I get the point your trying to make Aikar and I get that having more people to join the empire helps it in the long run. I believe once you push that book out with all the commands to emc this will really help with the amount of questions all of us have to answer on a daily baises. I have joined around 40 days ago and I have greatly love EMC from the time I spent on here. In my opinion tutorial was a great way to know the empire without even playing on any of the servers yet, through tutorial I learned that emc was a community based server, it was well runned, organized, and also very mature. Tho you say that many people are lost because they had to spend 5-10 mins to do a tutorial, I say thos people that spend time to do it and really get to know the server are the ones that are going to be staying here for the long run.
No offence, but I really do not like this 'update' one bit. I haven't even been in game for a couple of days and this really isn't encouraging me. One of the reasons I like EMC is because of the tutorial, when people do the tutorial they get a good sense of what type of server they are on and they learn some essential rules and important info about the empire. Of course there are some people that just went through it quickly and didn't pay attention and then when they got to town they had no clue what they were doing and then continued to be a pain in chat. I could deal with one or two people, but now I feel that this is going to happen way too often. Although I do get your point about the tutorial putting a few players off I think it's essential to keep EMC civilized, now I know we have our fantastic staff but they aren't always there and with more and more problems this isn't going to help things. If players really wanted to play EMC, they'd go through the new simpler tutorial.
That's exactly the problem, a majority of the players trying to connect to EMC do not know if they wish to play here or not. With forced tutorial, you require them to put in effort before they have even made a decision there. I just reviewed the player chat for past 2 hours and saw no spam. And even with the spam, we have a pretty good sized mod team now and all bad players are being dealt with pretty quickly. I've also even taken measures to help prevent spammers from spamming. So from what I can see, theres not even a real issue in chat either. So we may get 2 to 5 spammers in a day. We've had 7 bans in the past 2 days for spamming/advertising. That's proof that it is not a major concern. So, we've increased our new member intake by large margins with very little disruption to chat.
That is for sure a major factor at the moment, but our numbers are lower than what we want them to be before 1.7 landed too.
I see this as neither bad or good, we haven't given it enough time to even determine if it helps or not. I'm giving it a chance, and if a new player needs help well... What Aikar said
I believe I see Aikar's and the Staff's reasoning behind this. Think of a video game, Pokemon if you will. Do you read every aspect of the tutorial intro? The game controls, the info needed? No you pretty much figure it out yourself or look up the info in game. This tutorial skipping is a good idea because I know if I was a new player, I wouldn't want to work to get into the game when I might not like it. Here's another example: Imagine you are making a cake for 40 people (that's a big cake) but you are the only one who likes it would you want to go through that time and work to learn how to make a cake and then actually make it, only for yourself? When I joined almost 300 days ago I started in the tutorial, I didn't like it cause of reasons above, but I gave it a chance and was patient, then when I joined I had to study chat and get a feeling for it. Not everyone will be as patient as I was, cause if they have other servers to play on they have no reason to stick in our, the tutorial skips give them reason and time to enjoy the EMC experience
The alternative to skipping for an impatient (though possibly good) player is to hit disconnect if the tutorial is necessary. I also recall quite a few players that questioned simple things before this ability was added. Nothing bad about this update
i just tell folks to /tutorial is they are asking alot of questions. in most cases when you say that/ there is free stuff in there and tell them to find the easter eggs they are happy to do it
Maybe a spectate rank for people who wish to gander before "joining" would be nice would give them a chance to check town out - able to see chat, but not chat - maybe vanish/fly with no interaction - confined to town would give people a chance to see what going on and observe chat look at builds and make a choice as to weather they would like to invest the time in turtorial or not and would prevent the spamm we have been seeing a little bit of -Just my thoughts
That's really a good point. When you play a game and you know it's going to be good, you'll read through the instructions and like the learning. When you're not sure if it's a good game though, and just want to check it out, you'll just see how it looks, do a little bit of gameplay, and when you like it, you'll look into it with more detail and maybe, if you haven't already learned everything throughout the playing to see if it's good, watch the beginning cutscenes and instruction and stuff again. I agree with that, thanks for pointing that out.
It was originally intended to do just that. I just now question "Is it worth it?" - Worth spending a large chunk of time coding these changes in, developing more process etc. Then you have to answer another: What problem is it solving? I do not consider 3-5 people a day being banned for causing trouble over the course of 10 servers a "problem". Square is already at the point that there is not a "queue" of reports anymore. I'd much rather spend all of our efforts into Growing EMC and providing fun features for everyone. The skip process lets the user know that they are missing out on valuable information. I can work to improve the wording even more, maybe adding an item reminder, and also a login message every time they join if they skipped the tutorial. Ultimate goal is to try our best to ensure new players know how to play EMC. Using a tutorial as a filter to reduce our ban count by 5 players hurts us more than it helps, so its really not a good idea.
I love the EMC more than anyone and i am really not happy about the new option to skip tutorial. instead of that i think that EMC should offered a period of 1 or 2 hours to see if you like the server. you can chat and ask questions but you cannot buy, claim a res or gather resources until you finish the tutorial. There is a server (which will remain unnamed) that does this. People can see if they like the server and if they like it they can do the tutorial and not leave a bad print on EMC if they don't like it.
As said above - what would this accomplish? Say we did this idea - Players would enter town, still have the same experience as there is today with skipping, still ask the same questions. then what? In the middle of building or in the wild they are teleported to the tutorial? That is not a good user experience and would make me leave the server in confusion. In order to justify removing the /skip command - we would need solid reasoning on why you think it's better. So far, we are seeing tons of positive from this change with very little negative.
But how many have you had for people begging and threatening? On the weekend, a new player joined, skipped the tutorial and then went on to PM me begging for money. And then he began threatening me and supplying me with my location. I know, even with a tutorial, there will still be creeps like this, but I honestly think, the tutorial will deter people. What I honestly thinks needs to be done, is a new simpler tutorial is built, IMO the new one isn't any better than the old one, it's more confusing, not as clear to understand and it's too grandiose. When new players join, give them that 'preview mode' that has been suggested before, where they can go around and take a look at things, they can't break things and they can't chat. Then, if they decide they like the look of it, then take them through a tutorial that takes less than four minutes. EMC doesn't need big numbers of players, it needs to be able to keep older players and encourage new, rule abiding members to join, people who actually want to join to play. And I might be being a bit harsh, but EMC is failing to keep older players, but if they can't keep the older players, there won't be any experienced players around for when new players join and need a bit of help.
I think we need to look at all the factors affecting the Player count on EMC. Here is my view on what some of those factors may be and you may or may not agree with them: Game fatigue I think with every update of MC, people drop off the game and stop playing. Reasons can be such as having to go through the hassle of getting latest mods, etc, or not being able to play on servers that aren't updated. This affects every server and can't really be avoided. It doesn't help when the delay to update is so long due to plugins, etc. Server fatigue People simply get bored of playing on the same server and may go and try something different and decide not to come back. Again, affects all servers and can be difficult but not impossible to avoid. EMC today is a different beast from EMC 710 days ago when I joined (Give or take) but it's not come on in leaps and bounds and has stagnated in several areas, again, as many servers have. Frustration at delays With promises of Dragon Tombs, Wild Portals, Land Claiming, etc, being bandied about for over a year now, people have rightly got fed up with the wait and decided to hibernate on EMC until it's in. I suspect once (if) they go live, we'll see numbers rocket back up if it's advertised properly to those not keeping up to date with the site. EMC Direction I may have got this wrong, so I apologise and will stand corrected, but I am sure I recall a post from JustinGuy stating that EMC wasn't about the Wild, it was about Town. All well and good, but lets be honest - living in the Wild is the big draw about the game. So whilst we have servers which let you run a country in the Wild with all that entails, EMC has nothing apart from some lockable chests. Town holds attraction for a while, but after several projects even the most imaginative players can become tired of the routine of build it up, tear it down. I will post more, but I have just realised my dinner is burning.
Uh, that sounds a bit scary I totally agree. If anybody feels bothered by to many questions, send 'em over to me. I am glad to help. Also, if a newbie starts an introduction thread many people reply that they'd love to help with anything EMC related. There is even people that have it in there profile, like: Contact me if you need assistance with anything. A newbie can never bother me so much as to the point I can't enjoy the Empire anymore. Here is the main message of this post: After I won a price in the residence creativity contest ( ), my wife was really interested and I thought, yeah, that's the time to drag her in, hehe. So I made a Minecraft voucher for her and bought her the game. Then we installed the game, registered with Mojang, confirmed email address, copied necessary files (resource pack etc), then registered with EMC (making sure I receive the bonus), confirmed email again. This already took us about an hour, but we were happy: Soon we'd be able to run around together in the Empire. But then came the tutorial. Immediately she lost all fun and never tried it again Sad story, but true. Certainly not representative, only my very special experience with the tutorial. It definitly is a barrier, some make it past it others won't.
