Tutorial/New Player Goals (in General)

The bottom line is retention. Players will stay in a game longer if they know what they're doing, which is why the tutorial and goals are there.

But the tutorial does not teach that mages don't use ST, DX, or weaponry, or that tanks can't use a direct damage spell. It also says nothing about weapon allowance. In fact, as opposed to warning about WA, it encourages newer users to get the biggest thing they can get their hands on. The tutorial seems to send two messages, "more/bigger is better" and "DX is most important". This results in the oh-so-common 4 minion team with each minion training HP, ST, a skill, a DD, an ED, an EO, and twice as much DX as anything else. Better yet, they're equipping 4 ranged and 4 melee weapons that are pushing their PR into the hundreds of thousands, while having difficulty finding opponents to defeat for -101% CB :P

This is where mentors and the people of chat come into play, but I would imagine it is a bit discouraging when they are told that they shouldn't be using the weapons they spent all their money on, and that 90% of the XP they trained is highly incompatible with itself... ("Everything I did was wrong? I suck at this game, I'm out.").

"Goals" are great as is, with one exception. Forging... It adds something else to the whole heap of stuff you need to learn at the beginning for success. A very unnecessary and distracting step to learn. But it offers a seemingly HUGE reward (like 10k or some such) for it's completion, so they see that as the "must do" goal... This often leads to one of two things. 1, They can't figure out the forge, and get frustrated that there's so much money to be had that they can't get. 2, With the help of others, they manage to figure forging out, and get a point upgraded, and see that that was so much cheaper than upgrading at the blacksmith, so they waste near all of their BA on their tulwar or bastard sword, only to find that they still can't beat the people they couldn't before, and the few that they can beat all give -100% challenge bonus ($4 and 2XP? Sweet!).


As far as the tutorial, I would think it would help to add a line or two about mages not using weapons, and that tanks should mind their weapon allowance (possibly with a link to the wiki entry).

For goals, I think replacing the forging one with 2 goals (i guess split the forging goal reward if the ammount of money obtainable from goals has any signifigance aside from encouragement) would be great; 1) 'View the spell and skill descriptions on the train page' 2) 'Use the (get more) link to purchase a Battle Allocation'



Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Please leave them here ^_^

good ideas :)

how long until this is done?
c'mon it's been on the back burner

I can remember that I am a victim of misdirected goals

actually, I would like to see the whole tutorial again. (maybe show us the lines in the source code or something?). I can understand why it is confusing and misdirecting.

I would also suggest that NUB doesn't start until you have done the tutorials. And put more meaningful things to do in tutorial and limit the new player to fight a fixed pool of chars with different strat while doing the tutorial, so they really get to know how interesting the game can be with the depth of strategies around.

Or NUB starts 1 day after you join the game, so you have 1 day to play around at very low level with not so dramatic increase of char level.

The waiting for the NUB to start has been proposed many times. And to all of us here (ok, not all) it makes sense to get a grasp of what you're doing before the "awesome bonus clock" starts ticking.
The problem with that relates to what Hatch mentions several times. Discouragement. New players start with diddly. Even with the NUB it takes a little time to get the ball rolling. To a new player the first hour (or much much less) may very well decide weather he/she sticks around or not and if it seems like you're not going to get anywhere you may quickly decide this game is not for you.
I feel that the NUB does need to start right away OR new players and only a new players FIRST character could maybe start with "more". Be it more money, more xp, more whatever. I think maybe a pool of xp that they can play with to sort through the different strats/spells/attributes. Add to that the ability to retrain for free for the first say month and you've given new players a lot of flexibility that may help keep them around.

This thread IS great and long over due. Thats clear just by the number of people chiming in and no one is throwing stuff yet. :)

PK - check back through Shade's threads, he's posted screenshots of every page of the tutorial before in an effort to improve it

Another suggestion would be to give a lesser tattoo to new players. This tattoo would be untradable, and be free to re-ink. I'm not sure when to give this out, maybe the mentors could after helping them with their strategy, or specific people in chat helping the new player out with their strategy. A level cap of 50,000 would be implemented so the newbie can't use it forever. (It's lesser anyways, so they probably won't want to stick with it). They could sell this to the store at the regular price that all lesser tattoos sell at, except it would dissapear once sold.

make the character used during the tutorial a "ghost" character...

I think that's the old one, that's not how I remember my tutorial look like.

Perhaps even a minor rework to the ToS... It really doesn't say much, so you could just make it a buncha checkboxes, so you're a little more sure that people read it, especially if you throw in an oddball :P Like, instead of:


* Carnage Blender is used by many people around the world. Competitive behavior is expected but users are asked to 'keep it PG' (i.e., civil and non-profane). This extends to character names as well as discussion posts and chat.
* You agree that all Carnage Blender accounts, characters, and items are and remain the property of Jonathan Ellis.
* You agree to use one and only one account.
* You agree not to share access to the CB account you use.
* You understand that any account on Carnage Blender may be modified or deleted at any time for any or no reason.


[] I Agree....


you could use:


[] Carnage Blender is used by many people around the world. Competitive behavior is expected but users are asked to 'keep it PG' (i.e., civil and non-profane). This extends to character names as well as discussion posts and chat.
[] I agree that all Carnage Blender accounts, characters, and items are and remain the property of Jonathan Ellis.
[] I am not interested in reading the rules or playing this game
[] I agree to use one and only one account.
[] I agree not to share access to the CB account you use.
[] I understand that any account on Carnage Blender may be modified or deleted at any time for any or no reason.

I have realised that as a player when I first joined CB I was impatient enough to skip almost everything and get down to the playing. This caused me a lot of problems in the latter days as a NUB. But now that I think of it I reckon it should be made mandatory for all NUBs to tinker around with ghost characters on the first day and chat as much as possible to understand the basics of the game. Also free retrains on the first day to be able to use different strats and free XP of around 15k to understand different skills.