Guild should be doing this. Thats part of what becoming a novice aide / undersec should entail, globally, IMHO. No exceptions.

There's a compass/health/mana/ego tracker bar extension-plugin thing for MUSH. It's somewhere in Mechanics Corner, just search for MUSH compass.


There's at least one up to eth, one to Water from I don't know where, and one up to Earth from I don't know where. I'm sure there are a couple from the elemental to the cosmic planes as well. Insofar as I've seen, there are none on Astral.

Even though I agree this is part of what being an undersec is about, I think that saying "Guilds should be doing this" right now is counter-productive. Most guilds wish they could be doing this, but they don't have the people... and with newbies coming into the game, finding their guild empty, and leaving, they aren't getting more people. The game needs to be able to grow, whether there are players online willing to give away their time to help it grow or not; anything less is a gross error in the game's design.

I concur with Verithrax, but that aside, that's a very righteous attitude. The burden of caring for new players should not fall solely on existing players - unpaid, unwitting volunteers - and the game acknowledges this. That's why we have willing, paid Guides. (And one thing Guides can do is check in regularly and make sure that new players *are* being looked after by their guilds.)

I keep saying this because it's important:

Relying on player interaction to ensure a newbie's ability to enjoy the game early on is dumb. It makes newbies who join the "wrong" guild at the "wrong" time feel left out, lost, or just plain bored - and leave.

Do we have this? Because, when I started Lusternia, I read through every HELP FILE (via Nexus), read all of the histories (via website), etc... and this would have been a nice and quick start

And sorry if this was already discussed, but I didn't remember seeing it on the other pages.

Edit: And the FAQ isn't quite what I'm talking about.

I maintain that the administration needs to drop the Fancy Things they are coding and work solely on developing stuff to keep newbies in the realm. This, I feel, includes:
- A new set of city/guild-specific guide positions to serve as a backup teacher when there are no player teachers available
- A completely new introduction that introduces players to the actual world and its history instead of just a random segment of reality somewhere and is interactive enough that players can learn about the more advanced features with little effort.
- Low-cost alternatives to some of the high-cost features. Some novices drawn to aetherships may want to try one and may get rather discouraged when they find out that it costs 500,000 gold to get one. Rentals would be a good way to solve this: it would provide a temporary, low-cost entry point into a game mechanic that will leave them wanting more.
- A better reward system for player teaching. I am not sitting in a room for 45 minutes while Joe Novice learns 15 lessons at a time from his 180 lesson pool and then asks questions if I get nothing out of it. Increase the lesson gain and put it in the skill's pool instead of the skill so that people who have already transcended the skill still get benefits.
- More bashing areas. I'm sorry if the administration's policy is to have no areas that are exclusively for bashing, but if you want to support a large playerbase, you need lots of things to kill. Chop up level brackets into sections of 5 or 10 and make a couple bashing areas that cater to these sections. Alternatively, just make four or five new bashing areas, but write code to affect respawn rate based on how many people are trying to bash. Players who can't advance are quitting players.

EDIT: I apologize for the lack of sarcasm and backhanded insults in this post, I would have been quite late for class if I had proofread this post for tone.

Listen, if there could be an automated rental system, whereby I as an established aethership owner could rent out my ship to those I grant the privilege for a given period of time or something, I'd be ecstatic, and it'd definitely lower the cost of entry for those who don't want to go out and buy a ship for themselves.

The administration should help with novices, but at the same time, there are other things that need coding as well.

While I know novices are the future, IMO, if you don't keep the existing IRE base happy, things will get worse. Imagine if they dropped envoy fixes for this. The MUD should keep adding features because I think it would be riskier to lose the existing player who get bored if things remain static.

MUDs are a niche market, so I don't predict huge growth in this area. If working 100% on something that might lead to 5% growth per year comes at the cost of 10-20% of the existing base leaving due to boredom or frustration, it's a negative-sum game.

I wouldn't say 'solely', but I do think top priority has to go into whatever takes people from the 'trying out the game' category and helps move them into the 'sold on the game and spending money on it' one. Once they are there, it's pretty difficult to lose them.

I'm not against Fancy Things but from a business perspective I agree they must take second place to attracting more people. Without watering down the game experience.

Now here's my take on your individual suggestions.

Not sure about this. Guides are 'paid' players, wouldn't you be reducing the visible playerbase even further to get better guide coverage ?



I agree, from what I hear the novice area is good for teaching basic abilities like questing and bashing but it would be better if it could teach novices about the world's history, which is very complex.

Nice idea. Maybe have an NPC aethership that people can ride on as part of a quest, too ?



Nice idea too.



I don't know, looking at Lusternia's maps, bashing guides and number of people online on its website, I'd say you guys have a far better situation than on Achaea.

We've been working on one for some time. Note there's the thread on ideas asking for help in designing one!

Heh, way back in the aethership design documents (which were written before Lusternia opened!), I had this plan that nexuses could be attacked in aetherspace and the communes/cities would each have motherships that would protect or attack nexuses. I was imagining a ghostly Moonhart Mother Tree floating in aetherspace with a giant beehive mothership protecting it, then Magnagora's giant Floating Death Skull mothership would attack it. The sidebar idea was having one-man ships be generated by the nexus itself that would help defend against attack. Thus, any commune member, no matter the level, could enter the mother tree and get plopped into a one man "wasp" ship that could help defend the nexus.

I never thought of players renting aetherships. At first blush, it seems a good idea, but I wonder since this would risk the ship getting destroyed and losing power stores or getting stranded, etc., if many aethership owners would actually want to rent their ships.

I could more imagine cities and communes being able to purchase basic 3-room ships (command chair, turret, grid), which would not be upgradeable in any manner, and maybe letting them rent those out.

Anyone else get the Star Wars theme song in their head from that?

I'm not sure a special type of ship needs to be created. Especially any so limited. Unless with the limitedness of them made them much, much cheaper or reset to the city's dock if it got left on some bubble or what have you.

Alternatively could just allow manses/ships to be owned by organizations with functional control being granted to the head of that organization.

Well, I'd hope any Power Aide would be able to recall a ship when necessary.

What would be nice might be "aether taxis" that you can pay a bit of gold to go to specific bubbles without having to actually deal with aetherspace travel itself (even when someone else is taking you, I personally find the whole experience annoying), as well as back home again. It'd have to be somewhat expensive, and take a fair bit of time-- say, 5 minutes of sitting in a room that's "moving" (without actually spamming you with movement commands or actually going through aetherspace), so as not to really compete with actual pilots. This would open up aether bubbles for quite a few more people.

Edit: Alternatively, make it so that specific places can't be reached this way-- no Prime/Ethereal/Elemental/Cosmic/Astral docks, no Nexus World docks... only actual aetherbubbles which aren't tied to any organizations.

Agreed. Make it cost gold, power, comms, anything, just make it happen.

A gnome dock.. with a quest you can do to get a lift to various gnome-orientated aether bubbles?

That'd work, too.

Agreed, perhaps putting solely in there was a bad word choice, as it implies exclusivity, but I would still like to see primary focus on attracting new players and not making the existing players happier. We're fine where we are thx. We're not complaining too much about the state of the game itself right now, so take this opportunity to manage the newbies.



Well, you'd be reducing the active playerbase by either 4 or 16 (depending on if the guides are per-guild or per-city) and these guides wouldn't have to be logged in at all times. Perhaps the guides could lurk out of sight (or even play their usual characters) until a novice needs training or teaching, at which time they would be sent an urgent message and told to help that novice.

Something I forgot to add in that original post, there should be a new guild tutor character (not an NPC) that is only "logged in" when the guide needs to be logged in. They would be given a certain RP template and a set of instructions for playing the character consistently and told to stay out of guild affairs.



In terms of size, yes, but not in terms of bashing grounds. Achaea has many more bashing grounds at a larger variety of levels than Lusternia has, something that I definitely noticed when I popped back in a couple months ago to see how not-fun playing the game was. Lots of times when I try to bash in Lusternia, someone's already been through (gorgogs, krokani, etc) or the areas are all too challenging (astral, catacombs).

I love both of these ideas! Not so hot about the rental one.

My only question is how these one-man ships would function. After all, one person cannot feasibly be an empath, combateer, and commander at the same time. It's too many commands to keep track of and execute. Why not let players join randomly-generated 3-room ships?

EDIT: Unless! Each ship only had one purpose and could be grouped into some kind of armada, with one ship functioning only as an Empath-ship, one as only a Combateer-ship and one as a Commander-ship. Hey, now I kind of like this idea...