Newbies Improvement suggestion, based on research on Hills of AEnasan

[rosedragon 2,282]

Hello everyone. Grab a cup of your favourite beverage and sit with me while I make a wall of text about my newcomers shelter project and suggestions to improve newcomers experience based on it and my previous newbies improvement suggestion. version two. The suggestions here are based by my experiment of running a newcomers shelter [Hills of AEnasan] for approximately four months and what I think will helps (including from my old newbies improvement suggestion). Let's start shall we?

 

The Hills of AEnasan Project

Hills of AEnasan start as a project single-handedly managed by me, but with a lot of support from the Independence server community (a lot of donations from materials, silvers, to even landmass)and my alliance (adopting the newbies when they look promising, helping answering questions, or just filling the crowd). The objective of the deed is to provide temporary shelter for newcomers to learn the game before they join established deed or get back to wilderness. To this date, I have invited around 50 newcomers, around more than half were active for 1-2 weeks, and have around 10 newcomers have reached premium and either adopted by more established deed or make their own.

 

Located on less than two minutes walk from spawn (the howl), it still require people of the Independence community to help me recruiting. Some players gladly escort newbies to Hills while most would pm me if they see a newbie on chat or local. I only refuse newcomers that act rude or those that can't understand basic instructions (if they can't understand me, how could I even tell them what to not do?).

 

When a player joined, I give them a short tour of where the tree farm, mine, public workshop with the specific requests to them (only cut old, very old, overaged and don't mine floor), assign them to a house (I hold the writs), and then tell them that they can read the recruitment thread for infos and things they can do. Sometimes I forgot but I mention them the only rule is 'be nice'. 

 

Most of the newcomers is either already have something in mind what they want to do (check their house, fill it with interiors, craft tools), asking what to do, or offering help on any projects. A very few goes brb reading the recruitment thread or drop their stuffs and wander around for free land. When asked about 'how is the tutorial', most answers it is confusing, boring, too much texts, doesn't feel they have use of those (eg: taught how to heal with cotton but not sure how to get cotton), or say they just walk through it.

 

Most of the newbies are reluctant to asks on public chatrooms, possibly due to the mix of trolling answers they would get on public chatrooms but seems to pay attention to those channels conversations. They also reluctant to PM me when I am on other server, thus wait for me to be around the village to ask questions or stuffs. Around 50% only talk on local and village chat regardless encouragement of talking on alliance chat. So when I have my main char back to main deed, it become troublesome.

 

Activity of village leaders are very important.. as quesstions about village they reluctant to asks to fellow villagers. Attitudes of village leaders also matter on this or they won't bother communicating. I have two players that act as village leaders, they both are the best of all newcomers that been around. These were jenks and dssblindfox.

 

Several months after these exciting adventures with interesting and talkactive newbies, I have to spend less time on wurm and activity on Hills of AEnasan goes downhill ... it seems for it to keep its success I and several people need to be around, ready to answer, ready to tell them they are doing good job on the quests, swiftly 'pay' them for doing the quest, and do a random event.

 

Activities on Hills of AEnasan and its effect:

- After we re-make deed and have to make a lot of houses, everyone drop what they been doing, both those who have and not yet have houses and go help on building those. When they are done, they feels satisfied to work together as a group, even that the houses are based on my design. Me being there managing them and working the houses with them is crucial. One time I try to pull a 'we got plots for three more houses, so if you want to build them go ahead' and only the village leaders raise theirs hand for it.

- When we felt threatened by a neighbor and decides we have to quickly reinforced the mine. Decent number of newcomers come down and help either making support beams or mine. It seems many are reluctant to mine for long when they are alone.

- Hunting event in a large cart, quiet many wants to go-- first event have one cart full and two left out, second event we got two cart full and one left out. The small fighting skill gain doesn't bother them much, they love seeing the wilderness, mobs, and they love selling the corpses to token afterwards . The sell to token is a great concept, just need to make it more obvious feature.

- When Mystivia offering many horses and cattles to the village. Jenks (village leader) brings up a group of 5-6 newbies (both that can and can't ride horses) to acquire them. They felt having a fun adventure regardless there wasn't any promised rewards. Most horses and cattles are put into pens for village's stock, with a few are given to the participants. I also decide to give participants some CoC grooming brushes for theirs attendance.

- When dragoness' challenges first implemented and I am able to give out prizes almost instantly when they finish some challenges, many stays online when I am around and goes on doing the challenges. Now that I mostly only online at weekends, the excitment of it goes down and it seems to start that the ones that did challenges are only doing the ones that give out coins. Another amusing thing is regardless the explanation of CoC works, there is no huge demand to finish challenges that give points to trade with CoC tools. On other hand, some challenges that doesn't give valuable rewards interest the newcomers just because they want to try the skill.

- We also helped magnaron's scar with surface mining. Not sure if we poorly advertise it or just the fact that it 'just mining a surface of mountain' deosn't excite them, there only like three newcomers join in. The participants are promised and rewarded CoC pickaxes.

 

The suggestions:

 

Tutorial:

Again, make it less super walls of text, less maze, let them know the basic and throw them to the real world.

Things they should learn:

- Repeately make them use examine and what's this? to check on something.

- Running from combat and studying mobs from safe distance. (a few small islands with mobs?)

- Swimming, climbing, running (aka stamina management).

- Foraging for food and cotton.

- Healing self.

 

Interface:

- Make everything more uniform and make sense. If taking items from most containers can be done with right click take, then bsb and fsb also need to react the same. I got like more than four newcomers telling me they can't pick up from bsb because they wasn't used to do drag drop.

- Tidy up the menus on UI, many of them are not so important or feels more of debug things while some of the important ones are obscured (like character screen).

- Personal missions are useless for newcomers as they don't even know what is karma for.

- Get rid of hand. Just right click on clay to make stuffs out of it. It is just akward and the only skill that use hand.

- Group the menus better. If most menus are in option, why we have some more menus on character sheet? Maybe have menus on option that open submenus.

- Rename the chat tabs. CA help to Help, freedom (or other server) to Server, Gl-freedom to Kingdom.

- Get rid of /help and have one menu on option that basically a small encyclopedia of things to know. Like the commands, kingdom explanation (tailored based on where the player spawn), keybind, forage botanize and healing, security. The new notification window is GREAT.

- Make use of examine more to giving slight clue instead useless descriptions. EG: iron ore description into: 'Mined from iron vein underground, this ore need to be smelted in furnace to be useful'.

- Put all those weird tools and stuffs players don't need to create when they first start on 'not avaiable' until they reach skill level 10 of the respective skills (esp carpentry and blacksmith). Too many infos at beginning, players not sure what to make first.

 

Color code everything:

-Color code for difficulty of creating items: grey 80%+, white for 50-79%, yellow for 20-49%, red for below 19% success. 

- Color code for fighting both monsters and players. Maybe something around +/- 10fs, +/-20fs, and above for fighting.This won't matter much for high fs players as they usually have near similar fs and have more things of importance to determine their powers such as equipment and body skills.

Thanks to raybarg for this idea.

 

Newbie missions v2:

Goal of the missions is to give a clue of what players can do in wurm and also serve as tutorial that can be pick up at ANY time. They don't even have to always give rewards, as dragoness' challenges have proven that some players would like to do it as part of theirs curiousity. If they give a reward though, it should be a reward that they know they need it. Get rid of the newbies tools, make them have to do simple tasks to get the newbie tools or make the missions encourage them to make crude tools. Yes it is sound like turning wurm to other games with their quests, but on other argument, there are so many that don't know what to do.

Some possibilities of the newb missions:

- Find clay. Reward: a shovel.

- Get clay bow. Reward: a meat.

- Forage a pumpkin/corn/potato. Reward: carving knife.

- Examine an old, very old, or overaged tree. Reward: hatchet.

- Cut a tree. Reward: saw

- Make a kindling. Reward: steel and flint.

- Make a fire. Reward: newbie lantern. (works like newbie light, but instead some magical light, this would be a no drop special item that unrepaireable, unimproveable, decay and diminish in the 24hours play period).

- Cook food. Reward: fishing rod.

- Make a mallet. Reward: pickaxe

- Mine iron and smelt it. Reward: backpack

- Move X tiles. Reward: compass

- Make small anvil.

- Make healing covers.

- Flatten a tile. 

- Build a house. Reward: a door lock.

- Secure house.

- Build a container.

- Secure a container.

 

Things notification window should have:

- when starting to create a boat., about anchor, boat lock, and whoever finish get the boat.

- when starting a cart, warning about dragging.

- when starting to create fence, about legal enclosure.

- when creating house, about doorlock and recommendation of deed.

- changes thieft alert message to just say 'Items drop on ground can be picked up by anyone.'

Edited March 12, 2014 by rosedragon

[Ganken 60]

I agree that some sort of ingame tutorial with missions would be a lot more engaging than the current format. Most people don't even pay attention to the current tutorial.

Edited March 12, 2014 by Ganken

[atazs 965]

I expected a wall of text, needless to say i was dissapointed

Anyway, great ideas, and now you got me interested to make a project like yours... 

Edited March 12, 2014 by atazs

[Radni 1,089]

+1

[Alec 730]

-1

[Ayes 3,715]

Rosedragon, I found the reading of your post to be of great interest. Your descriptions of interacting with the new players on your deed and the activities that appealed to them for the reasons they did were very enlightening and enjoyable to see their positive responses to certain ones and little interest in others. Excellent observations that should be of much interest to the game Dev's. A treasure of little gems to be admired and built upon to their own determinations.

 

Now here I see the necessary key to your success: "Several months after these exciting adventures with interesting and talkactive newbies, I have to spend less time on wurm and activity on Hills of AEnasan goes downhill ... it seems for it to keep its success I and several people need to be around, ready to answer, ready to tell them they are doing good job on the quests..."

 

There absolutely must be players online dedicated to this type of project to make it work. This is why these types of Academies fail over time, as I have observed in the past. These are noble pursuits to help new players and can have many positive results but they require a desire and hard dedication that must persist over time. This is not to say that I could or would dedicate myself to a project such as this but just that it is necessary for continued success. It takes a certain type of person I think that gets an enjoyment out of helping others which is fulfilling in itself.

 

I would suggest that you also post this in either the Town Square or Community Assistance sections since this will just get lost in this section of the forums. I would have totally missed this excellent and very interesting post if I had not scrolled down and come upon it here. Yes, although you do make suggestions about how to improve the new player experience, what I found to be of most interest were your observations and interactions with the new players before any suggestions that were made. No doubt others will have much interest in this as well, so it is a shame to see it lost in the depths of this section of the forums.

 

I wish you well in your future efforts with [Hills of AEnasan] and hopefully you will find others to assist you as leaders/helpers to continue this project when your time and interests will be diverted elsewhere.

 

Best regards,

=Ayes=

[alaskanbob 225]

+1

[Tropical 13]

-1 You're basically telling them to revamp the whole game to make it more newb friendly.

 

/my2centsalways

[rosedragon 2,282]

bump.

[silakka 2,360]

Well thought out, nothing too hard and yet very effective.

+1

[Valdor 1,426]

+1 to many ideas, although there are so many suggestions, you are pretty much asking for a revamp

-1 to color coding, though

[LorenaMontana 3,008]

+1, if someone knows how to treat and care for new ppl its rose. I dont understand why ppl would -1 this, who doesnt want a better playerbase?

[rosedragon 2,282]

+1 to many ideas, although there are so many suggestions, you are pretty much asking for a revamp

-1 to color coding, though

Yeah I put them together, up to devs which one they felt promising .

[Audrel 2,223]

Maybe even an official Newbie Village with a volunteer staff of AMs - Academy Managers.

[KunAlt 844]

+2, because I think +1 is not enough.