Looking for feedback about the newcomer situation by the community

As you may know, i am one of the guides in the second expanded guide program

one of my given tasks, except helping newbies directly, usually around the arrival zone in PA, is also to gather info about the newbie situation from the other guides as well as the community

i have already spend some time at the swamp camp over the past week, speaking with newbies especially, but i would also like to have a thread here, since i like a direct approach there

generally, any feedback is welcome, but I am looking especially for info about the newcomer situation
be it first impressions if you recently joined, things you had problems with and so on

which can also help the guides to look into possible problems for example, or develop some solutions

i would like to keep the thread clean, so id like not to see some kind of flaming, although (constructive) complaints are feedback as well

if you don't want to post here, you may also send me a pm
if you have questions of course you can send me a pm as well

regards
Alice

When I started there was about 8people in Port Atlantis. If I had started now I would log out due to the spam there. Impossible to get a decent conversation going.

Biggest issue for newcomers right now is the extremely poor entertainment factor in the game vs other MMO's in terms of "Enjoyment per dollar spent".

i agree on the latter more or less, guess the main selling point atm is the RCE, gotta see what FPC gonna do in that matter

we (the guides) have some event ideas for newbies though, gonna see how that goes

the 8 ppl in PA is such a thing, cause it could give a bad impression to some ppl if they join and there arent many or no chats at all going
they may think "not even the newbies starting town has people, cant be played by many"


and even if newbie spawn would be taken away from PA, traders would follow, as the main stuff traded there is meant for newbies (or bought from for that matter)

Where is the new LZ? I used to go there sometimes before Titan hit and help the noobs get their feet ingame but now im not even sure where it is? I think the biggest problem with noobs today is there is no sense of direction ingame(and too few activities) with little to help you find your way if you dont meet one of the guides.

Once in awhile I even Broadcast my shows from there on Saturday nights. One paticular night I raised donations of armor and weps and ammo and actually gave out about 115 peds worth of low level stuff to new players.

removed due to idiot mate :D

do you mean the newbie arrival zone?

i dont know the direction from the tp, i think SE, but there is a road leading down a small hill to a building, go through the building and over the next bridge and there is the NAZ

i got some suggestions about the "direction" already and it will come to my notes

suggestions from some kind of small "booklet" you get "hitchikers guide to entropia" or so to NPCs with different areas, like controls and sweating etc.
they will be in my next newbie situation report

awesome, very kind of ya :)

the loot is very bad for pretty much everyone, i had several soc mates and friends outside the soc quitting or playing way less because of a considerably bad loot

this doesn't just affect newbies but everyone, so i can take it into my notes
but how would people think, just for the community part
if newbies would get special treatment with better loot, when they pay this in the end by having less
especially for sweaters it will annoy them considerably, because they already pay for their sweat to have ME to beam around
i don't know if it would be liked too much therefore


i take it into my notes but will mention it with this concern as well

.............

I don't mean better loot just more play time per ped, but then i suppose we could all say that would be more preferable. So probably a call for better average loot overall and less ath's which we have seen over the last few months. New players though especially will look at "bang per buck" on their initial 1-2 months ingame, and without new players the whole deck of cards goes down.

"Better to shan a sheep than a lamb"

my newbie reports tend to have a problem and then a possible solution part

this hitchhikers guide thing is a solution to the lack of direction, i thought of something similar already, so i will combine the ideas with it
like something which has controls, sweating, etc explained, maybe hint to swamp camp
but also some sites they have on the FPC site anyway, euforces.com for stuck players for example, forums, that stuff

i dont even know if the aths are the main problem anymore, they have a considerable cost per month with servers and staff it seems
gotta see where it is going, but favouring the newbies alone, could fire back

Sorry Alice i sent you a PM on EF to clarify things, and will post also a copy here.



Sorry Alice

I went and checked my friends account, then had some words of wrath for him. I checked tt of his avatar with what he had deposited and he was actually about even (so down sweat ped).
I think he had pre-conceptions about EU tbh, he is heavily into Eve Online. He had also not taken into account tt of equipment etc.

Sorry for wasting your time :(

All the best Norbert

heh, you didnt waste it
actually i have seen returns of 50% and less, so it wouldnt surprise me if it happens to newbies as well
if your friend himsel didnt calc that right doesnt matter, i know it can be harsh with 50% payback, so its a valid point

just for everyone, not just for newbies :D

yet another weekend bump

ok i dont have alot of skills in the game again yet, (stupid account wipe thing) but i have noticed that the new sweating tool is a royal pain... i can only get about half the sweat i used to be able to with the old style (had focus then too)... so if a noob decided not to depo it will now take him twice as long to get as far as i have gotten (ive only put in 20 bucks to finish my 5B set)

also at the noob zone they pulled out all the signs that gave basic moment commands and some general information....

also something ive kinda though about but have been to afraid to mention due to being laughed at is implement a stop between the space ship and the planet. on that stop have dummy targets to shoot at... and have a mining area with mine they can extract and stuff liek that... that way they are coming into the area with a basic feel of the game...

and as much as i hate to say this... we need the mentoring system back in... if i know im not gonna even get a crappy useless gun i can put in my storage why would i want to spend time, energy, or money helping out a noob that is most likely gonna quit in 3 days... when i joined in beta the only help i got was a guy saying "click on the creature then keep clicking gather sweat" when i decided to come back and found my skills and items have been reset i actually got a mentor willing to atleast give me advice on what to do

i personally think it is better now, because you dont have the 6 seconds dance, 6 seconds try to get sweat and then get a "failed" with a likelyhood of 1/5
that is kinda depressing

you have to keep the mob aimed at when the bubbles appear now, else you lose the target and the sweat pull is lost
if you manage to keep the beam for 5 seconds however you have a sure pull, no fail anymore (ofc its best done in first person mode)

but personally i find it more interesting and fun than dancing 6 seconds and beam for 6 seconds during which you could read or something and didnt get anything in the end

however, several ppl have problems with losing target tho

without all the Mindforce back yet and also so few players (or ME buyers for TP chips) than before, it is also hard to get a useful insight on the "final" sweat price or "ped per hour" you could get if we had pretty much everyone who played before playing again

back when i started, we had 1-5 sweat (now its 1-4) but we had this 6 second dance and 6 second beam sweating, which was considerably slower
the amount per pull got increased later up to 2-22, also sweat cap got lifted (guess basically to get less secondary account once one couldnt sweat anymore)

so just from the amount, you are around the same as I got in the past, but are way way faster

ya, i got that a lot, its already in the notes and was even in a report already

so far i got several suggestions to that topic as well, "signs", "NPCs", "book in inventory-like hitchhikers guide to EU" and so on

what i also got and which fits to your dummy target, is a "newbie training level", on the exodus tho, but basically the same idea :)

heh, i may be the mentor with the most (genuine) graduaters
and i got loads of alpha ME, EP17 ME, tasmo ME, brave ME, or to make it short, lots of crap :D

the old mentoring system sucked in many many ways, the skill level to start mentoring was way too low, so people started farming newbies for gifts, but left them alone without advice

the limit for taking a disciple was 20 pts in a grad skill, so say a guy deposited and went hunting a bit, then heard there are mentors and thinks its a good idea, but he is too skilled already then

the limit for kicking a (useless) mentor was 20 points as well, which often led to some serious drop in helpfulness of the mentor once this cap was reached (if there was any at all), by the time you found out where to kick your mentor it was often too late as well

the useless and crap gifts didn't encourage that many good mentors to actually keep doing it, you spent loads of time on a disciple to receive an alpha ME crap gun, which was worth nothing, had no use, nor could you drop it (0 ped tt), tting was useless therefore as well, so you could basically drop in storage to fill that one up or trying to sell
however, most of the crap guns had been likely bought by newbies, and have such a disastrous eco that (at least for me), you couldnt sell it if you had a heart, cause for newbies those guns are a disaster


but you would actually be amazed how many people spend their time without getting paid to help newbies
many people are healing newbies (especially sweaters) at swamp camp without getting paid
many people help out when they got asked

there is a Calypso Rescue Team (site http://v2.euforces.com/)
who help stuck people out of outposts

there is a TP run service, the entropia tour agency, or ETA
(site http://www.entropiatours.co.nr/) which just started again and had regular free TP run events in the pasts
the TP runs were guarded heavily by people with bigger guns to cover the TP runners, good organized etc.
they spent(d) a lot of their time and even peds on doing those runs

i wrote a guide (something around 180 pages now i think), site http://rp.apachenet.de/downloads/planet_calypso_guide.pdf

also i used to spend a lot of time at the NAZ (newbie arrival zone) in the past, along with like 7 other people, we didn't get paid either, but greeted newbies and helped them how to move and answered questions etc.

however:

now many of the former NAZ crew are currently extended guides (until the program ends), so we are still there (although with some FPC support in terms of prizes for example) and you would be amazed how many newbies ignore us
we tell them to ask us if they have questions but they just run off

ETA has also gotten way less attention as it should be, free and guarded TP runs to new places seem to be very uninteresting for the newbies
since i am part of ETA as well, also from the guides, we had TP run event recently (actually 2, as Stave (the boss :D) had his relaunch event this Friday, which came after the guide TP run)
and we had quite some newbies, i think 22 runners or so in the first one, which is pretty amazing
but we said there would be gifts at the end of it, i wonder how many just ran because of that
appearently some newbies even want to get paid to be helped

if you mentored and gave the newbie some peds to start with, you usually had one of thse outcomes:
-he stays and keeps playing, eventually graduaters and is a happy camper (very very unlikely)
-he shot all the peds away, then saw the choice between sweating to get peds again (booooooring), ask mentor for more money (that was way more often done) or quit (i mean, he didn't spend any peds, so who cares, except the foolish mentor who gave the ped away maybe)
-kick the stupid mentor and search the next idiot to be mentored from to get more peds!

the most likely of those were "quit" and "kick mentor to search the next idiot" btw

even without that, i had over 68 graduaters, if you count all the tp run time i had together, you come to 2-3 weeks running nonstop
not to mention the hours i explained stuff, what to do, what to buy, how eco works, etcetc

for most of that, i didn't get a "thanks" even, they just quit
and for the few who graduated you got a alpha ME crap in your loot window
so mentoring system didn't make you -help- newbies, if you wouldnt do it for free anyway

well i aint figured out how to do the quotes so i gotta do it the old style

ALICE:"back when i started, we had 1-5 sweat (now its 1-4) but we had this 6 second dance and 6 second beam sweating, which was considerably slower
the amount per pull got increased later up to 2-22, also sweat cap got lifted (guess basically to get less secondary account once one couldnt sweat anymore)"


i agree it is better than the origional system... but i doubt there are very many of us left that still remember those times i was refering to the system before the VU update... as stated in my origional post i had my account reset due to taking a year and a half off... so i had to start over... i was refering to starting then not in beta

i also agree with the lack of ME usage currently selling sweat is a pain in the ass... once the other chips are implemented again it should (theoretically) make the sweat price go up and easier to get started


ALICE:"the limit for taking a disciple was 20 pts in a grad skill, so say a guy deposited and went hunting a bit, then heard there are mentors and thinks its a good idea, but he is too skilled already then

the limit for kicking a (useless) mentor was 20 points as well, which often led to some serious drop in helpfulness of the mentor once this cap was reached (if there was any at all), by the time you found out where to kick your mentor it was often too late as well"


i know this all to well i was stuck in this catagory when i started playing (2nd time.. 1st time i got a useless montor) however i also see taht it would stop people from stealing each others deciples...


ALICE:"but you would actually be amazed how many people spend their time without getting paid to help newbies
many people are healing newbies (especially sweaters) at swamp camp without getting paid
many people help out when they got asked"


yes there are people that are willing to help.. however how does a noob that come into this game know about all these things... i wouldnt if i didnt read the fourms and listen to atlas haven radio and thyme's show


ALICE:"even without that, i had over 68 graduaters, if you count all the tp run time i had together, you come to 2-3 weeks running nonstop
not to mention the hours i explained stuff, what to do, what to buy, how eco works, etcetc
for most of that, i didn't get a "thanks" even, they just quit
and for the few who graduated you got a alpha ME crap in your loot window
so mentoring system didn't make you -help- newbies, if you wouldnt do it for free anyway"


as much as every one hates Lucky Seven i was part of his training society... i had my own group of noobs that we were all taking care of... there we had about 7 "skilled" players that would basically rotate through the pain in the ass things (nea's/twin/argus) we had an unwritten rule that inorder to be allowed to lead the TP runs you had to be at a kross400 level minimum... anyone lower than that would get chewed out.

we did do it for free... (basically) we would give them all the information they need/asked for... i was willing to give actual demenstration for mining.. but i went to a place that would almost always have a size V-X mine right around the TP... so i actually made money showing them

the only time i would lose money is when i bought their 1st 1k sweat.. i would buy it for an opalo and 5PED ammo... (huge loss i know)

useful mentoring system may help indeed, but newbies can know, when i stand at the NAZ as a guide atm i am basically ignored by them when i ask them if they need help

sometimes you can offer the help on silver dish and they don't care :P

off topic:

Seven's soc is hard to assess for me, although he has typical harvester behavior along with funny quotes "i dont like helping newbies, i let others do the work" or so, but if it works out its ok
cant say much against that as long the newbies get info


ah, besides, to quote, there should be a button below everyones post, which automatically puts the whole post on quite

when you write a post there should be a "wrap quote" or so thingie on top, which creates the start command for a quote and the end command around selected text
you can as well write this command manually (or copy it if you wrote it already, what i tend to do on lengthy posts :D)

yall need to have something that makes everyone know your there to help.. i could just stand at the noob zone all day next to you and no one coming into the game could tell a difference...


on a different note retention has always been a problem for PE... er EU as yall call it now... there has to be some way to increase the likelihood of a noob staying around... im kinda hungover from last night so i really dont want to think anymore right now :(


one more sidenote.... after the spiders were put in the LA on the way to Nea's Lucky, Vinnie, me, and Dee would then all do the neas run... i would fap lucky and dee would fap vinnie.... then we could get the new players all to nea's without them biting the dust (good chance of a HoF too :D)