I like this a lot! The small codes will always make big change that will help EMC in the process well done Aikar
It would appear that there is a small glitch with the welcoming routine: Not sure exactly what is the cause of all this but it seems very peculiar. I'm a little short on playing time right now but I'm definitely going to try and reproduce this behavior at a later time. Terminal told us that this seems to be related to re-visiting the tutorial. It could be a simple glitch, but even so it was a funny one
Just tested it on my staff acct, the message is sent to everyone else when you go back to the tutorial. It is definitely a very amusing bug, lol.
I wouldn't say it is so amusing I can't stalk new people unless I do /p (new person) every 2 minutes to see when they finish the tutorial
That is AWESOME! note though: if you have been playing for less than 100 days I still consider you a new player on EMC unless you have firmly established yourself within the community or accomplished large builds that are impressive on some level, like shelluser or cubefragment.
To be honest I still considered myself to be somewhat of a new player even though I was already 500 days old You are as young or old as you feel I guess
Sorry to be 'that' guy but I always speak my mind. I had some doubts when I read this but it's only fair to give changes a fair chance. And quite frankly I honestly believe that this change only made things more confusing for most players. A new player joins and some players greet them (this never really changed). But they still have a tutorial to go through, they can't "just" leave it. As a result (I've witnessed this one time) you now risk players talking and "can I visit you?" "sure, just use /v somename" "doesn't work" "it should, try again, or do: /v 1234 (not the real res. number)" "doesn't work" And I think you can see where this is going. New player joins a server, players tell them to do stuff and nothing works. Some server. Now, this obviously doesn't happen all the time. But you do risk scaring away the players you actually want to keep. Not everyone is active on these forums (I think the majority isn't) and as such most players will assume that "greeting = out of the tutorial". And when things apparently don't work as expected that sends out a negative signal towards new players. Something I've seen happening. Instead... why not change colors? We're already warned about players starting the tutorial. Make that one cyan and change it: "Newplayer started the tutorial, please give them a warm welcome!". That will make people notice. Then revert this change and leave the other message as-is. SO basically: warn players when someone starts and ends the tutorial. But I honestly think this change has a lot more potential to scare active new players away than the original situation. Because when players tell them to do stuff it doesn't work because they have to finish the tutorial, which is something many players don't realize.
As someone that did not read this post before this started happening with the tutorial, I thought it was something that was broken, aggravating and in no way helpful. That's just my experience. Even reading what shell quoted I still don't understand the reasoning behind it. I ran through the tutorial the other day and didn't have to answer any questions that I couldn't even see the questions too or run through any mazes but the floating dialogue boxes are at best a pain in the butt to read. The tutorial... even in its, what fourth?, generation is just as garbage as the others :/ I don't say that with malice, I love all the effort that has went into the tutorials but for some reason EMC just misses the mark horribly with them. Even though they are usually very pretty and flashy lol.
Respectfully. The following is coming from someone that has had almost no involvement in the tutorial creation process. It is easy to be critical. I know you say these things in a sincere manner; but I see nothing constructive in what you said here. I do not know the solution, but you offered none yourself. Edit. It should be noted the most recent changes were done for date collection purposes. If the data shows that this is ineffective, we will be reverting or trying something new
The only reason I'm responding is because you quoted / addressed me too To be perfectly honest I don't think it's possible to build or write a perfect tutorial. And that's coming from someone who has written, published and sold plenty of them. Some will argue that there is too much "indirect" or "not directly relevant" information whereas others might praise the easily to follow learning curve. Some text is indeed harder to read, I agree. But that can also have a positive result as well: players will now have to pay a little more attention to the text than usual. Which could result in them actually remembering what they read. At least long enough to answer the question I suggest we don't start a discussion here (maybe that's better left for the controversial section) but I do want to share that I don't quite agree with this. I obviously took the previous tutorial (several times even) and I've also had the luck that fBuilderS took my friends and me on an expedition to explore the one before that on SMP5. So I can honestly say that I've also followed the mazes and have 'tasted' some of the frustration of having to walk for several minutes only to be told "Sorry, wrong. Now run back and try again! ". And in comparison to those two I honestly think that the tutorial has drastically improved. See... it's not just about trying to stuff as much information into the new players head as possible. It's also about trying to give the new players a good taste of what EMC is all about. While... and this is the hard part: while also making sure that you don't feed them with too much information at once (they'll get bored or overwhelmed). The current tutorial might be a relatively simple one (then again... have you ever tried to download it? I have and you might end up surprised at the detail of the background scenery) but it does contain a lot of useful information. ... reminds me that I was planning to take it again myself. Just so I keep up with it
Well the problem is that there are literally hundreds, probably thousands of servers that have tutorials that are not at all frustrating, they might not be perfect but they provide information that is legible even if it isn't "modern floating text" or redstone functioning. Emc over complicates the tutorial to the point that it is just distracting from the information provided. Some servers just have you talk to villagers that give dialogue through the text box and some just have stuff written in a book. EMC has an assistant that you have to click through links that are confusing and have multiple sub sections. Yes, EMC is complicated and I love all the different custom commands and things you can do here that you can't anywhere else. That doesn't mean that the tutorial has to be as complicated or flashy. Just figure out what information is needed once you very first log in. The community does an absolutely splendid job in game, in my experience, of following up on what the tutorial misses, which is usually everything because people get so frustrated with it. The latest tutorial is extremely streamlined from what we have had to suffer in the past, but is it any better? All these nostalgic momentos that are in the scenic background can be put in any number of places and nice builds and even not so nice ones that bring up some nostalgic feelings are really cool. Do they show what EMC is about though or are they just something distracting from the whole point of a tutorial. Like I said, the tutorials have been gorgeous, the easter egg things was a fun addition but... is it a tutorial? OR is it detail, distracting detail that takes away from what you are trying to get across. Don't cuss, its a family friendly server, no griefing is tolerated. These three simple things seem to be the core of what is trying to be focused on in the tutorial and yet people have to jump through hoops and read through a bunch of different things and then try to figure out what really was relevant. Book titled, "Welcome to EMC" Be nice, don't be rude to others. Griefing is not tolerated. We have a very long standing community of people that will help if you ask. Second page: We have a virtually unlimited area for you to build in in the frontier on our survival multiplayer server, with no PVP. Third page: We have a custom town where you get your own 60x60 place to build whatever you want! That is being made into a whole world with question answer quizes, of course we know about that maze from the original tutorial that no one was sad about seeing but the following tutorial didn't exactly have a direct line path to where you were going and you could get lost. The most recent tutorial you aren't going to get lost but when you look forward there are three overlapping floating text boxes and you have to maneuver yourself around to see one. Most people are just running by these because its just so much, visually that its more of an eyesore than "oh hey information that might be helpful." I don't think I need to restate how much I have personally enjoyed running through the tutorials and seeing all of the builds... AFTER I had already been playing and got to experience the server, the community and what was able to be done on this server that I have been playing almost exclusively on for over 3 years. I love EMC and all the work that goes into it. That doesn't mean the tutorials aren't horrible. :/
I just want to start off by saying that the tutorial already improved quite some overtime. However, Gawadrolt has a point here. I myself notice that often when players join the empire, they are still confused. What happens most of the time is that players are stuck in the frontier and don't know how to get to their plot. This should be the most basic information though. What I also notice often is that 9 out of 10 times players are done with the tutorial very quickly (like, speedrun quickly. They don't read it). I checked out the tutorial again myself, and noticed that there are multiple walls of text. Sure, it would still take just a couple minutes, but if I am honest, if I don't know what kind of server I am dealing with yet, I wouldn't spend the time reading all those things either. I asked some new players and they mentioned to me that they didn't like the tutorial. I know that a lot of work was put in it, and it is already a lot better, but that doesn't necessairily make it good (yet) :/. JUST AN IDEA BELOW: Here is an example of how I would try to make the tutorial: - Force the player to go through it. Make it so that some kind of in-game video plays by locking the player position on certain sets using titles to give quick info. - Cut down on the information given in the tutorial itself (about 30 seconds?) - Then give the option to learn more about an aspect of EMC. - Upon finishing the tutorial, give an interactive book (with clickable table of contents) where players can find the more common commands and features, also containing a link/links to the wiki So you would get something like: "Welcome to the Empire" (title), "A vanilla SMP server with a touch" (subtitle)... - Move player to a town setting "Emc consists of three worlds" (title)... "/town" (title), "In the /town world, you have a 60x60 plot to build!" (subtitle)... - Move player to a frontier spawn setting "/frontier" (title), "The frontier is where you can build outposts" (subtitle)... - Move player to a wastelands spawn setting "/wasteland" (title), "The wasteland is where you can get resources" (subtitle)... - Move player to a shop setting "Custom player shops"(title), "Empire minecraft has a player run economy" (subtitle)... "Set up your own shop using signs!" (subtitle)... - Move player to a place where they can move again with the rules and additional info, as well as a teleport to town. (I wouldnt make a frontier teleport since those are at the town spawn already and new players often get stuck there). "In the EMC book there is more information about our features" (title)... "Make sure to read the rules and enjoy!" (title)... The book would have sections as - Residence permissions - Group commands - Player settings, play your way! - Feature signs - etc. If you'd keep these display messages for 5 seconds each, you would be holding the player for just 30 seconds, but they at least get the basic information. You also gave and explained to them the book with more information, which they only have to read if they want to use it. This exact example would probably not be optimal, and it is very hard to choose what information is important and what information is not. But it was just something I quickly wrote down as example.
We've had a tutorial that forced participation through quiz questions on basic items to proceed. The numbers for completion and retention weren't doing as well as they should, so we removed that aspect, taking a cue from other server tutorials. This change happened less than a week ago. We're gonna try it this way for a little bit, look at the numbers again, and make modifications to suit. The demographic that actively plays Minecraft is changing. We are working to modify our tutorial to fit accordingly. It takes some time for data to mean anything conclusive, but the numbers look better without forced questions and we don't see extreme negative effects yet. We'll keep watching and see what patterns emerge.
That's an interesting idea. However, I'm afraid that if people won't have to do anything at all, they'll just wait until it's over, or even disconnect when they find out they can't move. Side question: is anyone keeping track of the tutorial history? I've seen Shell speak like there have been three, but I'd estimate the current tutorial is the sixth one. (including 'placeholder's) I'm not sure, though, as I haven't played all (I haven't seen the current one either, I think).
Your guess of six is more accurate but I'm not sure of the exact number right this moment. Off the top of my head I can name 5.
