I'm a Guide on my main, and it's pretty interesting to see what questions pop up in Newcomer chat. The most common thing people seem to be having trouble with is using emotes. Or possibly that's just a mistake which ends up in chat, while other mistakes are invisible. The other major mistake, which is also visible, is talking in the wrong channel.
For background, one of the quests in the new introductory area of Exile's Reach asks you to /wave to an ogre (and then to /dance with him). It's very common to see newbies type "wave" or "wave to Gor'goroth" in newcomer chat (which appears to be the default for new players).
Slash commands are second nature to experienced players, so it's enlightening to see how foreign they are at first. It's possibly even more foreign nowadays in the age of phone and tablet apps, where everything is done through taps and gestures.
I wonder if WoW should follow FFXIV's lead and create an emote menu, with icons you can drag to your bars. You can do this now with macros (memories of /kneel macros to get the achievement for Fandral Staghelm in Firelands), but you can't expect a beginner to handle macros.
I do like WoW's implementation of the guide system a little bit better than FFXIV's mentor system. There's no visible marker for guides, unlike the crown in FFXIV. Guides can identify new players (murloc marker), and new players can identify guides (green flag marker), and both have access to Newcomer chat, but that's it. As a result, I think Newcomer chat is pretty helpful and sensible.
Taliesin did a video of his (completely unfamiliar with WoW) brother playing through Exile's Reach and I remember that quest catching him out as well. In his case he interpreted the slash as an "or", reading the instructions as "type or wave at Gor'goroth", which was definitely one of those "oh, I guess I can see how someone could think that" moments.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's one of those things that would give you a lot of trouble if you never encountered it before. Especially if you've never used a command line to interact with a computer.
DeleteI'm a guide on all my high level toons. It's nice to have civil chat and actually help people play the game. One interesting point is a number of folks actually want to play through all the expansions, in story order. They get irritated that they can't use Chromie time and have to do BfA first. It will be interesting to see if the BfA-for-first-50 ever gets lifted.
ReplyDeleteWell, thanks to Cataclysm, it's already too late to play in story order. I rather doubt we want to send newbies to The Burning Crusade first. I actually think BfA is a good first story. I really liked the leveling zones.
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