Consultation: new player onboarding, popup tutorials

[Chxlls]

As a newer player to the community, I’d say perhaps finding a way to better integrate the discord into the game would be a practical solution. There’s so much info to take in at first that adding more info in regards to IDs and rules might just be too much. And I didn’t find out there was a discord until after a month or so of playing.

One solution could be to make it required to fill in the Discord ID box when you create a forum account. You can still put it as N/A if you don’t have discord. But that way, a staff member could see that persons discord ID and reach out directly with the link for the Discord server. A large majority of people use discord, and I think it’s a more modern/simplistic solution that’s not gonna require (presumably) a ton of work on devs part to implement.

On the discord itself, there could be a ‘new player’ role and channel where there are designated “helpers”, staff or otherwise that can help with any inquiries a new player would have.

Spitballing here. Hopefully I’m making some sense.

[Kherty]

I strongly recommend against using Discord as a tool for beginners however useful it may look like, it remains fragile as a means of communication.

The server and software are practical - the company behind Discord will make sure to continue to drive the tool down to Hell and its users with it.

Essentially, it would be useful, but I am of the opinion that information on the forum and game are better.

This is simply my opinion. I make no statement with no definite objective behind.

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[Demonic]

As much as it pains me to say, I agree with Kherty. Discord is a useful tool but we don't have full control over it and so are vulnerable to unwelcome changes. Formu and server are fully in hands of disco Staff and so we can be sure the information presented there stays available.

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Links
Characters and feedback | Freelancer's Woes | MacRory's Irregulars

[Sally]

Let's not put the devs (nor anyone else) through the pain and misery that is dealing with Discord's disgusting proprietary API and ToS just to implement Discord chat ingame, even leaving aside the fact that it's a whole new can of worms regarding metagaming abuse, there's so much better and actually community friendly replacements for Discord to achieve such thing, like for example XMPP, which could be hosted on a community managed server, same for voice chat with Mumble by the way, the tools are out there.

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"I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute." - RMS

[Antonio]

Staff have recently been thinking a lot about how to onboard new players to Discovery, and making the whole server environment more accessible.
...
If you have thoughts on this, or other things we could do to ease new players into the game and community, let us know here.

I'll try and finish the compilation of about 20 different things staff could do, and could have done a decade ago, which has been brought up well over a 100 times by me and numerous other people, which staff have stubbornly refused to do mainly for personal ego issues, providing brilliant reasons like "its an old game why bother" and "but lazy players wont read it anyway" and "all we can really do it hope that random people on the internet will just be more excellent to each other".

Hopefully staff wont put more work into finding excuses not to do anything but the tiniest bare minimum, than it would take to do the whole thing, or allow someone else to do it.

Again.

Get to writing. Now’s your shot.

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SNAC Montage Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Thruster SNAC

[Levenna]

I haven't read every post in this thread so I apologise if it's already been mentioned, but I think a really simple step in the right direction (though far from the only one) would be to bring back new player ships spawning with the old discovery rules cargo item, as well as the history and.. I forget what the third one was.

I doubt every new player delves into the forums before trying out the game and if they see it in their cargo hold, they might just take a glance and be a little bit informed about what discovery is and what's expected. Mind you this isn't meant to be a suggestion to fix every problem imaginable, simply a step in the right direction.

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[03.07.2024] LNS-Beast***: we can do this every day but you have to buy bigger stronger ships...and i'll help you

[Saronsen]

replace the freelancers installation slideshow with a discovery related one instead
or add some other helpful bits in the installation folder in various languages. itll at least be seen more than the forums and the discord.

[jammi]

replace the freelancers installation slideshow with a discovery related one instead
or add some other helpful bits in the installation folder in various languages. itll at least be seen more than the forums and the discord.

That is a very cool idea, but the problem there is we'd then need to distribute the vanilla game files + CD crack as a part of the mod. Freelancer is abandonware and the odds that Microsoft would notice (or even care if they did) are remote, but non-0.

Possibly we could offer an 'induction' PDF as a readme option when you install the mod though.

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