- Jamin

I’m not sure I even know what caused that one, maybe something like ‘I may have spent money on this game, but do I actually feel like making the commitment that having a character will entail? Maybe not today, perhaps I’ll come back tomorrow…’. and I never did.

As for chat…

…in no MMO I’ve ever played, have I ever been given a tutorial for the chat basics, and in any game I’m unfamiliar with I always end up fumbling around the first time someone tries to talk to me, or I try to answer someones question, for what exactly in this game are the particular magic incantations for replying to tells and posting to the chat channel I actually want rather than the one the default chat window is pointing to (no /say is almost certainly not what I want in any given situation)..

No I shouldn’t end up googling for the list of slash commands apply to your particular game, and that inevitably aren’t even on your games website but a fan site instead. Not when chat is supposed to be fundamental to the whole experience.

Maybe they should disable chat to start, and have part of the tutorial walk you through enabling it and adding yourself to and removing yourself from the right channels.

And once one’s played one MMO, figuring out the next isn’t that hard.

I’m not really arguing against the early levels being easy. They should be somewhat easy as one gets a feel for the specifics of the controls and works out how squishy the class one’s chosen is and all of that. But, at the same time, I can’t help wondering if Pardoz and Inquisitor haven’t nailed it. That people are driven off by bad experiences with other players and/or that many of those low level subscriptions weren’t genuine players to begin with.

It’s an issue nowadays because the profit goal is long-term subscription, not one-time box sales. If you don’t get the hang of a Steam game, who cares, the devs already have your money whether or not you play the game – they might care because of word-of-mouth advertising or for sequel sales or whatever, but that is about it. Meanwhile, MMO companies live or die by sustainable sub numbers. If you quit in the first 60 minutes, you obviously aren’t resubscribing next month.

Besides, if Blizzard thinks they can get 10k (or 100k or 1k) more subs by appealing to Farmville moms or nongamers or whomever, why shouldn’t they do whatever is necessary to capture them? Us veterans can poo-poo on the forums and be indignant but Blizzard already has our dollars and the amount of people quitting because “HARD MODE level 1-5″ as Spinks terms it was nerfed is effectively zero. At this point, Blizzard couldn’t provide challenging leveling content for us even if they tried – we have too firm a grasp on the concepts and mechanics, and would recognize the difference between “I can solo the elite by popping X, Y, and Z cooldowns” and “there is literally zero way to defeat this mob/quest/etc with my class/spec/level.”

From personal experience, I have let people roll characters on my WoW account, and their reaction is, “This is it?”

I’m not sure what the best approach would be to fix this. Real-time enforcement is employee- (and thus money-) intensive. A compromise involving close monitoring of the default channels and zones new players see combined with a tutorial explaining how to add/remove additional channels (with a warning that they aren’t as tightly regulated, enter at the risk of your sanity) might work. I also suspect that generous use of the mod-hammer over the first six months or so after a game is released might pay off in the longer run, allowing one to gradually reduce the need for enforcement – it’s easier to house-train a puppy than a grown dog.

This was never true for me in MUDs, (I’m not sure any of them even had turning off chat as a feature) but then peak population in most of the MUDs I played was less than twenty people.

New players aren’t necessarily going to realize this is a possibility, or even desirable. WoW in particular probably needs to do something about that.

- somebody in zone chat calling everybody in the zone “gey nigerz”,

- figuring out how to turn off /emote text to shut off the overspill from the hawt futa sex scene playing out behind a nearby bush, and

- immediately after logging in being challenged to a duel to the death by a level 80 in full epic gear, who spent the next several minutes following me around doing the /chicken emote and spamming me with tells to “dual me fagit” when I declined the invitation.

A nice animated popup on the screen that neatly laid out how to use the WASD keys to move probably wouldn’t have made a huge impact on my desire to dig further, y’know?

The video could include clips of the various aspects of the game, a sort of teaser if you will, to entice the hesitant to stick it out.