[MUD-Dev] Addressing newbies

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Mon, 22 May 2000, Chris Lloyd wrote:
> Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > [Warren Powell's idea of having aggressive monsters leave newbies alone]
> >
> > Potential for abuse is high.  Large group of high-level characters die on
> > really tough NPC in the midst of a dangerous area.  Rather than retrieving
> > their equipment "the hard way", they create a few newbies and run
> > through the area unmolested.
> 
> If that happened in any game I was running, I would come down on that player
> like a ton of heavy things.

If you've got a playerbase of 30 and you've got the time to hang around
watching them all day every day, then sure.  Once your playerbase gets up
into three digits, I would say policing this will become next to impossible.

It makes more sense to simply code the system so that it is not so obviously
abusable.

> I am not a big fan of players with more than one
> character, anyway. But that's a separate issue.

Playing different characters (and seeing the game world from different
perspectives) is a lot of fun, and adds a huge amount of replayability
to the game.  I'm not sure why you'd want to limit this, unless there
was something very specific about your server that made
one-character-per-player benefit the players.

> > What is "obvious"?  I have a slaver ship off one of the docks which has
> > numerous foreboding room descriptions, making it very clear that you
> > should not proceed unless you know what you're doing. [snip]
> > Even so, (relative) newbies get captured by the slavers ALL the time.
> 
> Which is why every newbie needs a guild/city/clan/player-helper to ask about
> it:
> 
>  (Sunnydale City) Newbie: "Hi, I'm new. Can I go inside this scary ship?"
>  (Sunnydale City) Bubba: "Best not. The slavers will capture you."
>  (Sunnydale City) Newbie: "Oh. Thanks, anyway."
>  (Sunnydale City) Bubba: "But just around the corner from where you are is a
> special newbie area."
>  (Sunnydale City) Bubbba: "Go there, there are plenty of easy things to
> kill."

Again, I urge you to watch some "true" newbies play your mud for the first
time.  (Just plop one of your friends down in front of your computer
sometime.)

Newbies, generally speaking, do not talk to anyone, pay attention to anything
in the room description, anything in their inventory, or anything in their
equipment.  They do not bother to "consider" an NPC before attacking it,
or even look at him/her/it.  And they *certainly* do not read any help files.

There are exceptions, but I have found this to be the case about 75% of
the time.

The ONLY way to keep newbies from frequently entering a dangerous area is
to physically restrict them from doing so.

> This especially happens when a mud uses a different system to stock muds.
> With newer and more complex worlds that use improved skill/character
> systems, even experienced mudders can get thrown. Hence the need for a
> _really_ good academy/introduction course and people to give advise to the
> newbies to.

Yes.  And again, you want to present an absolute minimum of text, and allow
them to take at at their own pace.  As soon as they start to reach
information overload, they get confused and frustrated, and log off.

> Sadly, yes. A map should be available, even it just so it shows off the
> scale of your world. (This can be large or small, depending on the size of
> you world. Looking at a map of a huge continent can be daunting if the two
> main cities are on opposite sides of it. At the same time, a small map makes
> the newbie think the world is not very developed).

I might mention that I have *many* newbies OOC "I'm lost!" or "Where can
I get a map!".  This is despite the fact that you start with a map in
your inventory (item name is "a map of lower Ravenfall") and the game
prints a message like "Make sure to 'read' the tourguide and map in your
inventory!" when you enter the game.

As I said, you can *never* make important data blatant enough.

> > There's no reason that newbies should get stuck with the "boring" areas.
> 
> Balance the regeneration time, too. There are few things worse than arriving
> in a new game, and finding the newbie area has been cleared out (and is
> being continuously clearing out) the easy areas.

As I don't have repops, persay, this isn't a problem for me.  But certainly
you need to have enough "stuff" to do such that you can keep up with the
number of newbies your mud is bringing in.

Arctic handles this by adding new towns every so often.  There are, I believe,
six newbie-accessable towns, each with their own newbie areas.  You choose
one at random (or the one you prefer if you're an old-timer).  If it's
too populated, you can go somewhere else.

Adam





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