the "learning lessons" orientations for novices that directly join a guild. The game could auto-allocate the appropriate lessons learned by every novice, set by the guild administrator+master. Perhaps an option could be presented to novices, to go ahead and take the 'default lessons' (With some note being made that this is a good choice if you're new), or allocate them personally. That way, orientations could focus more on teaching about the role- and game-play, instead of slogging through a hundred+ lessons.
I LOVED doing the planar quest, since it gave me the opportunity to gush about the plane of Water and the Tide Lords, poke around Celestia and the Supernals, and try my best to keep the newbie alive on Astral for the, what was it, 12 seconds they needed to drop the thing and regain it so they could PORTALS back to Prime. My point was more that I'm not sure having an NPC that says "Greetings novice, here's your required reading and here's what you need to LEARN. If you have questions, save them for someone who's awake or pose them to NEWBIE."
The system merely perpetuates itself. We have to come to grips with the fact that player interaction is required at some point if we are going to keep new players. And there will be times when new players won't have anyone around to explain things to them, especially during off peak. And we have to accept that we will lose players once in a while because we simply cannot always be there and no amount of automation can replace our presence.
My point was more that I'm not sure having an NPC that says "Greetings novice, here's your required reading and here's what you need to LEARN. If you have questions, save them for someone who's awake or pose them to NEWBIE." is going to help keep a newbie around.
I see your point about the auto-allocation, especially now that only one or two skills would conceivably break the 100 lesson limit these days as far as newbie intro lessons are concerned.
I do like the idea of bringing back or at least expanding on the intro (which covered a few nice things like learning lessons, using AB, and Flame sigils in addition to just giving newbies stuff.) and had a thought about changing the colour of the "novice out of the portal" message to something else by default so it stands out more for players wanting to pay attention to that sort of thing. Or better, give it a colour coding based on starting org :drool:
Edit for clarity.