Right now, a person can create a free or trial account and have access to the majority of Istaria within a few minutes of loading their character. While in the spirit of being open, this arrangement leads to situations that degrade the play experience, both for the above person and other players.
Consider the following example situations:
Situation 1: The person may be a new player and completely skip all of the introductory content, go to New Trismus, and get frustrated from not being able to do anything. The frustrated new player then irritates other players by asking fundamental questions that would have been answered, had the player at least gone through the first few minutes of the tutorials.
Situation 2: The person has no interest in actually playing Istaria. They want to cause trouble by being a pest to other players or spamming. Account banned? No problem. Make another!
Situation 3: The person wants everyone else to play their character. They don't want to do anything for themselves -- someone else kills the mobs, leads them around on their quests, makes their items, fights the epic mobs.... Then the person gets bored and leaves!
I have seen variations of these situations come up in the forum, in support tickets, rants from other players, and personal observation. However, I'm not sure how big of a problem this is, so I won't say it's an emergency that we need to fix immediately. Nonetheless, I have given it some thought, and would like to have a discussion on addressing these situations, or at least containing their damage.
I think that all of these situations stem from a lack of personal investment in the player's character. This investment may be emotional; social; financial; or at the very least, time. By not forcing a player to make an initial investment, the player has no commitment to their character or Istaria, and behaves accordingly.
This is part of a larger phenomenon that extends to just about everything that's “free”. Free things usually have no value, and are thus treated accordingly. Consider a simple pen, for example. If you had to buy the pen from the store, you're probably going to make sure you don't forget it. If someone borrows your pen, you'll make sure they don't walk off with it. Now, if you acquired that pen for free, say, it was promotional swag, you would be much less inclined to care if someone walked off with it, even though it was still “your pen”.
So, back to Istaria. In the interest of creating some form of personal investment, I make the following proposal that effectively restricts new characters to their respective starting island until the player demonstrates an effort to commit to playing:
1. Flag the New Trismus destination pad to require attunement.
2. Create a very short quest to attune a character to the New Trismus destination pad.
3. The quest in (2) requires a token to complete.
4. The character may receive the token in (3) in one of two ways:
4a. The token is given to the character upon completion of either the adventure or craft (or both?) tutorial quest lines.
4b. The token is created by someone else through a mildly time-consuming process (say, on the order of creating a cargo disk) and traded to the character.
Thus, in order to get off the starting island, a player must either run their character through a tutorial quest line (something they should do anyway, since it does teach the fundamentals); or get sponsored by another, established player.
Note that this proposal may also involve adjusting or redoing the tutorials to make them more fun and less degrading. That said, the actual content of the tutorials is off the table for this discussion -- assume for the moment that we'll fix them.
So, I open the floor to a discussion of the above proposal, and whether the frequency or severity of the example scenarios warrants any sort of action to begin with.
I know this can be a sensitive subject, so please, try to stay on topic and keep it civil -- don't accuse other players of misconduct. If your post mentions another player, character, or guild; or indirect reference to another player, character, or guild; you're probably accusing someone of misconduct. Please PM me with your anecdote if you feel that it cannot be presented within this guideline.