Suggestion: Tutorial Chat+System

[Llyssa]

Paused the livestream to write this--best idea for a tutorial seems to be such:

 

Introduce another chat channel, specifically for tutoring new players---people ask and answer questions there.

 

The players can then find out whatever they don't need. This isn't the perfect long-term solution, but the players know how to play, and it's easier for the ones who know to explain it to the ones that don't.

 

There *should* be permanent lessons as well, but the q&a channel would help lots.

 

On top of the introduction of this, there should probably be a reward system tied into it--each new player gets a few thank you points to award to people that answer their question correctly. Accumulating these would be helpful to the players that helped them, in some way, so that there's incentive to actually check the q&a channel for people to help.

 

A player should gain them (the thank you points they can award to others) on an exponential system, the first few hours of playing and first few missions done awarding the most, and slowly decreasing until it levels off at like one per week or so. That way, older players can still award people who've been helpful to them, newer players have the most points to give, and the system is difficult to game because you don't just start off with a box of points to chuck at someone.

 

Additionally, to avert trolling, the points aren't actually awarded until after the player rewarding them completes another mission--at that point, they're asked if what they were told actually helped them or not. This would curb malicious players from being able to fleece newbies with lies to gain points, as they'd notice right away whether or not the advice was actually useful.

 

The responses themselves should need a special formatting, like @<tennoname>, so that it can be sorted from the questions, and both sent to the asker along with the question of helpfulness, but also stored for the player who offered it as a response, so that if it's flagged as "no", it can be paired with that, and "no" votes can be tallied, so that players with abnormally high rates/numbers of "no" answers can be reviewed, and possibly punished(turn off their ability to access the channel or gain points at all).

 

As for what the reward is, I imagine like a "sensei store" section with perhaps special art or color options they can buy there, and/or perhaps slight discounts on select items stored there. It should probably *not* include anything that actually changes gameplay, as that would increase the incentive of players to cheat the system.

 

Some art suggestions would be perhaps an aura(not the mod-type thing) around a player with configurable style/color, and perhaps dojo decor items that require materials you have to buy with thank you points.

 

This would be a bit of extra work to set up, but once it's in, it will save people a TON of time and effort finding out things, provide the information people need, and cut down on the need to leave the game to find an answer.

 

 

A second concept that I have seen before is the institution of a /help command that actually searches the wiki and provides text in an in-game window, so, like, "/help ember" would query the wiki page of ember and provide the text there, with clickable text links to grab the forum pages it references.

 

This would also help with finding out things, although the wiki is woefully inadequate at this time--we're not very good at keeping pace with the update schedule on many things. Any /help query that would return a search page should merely direct a player to the q&a channel instead.

 

Together, these would cut down on a lot of the need to stop and make new tutorials every time a new feature is added, particularly since most tutorials would be out of date within hours or days, because of the dynamic nature of the game.

Edited July 22, 2013 by Llyssa

[omagawolf]

All the yes. The only thing is that chat itself would have to fixed first.

[Llyssa]

Nobody else likes/cares about this idea?