Starters Area Makeover [DIS]

[Chicka-Maria]

These are the problems I have with the starter area and these are my 2 cents on the area.

1) When I first joined the game in 2009 there was a land bridge connected from south of hurnscald to the south west of tulimshar. IMO this was a great thing to have. People would walk back and forth from hurnscald to tulimshar all the time, hence meeting new people who joined. This also allowed new people to explore and find hurnscald faster. I know this bridge was removed due to "not making sense of the game map" but this is a open source game why cant the map change?. If it allows people to communicate faster/easier/better with new people who join why not put it back?

The bridge was removed during the "money sink" ideas and outcomes because people would have to use the dock rather than just walking for free. But this lost most contact with tulimshar and less people have gone there since.

2) The stats NPC was moved.
The moving the NPC to reset your stats was ...well im not really sure that was moved considering it was easier to find before. I even couldnt find it until someone showed me where it was the first time it got moved. The NPC to reset stats should be put back in tulimshar where it was before. This allowed Newbies experimenting with stats to find it easier and if they messed up their stats while they were first leveling up, they could easily seek the npc to reset themselves again. This is also a longer walk through tulimshar considering people can only take the dock there now....or pay extra for the traveler which sucks and pushes people from going to tulimshar more often yet again.

3)I love the tutorial idea. It's great and allows people to learn more in the beginning than they did before. I just wish the location was a bit into tulimshar more if it was possible. Before the tutorial area people would just pop up in tulimshar and the people in tulimshar would help newbies more. When I first joined the game someone showed me the NPCs in tulimshar which allowed me to gain emotes, trade, and monster points. Appearing in a place where people visited often for other things was helpful and easier to get help from others. This also allowed me to make friends. The first friend I made was Doulos and Erienne. With the changes of appearing further away, If I was to walk to tulimshar by myself after the tutorial I probably would be lost.

These are my two cents on everything and my view/opinions/changes on from what I seen from 2009 till now. Just keep in mind little changes like these that people might not think is not much can be a big deal towards player communication.

Others might think differently but everyone has an opinion on the matter.

regards,
Chicka

[Freeyorp101]

This has been an issue for a while now. I gave my thoughts (rationale, possible quick fix, and way from there) [here].

I propose the following:
1. Set the starting spawnpoint to be in Hurnscald, by the city center.
2. Alter the warps out of Hurnscald to be conditional, warping anyone new to the tutorial area around Tulimshar.
3. Downsize the tutorial area. People should not have to jump through hoops to play if they do not immediately claim to know everything.

Rationale:

There is no substitute for seeing other real players. Regardless of whether newcomers come for a challenge or for socialising, people come here for a community.

Hurnscald is not built for low level content, but being the starting area is a must, as that's where the people are. Because it does not and should not have low level content, people need to be brought back to tulimshar after glimpsing people.

The tutorial area should not aim to be self-sufficient - people can work things out, and if people get lost, there should be other players around to help. Downtime before play is evil. Minimise this as much as you can. The old HMC newbie helpers were orders of magnitude more effective than any NPC.

In short, people want to get right into the game, which is about people more than anything else. Having gone through the tutorial myself, I found it very confusing, sprawling and with no clear sense of direction. Open areas can be nice, but a tutorial is certainly one place I would rather have short and straightforward.


---Freeyorp

[meway]

So I was thinking about the starting area. The reason it scares people is because it is boring. The reason its boring is because it takes a long ass time to get a crappy weapon and a shirt and a couple level ups and oh you get to learn how to pic up stuff.

[o11c]

Just a side note: I think the problem with magic is that players spend most of their levels (from 40 to 99) grinding on the exact same set of monsters. So, it's just not worth learning weaker spells.

In order to work, the weaker spells need to be used against common enemies that are worthless for higher-level players to grind, and the higher-level enemies need to instakill lower-level players.

[Hello=)]

Just a side note: I think the problem with magic is that players spend most of their levels (from 40 to 99) grinding on the exact same set of monsters.

It's rather global issue of TMW. Everyone grinds same set of monsters with same equipment at same levels. And mostly looking the same as well. Though I think I've got explanation why it happens: the only easy items to draw are "hats". Everything else takes a load of pixel art drawing. But even then, only few "hats" have stats meaningful for battles. Tis can also be told about many other items. For example, terranite set is expensive like hell but in terms of stats, only pants make some sense. Everything else is expensive but useless and so mostly unused.

However it's not most troublesome issue with magic. Magic troublesome for newbies because of lengthy learning curve "just to get started" and then it turns out it's damn expensive, up to degree where you can't hunt enough monster drops (greetings to low drop rate) to continue using spells. These 2 issues make magic rather pointless below ~lvl 60. Also mages are bad for grinding (it's more expensive than other classes while not being efficient) and TMW is all about grinding. For these reasons, most TMW mages are either alts or temporary restats. This basically means TMW is not really welcomes playing as mage as 1st time character. Not really sure why it should be this way. For me it appears to be just consequences of the fact magic has been added to pre-existing gameplay so it has been hacked into game "ad-hoc", just to get it working at all.

[Chicka-Maria]

what does magic have to do with the starter area?

[Hello=)]

what does magic have to do with the starter area?

I think some simplistic/cheap spell (something like acornshot?) can be learned here, to allow players to play this class from relatively low levels. (level 0 spell? Levels in code are rather confusing: some places refer to level 0 but seed grants you at lvl 1, etc). Though this idea does not really fits current manaseed storyline and can require some balancing. I think current state of things can make players preferring to play as mages away from game. Because now it takes half of game to become beginner mage. And if plan was like this, I guess it would also be logical if noob can't really use bow or sword, at most some slingshot and scythe/knives.

[wushin]

I mentioned this before in IRC for Magic.

The Idea is a Magic Wand.
I did art for the sprite 1.5 for it.

So we have a magic spell. Whether or not their is a simple reagent yadaya can very.
As we create a spell that reads player Vars for setting the spell.
For Example:
Wand of Fire has {set WAND, (1<<31); } in equip scripts
in magic we can read that bit and set the element to fire or adjust dmg, etc.
Since it would be a spell we could give it charges, durations, restrictions same as any other spell. We could also check to make sure it's equipped and the player meets requirements via the Equipscripts and unequipcb function.

The spell could then be level 0 magic with the Wands being leveled and increasing the power of the spell.

[veryape]

Well I have been reading, thinking and trying to stay updated with what has been said on IRC, still I feel a bit unsure about a few things about this newbington stuff.

Everyone has been working enthusiastically and i don't want to curb the enthusiasm, don't take this as negging. It is just sincere questions.

1. What is the scope of the new area, tutorial just or more like up to getting ready for hurnscald quests (lvl 30 or thereabouts).

2. What particular problem will it solve? The tutorial needs to be updated for sure, tutorial-stuff always suck in almost all games imo, the only starts to games i can think of that I really do like is fallout. And there they happen in a "safe" enviroment before you are confronted with the big and dangerous world, from what I understood this is largely the other way around. Get the new players mixed up with the oldtimers as fast as possible. (Look at how illia made people strive for getting level 90 so they could join in on that cool thing for instance.)

This has a few pros, of course most older players can help them when they have questions etc, the cons are that the new players don't see that "cool new town" they want to strive for, everything is right under their noses. And this is not an extended list by any streach.

Long story short, i like the idea of a new tutorial, i think it should be re-doable, because people tend to click next fast as hell to get going in the real game it would be nice to be able to redo it once they realized that they might learn from doing it.

[meway]

http://imagebin.org/294373 a bit of an update can be shown here.

[meway]

Here is a small peak at progress

[willee]

thought to necro different thread but found this

note on following blind intuition: before ferry change at best 1 out of 6 players from newly created accounts approached hurnscald