Hello!
You won't find any flames by me here. I think this is a great game, and as such I'd like to invest some of my time in making the community and game a little better. Here are just a few suggestions that I have thought about as I am learning how to play Horizons. (Great game by the way, and even better community!) Mind you, I don't think any of these are original suggestions necessarilly, I just thought I'd post them so that they are voiced. I'll list the suggestion and then my rationalle behind it.
1.) There needs to be an In-Game accessable manual. The manual needs to be easilly activated (maybe by a button under the menu with recall, attack, gathering etc.) The in-game manual needs to contain sections for each of the schools (adventuring and crafting) in the game, the requirements to join, and locations of a few of the trainers in that school. There also needs to be a section on multi-classing (including a description of rating and XP requirements based on rating not level). The in-game manual should also include a section on crafting that describes the idea of tiers, tools, formulas, teching, and deconstructing. The manual should also include a communication section listing all of the slash commands usable as well as a section on joining channel and controlling your chat windows. Finally the in-game manual needs to include a glossary.
R1.) My rationalle for an in-game manual that is easy to access is that this game has a very steep learning curve. It is also my belief that you should not have to go out of the game and access external resources to learn the basic requirements for many of the game's features. As a new player downloading the content you have NO access to a manual and very little access to online resources. In addition the resources you find are likely to be out of date. So the benefits of the in-game manual are great for new players. The manual also has benefits for Tulga. If you plan to re-release Horizons then the creation of an in-game manual means that you can make your printed manual pretty bare-bones. This saves you money and time designing the new manual...but mostly money. The idea is technically feasable. As far as the content, it's not out of the realm of possibility to petition current players to volunteer to write for sections of the manual. You could reward the players that submit accepted entries with a token that gives them the title, "Sage." All you would have to pay for was a person to read over and edit the matierial that comes in. Saves you money and time and helps out everyone.
2.) A pop up window upon dying that gives a button that activates recalling.
R2.) Many new players are confused when they first die in Istaria. If you haven't played an MMORPG for a while you may not intuitively realize that you have to recall. A pop up window saying, "Would you like to Recall now?" would be a great help. This makes the game less confusing for new players and doesn't take much programming to instate.
3.) The in-game tutorials need to be more easilly accessed in-game! Perhaps a button that activates an index of tutorials available that the player can browse at anytime. (Maybe put it right under the new in-game manual button ;-))
R3.) The tutorials are hard to get back up if you accidently close them. This is troublesome if you are trying to learn and you didn't get all of the information you needed because you accidently clicked on the wrong option.
4.) Beginning NPC's should all be in the same area an within visual distance for the average user. Or, if you have a desire that the character should walk, you need to include explicit directions on where the new NPC is. This might be helped by using special colored markers on the paths in the newbie towns. This way directions could be given such as, "Go to the BLUE marker and continue heading west and you will see Bob the Battlemage trainer."
R4.) When I started my dragon I had absolutely NO idea that I needed to join an adventuring school or a crafting school. The hatchling emissary is NOT very helpful at all when it comes to figuring out what you actually need to do. In addition the dragon that you need to see is far outside of visual range into the lava field. So some more explicit directions would have helped.
Well those are my suggestions so far. Undoubtedly more will come to me, and I'll try to post them here. This game has a lot of great content, but I feel that some players miss that content because they get confused and quit. The community out there is the most helpful MMORPG community that I've met so far (and I've played a lot of MMORPGs). However if the new player doesn't know how to access that community then it doesn't matter how helpful the community is.
Lansolyn