Overhaul the starting quests of the Server for the sake of new players.

[RensetteParticipant]

When you keep your ears to the ground as long as I do, you hear lots of things.

Gripes from new players, things guys wished they had, what people feel like is missing from the server.
Sometimes it seems like they fall on deaf ears, so I figured I’d try polishing up something I hear a lot that rings true to me.

The early game of the server is a story of being shoved around, placed in front of NPCs and told to grind on an enemy until you can be placed in front of another NPC and grind on a new enemy, and If you’re really lucky, one of those NPCs might actually be a DBZ character.

I know there’s lots of talk about the server lore and stuff, but you can’t expect people to stay interested when they’re constantly told “Oh you’ll see the coolstuff later”.
Good content shouldn’t be used as a carrot on a stick, it should our introduction, to let people see that they can expect quality from the server in their training, the thing they’ll do for nearly their entire life on the server.

Part of my reason for making this post was watching Poke talk with a new player who wanted a “Storyline” from the server, something to make all their training feel like it actually amounted to something.
I can tell you that the story doesn’t end with Poke agreeing with him, instead he’s brushed off because hey, we’ve got plenty of story, it’s just the new guy’s fault that it’s scattered all over the server and we don’t have a Vaatividya to make a three part series on Simu.

We send new players to places like /warp plains, where instead of seeing someone like Gohan who offers to teach them the basics and encourage them with flavor text while fighting training dummies, they get a farmer and told to kill animals.

Then they’re sent to /warp rocky, where Piccolo gives them two sentences of dialog and has them fight underwhelming clones when they could battle something more interesting like different varieties of Saibamen while we save the fight against Piccolo for later.

Next on the list is /warp namek, which isn’t even much of a training area but it has a decent enough quest that after getting nerfed, still beats out /warp rocky in terms of utility.

Now we’re at the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, where dreams go to die.
I’ll admit that after the reset, the Time Chamber became a really cool place where people can actually find some interesting lore with the Simulation stuff, but it still suffers from the problem of not being DBZ enough to keep them interested.

Past that is the bizarre scenario where you kind of have earned the right to actually do DBZ stuff now, but none of it really matters with how disconnected it all is and eventually, you get on board the Underground train where story starts happening.

What keeps new players around isn’t the thrill of seeing a number go up or the idea that one day they’ll be the one with big stats, it’s the magic feeling they have of coming to the server full of wonder and mystery.
That feeling should be cultivated so that they’re riding that high as far as it can go for them, so that when they hit the wall where things get tough, they’re numbed up with that magic feeling to power through it.

We can say as much as we want that players leave us for other servers because they get more TP there, or they’re given forms easier, but it all boils down to them not having fun.

Just think about it, we give players flak for trying to find weapons to help them beat mobs as their training slows down and they run out of options.

We joke about people asking to become a Super Saiyan God to fight training mobs when just doing the best quests they can do doesn’t give them enough TP to raise even one stat.

If they start to wise up and ask why things aren’t fair, We tell them to suck it up because we did it too, even if we did it with uncapped weapons, cheap transformations, being carried, and before things got nerfed.

And to the unsung heroes, the players who despite it all, play through the pain and make it to the better training areas…
Their reward is being killed for sport by a player a dozen times their power for an ego boost while everyone looks onward with a disapproving look on their face, but not actually saying anything because they either don’t have enough of a reputation to not be told to shut up, or because they don’t want to be the guy who rocks the boat.

Despite all the progress that’s been made with building the server, the new and rising players are criminally overlooked despite how important they are.
They are our lifeline, the new blood that keeps the server filled and makes sure it stays alive when old players eventually leave.

By neglecting them and taking their naivete for granted, we’re only hurting ourselves when they eventually do run off for some other server and we’re asking ourselves “Why would they do that?!” and blaming the other side.

[PokeKeymaster]

While I’m personally down with revamping the starting training area, the main problem is that, in the end, people don’t really read as much on the content, most people even skip the dialogue. I’ve been trying to do starter quests for a while now, heck, I recently did a major revamp on Namek. But people didn’t care on that. Heck, my major fear on working on Friezatraining is the fear that people will just skip every bit of dialogue and just mindlessly do the quests, making months of work pointless by the end.

[RensetteParticipant]

But isn’t that a problem that comes up with everything?

I can bet Kuroi has noticed some people who don’t try to soak in the lore of the Underground, or who make it through Angel Skies without even noticing that there’s two sisters there.

What about the players who actually will read everything and digest the story like a fine steak, should they be the ones who suffer because a bunch of players ran through everything?

If this really does just boil down to wanting people who will appreciate what you write, then you have to show them that they can expect something engaging.
Just like how you can’t expect to catch a phoenix with chicken feed, you can’t expect to draw in engaged players with flimsy writing.

Because if you’re expecting them to talk about the deep lore behind Farmer Steve’s accent, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

[hauntedplayzParticipant]

I Agree With Your Points, For the Beginners there should be a story, like a proper good written story not pressing v and killing mobs.

[matuteharcosKeymaster]

Hero saga will be about that

[Author]

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