Calypso Gateway - Helping or Hurting

hogfather said:

Well, since we had the guide program, recognized and thankfully awarded by FPC, wouldn't it be feasible if a new twist gave them and them only the ability to travel back and forth to the gateway?

This way people that FPC already trusts, and for good reason, would be the ones to make "first contact" with the new players.

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I would be open to something like that.

Kitten said:

I think they should make it tie into the event / reputation system. A person wants to go there and help they click something to go, New players that find them helpful given a +rep button they can click on for that helpful player or a -rep for useless

Then block persons with bad reputations from going in there or something.

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This is a cool idea...

imo, the system is not automated enough up there

especially movement explanation is still a problem, you should really have some holographic writing thingie there, explaining aim mode and wait til the newbie actually managed to turn with aim mode til the next step starts
may be a bit old fashioned, but amazingly many people i saw during my times as NAZ, as extended guide and before, had serious trouble moving

being on that topic, the (fairly few) arriving newbies rarely spoke at all or asked questions, although being told in chat to do so if they need help
amazingly few seemed to read the chat on how to move properly too, as they continued running without being able to move

most of the (fairly few) questions we got where about moving, how to get ped and how to hunt
the gateway answers just one of them imo, which isn't too good

that said, having people up there answering questions may be less useful than it seems to be
also, you allow pretty much everyone to get up there, or you get a selected few which will have to endure quite some trouble by the community (i could tell you some stories from the extended guide period, but i rather don't- goes from plain jealousy to insults)

i dont think that many traders would be up there, cause arriving newbies usually don't have peds, nor sweating tools there i think, so not much to get from them


but its hard to say, i think opening it up for everyone could be interesting
let it run for say 2 or 3 months and see how it goes
if shit starts, just turn it back



as to the mentor system, it was crap, there isn't much denying of that
for example there were pretty much these outcomes in case of possible disciple and possible mentor:
-(usually depositing) newbie wants mentor, but found out after he got 20 pts in rifle after he got an opalo that he is -too skilled-
so a very promising and most likely help needing newbie went without mentor, especially a that early depositor would need advice imo
-an "i want to get rich fast" newbie, which are around 90% of the arriving ones it seems, gets a mentor, who spends hours on explaining stuff
newbie doesnt log in a second time
mentor lost lotsa time
-(possible promising) newbie gets a mentor who is just after a gift and doesn't help at all
seems to have been happening very often too
so newbie didn't have much of it either

-the least likely case afterall is that a promising, still basically unskilled, newbie meets a good and decent mentor

so the newbie as well as the mentor had just one useful outcome, a pretty unlikely one too
cause most of the more skilled and/or knowledgeable people simply dont have the time or mood to really take care of newbies, but I can't blame them

if my graduation rate is correct, that good outcome roughly the case in ~5-15% of the cases in total, depends a bit on your luck
makes pretty much a 90% total loss of time
and i guess you can easily count 1-2 hours lost per newbie there, rather more

so imo, the system was crap for the newbie and crap for the mentor

some word to the gifts
if you spend LOTS of time on helping disciples who mostly quit cause they didn't want to deposit (can't blame them there either often enough), and wait months for a graduater to actually finish and get an alpha ME after that, it is an insult
i don't speak of the value itself, i speak of usefulness
i can't even drop the shit in my apt cause i had to repair it ^^

so please, leave the old mentor system out, it was mostly abused and not useful imo
if you want to help, you do so anyway
imo the whole mentor thing was just some funny MA psycho trick, to form an emotional bound from disciple to mentor, to make the disciple deposit so he can graduate to get the mentor the epic (ly bad) gift

The White Dot said:

I think these are all good points, do you think the revamp of the swamp camp is likely the candidate for the 2nd arrival zone?

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Thanks. Well I can only speculate if the communication from MA to FPC is really as bad as it appears to be, but if it is that bad, then no the revamp has nothing to do with it. I say that as FPC probably does not know what the mentor system will be like and when it will arrive, so they cannot create content geared for it yet.

The White Dot said:

But what about players that never make it to PA?

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That is too bad, but somewhere the lengths that are taken to retain players will have to have an end.

With the quest system there is one mighty tool available for FPC to provide enjoyable experiences, but the social tools are completely inadequate right now, so I sincerely hope that this will see improvement.
Having quests for mentors and disciples, alongside to quests for societies, teams and so on will be something neat.

I mention this because a streamlined social experience will affect retention a lot in my opinion.

The White Dot said:

Btw I agree it is good for the newcomers to see the realism of equipment decay. Maybe not so good if that can't complete quest though.

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Well that was what my quip towards FPC was about, broken quests in the gateway will lead to expect the same or even worse quality later on.
As it is common for businesses to take special care about making a good first impression, this has a great negative impact on expectations.

Something else came to my mind in regards to the gateway versus the old NAZ.
In the old days when I visited the NAZ, quite regularly weird new arrivals popped up, that right away started to do hating of MA, EU and RCE in public chat and telling that all of it is a scam and so on.
Usually someone would be around to counter their arguments, like Jot or even Simon himself.
I wonder how this is nowadays at the Gateway, do these haters have completely free reign now? (I never understood the motives of this kind of behaviour by the way)

Pirx Danford said:

I wonder how this is nowadays at the Gateway, do these haters have completely free reign now? (I never understood the motives of this kind of behaviour by the way)

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Likely alt accounts, angry bitter depositors. Yes I bet they probably do, another reason to have old players allowed into the starting zone. I have suspicions actions like this are occurring.

Pirx Danford said:

Usually someone would be around to counter their arguments, like Jot or even Simon himself.

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Yeah ,Jot dissapeared after his home was taken away. I know the feeling. The Naz was our home and we defended it with our hearts. God i miss the old days

Might make more sense for them to sweat first? Yep, sweating is boring but as a mentor its the first profession you teach someone (and the next is reselling sweat). Might let em run around for bit before they can buy their way into the newb gate with their own sweat they worked for.

The old PA worked fine. As a new player I found PA exciting, there were traders there all day everyday. It was busy. When they first opened the swamp mission broker, the area had a lot of energy. Old players and new players combined in one area. That gave the newbs a bit of hope IMO. They could see many of us with all sorts of different items and actually on playing. Not like you would just see maybe one well armored person at the tp but a lot of ppl that actually play.

2 things that newbie needs to know. How to set up the L key functions. Thats the biggest speech, is how to set up buttons for convenience. Then they need to understand the rules of having a mentor...because 50% of them will probably never know that they can kick their mentor. After that sink or swim.

well I think for some personalites it`s good to have the gateway for others it`s bad. The question at the end of the day is which customers FPC is looking for. I would say at the moment the trend goes to a younger audience which doesn`t have the patience to figure all out by themselves or ask for help. I don`t think this is "right" or "wrong".... it`s just a different strategy and I hope that for once the devs know what they are doing. However I have a good feeling about it this time because from what I have seen the new start area seems to have a decent design and the PA overhaul will hopefully second that.

(I never understood the motives of this kind of behaviour by the way)

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Could be a religion thing since some religious folks don't like gambling, and we all know MA's main professions are gambling even though it's not officially called that... "The Prince of lies shows his face" some zealots might think.

Kind of reminds me of back in like 2007 when there was someone at 3dlinks.com forums that was just a jerk telling everyone in the forums that it is evil to work with 3d software to create the likeness of creatures and humans since you are playing God, yadda, yadda, yadda... Some folks do the weirdest things under the guise of religion.

All now bow down before Lord Lootius and place your tithings to him on Memorial Island or the invisble lake... yes, people do some weird things in the guise of religions, lol

Another thing that could work, although it's probably to late to be implemented in the redesigning of PA, would be to have the new players arrive there, having the option of Teleporting to NNNAZ to finish the quests and get free skills, till they reach lvl1 in any profession.

That way they'd have the option of taking the missions later, maybe making some friends that they can pm for assistance if they go back and get stuck...

Maybe one way to avoid noobs being ripped off in the starting zone would be to allwo all peopel access to it but not permit trading between players. That would keep most of the spammers away and would mean that only the more helpful sort of person would be likely to go there.

davidgr1200 said:

Maybe one way to avoid noobs being ripped off in the starting zone would be to allwo all peopel access to it but not permit trading between players. That would keep most of the spammers away and would mean that only the more helpful sort of person would be likely to go there.

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No trades, no mining, no hunting and no crafting up there for non noobs would be great.

I voted that, in essence..it does its job it seems, but what's missing and it's something i miss alot is a slightly enlcosed area where a player will spawn into a relaxed atmosphere where some of us used to hang out all the time without all the trade spam and crap (PA arrivals). Many good times there.. good conversation with ofc the ocassional conflict , made some good freinds there. It's just not like that now.

It really proved itself to be a good place for new and old players to chill and ask any questions a newbie or oldie could come up with.

I doubt there would have been such a successful guide program if there was no proper arrival zone the way it was then.

More to say but .... need beer.

I don't think there should be any old players there at all. Sure there would be a few that would help but there would be many more that would start there scams off early.

I think its ok like it is now, if:

1- You have a warning before leave the gateway (saying that you can´t return there after tp to Calypso)

2- The player have 14+ age and can read english


Like on many MMORPG you should think well before the next step because some times you can´t return to the previous point.


The idea of gateway is to give a "clean" area for new players to explore and learn the game without the "stress" of swamp camp.

Maybe the official guides would help at gateway, but never regular players upthere.

How about letting the players with above average Reputation in.

Say 1015 / 1020?


Or say a Mission for a skilled player, show a noob how to create a team, let him/her Invite you (assuming dem ah undah 5 agility o woeva), then give the noob a TP run through a bunch of teleporters.

Noobah gets fragments, ubah gets punane?

no? ok

I voted no because I quite like the fact that new players can explore that little island on their own with the tutorials they got there without interference of experienced players.

What we do need though is getting rid of the auction house at sweat camp so the sweaters and all people have to go to port atlantis more often and make that now dead city more alive again, get some trade going again, what it used to be like pre ce. That way new players will always find people there and won't feel alone when being introduced to the main game. Now it's a ghost town, I have often enough met new players there asking people who are just tping, or afk or just not answering.

I do not want experienced players on the gateway because IF mentoring comes back there will be noob hording again to get skills or mentor gifts or whatever and there is no guarantee that the mentoring is any good. People who really want to help will be at pa and wait for the new arrivals.

hogfather said:

Another thing that could work, although it's probably to late to be implemented in the redesigning of PA, would be to have the new players arrive there, having the option of Teleporting to NNNAZ to finish the quests and get free skills, till they reach lvl1 in any profession.

That way they'd have the option of taking the missions later, maybe making some friends that they can pm for assistance if they go back and get stuck...

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Beeing anoob myself, I would say that gateway stuff should be put after sweating missions in swamp camp. You get a point about the community and envriroment, maybe get some friends you can PM later, and THEN get to a training area where no older players are present.

Your poll options make little sense, if you ask "A or B" you can't set up options like "Yes and No"...

But in general, i think it is not really helping, people are impatient and will not really remember all the things they are supposed to learn there.

Other MMORPGs have kind of a "noob island", too, but i think nobody really pays attention to what is offered there - at least i don't when i want to see what a game has to offer...


And, that older players cannot access it is a bad thing, too - most who stay in EU longer than a couple of hours met a nice guy who guided them throughout the first days... if you need to spend hours on the gateway, you'll probably be even more lost... than you'd be w/o the gateway at all.

ruslan said:

How about letting the players with above average Reputation in.

Say 1015 / 1020?

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Nice idea, but has problems. First of all, the way to get reputation is by attending events and hoping people will add rep to you. What if you don't attend such events? Or if you're like me, and only attended a few but have no + or - rep from it? You're cutting out some experienced players.

Besides, if you really wanted, you could cheat that by creating an event and getting people to vote for you. Pretty sure you could con newbies to joining a free event and offer 1PED or something to vote you up.

I voted only newbs on newb island. There are always bad apples that want to pounce on poor newbs as soon as they spawn. Keep them away at least initially. I'm sure there are sincere people who want to help, they can wait at PA.

Coachman said:

I think they should make all weapons and tools unbreakable and instead strip it off them when they choose to tp to Port Atlantis.

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Nice idea

GandalfSzary said:

It could be exactly same scenario for every single gamer thats fine as long as it is exciting, fun and not boring. Well at least this is how I see it.

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Just remember not everyone like the same thing, to some it might be exciting and to some just boring and ridiculous, tough to make a balanced way there but ofc some improvements would be nice

Kitten said:

I think they should make it tie into the event / reputation system. A person wants to go there and help they click something to go, New players that find them helpful given a +rep button they can click on for that helpful player or a -rep for useless

Then block persons with bad reputations from going in there or something.

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Excellent suggestion

Chelle said:

would be interesting for new players to have a look at more skilled players to see what they can become if they get out into the "real" game

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This would also be great, just make it so we cant bring the stuff we need to use our tools/weapons there, and lock melee stuff so no uber players* can come and extinct the mobs in 5min time there

Or limit the ammo/bombs/probes/melee uses/crating materials to only a few uses, that way can show the newbies a "one shot one kill" which I think would be a "wow experience" for a lot of them(or was I alone at that when I was new?)

*which we all are to the newbies out there hehe

hogfather said:

Well, since we had the guide program, recognized and thankfully awarded by FPC, wouldn't it be feasible if a new twist gave them and them only the ability to travel back and forth to the gateway?

This way people that FPC already trusts, and for good reason, would be the ones to make "first contact" with the new players.

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Kittens suggestion would be a better way I think, would not cause such a unfair treatment that some thought it was...

It does a good job to order the new players time to get settled into the game before they see what it means and before the old players can say theirs words about the game and the MA save money on all aspects of the mentoring ( no free items to the players ).

valentin said:

It does a good job to order the new players time to get settled into the game before they see what it means and before the old players can say theirs words about the game and the MA save money on all aspects of the mentoring ( no free items to the players ).

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Those mentor gifts were always handed out at zero tt value, so didn't cost MA anything. Sorry valentin, your MA defamation didn't work this time.

UnaAlconbury said:

Those mentor gifts were always handed out at zero tt value, so didn't cost MA anything. Sorry valentin, your MA defamation didn't work this time.

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But we all know that there where mentors that only wanted the gifts and didnt do a thing to help the newbies.

ranpha said:

But we all know that there where mentors that only wanted the gifts and didnt do a thing to help the newbies.

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Yep, but that's another thing. I was just picking on valentin a bit for his efforts of trying to speak bad about MA in very close to 100% of his posts Add some bragging posts and we got them all covered lol

ranpha said:

But we all know that there where mentors that only wanted the gifts and didnt do a thing to help the newbies.

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About anything and everything that exists is abused.. it is people nature. Just cause it can be abused doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't also do some good.

Tools can only be as helpful as people make them to be, and how they use them.

The White Dot said:

About anything and everything that exists is abused.. it is people nature. Just cause it can be abused doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't also do some good.

Tools can only be as helpful as people make them to be, and how they use them.

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true but the tool was blunt also. I remember advising newbie to ask support to kick their mentor for not being online almost every day. If in all the system really needs some major overhaul and Alice pointed this also out , maybe even a complete new system. I self was thinking with a checklist maybe. Or a builtin timeframe mentors need to be online etc.

Well I am not against automated tutorials, many games got them, but ...

- no teaching about the controls, for totally unexperienced players it can get difficult to move, turn around, equip/unequip, use inventory aso aso. No basic teaching at gateway.
- no teaching how to improve gui! We have lot of icons that can be dragged from action library onto screen, and we have option to assign keys to tools/wepons. How should newcomer know that, nobody can tell him, no tutorial shows how that works
- no teaching of market, trading, item stats aso. Very important, but can also be done by human mentors once newbie passed the gateway.
- bad design at gateway, as already mentioned several times, gun can break, and makes it impossible for newcomer to finish basic quests, so he gets anoyed, leaves and never come back (optional depositor lost)

The actual design of the gateway and its missions can replace human mentor in any way, MA invested not enough thoughts on difficulties newcomers may have, and totally missed to explain basics. So the actual gateway, hurts EU more than it beeing useful.
I am totally for a gateway, to keep trade spam out, and keep scammers away, but with actual setup it isn´t of any use to make EU enjoyable to new players.
Especially those younger players that haven´t played any other RPG or Egoshooter could have serious difficulties in understanding controls. If this players struggle, they will surely leave and never come back.
Other games got handbooks, where controls are explained, or leaded tutorials that explain all the basics, but such things have been totally overseen by MA.

No handbook, no useful tutorial, bad job MA!

jenny ferr said:

Or limit the ammo/bombs/probes/melee uses/crating materials to only a few uses, that way can show the newbies a "one shot one kill" which I think would be a "wow experience" for a lot of them(or was I alone at that when I was new?)

*which we all are to the newbies out there hehe

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That reminds me of my very first TP run as a noob.
An older player lead me from PA to Billy´s and killed a Sabakuma on the way with one shot, and I thought, damn this must be an UBER
Later I learned it was just an opallo with A101 on it