Newbie channel and better in-game documentation

[caladrian]

While the game is very engaging once you understand how it works, the lack of newbie-friendly information is a deterrent to new players. There are no tooltips for the abilities showing what they do (how is anyone supposed to know that exploration helps you forage?), no tooltips for what most craftable items do, no information on how combat works etc. One has to rely on external resources, notably the wiki on ringofbrodgar.com, for the information they need, but new players will generally not know where to look for it.

What I propose is the creation of a newbie channel that is set as the default chat channel for new players; a notice would be given on this channel whenever a new player would log into the world. New players could use this channel to ask for information about how the game works, and more experienced players would jump in to help them out. There would be an option to disable the channel for those players who weren't interested in helping out newcomers.

In addition, the players (myself included) could submit bits of in-game documentation, notably for item description tooltips. There are plenty of items that currently need this, clover and buckets being notable examples. The descriptions need to state how one can use the item, i.e. by right-clicking the item on another item, placing it in a container etc. While the wiki is clear about most things, new players have no idea that the wiki even exists, and would greatly benefit from immediate access to tooltip-based documentation.

[NineWorlds]

While I do agree that the game is very lackluster in terms of not be able to figure out what certain items do and or how to advance in the game - that specific aspect adds value to the game. Discovering how to do things on your own adds much value. My suggestion is just that jorb/loftar post a formal link on hnh's front page to the wiki.

[MagicManICT]

What I propose is the creation of a newbie channel that is set as the default chat channel for new players

There are no global chat channels. This is definitely not going to be a solution. Feel free to wait for a dev response here, but I don't think you're going to get much different. I agree it would be great, but it's just against design philosophies.

"Local chat" gets sent only to people you can see on screen. There will be realm and village chats once those become established. Village is only for members, realm for anyone present in the realm, but only globally when a member of the realm. You can chat with a party or pm other players anywhere.

Used to be one of (all, really) the custom clients used an IRC channel to provide "global chat" functionality, but nobody uses IRC anymore but us old farts and hard core internet geeks. There are some pretty popular Discord channels around, though I don't keep track of them myself.

I do try to make sure the H&H Guides post in "How Do I?" stays up to date with relevant links, but I don't do much writing myself.

[Burinn]

I've considered un-fucking the wiki. There's just so much that's out of date. It'd be a monumental undertaking frankly.