In conclusion, if I hadn't stumbled onto Terran I would not be playing battle master most likely. We have to maximize the amount of people discovering realms that suit their personality and playing style if we wanna keep potential future battle master players
Bottom line here being: and we can't trust realm descriptions and whatever information we're currently able to provide to be enough to do that. Surveys just might be able to do that, even if they come in the form of multiple choice questions.
I agree. Finding a realm that suits you makes all the difference. Also, realms that aren't interesting will eventually shrink, and will either have to become interesting or will eventually (and slowly) cease to exist. Which will give way to more interesting realms.
Many of us liked WI when it first came out. However, the thing I missed most was teamplay, and how repetetive the games were. If you'd somehow keep track of another ladder with wins, you could scramble all participating players every round.
I miss the in game War Islands specifically because of that: lots of battles all the time, lots of team play, not much politics (but still some), high turnover in positions, several experiments with the army, and everyone could go for world domination without feeling guilty or knowing the result would be boring, because then it would just reset. However, I don't think it's the answer here, and it might just give the wrong impression of what BM is about. Perhaps "newbie realms" instead of "newbie island" would be better.
I think we pinpointed two main problems, then:
1. The ability to choose a realm that will suit you
2. The learning curveNow to tackle these...?
1.A Mostly, I like the idea of surveys. I wouldn't mind helping develop some 20 questions that might help grading a realm, so we can send randomly 5 of them when the person has spent 100 days in realm (and perhaps again at 500?), and/or when they leave the realm (some restriction here to avoid cloning for grades). This could be converted to a rating of sorts with maybe 3 categories (War, Politics, Atmosphere/Fun), which upon clicking you can see the multiple choice replies and other comments made about the realm. This should probably be moderated to avoid trolls. Do it in a way in which it updates itself: no use having the grades from last year working for the realm of today.
1.A' Or we could go crazy and do a match system! Players answer questions about what they like, players answer questions about the realms they're in or leaving, and every time they look for a new realm they can see match percentages.
1.B I'm not sure this doesn't already happen, but it would be good to let everyone coming to a realm know the rating of mentors within the realm. We already have the mentor points and the questionnaire, so it's probably easier to make that into a "newbie-friendliness"grade
2.A Grade mentors as per 1.B: make it a competition between realms. They might try to do better if this makes a difference in whether new players join them or not.
2.B Consider in-game tutorials? They might be a pain in some games, but they also succeed in showing you where everything is, and they can always be skipped. I wouldn't tie them together in a huge "newbie-welcoming pack" where they'll spend all their hours training their men or recruiting new troops, but make them separate for each type of action, and the first one would take you through message screens (greet your realm, message a mentor), politics, data about yourself and your realm, possibly a hint at the wiki and forums...
2.C We could make a campaign for player-made learning material. Like updating the wiki tutorials (as we had some time ago), getting good mentor classes and giving them some spotlight. (is there a wiki page which gathers player-made tutorials and guides?)
