New Player Diary

[Object]

So I figured in the interest of learning a new players perspective to maybe help improve the new player experience I decided to write a diary of sorts to show my progress, trials and tribulations of playing this game.

First off, a background of myself. I started in the 'multiplayer' scene on an old Mac SE with a 9600 baud external modem on a local bbs, back then I was playing games like LORD and Usurper, fun as hell and I actually met one of my first girlfriends on it (I'm such a nerd). Then the internet came out commercially, or at least I finally was able to gain access to it, my dad was in real estate at the time so he ended up picking up a package through his company to get 20 hours a month for $20, crazy! Muds, mushes and moos, oh my!

So after maybe a year of playing muds I ended up in The Realm and I managed to get into the UO beta test for $5. Man were those awesome times, going from muds to ascii muds to graphical muds and now Richard Gariott coins the term mmorpg. In UO I was on the Catskills server (the RP one) playing with a bunch of guys called the Undead, we had a strict dress code and naming scheme, so I was known then as Sabet Diamaina. Since then I've drifted away from RPing on a mmo, but I still remember those early days with fond memories.

Since UO I've played everything from Asherons Call, DAOC, WW2Online to FFXIV:ARR and Archeage. I am definitely what's known as a veteran of the mmo world doing everything from paid GM to game design on smaller titles.

So I'm going to leave this first post as more of an introduction post and basically double post to have a nice line break between the introduction and the first journal entry.

[Object]

Day 1-3

So I decided to throw my first few days into a single post since not a lot happened, but enough to note how things went and my impressions so far. So one of the first things I did was look on youtube for videos on Neocron and I ended up finding one from a while ago showing a player creating and playing a droner, and it looked pretty damn cool to me.

So I followed the same steps the other player did and made a droner, I skipped the tutorial and immediately found the replicator, went to my apartment, and into Plaza. I found the sewer lvl 1 entrance, pulled out my drone and started shooting at things to no avail. For some reason I couldn't do any damage, so I hit up IRC and asked if anyone knew if I was doing something wrong. Another player informed me the newbie drones were bugged and did no damage, which was a bummer, he instructed me to make a tank and try that out instead.

On my second character, the tank, I initially did the tutorial since I figured it would be helpful. I explained a few things that I basically glazed over since I had absolutely no context as to what I was doing, I shot a few things in the face and moved on. I finally figured out how to access help chat which I found a little concerning since it didn't seem to one of the default chat options, I had to click F1, click Custom, find players helping players and select it before I was able to use the help channel. I'm not sure why accessing the help channel is done this way instead of a default channel but it's not very intuitive and would definitely throw off any new players attempting to get some assistance.

Now after accessing help and chatting to a few very helpful players about me wanting to drone, a player decided to give me some stuff to help me through the process. When we met in game he found out I went tank and told me droners are best as spies, so I should remake my character as a driver->spy.

Character number 3, the driver/spy that will probably end up as a droner eventually. The very helpful player gave me 10k, a recycler, a grenade launcher and some drugs to use the grenade launcher until I leveled my str to 3. He told me to go to sewers 1 and grind on the tiny mobs until I leveled up enough to get my heavy weapons to 7 and then level up recycling more to not only make my own ammo but also make my own medkits. I wish I could remember his full name but the only thing I remembered was his last name looked kinda like Kindergarden.

After getting my str up and leveling to level 7 I decided to do some exploring. My main goal was to figure out how to check my mail since the flashing AOL-like "You've got mail" was getting annoying :P I remembered from the youtube video that there were these citycom terminals, so I found one and to my relief I could finally read my mail. This, ended up being the best tutorial I ended up getting from the game because it explained how the death system worked, the law enforcer implant and the navray, which is the most useful tool I have found so far and am completely amazed it's not explained in the tutorial.

Observations:

The tutorial might have useful information in it, but anything that was explained during it (the crafting? and the hacking) really were way above my head at the time and ended up being mostly useless to me at the time. Teaching players how to use the navcom and the navray would have been extremely useful to me since I had to be explained how to send pm's via the direct channel.

The help channel should be a default channel, it's already a bit different to switch between chat channels but being forced to assign help to the custom channel seems a little too inconvenient for new players. I understand that a game like this is a niche game and only really retains a specific type of player but it should be the gameplay that culls the playerbase not the overly difficult method to access help chat.

I just want to reiterate how useful the navray is to me now, adding it into the tutorial somehow will probably be one of the most valuable new player retention feature you could add in to the tutorial. I really wish I knew about it from day one because of how amazing it's been. I understand it's explained in a mail but I actually had little idea how to access my mail initially and even maybe adding in a citycom terminal into the tutorial might actually be useful as well.

All in all though, the games been very interesting so far and I'm glad it was still around for me to experience it.

[Jack Slater]

Welcome,
it's always nice to hear about new runners! Keep up the good work I'm very interessted in reading about Neocron from your point of view. Right now I'm thinking if it would make sense to make some tutorials on stream and save them as a highlight but YouTube would be the better platform I guess.

I wish I could remember his full name but the only thing I remembered was his last name looked kinda like Kindergarden.
Maybe "Zarten Kinderhänden"?

[Dasore]

Hey Object,
yeah that person was me (Zarten Kinderhaenden).
Keep up your diary, i think its one of the best ways to improve the experience for the new players. Vets cant exatly see what needs to be changed at the newbie-leveling-part of the game cause we would do everything that way that we get the best xp/hour out of it ;)

See you ingame and good luck getting your droner going

[yavimaya]

Hey Object,
yeah that person was me (Zarten Kinderhaenden).
Keep up your diary, i think its one of the best ways to improve the experience for the new players. Vets cant exatly see what needs to be changed at the newbie-leveling-part of the game cause we would do everything that way that we get the best xp/hour out of it ;)

See you ingame and good luck getting your droner going


Yes more XP/hour is good, but i found the fact that NC didnt hold your hand, simply dumped you into a world where you could do what you wanted was the greatest. i played lots of BP, i didnt like the way you had to run a tutorial at the start, also 90% of people who werent in the earlier betas didnt understand that once the tutorial finished that it was an MMO, they wanted more tutorial.... for the rest of the game.

[Trivaldi]

Information like this is a fantastic eye opener for us and I'm sure our veteran players. Your efforts in writing this are really appreciated and I hope you continued on your journey so you may continue your diary! :)

Regarding the NavRay point, we feel this is a great way we can help newer players as it's an area we can fix relatively quickly. If you find yourself somewhere and the NavRay behaves oddly or doesn't at all (some areas it doesn't on purpose bare in mind) please drop your thoughts into the bug reports forum as appropriate. We can then use that feedback to fix the NavRay in areas important to new characters, rather than those that we happen to come across first. In the latest patch we made getting around the city much more logical when following NavRay and we hope those improvements helped you on your journey.

Welcome to Neocron! :)