Sindome Town Hall Meeting

Ways to make it easier for newbs to get started… thus... increasing the chance of adding more and more new chars.

And not scaring them away or making them angry so they leave.

(Edited by Lucifer at 9:44 pm on Oct. 21, 2003)

touch on how close we are to large quantities of cyberware, and the matrix.

share ideas on generating RP with eachother.  

Lucifer brings up a topic that i think needs a fair amount of discussion.

Why do new players not stay?
What happens to them in the 1st couple of days that make them go "woo! this is cool!" or "yeah. no. this sucks."

How does their interaction with GM's/players/helpfiles/the web site/the game world itself, help them in deciding if they are going to keep playing?

heh maybe SD needs an ombudsman. :P

Or something.

And yeah, there's a lot of info available ICly.

I hould get back to work unless I want to be one of those idiots that fails a course in her fourth year.

… I've talked to several noobs. And even started a char myself... which, even with me playing SD for over 5 years, died within 24 hours.

There are -alot- of new things that have made being a noob here hard. When I started Luc, people threw money at me to help me out... that didn't happen to the noob char i started, not saying it doesn't happen, just isn't as easy.

Another big one... a few areas that are accessable to exploring noobs... (Noobs ALWAYS explore...) That can kill them just by being there (Won't say where, IC issues.)

Topping the list is clone prices... 5k for a noob is ALOT... and they may not want to get a loan... updates are heavy handed as well. The 1k, 200c old prices were good for a noob. Easily doable. I know the prices were changed to try and make death more... important. However... oldbies really aren't affected, they probably all have alot of cash sitting around... 5k isn't much for them. So noobs get shafted on that end.

Other than that... lack of RP seems to be a problem. Most noobs don't know the spots, the Drome usually has something, but not all the time. If players were to move RP that could be anywhere to a more accesable location, we may be able to hook more noobs. ;-)

(Edited by Lucifer at 11:55 pm on Oct. 26, 2003)

Quote: from Lucifer on 9:53 pm on Oct. 26, 2003[br]…
Other than that... lack of RP seems to be a problem. Most noobs don't know the spots,

(Edited by Lucifer at 11:55 pm on Oct. 26, 2003)

Shit I've been here for 4 hundred som odd days and i still dont know where those spots are. course the mass majority of my 15 characters have not been the same type as my current one, so it's like finding the hot spots all over again.

yeah

It�s not HARD to make money ICly.
It really isn�t. (yes yes, I already hear the �wait till you have a new char� bit) But there�s been a good amount of progress (at least from my vantage point). There�s a fair amount of different, moneymaking avenues to suit all your potential characters needs. But Of COURSE it will be harder to become a millionaire then to eek off a small but �stable� living from the passing saps.

As it is, there�s a lot of chyen floating around in the game, even just from petty and small time shit…

I�d love to know the expectations of someone starting off their new character.
That�s a question I�d want newbies answering, because if newbies are coming into the game with the idea that within a week they will have 50k, a clone, armour and a gun, and they think that�s standard�  
I dunno, is that a good thing or bad thing?

I�d love to see all the �tips� that scroll across the bottom of the @who placed on the site.
Little things like �Great enemies make for great RP� (or however it is. ;)) need to be prominently shown. Little nitty gritty details that go beyond, "yey chyen."

... Someone said this somewhere, (ie. Not my original idea) but� i would love to hear and talk about posting RP announcements on the site. Things that EVERYONE and their dead goldsfish will have known about ICly anyways. As in, you know, the upcoming fights? While it's not hard to miss ICly if you're a regular player. It would be a cool thing to show newbies that stuff does happen other then "looking for chyen quests."

erm. i'm done. :biggrin:

I remember when the entire IC grid was an RP hot spot, heeh.

You could get/witness heavy RP just by idling on a street corner.

Ah well.

Hm..  how about a better way of getting new heavy gear into the game?  I dunno how this could be done though..

But with the GMs as busy doing other things as they seem to be lately, its gotten to be a little bit of a problem.

Unfortunately I can't seem to think of a good solution.  :(

Anybody got any good ideas?

I'de like to discuss player contribution,  player written scripts, and the barriers that prevent everyone from enabling themselves instead of waiting for the staff to enable them.

-Kevlar

Now thats a funny post. You're such a clueless ass sometimes Luc.

What Johnny is saying, as is Kevlar, is that we as staff are enabling ways for the players to contribute to the content of the IC world.

In fact, didn't you have desc-whore privies to fix typos when you started up there Lucifer? Same thing here, only on a larger scale. There are what, 5-6 staff members that are at part and full time activity right now, and there are over 15,000 rooms and items, thousands of pages of text back grounds on the NLM boards, and on the BgBB, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code and scripts.

I would say a good 10-20% of it is player contributed.

Players have always been the heart of the MOO.

That is one thing I would like to bring up at this town hall, is the player apathy issues and what the -PLAYERS- can do to fix it.

Cause I can't fix the APATHY of the PLAYERS. PLAYERS have to FIX it.

At least in part.

So that's one topic I think should be brought up. Why you PLAYERS can do to enliven your SINDOME experiances.

A good step would be leaving your cube/appartment/hotel.

A second would be to support player businesses.

A third would be to spend less time on the BgBB bitching and more time on the MOO bitching to the people around you…Do players even do complex poses when they are by themselves any more just for the enjoyment of being in character?

I would also like to see the issue of GM activity and the realities of our lives in conjunction with the MOO addressed. I'd like to hear some feedback from the players on what we as GM and Coding staff should be focused on for your enjoyment.

we should talk a little about player run business, I know of not less than 2 players that have entered a quest for realestate with no success. dunno why, when I have the admins telling me that now is a booming time for player run stuff.  so we can discuss it.

also the time gm's spend on what  is a great topic to discuss, that's why I mentioned voting for what's going on on 'the list' project list or whatever.  the only good conversation I've ever seen relating to that was the material worth thing.

I know this is somewhat IC information, but its publically known information (IE, Quickterm). Since it answers Jotun's question, I'm going to put it in. Also a note, Johnny cleared me talking on the subject due to its IC nature.

You said you haven't seen many players go for businesses… I can tell you with esteem personal experience that it is not impossible to do so. Just really hard.

When Luc was in his prime about three years ago... he started a private security agency, which was eventually renamed and became TERRA. For a full YEAR I RPed TERRA, I found clients, responded to calls for help, RPed the whole kit-and-kaboodle... even got uniforms made.

After a large amount of RP, and many hours spent in talking... (and alot of investments). Luc ICly achieved realestate, gun permits, and other IC info that I won't go into.

Now look at it. And please don't tell me it was all admin. Yes they fleshed it out to what it is now. But I put a good 2 years of RP into it to get it to the point that it was at.

(As a sidebit, at one point TERRA held PC 4 employees.)

I can name several other PC buisnesses, most of them tailors and bodyguard services... mostly because that's the bulk of PC run jobs at the moment. Realestate doesn't set in stone what a buisness is... you have to get it to work first.

Fifi : Noted and noted. I'll bring up more in the town hall, do come Fifi, I'd like new, mid, old, and everything there.

If one person asks it, others must be wanting to ask it:

YES players are allowed to come to the Town Hall, that is the reason for it in the first place!

:)

All are welcome, and encouraged, to attend.

You said you haven't seen many players go for businesses… I can tell you with esteem personal experience that it is not impossible to do so. Just really hard.

I didn't say I haven't seen many players go for business, I said I have seen some, and they have (for the most part) had little success.  here's why: the two main ones In my mind wanted real-estate, a place on red for their business, now unless there is some player out there that is holding on to said real-estate for no obvious reason, other than they have no need for money and like owining abandoned, and or almost never used buildings, then somebody is holding out.  

now I've been told by multiple admins that in the recent few months charcter run business has become easy to start and run, and is booming.  maybe for the doc in CWH on green, but nobody is getting any property on red.  

that's what I'm trying to say.

no diss, just hard facts.  

What kills a player-run business is the fact that there isn't enough -business- to support them. Location has NEVER been a factor.

And I have no interest in faking customers thru npcs or ambient shoppers due to the incredible ease of abuse.

The buisness problem..yeah amibient population and NPC shoppers could be abused, but if say there was a GM in charge of watching over the player ran buisness's they could control the amount of ambient compensation. Either that or depending on the type of shop, the area, and the renown of the owner, a GM could set a flat weekly or monthly payout to the buisness account, which would not be negotiable, if the player thinks he's getting a bum deal then he doesn't have to start a buisness, I mean what we're talking here is essentially FREE money, just for owning the buisness you'd get a payout.  But as I said there's things to take into account and there'd have to be a GM to take care of it.  And as far as further down the road, if a person thinks that with advertising or special sales, or a sudden pick-up in the need of the service or good they provide that they're ambient earnings should increase, they could bring it up to that GM.  Now on the other hand, if there's a buisness out there that is getting -no- players shopping/eating/drinking/copulating there, or if the player who runs the place is found out to be something undesirable in the area that their buisness is in the ambient earnings should be dropped.  If the player doesn't like it he closes up shop just like any other shop owner would do if their buisness went belly up.

Last time I logged on as a coder I wasn't needed.

Wasn't my call.

Just so you guys know, I plan to attend the "Town Hall Meeting," however I have an exam that evening and may be a bit late.

Just a heads-up, I guess.