However, this gives me an idea. One of the problems for new players may be simply that they log in once, see nothing happen, and just forget to log in the next day. What if new characters, when being created, could see all the realm-wide messages that were sent in the last 72 hrs? This way they would see that the game is not empty; and it would give them something to respond to other than the boilerplate introduction message.
This sounds good, although a bit prone to abuse.
Actually, I always thought that BM *had* to have some sort of way to store the important messages, keep archives, some kind of ingame library (it would be cool to have an ingame librarian
). We do have the wiki, but people don't use that too much for day-to-day events, only to depict the larger events that are going on or have already passed.
But after I saw the screenshots of the ingame forum posted above... well, I don't really like it. :p How to make it work without losing the feel of letters? The send-to-region, send-to-realm, send-private feel? The formality built by it, the atmosphere? The ICness?
Nowadays, BM messaging works more like a chat room, where the history gets erased as more chatting comes up, and only if you manually copy it and save it somewhere else you're able to keep records. And as a chat room, everytime you go off topic or OOC, you're disrupting the chat: it's hard to keep many discussions going at one time, because people lose track of the subject and of which answer is regarding which topic. It's a built-in strategy to keep the atmosphere inside a realm, at any time: if you want to talk OOC, you go outside of the game (forums or IRC).
What I'd much rather see (and have been dreaming about in the past) would be an in-game actual chat room (restricted to people in the same region as you are). But this is probably for another thread.
And this is exactly why we're having retention problems. We need to bring that feeling of meaningful actions and fun times back.
I think this is why we're losing players on the whole. New player retention has more to do with specific new-player treatment than overall gameplay. Of course, if the game is bad for players, it's bad for new players. So yes, we do need to address this issue, but we also need to do stuff specifically for new players.
