New players seem to ask a lot of the same basic questions. I feel like the tutorial is not an ideal introduction to the Empire. It doesn't give any basic orientation between the worlds of town/waste/frontier(/games) and new players join disoriented and confused. They often seem to walk out into the waste before realising they want to be in town - does it first spawn them in the waste? or in town? Maybe they should be sent to their res first? I don't think it's optimal to make them open up a browser link. Maybe instead they could answer questions from a player guide in-game? I know I'm not the only person who plays on a device which doesn't like having a browser open at the same time as my game so I'd need a second device to refer to the wiki guide. Even the wording of some of the questions is a bit confusing - that could be just me - but I got answers wrong doing the tutorial and I've played on EMC for a while now The previous version was better. I think something with a virtual/visual representation of town vs waste vs frontier and an intro to the bosses and custom elements would help new players a lot more.
To be quite honest, I am not even sure how many different tutorials EMC has had at this point in time, however, I agree, the current tutorial is not sufficient for newer players.
We must maintain a balance between what we require and do not require new players to complete, or else we have an increase of player dropouts prior to even completing the tutorial. The tutorial may receive an update soon, but there's a lot more data that needs to be pulled in order to be able to do so. As of now, this tutorial has been a very good balance between keeping the retention rates and giving the information to people who will actually look at it.
I've been playing on EMC for quite a while. I'm well aware that the same can be said for others as well, but I also always try to keep an eye open for new players. And I'm not too sure how many players have re-visited the tutorial on semi-regular points just to experience it again.... My point: you're making a valid argument Linden, really, but it has one flaw... What we're seeing now is no different from the other tutorials. We have had tutorials (which I kinda miss, I loved the "Frontier mimic") where players could honestly just walk through, use some common sense and plenty of players still would ask about the questions. See... this is the real issue: you're focusing on the amount of players who ask questions about the tutorial. Fair enough (I am not being sarcastic here!). But how many players step through with no questions asked? Unless you know that ratio, and us players do not, then you can't really draw conclusions such as yours. And there's also something else to consider: liability. If you click "I know its bad to grief" (while you even had to do some work to come to that answer) and you still end up griefing then Staff has all the tools they need to remove those bad guys. If you can just run through the tutorial.... "Gee? Wasn't I supposed to remove this entire player build? I didn't know that!!!!". So... are they telling the truth or not? Apologies for a longer post but... this honestly left a serious impression on me... I was in the waste (I'm the kind of nutjob who enjoys building buildings in the waste) and at some point in time we had a mining event in the waste (it was hosted by a minty, but I forgot who)... I was out in that campsite again (plenty of players build very cool houses there) and a new player (I know how to use /p & /res list) was destroying one of those houses. All I told him was "Dude, don't! you're not supposed to do that, always respect player buildings!" and he was like "wow, sorry!!!!!" (a lot of !'s, I think he even got warned for that) and.... he REBUILD the ENTIRE frickin' house (2 walls and a large part of the floor). Now let's say you were staff... and you caught this dude while he was "spamming" and when you looked into things he was even griefing. Yah... but as it turned out his heart was most definitely in the right place. I just told the dude about stuff and I wasn't even a support at that time... I was white, just like he was. This was the kind of guy who didn't complain about the tutorial, who did not went 'attitude' about me telling him to stop (as a fellow player) and he took effort to rebuild. (correct his mistakes) I'd rather have these kinds of players than those who complain about the tutorial because (pardon my directness): they want the easy way out. That is essentially my personal opinion on that. </vent>
