I agree that the newbie experience could be a lot more immersive and instructive. Lusternia is extremely complicated and there are very very cool features to it but as someone pointed out, how is a novice suppposed to know about them? Depending on the players to help out novices and answer questions and make them feel welcome is perfectly reasonable. Depending on them to teach them pretty much everything there is to know about the game really isn't.

I really like the idea vale_kant had of a player having the basic tutorial and then having a more role specific tutorial based on the city/commune they choose (I'd like class too but 4 is easier than 16!) that got them involved in the story of their organization while maybe explaining to them more about how organizations work. The nexus of power, how power is added, the villages, what a revolt entails, the nexus world, the higher planes, etc. Definitely an aethercraft tutorial as it is one of the coolest features of the game but I doubt many novices at all know about it. Influencing. With tangible benefits for going through them like extra lessons, equipment that he mentioned, etc. For example it would know what class you are so would provide you with the armour and weapons you needed to get going and explain how to use them. Depending on players for just a basic function is going to have a lot of newbies slipping through the cracks.

I'm sure players would be very willing to help provide the information that needs to be in these tutorials. It probably won't totally solve the problem but it may very well help out quite a bit.

I didn't like newton caves that much but it was ok. I made some money off of it not much to my liking but some. It would be nice if it was made a little different kinda like vale kant's idea.

It's by far the worst one. The other games don't have any of the mechanics that affect your nation, and that your character's supposed to care about - revolts, power, certain quests, Higher Beings on Outer Planes, etc. At first, it's just your character struggling to survive and improve and everything else is optional and you can choose to buy into it. (On the plus side, your character has immediate ties and interests and isn't just alone and wandering aimless in the world. If the overwhelming aspects of it could be toned down, that would be good.)

If Achaea was a steep learning curve, getting into Lusternia was that learning curve again when I already knew how IRE games worked.

Different note: the Newton quests are awesome but impossible for a novice. Even a dedicated novice wouldn't realise that there are rooms in hidden directions, would probably have trouble with pulling on objects or putting things into them, when and why objects vanish from inventory, and I do believe a late part of the finks quest even involves pulling on something that isn't an object in the room desc. (Someone has to clue you in that you can push, pull, touch non-obvious objects. That's a lesson that can go unlearned for a very long time.)

People keep saying this.. but that wasn't my experience at all. I remember my first Lusternian experiences very well indeed. I stepped out of the portal, was directed to Crylia who I talked with for about 40 minutes... all my initial questions were answered then. My subsequent questions were dealt with on GNT, and I found almost everything extremely intuitive and easy having spent several years in Achaea beforehand. I didn't find Lusty a steep learning curve at all.....

I've had more than one ex-Achaean friend give up due to the complexity. That was early on in Lusternia though, dunno if it's been corrected since then.

The credit investment I can see being something to turn people off, but not the complexity. Perhaps the issue is something to do with demographics and age range?

I played Achaea for four years, and Lusternia for another year before I realized this, and that was only because someone blatantly told me how to do the Estelbar quest.

That was one of the more irritating aspects of the honors quests in Achaea, or even getting to certain places unrelated to those quests.

Same here. Except the Achaea part. And at the end we made out at Mrs. Trundle.

This has all been very good feedback so far, and I'm particularly impressed with the level of constructive commentary this thread has garnered. Keep it up!

People really enjoyed catching butterflies in Achaea. Even I sort of liked it for a little while even though it wasn't great income. The names of the butterflies were pretty and they weren't confined to the newbie areas which meant that to get them you'd get to venture out into the real world.

Having something along that same line would be great. Its pretty basic, just a simple 'get x-bring x to y' sort of thing but people like finding things with pretty names.

At the risk of derailing this thread (which seems to happen whenever I post these days), the more I see experiences of novices with no one in their guild and being without any direction, the more I think the novice system isn't working for new players. Again, I think it's fine once they get their feet on the ground. So, along the lines of combining GNT's, I've been thinking about going the whole hog, and having each city and commune have an "Adventurer's Guild" (or rather a unique name per guild but something like that) that all novices start at. The guild would be run by all the guild administrators and their secretaries. The guild would be a starting place for all novices to learn their beginning skills, getting access to whatever help files they need, etc. They'd still have their beginning guild skills and maybe something along Daganev's idea of a quick learning scheme that guilds design.

Upon graduation, they then enter the true guild novice system as we have now. They would not be able to remain in the Adventurers Guild past a certain time period and guild administrators could speedup those novices who are directly under them.

That sounds very drastic. Even still, the novices wouldn't have anything more to actually do than they do now which is one of the bigger problems for new characters.

That seems like a neat idea, though you may want the Undersecs in on it too.

But perhaps I could ask for a clarification?

Would this 'Adventurers Guild' act as their novicehood in their Guilds or would they have to do that as well?

Sure, undersecs.

I would think they would do the guild novicehood as well as the adventurer's guild novice program (or whatever it would be called). This would be their introduction where (hopefully) the GA's would get together and design a program to give novices in their city/commune something to do as well as a community for players starting out.

Have some questions about the adventurer's group (like why pick a guild prior to joining the group) but beyond that would it be possible for the city/communes to work with their patrons to design an immersive tutorial like described above to get them involved in the culture as well as essential knowledge? Most novice introductions are repeating the same things over and over and over again.

While it's great having that personal interaction to read off a help file for you, relying on players to do it in a world that is as distracting as Lusternia (raids, revolts, construct/colossi, wildnodes, any other random thing that just demands attention right then) seems doomed to never work out quite as well in actuality as on paper. Then the players could focus on answering questions, making sure the younger players are involved in the organization, and giving extra attention to those who really, really need it rather than either becoming burnt out by giving five novice intros a day. Even with super dedicated novice helpers who played the game solely for the pleasure of greeting every novice personally to the game, some will still fall through the cracks. An automated experience can help seal some of those cracks.

In theory it could be a tutorial that has an NPC guide or if a player is online who wants to be the guide, a PC guide. I dunno. Sticky problem

I'm not sure that wouldn't just confuse people who sign up for say, the Ebonguard and find themself in an Adventurer guild. But let's say you just go along with it and do what it takes to graduate. Now you have a sense of accomplishment and are ready to move on... to another novice program. So now that you graduated from novicehood you're ready to start the next novicehood? And during this whole time the most you've been able to do is pick off gnomes and finks?

Perhaps this is a personal bias of mine from past experiences, but I think it would be particularly beneficial to have our builders begin work on specific newbie areas for each of the major political organizations. I would suggest having mortal builders who belong to each of the organizations work with a God or Goddess (or an ephemeral) to design an area for each city that would essentially form a microcosm of many of the activities that elder players are involved with on a day to day basis. This would serve to familiarize each newbie with the particular concepts they will need to learn to function later on and most importantly to introduce them to various terms that it would not make sense to incorporate into general newbie areas such as Newton.

Yeah, it's a bit too many layers. Why not they graudate from the tour, join the Glomdoring. They're in the adventurer's guild and they learn basic stuff like some quests to do, where to hunt, how to hunt (some method to hunt would be necessary), how to interact with the world, and why it's so cool to be in the Glomdoring. Then they graduate from that and they pick the Ebonguard because they've been doing reading and have a little experience under their belt and really like that guild. In the Ebonguard they're not a novice. They're just guildrank 1 with a certain grace period in which they'll get back their lessons if they quit. Then they can proceed as normal in the Guild.

Yes! Something like this. I know it would take time and resources but with mortal builders and the patrons overseeing it, it shouldn't take too much from the day to day operations. Even still, without retaining novices, we won't have new people to appreciate all the interesting things that can be done.