Best Of

To semi echo the sentiment above, the last 18 months has been tumultuous at the least. As most of you know, I work in the events industry here in the UK - primarily as a singer and primarily at weddings - and Covid did a real number on that when it hit. Things have been really busy over the last month as we play catchup with all the cancelled events that rearranged alongside the stuff that was already in the diary!

However, this morning I got an email from the national wedding awards telling me that I'd been shortlisted as a finalist in my category. I do normally get nominated because it only takes a couple of happy clients to put my name forward. I'm usually more than content with that as it's very flattering that I seem to have left a positive lasting impact on those clients. However, to be a finalist, it means that a lot of people have taken the time to put my name forward and vote for me with zero prompting.

It gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction and pride that the work I do has made enough of a positive impression on the people I've worked for to have reached this point and win or lose, at the end of it, just knowing that is reward enough!

To me the easiest answer is to have them show up on GWHO as well as CWHO and give them access to GHELP even as a novice. I would also like to take this time to say I would absolutely LOVE org help permissions. I loved them in Achaea as it let me condense information down for novices and recent-novices so I can give them 3-4 files to read rather than say... bombarding them with 15 different GHELPS, many of which are not relevant to them until they become established.

I like this a lot. It gets around issues of guild switching (I'd say so, at least, since they're not shown as real members), gives novices the visibility they need to get helped by their guild (I know I don't check CWHO even half as often as I do GWHO), lets Guilds give novices access to class-specific and pre-membership help files as they see fit, and still funnels their questions to the more populated CNT channel. We wouldn't even need full help permissions, either. Just let us create GHELP NOVICEINDEX which gets shown to novices instead of GHELP INDEX.

We removed novices and new characters from guilds for the city-centric system it is now, and while it's good for impressing that cities are Aetolia's central driving organizations, and not getting dumped into an empty organization to fend for yourself, it's bad for new players and new characters to not see and interact with their guild until they graduate from the academy.

Keeping them out of the guild until they graduate deprives them of seeing the guild and class themes, they don't know what the guild environment and player count looks like, and they have no way to judge if they'll mesh with the guild culture until after they've lost the ability to easily change. This causes them to miss out on a core component of the game for at least 31 levels, and all of their novicehood.

Moving the brunt of the novice experience to the city was a good thing! More people to answer questions with CNT rather than a smaller populated GNT, better likelihood that someone is paying attention, etc. However! If a new player takes the time (doesn't get power bashed) and plays the game all the way through newbie dom on their own, it can take several hours of playtime spread out over several days, and never interact with what will become their guild - and when they finally DO land in that guild now there's a whole process of being pointed out as new AGAIN, a bunch of people who may have not noticed them on CWHO available and interested in them, and they may find that the guild sounds good on paper but they just don't mesh with the people - and they have to manually quit and find a player to let them into a new guild to try the process again.

tldr; Put newbs back in guilds so we can track them better, interact with them earlier, and decisions can be made while grace periods are still open.