So, I'm an old player who left the game, had my old account auto-deleted after being away for so long, and who has just recently created a new account.
As such I'm experiencing the game from scratch (no family fame or wealth to back me up, no long glorious history, no name recognition) but with the benefit of pre-existing knowledge about how it works. Here's my thoughts:
1) Most realm government types are recipes for stagnation
I deliberately made sure that both my new characters were created in realms that were either democracies or republics. I know that these are the least medieval government types from a RP point of view but in my experience they also make for more dynamic realms with opportunities for nobles to rise and fall in influence.
In realms where key office holders are elected or appointed once, for life, then it is incredibly difficult for a new player to make an impact short of waiting for someone to die or be severely wounded.
Obviously this doesn't always hold true, democracies and republics can be utterly dead (see: Sirion), but there's definitely a problem with government and region lord mechanics locking most new players into purely the knight game which can be very boring if the realm you're in doesn't have active discussions or active wars going on.
In my case my first character landed on his feet in Vix Tiramora - pretty much everything possible is debated by all nobles and even though I don't have enough prestige to run in lordship elections I can see that there will be plenty of opportunities to advance in the future.
2) There's very little information to guide new players as to how to choose a realm or continent
Before choosing a realm I did some research on the wiki, used my existing knowledge and looked at noble densities to decide which one to pick. But when I went through the character creation process only Steps 1 and 2 were easy and informative.
When you get to Step 3 the continent descriptions are a bit outdated and don't really give you an honest impression of what it's like to play on them. If I was new to the game then I might pick Dwilight for the SMA without realising that it's a place where realms are far from each other and where the game is often more PVE than PVP. Equally it tells me that BT uses the same map as Atamara(!) which is inaccurate and unhelpful but fails to mention that the periodic invasions make it a place where realms rise and fall a lot more quickly and that therefore there's more potential for a new character to rise to power and influence
And when you get to Step 4 it'd be useful if there was something explaining what kind of gameplay activity, opportunity and war translate into and it's utterly appalling just how many realms don't have descriptions at all, let alone descriptions that are useful to guiding a new player to what they're like to play in.
So overall, just more information about what options you should pick in order to enjoy different kinds of gameplay, and explaining to new players what the implications of their choices are better would be a big improvement. Otherwise it's easier to create a character in a realm that's utterly unsuited for your vision of playing the game.
And if there was a system of properly curating realm descriptions, and promoting realms with high activity to new players, then it might do more to help new players get started in places that aren't utterly dead.
It was also a bit offputting that the heraldry creation system currently breaks when you try to save a new shield but that's a more minor niggle.
3) Once you've started the game there's very little within the game itself to give you an idea about what to do next
After creating a character the only thing the game suggested I do was to tell me to send a letter to my liege. It doesn't suggest what to put in it, it doesn't make you aware that your liege might never reply to you and it doesn't suggest you introduce yourself to the whole realm (which is more likely to get a response).
And after that you're utterly on your own. I really think things would be greatly improved if new characters (at least those of new players) were given advice about general courses of action they could take. For instance, some good advice might be:
"As you gain honour and prestige (from battle) you'll have the opportunity to steer your character in lots of different directions but right now you're a knight in a world of war. A good way to start would be to ask your liege to assign you to an army, travel to the capital to recruit more men for your unit and to start training your men so they'll perform better in battle.
If you want to become a lord or a duke or a ruler then you'll need more honour and prestige. The best way to gain it is to fight in battle alongside other nobles in your realm. Don't worry about making mistakes or fighting on being on the losing side of a battle at first.
Even if your unit gets wiped out you can always recruit another one and in the meantime you'll be making a name for yourself, bonding with your fellow troopleaders and gaining the honour and prestige that your character will need to advance in the game later on."
It doesn't need to be a big wall of text but guides as to paths you can lead your character down and ways you can start to get involved, as well as warning that it often takes hours and sometimes a couple of days for other characters to respond to messages, would all help a new player avoid feeling lost, confused or disappointed by the gameplay experience.
4) The knight game mechanics by themselves are very boring and isolating
If your realm doesn't have active discussions going on then the basic knight game can be pretty dull. Even if you're getting orders your gameplay could quite easily just consist of login, train your men, travel to X, recruit men, train men, travel to Y, rinse and repeat. Over time that just becomes dull, repetitive and isolating. You might know that discussions are going on to decide important issues of war and peace but if they're happening behind closed doors then you soon feel pretty irrelevant.
I know that there's probably not much that can be done to make being a knight more interesting in turns of gameplay, and the real solution is to just have more active realms with lots of conversations for new knights to join in with (in my case, Vix Tiramora having public debate about just about every decision imaginable means that things are never quiet or boring), but anything that gave knights more to do to make an impact, or accomplish something in the game, would be an improvement.
5) Most of the flavour and history of the game is locked away out of sight and out of mind on the wiki or forum
Even Vix Tiramora is a great example of this. On the wiki there's lots of background to the realm and potentially lots of room for detail about its history or even just lots of flavour content but you have to leave the game in order to find it and create it. Most new players won't do this.
I don't think there's an easy way to bridge that gap but I remember that one of the best parts of the game years ago were the newspapers, histories, descriptions and propaganda that you could find on the wiki and I easily spent as much time checking the wiki as I did the game. Now people are less likely to check the wiki and, because it's separate from the game, it's updated a lot less.
But if it was, for instance, possible to create a newspaper within the game, update it within the game, read it within the game and distribute it within the game (probably on a continent wide basis via a notification message or even just a link from the politics section) then I bet you'd see active newspapers again. Similarly, while you get (often high quality) region descriptions within the game, a lot of other things are very bare bones in terms of flavour and detail.
The realm/government/army pages in the game have limited space and can only be contributed to by a very small number of people. Your realm might have a glorious history or detailed descriptions of how your constitution and governing bodies work but there's no space for it in the information pages. Your army might have a system of medals for honouring its heroes but there's no way to record it on the army pages. Your city might have been the capital of multiple realms in the past and been the sight of major battles but there's no way to see that on the region page unless you take the time to manually put it all in the region description. Your realm might have a long line of heroic kings and queens but there's no place in game to record their names and reigns.
You might have a detailed backstory for your family but the only place you can put it is the wiki, not in the game - a link to a family page on the wiki really isn't the same since, if nothing else, it requires you to create another account for the wiki and to get used to editing the wiki to create that detail. And you might have a clear idea of what your character looks like, and have accumulated impressive stats, but there's no way you can record a character description inside the game and the only way another character can even look at the stats of your player is through a convoluted route.
World building is such an important, and enjoyable, part of the game but by having most of it separate from the game and on the wiki it just creates more barriers to participation and leaves it isolated from the gameplay and liable to stagnate.
***
I know that all of the above would take a lot of effort to fix, and some of them might be unfixable, but those are the main things I've noticed so far that limit the enjoyability of the game. In particular, I think that BM handholding new players through their first few days and weeks in the game and doing more to integrate flavour, history and RP descriptions into the game mechanics would do a lot to improve it.
After all, even if you join a realm, send an introduction letter and don't hear back for half a day, just being able to explore your new realm, read up about its long line of kings, look at the latest war heroes, read the character descriptions of prominent nobles and maybe read a newspaper published by some biased propagandist on the other side of the continent, all without ever leaving the game, would mean you'd come away impressed with the depth and detail in the game instead of just getting impatient because of the silence.
