New Player Tutorial - Chat Channels

[Raisty]

I can't count how many times I've caught up with and dragged new players into the New Player Assistance channel on Chaos. Would it be possible to have a part of the tutorial that shows new players how to browse and join chat channels or just auto joins into a new player channel on creation and shows them how to switch chat tabs?

Sometimes just knowing that there are other people playing and there is a place to get help and ask questions will keep people around long enough to find out that they actually enjoy the game.

[AmonGwareth]

There is actually a section of the tutorial that talks about player channels. In fact, its right after telling you how to move at the very beginning in the very first set of blue-boxes that appear to you.

"Communication is a key part of the game and can be extremely useful at all stages. If you run into trouble or have questions, knowing how and who to ask for help will be a life-saver." is how it starts.

And it goes on to tell you how to join a channel and some of the other channels available to you. There is a part of it that is currently broken though because of a busted client trigger, but we're working on fixing that.

However, the tutorial DOES tell you about communication.

[Blue Hasia]

it does, wow that tells us not many people really bother to read I have lost track on how many dragons i have told on how to join the 3 main chat channels.

[Dracaena]

They don't read and are proud of it. We got one in market this past week complaining they were bored, knew nothing about the game and they were running blind. I suggested they read the tutorial. I was told that they didn't like to read and would rather just go kill stuff. Think it was a lv2-3? hatchling and continued to complain they were bored. I gave up watching market for a bit. There is a lot of truth to the old saying, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink".


Dracaena

[TheGolden Dragon]

Yes, I do confirm tutorial is indeed in game as when I have created new bipedal character, it did float above my head (the blue bubble).

Tutorial, for both dragons and bipeds, have gone great length from what it was in 2004 and earlier.. which is good!

@Draca: Its one of the bonus aspects of Istaria that it filters out this type of players, who add to community with their LOLnguage and do not understand that games were created for competitive, challenging purposes. Not collecting brain-less achievements.

-TGD

[AmonGwareth]

We're making a change to the biped tutorial which hopefully will help this out. In the biped tutorial it initially tells you about movement. If you choose to cancel that, you actually skipped the communication and greeting parts of the tutorial. Those have been broken out into their own sections now, so skipping movement will take you to communication. Hopefully that will help a little.

Also, the Dragon communication tutorial is at the information kiosk on Skalkaar, rather than being "in your face" like on Spirit Isle. So it could be easy to miss. We're still considering how to address that.

[TheGolden Dragon]

Not sure what are the limitations of Istaria's script, but how about a sudden Personal message from NPC, standing somewhere in starting area, asking for player to come close, showing him in normal talk how to talk, in emote, it emotes *nudges <<Player_Name>> to type <<emote>>* (darn, forgot how to actually do emotions in Istaria.. so long its been.. *blushes*)

Had idea of pre-scripted NPC to spawn and walk towards player but that would not work since players sometimes just dash off in random direction..

The "Dragon Whisperer" NPC would do the job quite well me thinks, showing both ingame normal/emotion and open up a flashing tab on chat window with a PM conversation, telling player there how this works, how to join channel etc..

-TGD