NEWBIES: Discuss your experience ITT (in this thread)

Let’s cut to the chase: New players are great and we want to make sure they have a reason to stick around. Making things easier on new players makes things easier on all of us!

Use this thread to discuss anything involving making the mud more accessible to new players.

Topics for discussion:
-Anything related to chargen
-Anything related to the academy
-Anything related to help files
-Immchat/RPC/OOC channels

New players, note: We especially want to hear from you in this thread. Consider this your one-stop shop for talking about your experience on LOTJ – the good, the bad, the ugly.

Keep this thread a safe place for new players to post. If anyone gets condescending or rude to players in this thread, I will kick you out.

Is the Hutt in the academy still a tough thing to get past? Do we need to add a “just tell me the command to input” thing in each room?

Please, separate newbie and OOC channels. Let the people that want to help monitor newbie to ask and answer on without having to listen to OOC.

Please, separate newbie and OOC channels. Let the people that want to help monitor newbie to ask and answer on without having to listen to OOC.

In complete agreement. OOC channels can leave a bad taste in many new people’s mouths.

Yeah OOC can be bad sometimes. Welcome to all the new players.

Yeah OOC can be bad sometimes. Welcome to all the new players.

OOC and newbie channels are separate, aren’t they? You can turn off OOC without having to stop listening to newbie

I don’t think they are. Chan -newbie just blocks any OOC chat from anyone with the (NEWBIE) tag iirc.

Newbie is only available lower than a certain character level. You can listen to newbie, but if they are over that level, can only use OOC. I might rephrase my request to unbind newbie from character level.

I’ve been asking for OOC and newbie to be split into separate channels for years. Please, for the love of god, do it.

Okay. How exactly would that work?

Well, my idea is.. Let’s say that everyone has access to the OOC channel. Newbies have access to the OOC and Newbie channels. Veterans that have actively spoken with someone (either RPC or a specified IMM) can have access to the Newbie channel and have the tag of “Newbie Helper” (or NH). This way Newbies know who to trust when they’re looking at responses. If a NH royally screws up with their “advice” (like telling them to suicide or old OOC line antics), their tag and line access gets taken away. You’ll have to find a better way to distinguish between Newbies and Veterans, however. Many legitimate newbies still have questions after level 100.

Hi! I played for a few weeks a few months ago, but business made me put LotJ aside for a bit. I’ve been trying to get back into things recently because I’d like to hop into the next TL, so I’ll offer a few of my experiences:

Chargen:
-This seemed pretty straightforward. The only thing that strikes me as a little weird is that with any race I’ve made a character in (admittedly two) I always have leftover stat points after putting each to their maximum availability. Are there races when that’s not always the case?

Academy:
-The quests are all fun and interesting, so good job! If possible it’d be nice for the trigger syntax on quests in (and out of) the academy were a little more forgiving. It kind of kills the IC-vibe if you’ve constantly got to actually say things with no capitalization or punctuation. That’s minor, though!

-I wish one of the rooms, probably the library room in the station, went into a little more depth about the nature of maximum stat levels, how races influence that, and gaining stats as you level up skills and abilities. I think that was the most confusing thing to learn about, for me.

Help files:
-I think a LOT of the files newbies run into could use the SEE ALSO lines you find in some of them. Help Say should reference the files on tone and textcolor, comms, etc. With the way helpfiles tend to catch different queries it can be a little frustrating to try and find all the files relating to a specific part of the game without already knowing their names.

-On that note, a command like helpsearch or something would be SO useful. Instead of automatically opening a (possibly) relevant helpfile, it would return all the files that contain the word, or maybe just have it as a keyword in the top.

-Some things don’t have helpfiles at all, like the ‘refine spice’ ability in the Smuggling tree. Something basic, even if it’s just saying the skill exists and you need to find out more IC, could really help stave off people (me) staring at the practice list and going, “Well, I have this thing at 0%. That’s cool, I guess.”

Immchat/RPC/OOC channels:
-Making OOC and Newbie completely distinct channels feels like a huge must to me. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just make a copy channel of OOC called Newbie that you can toggle individually, and make the rules that it’s expressly for asking and answering questions about the game and nothing else. Most of the time if I’m actually focusing on the game I don’t want OOC to be on, and for a lot of basic questions it’d be easier to have an outlet to quickly clarify things without nagging an RPC.

Misc:
-The wiki! Since I played last it went down, and someone said it was because bots had overrun it with random spam/advertising pages. It would be SO useful to have it back in some capacity, even if it were locked to make editing a lot more difficult. Especially when you’re starting, some of the old-ish guides on getting into the game, or the handy quick-sheet that used to be there for the basics of piloting, etc are all a huge relief to be able to go over.

-Non-clan progressions. I think it’s pretty typical for newer players to want to stay out of clans initially. Some want to just get a better grip on the game’s controls before interacting with other people, or others might like having their characters somewhat proficient or developed and work on building ties/connections IC afterward. Either way, I think it can be fairly difficult to figure out direction with some of the quests on different worlds, or otherwise advance yourself in the game without someone more experienced directly explaining how to interact with specific mobs, or what to do, etc. I would add more specific examples but it’s been a while since I’ve played so I just remember the broad frustration rather than the specifics.

And that’s it! For now. I think. Thanks!

As for how to distinguish who is a newbie and who is not, simply have a cookie on their account that they are a newbie, and give them the option to enter “newbie off” which would remove the cookie and revoke their access to the newbie channels. They would not be able to activate this newbie flag again unless the IMMs put it back on. In the helpfile it would spell this out clearly, of course. The idea being that when they feel comfortable playing the game, they can turn it off.

We are working on some chargen cleanup!

How does this sound for describing the race/class level chart?

The levels and skills available to you depend on your race and your class. Different main classes will have different strengths and weaknesses depending on your race. Read this chart from left to right to get an idea of what your race and class is capable of.