Just to counter the person who felt it was necessary to counter me for what ever reason, the other way takes less programming and is more intuitive for noobs because that's kinda how the SP starts. But what ever.
Just came back cause I remembered something else that needs noob-befriendment. The repping with bribes. Somehow it should be made clear that they dont apear anymore once you're green, cause many noobs lose their minds over non re-apearing bribes, and the necessity for double bribes (like zoner or freelancer) should be avoided. Double bribes are kind of a sploit anyway. Maybe make IDs purchasable at just green, and then they rep you to the IFF. Then a /dropiff can get you rid of it if you want. Or is there already something like a /resetrep? Can't remember.
(12-11-2012, 09:09 AM)Cannon Wrote: 'noob-friendliness' is probably my biggest concern and I don't have great answers for how to achieve this. Suggestions are welcome.
Simple. Don't make em start out in Pennsylvania where they undock straight into the fray with a frapping Starfly. Make em start out in a disconnected system similar to Connecticut. A "Welcome to Discovery" area with some explanations about the server. We can make sure to show off some of Disco's eyecandy there, too.
Heck, you could even make something like "around you you see a number of bases belonging to various factions. Please take a moment to inspect each faction (read the station descriptions) and decide which role you want to be. Upon docking with a base you will be disconnected from the server briefly while your character is updated. You will start with a simple light fighter of that faction."
Then have bases like "Liberty Navy - Liberty Police - Liberty Rogues" etc, which docking to one automatically causes a /restart to kick off, transferring you to a starting base for the faction, with a small sum of credits. No more repping required, you get a LF with rep to the faction plus the ID.
Many roleplaying servers I played on before (NWN ones) had such an area where you could basically customize your character prior to entering the game world. Discovery could benefit from something similar. It would require some minor FLHook programming to tie docking to specific bases, to kicking off a /restart action. And additional /restart templates would need to be built, but that isn't too hard to do.