@Thenomain said in New Player Onboarding:
@Arkandel
Okay, I'm going to rant. Not at you this time, just in general because this keeps coming up.
What in hell is the difference between typing in a Mu* client and typing in a web client?
A lot. The entire interface, including the client itself you're using to access the game. The presence of graphics and enriched text. The sense of familiarity and continuity from stuff you're already used to doing.
For example the very first part of doing anything on a game...CGen. Anyone who's played an RPG could fill out a character sheet and over the web you can actually show them a character sheet then have them click on the dots or whatever they're increasing and it's all visual right there on a page. On a MU* they need a collection of arcane-looking commands, sifting through help files and asking on channels, right at a time when they might (and most likely) never have used either a command-line interface, know how to look at help files or know how to use channels.
That's fairly effortless for seasoned players and not that hard to figure out for someone already hooked. But at that point they are not hooked; they heard from a friend or read something about these games and we probably have like 10 minutes' worth of their attention (I pulled that number out of my ass ) before they give up and go use a web chat or whatever kids do these days.
The typing you are referring to, the typing we can't and don't want to be rid of, comes later - once they're on the grid and they need to pose, or when they are chatting with other players. And even that can be vastly improved - consider the difference between a modern PM Hangouts-like interface with a multi-recipient page command, people logging on/off who need to be taken off or added, names with spaces in them, etc. The simplest things are what we can't improve.
Oh, and graphics. Making things actually pretty to look at. I don't need to tell you why that's important to gaining new users for a service. Have you seen some of the wikis folks like @surreality have been making? They look pretty damn neat - but they can't do much to improve the black screens with un-enriched text on them.
This stuff matters.