One of the most important needs of Lusternia is to grow its playerbase. If we want to ever develop more major player organizations (*cough*hallifax*gaudiguch*cough*), we need grow. Thus, we’re taking a serious look at how Lusternia treats newbies and the newbie experience. We’re hoping to make quickstart and detailed newbie help files as well as a FAQ. If you want to help us with that, check out the forums where we asked for ideas.

Also, IRE auditors have been checking out what the newbie experience is like in Lusternia by creating characters and testing the waters. In a nutshell, we need to definitely improve the newbie experience. There were reports that requests for help on the newbie channel went unanswered, even after asking for help 3-4 times. Apparently, the audits found that newbies were often ignored in their guilds and even given a cold shoulder in some cases.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to make someone’s first time experience here to be as fun as possible! Remember back to your first time in a text game, and consider that some newbies here have never played a text game before. It can be overwhelming! Although I know guilds aren’t going out of their way to alienate new players, if we find that specific guilds are driving away players, we may have to step in to figure out what the issues are. But I’m hoping by this post everyone will at least be made aware of our seriousness in meeting the needs of newbies and help us work towards making Lusternia as fun and exciting for first time players as well as for the old hands!

Not to sound harsh, but when you spend two hours carefully helping each new player only to have 90% of them vanish, it just feels like such a waste of time. If the newbie intro was good enough (covered skillchoices, had learning that modeled real learning instead of being fake, explained the 15 lesson at a time limit, explained registration, explained grace, explained powerblocking (or if powerblocking was automatic so we didn't have to explain it), explained nexii and tutors, news, messages, the planes, taught to use AB (I mean, they're taught it, but very few ever seem to understand it, since it nearly always has to be explained again), etc), then newbies wouldn't need so much teaching when they got out of the tour, and teachers wouldn't get so burned out about it.

Regarding the intro, I believe we have a very solid intro that goes over the basics. We did a lot of testing and research with people who've never played text games before to develop our intro. The thing is, it simply can't be too long or they'll get bored and leave. However nice it would be to put everything into the intro, there's a very limited amount of information that new players can absorb.

I appreciate that one gets burned out if you spend hours helping newbies. If you can't stomach teaching a newbie, fair enough. But there's no reason to be rude or not answer a simple question. Indeed, one report I received was that a guild refused to tell a newbie how to get to Newton Caverns until they learned some guild skills!

Wouldnt that be helping them? Kicking and punching in Newton is not very easy, nor is it very fun for them.

Wouldnt that be helping them? Kicking and punching in Newton is not very easy, nor is it very fun for them.

Maybe secs and undersecs can get some benefits (a minimal amount of credits) for doing the job they do, which might encourage more people to become undersecs and such.

I've kicked my way through Newton before without a problem. Anyway, I suppose it would be helpful if the reason was explained to them and they were helped to learn the skills. But just saying, "Learn X skill and then ask me" isn't very helpful. Besides which, there's really no purpose to keep how to get to Newton secret. All you need to do is tell them to type PORTALS and walk north.

Teaching novices is supposed to get you a very small portion of lessons, if you are not trans. Not sure if I've seen the benefit either.

Do you mean that (and these numbers are completely made up) if I taught say, 30 Tracking, I'd learn 2 or 3 myself? That may be why I've never seen the benefit, I don't pay attention to those things .