I have seen several games that a had a forum board specifically for new players to ask questions. Not the "helpline" one that we have now that is a generic help board, but a dedicated "Newbie Corner" kind of thing. Perhaps we could do that, including giving new players a link to that board in their IG welcome message. That would hopefully give newer players a way to ask questions about things, and maybe get a quicker response, due to the wider player-base they could access on the forums rather than their realm.
I think we had this discussion once on irc. I remember that several advocated that the whole mentoring process should be more ooc, to give newcomers more informations and allow them to stay.
Personally, I still believe in the other way around. Mentors IC are a great idea Tom had, and having the whole tutorial done by players in a player to player way greatly gives to newcomers the feeling of battlemaster. Certainly ooc aspects are touched as well but one thing is putting an ooc note to an ic mentor message, another one is sending newcomers to the forum.
Clearly the biggest downside of my argument is that having a bad mentor is more or less equivalent to having a very bad game start. This certainly does not help increasing the number of players.
cheers,
