Do we have some stats showing that newbies tend to leave after playing for several months?
Because being a newbie myself I'm not seeing that. Newbies love it here.
What I see is old players leaving because of OOC drama and devs' awkward attempts to control population density. So maybe we should concentrate on veteran retention strategies.
To comment on the actual ideas, #1 and #2 seem to be interesting, but you don't want to implement both of them. Imagine a newbie finding 7 awesome realms on 7 different continents and then being forced to pause 5 of his characters just when he started having fun. A major bummer.
But greater mobility might be a good idea considering how many stagnant realms there are.
#3 is just redundant because this kind of interaction can be easily done via the forums.
As for the comments on the suggestions:
I still think it'd be good to allow them to try *all* of the continents. Can anyone think of a way to do this, without the issues raised? If the character limit is lower, perhaps new characters could be allowed to be "smuggled" out not only to another realm of the same continent, but even to a different continent?
As for #3, I disagree. We just don't see it happening. Newbies tend to be public-shy, they rarely speak negatively about their experience unless they don't intend to return. They could go on IRC too, but scarcely do so. A dedicated message group would shield them from the reactions of older players who might not agree with what they say. If one finds that his new realm sucks, and says so on the forums, he would likely be met with hostility by other forum members who have been there for a while and loves it. I also find that all realm advertisements on the forums tend to be misleading.
I believe we do. Not sure where to find these any more, though. They don't tend to come to the forums to say why they are leaving, however. If I recall correctly, a lot of players leave after very little time in game.
