New Player Retention

[Stue (DC)]

after mentoring for almost two years, I would state few comments.

- threshold for mentoring class seems to be low, and i saw number of players who in my humble opinion did not take effort to learn very basics, but suddenly i see them as mentors. i can only imagine how can it affect new players.

- from what i see, the absolutely largest problem in new player retention is deep disappointment of some when they do not receive answer to their question within 15 minutes after they posted it.  by the time you are able to explain them about game dynamics, many left already. there is also problem with players who, after they receive several initial lessons and several invitation to ask their question to at least send some voice of themselves - those who never answer a single letter are normally hopeless.

here i am talking about problem of very new players retention only. for bm in my opinion much bigger problem is old and half-old players retention, but that would be another subject.

so the welcoming message should:
- clearly explain to players that this is slow-paced game and they can find much interest in other things than online hanging
- encourage players to talk to their mentors. together with mentioned raising of threshold that should be very useful.

yes, to complete this proposal, something should be devised on how to motivate mentors.

while it can be true that some players do not want to give up their subclass, i would say that more problems is with incentive.

mentor goodies is very nice idea, but currently most of those goodies are rather weak, scout reports 13 turns old are not so big deal, or earning 30-40 gold, they should be made somewhat more fruitful.
and, yes, what about some sort of mentor rank based on cumulated number of goodies? few good sounding titles that could be reached and held whenever mentor class is switched on could gain i-c respect for the characters, our chars are claiming titles anyhow and that could be good incentive.

[Heq]

Well, I don't use IRC and I think I learned the game well enough.

That being said, I don't know that the mentor class really does what it was set out to do.  Really it would be better if everyone who was experienced could simply click "I'll help mentor this new player" when a new player is added.  Just make it a flag.  New players don't show up often enough that people are going to build a character around being a mentor (like they can around hero or infiltrator), but that doesn't mean that these players couldn't have a thing or two to teach.

So thusly, set the lessons people should know as flags.  Each player can choose one or more flags (say, one flag for every 5 family fame points, starting at 10 fame), and at the end the player ranks their competency in each field.

I know, hippy "It takes a village" stuff, but weak mentor rewards could then be gained by everyone, so they don't need to be strengthened and people would want to buy in and train new players.

[cjnodell]

I completely agree that such a chat page would need to be separate from the game itself. Kind of like the forum is. In fact, I believe that would be a good place to put the link - right next to the forum link on the menu bars. The only thing the webchat would be for is making it easier for players of any dork level to access and participate in the existing, OOC chat on IRC.

This way they can just click on the chat button while playing and ask anyone who is on how in the heck they can setup that stupid automatic caravan their Duke is demanding of them and potentially get immediate feedback. A potentially positive side effect is seeing the number of people participating in IRC go up.

[vonGenf]

Actually, starting a "Questions from newbies" forum with a link straight on the login page would serve many of the same purposes as a chat.

[Indirik]

We have discussed this (meaning the newbie forum) with Tom, and gotten preliminary approval to do this. But he's the only one who can actually create new boards. So it's waiting on him finding an opportunity to do it. Please be patient. I'll see if I can bring it to his attention again.

[Indirik]

Well, that was fast.

http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/board,32.0.html