Way to help noobies on launch
Hunter.S.T.
Join Date: 2012-05-26 Member: 152596Members
Join Date: 2012-05-26 Member: 152596Members
<div class="IPBDescription">500+ playhours, mark players for questioning!</div>Hi, i know that release is coming up soon, and that we were looking of ways to make the game easier to get into for the swarm of new players who will be joining us.
Newb only / learning servers have been talked about, as has marking a player who is very new, although some new players might not like that.
I thought of another system i would recomend. We could give players with over xhours of play time on the beta, a checkable/uncheckable option on their client, which would mark them as a player who is happy to help newbies.
In game it could be represented as a question mark appearing over players heads, and/or a question mark next to their names on the score board, with a tool tip that appears informing new players, that if they see this, they can feel free to ask questions, as the person has allready marked themselvse as willing to help noobies out.
I for one would use this option when the game comes out if it were available, it seems nicer to me to mark a player as "experienced but willing to help" rather than to mark players as "noobie, assume im rubbish".
Newb only / learning servers have been talked about, as has marking a player who is very new, although some new players might not like that.
I thought of another system i would recomend. We could give players with over xhours of play time on the beta, a checkable/uncheckable option on their client, which would mark them as a player who is happy to help newbies.
In game it could be represented as a question mark appearing over players heads, and/or a question mark next to their names on the score board, with a tool tip that appears informing new players, that if they see this, they can feel free to ask questions, as the person has allready marked themselvse as willing to help noobies out.
I for one would use this option when the game comes out if it were available, it seems nicer to me to mark a player as "experienced but willing to help" rather than to mark players as "noobie, assume im rubbish".
Comments
they can always turn it off if they don't like it.
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why not have both? we'll be having so many new players at release, every bit might help. the only possible downside i can think of is clutter in the UI.
Maybe a newbie would be afraid to ask a question to the team in general chat or something, I don't know.
In my experience, simply asking your team will net you a response most of the time. However, being the internet, you will always get a handful of troll responses along the lines of "get good", "l2p" etc. The latter could dissuade newbies from wanting to ask anything else.
It's all about making newbies feel welcome.
But this isn't an MMO where you can just take someone aside and show them around.
No, but what it is, is that you would be actively displaying to newbies that you are an experienced person, and you would gladly help them with any questions they have.
As you said, this can be accomplished by simply asking your team as well, but my only concern is (and probably because I'm extremely cynical of human behavior here) is that newbies who ask the team in general will also get some snide or elitist remarks, which may put them off from wanting to ask any more questions.
Basically, having an indication that someone is here to help makes it more friendly than blindly asking and getting a couple hostile responses.
Where I think it would be particularly useful is if we have dedicated newbie servers. Newbies are less inclined to seek answers from their peers than somebody who is labelled/identified as help. It would also be helpful for veterans who join a newbie server to work out who needs help and who is already there to help.
I can say from past experience that saying on voice chat "hey does anybody have any questions" does solicit questions.
as i understood it, veterans will not be allowed to play on newbie servers. this makes sense as certain veterans would certainly take advantage of the situation, recklessly dominating the enemy team which could heavily distract the newbies from learning the basics at their own pace.
newbies are allowed to play on mixed servers though.
anyway, the newbie mark will only last for very few hours (they mentioned 3 but that's not final afaik) so there will still be a lot of questions for them to ask after that.
Darn, there goes my chance to make it look like I'm actually good at the game.
Anyways, you can be sure us black armored people will be questioned a lot after the game is released.
Oh man, the memories. Then there was that Dojo thing for a while too.
But yeah. In general people are pretty helpful, so hopefully they just start asking. # of hours isn't a good metric for helpfulness.
Over all I think the idea is sound, but only as a 1 on 1 mentoring. Once you get out side that, it get's pretty lackluster.
anywho that's my 2 cents.