I agree with the advanced mentoring thing, as I have tried over the years to get several of my friends to play, and almost all of them quit after saying the game was boring and too hard to figure out. It is a serious problem, and won't be fixed with the status quo "let them ask somebody".
I definitely agree, but we are speaking about another thing here. As I said, if someone leaves battlemaster because the game is too hard, I don't think that a guide on how to be a good duke will modify his attitude so much. The post on how to gain influence is the perfect example of a tutorial I completely agree on, and should be developed more. This unless we want to involve ooc people by showing how the end game looks like and potentially hoping they say "ok now it sucks but look at how cool will be when I become a duke!", or hoping that reading guides will shed some light on the stuff people around them say and that leaves them so confused. Perhaps it may work, I don't know.
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- BattleMaster is like a boardgame, where friends are playing together for good fun
- The rules of the boardgame should be known to all, so should implications of most basic actions or combination of actions
- Standard etiquette should be taught to all players to encourage an enjoyable environment
- Basic strategies should be discussed to encourage further thought and explain interesting aspects of the rules or consequences of actions
I think I agree here, but there is a big question mark incoming, that has been also mentioned by Gustav. Tom said in several places that he likes the idea that you can make a lot of mistakes by experimenting buttons, and that the game is purposely vague to make these kind of things happen. Many of us stated that this is a source of frustration for newcomers especially because quite often they don't face a forgiving neighborhood that will pat their back and tell them to try again.
Since it seems everyone agrees that we can split tutorial roughly in two parts: how game mechanics/button work, and advanced strategies, we should understand which of the two we deem as appropriate to be put on a forum. Do we assume the noble IC should know what things do, to a certain extent, and explain buttons going against what was perhaps Tom's idea? Or do we rather not explain mechanics but just strategies, in the hope that showing how cool end game is people would get involved, but need to go through mentors and questions to understand how to translate buttons into strategies? I have no answers to these questions, but teaching advanced strategies without going through the basics is a bit weird at least.
Just to present one more question following Vellos' argument: he seem to suggest that avanced mentoring will be too advanced for newcomers to really understand it and become the bm instructions book. So do you think that perhaps having good tutorials to give people insightful and deep instructions on the first steps and then have high end almost impossible to understand tutorials to let them feel how cool would be the end game could help player retention and, at the same time, save the need for interaction to get from "a newcomer that knows his whereabouts" to a "rather new player in a place of power that applies what he read on the tutorial and is thus better than average" status?
edit: just one additional random idea. Whatever tutorial is going to be made, I think it could be interesting to add some kind of "glossary". I don't know if that's a commonly experienced trouble, but I can easily imagine a newcomer not understanding half of the messages that go around because he just doesn't know what word mean. Again, he should ask, but since it's very rare to see this happening, maybe it would help player retention.
