Noobs, noobs and more noobs :D

[ToejamS]

Every day seems to be bringing more and more new players to the game. Many of which have never played a person. These guys are the future of this game. Players drift away from the game, its natural and we need players to replace them if the community is to survive.

The idea of this thread is to help welcome newbies to faf and get their game happening. I have a couple of suggestions to try and streamline their learning, as we all know this is a difficult game to learn and impossible game to master.

Back in the day on gpgland, there was a mentor/mentee system that worked well. On the elo system, you mentory would be 200-300 points ahead of you. You would play a few games, post the replays, he reports and chews you out for dumb shit and do it again, hopefully with less mistakes. This however takes players that would be dedicated spending time with said noobs to teach them the game.

We need more noob freindly games. Mebbie noob tournies. There wouldnt be a great turnout for these but we need something to get these guys off the ground so to speak.

Anyone with some idea's please put them here. Lets welcome fresh meat to the party

[FunkOff]

Idea: Make mercies worse against ACUs so noobs are not scared away by merc snipes.

[Karottenrambo]

Idea: Make mercies worse against ACUs so noobs are not scared away by merc snipes.

You madman! Thats extra heretical!!!

[-_V_-]

*OR* learn then how to play ?

[pip]

Gowerly started video tutorial. But Gowerly disappeared. I hope it's temporary.

[Kryo]

well we didnt learn to play with mentor/mentee systems either. We watched replay, and some of us, me included, played since day 1 and we had noone to learn from. Livereplay is awesome, if the new players would want to learn, they could watch replays and live replays and ask here in forums.


But sure, if enough mentors and mentees are found, this system is cool too.

[uberge3k]

I've already been more or less doing this myself - I have an open invitation for training in my profile on GPGNet and offer to whomever seems interested in learning the game. I've helped several people this way, but the problem is twofold:

1) There's no way of advertising it other than word of mouth - and some new players are shy about participating in chat.
2) It's a fairly ad-hoc system - what would be perfect is if there were an option to host a "training" match, where the mentor could both observe the entire game and still chat with the "mentee", to point out in real-time what's going on.

To expand on point #2, it might be useful to remove score from the game, so that others wouldn't be afraid of playing against a new player that has "help from above" in such a way. And possibly add avatars/other rewards to encourage participation, once those systems are in place.

It might also be useful to have an "open training" type system - eg, a mentor could host a game specifically marked for training that anyone interested could freely join.


Finally, learning FA requires a deep commitment from the player. It's not something that can be forced. Those who do wish to improve can typically find these resources on their own, by asking other players and searching for guides/videos/etc. I think we should focus on trying to sway the "almost-committed" by making these resources more obvious and readily available.

[Raging_Squirrel]

everybody keeps saying that we need this or we need that, it should be better that way etc. etc. etc.
why don't you just sit and make such thread? spend your precious time, gather and post all the info you think would be useful. it's spread out on the forums (here and gpg), you don't need to think of something on your own.
It's better to spend 30 mins to make something useful rather than waiting forever until some other guy makes, isn't it?

[Gowerly]

I actually made 3 "This is how you play FA" videos. Then my PC blew up and I needed to fix it. I'll see if they survived.