[dev1000] Tutorial and Direction for New Players

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

These are some things I would have liked to see when I was playing and some things I believe could help new players. I apologize if this has been implemented already since I haven't made a character in a while.

Short: Read only #1 and #2.
Long; Read reasoning to put #1 and #2 into perspective.

#1) Increased direction during starting missions (or missions in general). This would be an icon over the NPC or area of interest. This icon would appear both on screen and on the mini-map. Feature on by default, can be toggled on/off.

#2) Quest tracker on screen that highlights details from our journal of what to do next. Feature on by default, can be toggled off/on.

Reasoning: In Ul'dah's starting mission, I wandered around and if I went in the wrong direction, the screen would fade out and fade in. My position was reset. I didn't know what happened or why. I thought maybe I loaded to a different instance, but this was not the case.

After clearing the Ul'dah mission, in the aftermath, the NPC gives the impression we can head to our next destination on our own. But we can't. We get a similar position reset when exploring on our own.

This may seem negligent to us players now since we went through this phase in Open Beta, driven by our thirst to play the game and trying to figure it out. After we go through one city's starting mission, we can figure out other city's starting missions. But a newer player may experience these small hiccups, which set their first impressions of Eorzea.

The quest tracker portion comes in as that hand-holding / direction effect of what to do, as it's not always apparent. Using the emote quest as an example, I and others in Open Beta spent dozens of minutes spamming emotes at our targets. It wasn't immediately apparent to me (and apparently the others) that we had to demonstrate specific emotes to our NPC emote teacher, then practice them on our end targets.

If a quest tracker were present on this, I would have it read something to "Target X and show her emote Y". I know it sounds like too much spoon feeding, but I see this quest as easily deterring a new player away from the main storyline.

The less I have to look outside of the game on how to do things in the game, the better. A separate topic may be created relating to other thoughts on dev1000.

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

Thanks for moving this. Got a new interpretation of the feedback & suggestions and now it makes more sense where to place this.

[Dreamer]

The quest tracker portion comes in as that hand-holding / direction effect of what to do, as it's not always apparent. Using the emote quest as an example, I and others in Open Beta spent dozens of minutes spamming emotes at our targets. It wasn't immediately apparent to me (and apparently the others) that we had to demonstrate specific emotes to our NPC emote teacher, then practice them on our end targets.

If a quest tracker were present on this, I would have it read something to "Target X and show her emote Y". I know it sounds like too much spoon feeding, but I see this quest as easily deterring a new player away from the main storyline.

The less I have to look outside of the game on how to do things in the game, the better. A separate topic may be created relating to other thoughts on dev1000.

They seem to have fixed that particular problem the last time I completed the quest, but it does highlight how certain quests can form roadblocks if not carefully constructed.

I'm personally not a fan of excessive hand-holding in-game, but I can certainly see the need for more direction, especially early in the game. To that end, rather than beating the player over the head with NPC indicators and the like, I'd prefer to see something more subtle. Perhaps something as simple as a short message in the chat pane - "As you enter the inn, you see Badeon beckoning you to the bar."

One thing I would like to see is a quest entry for the next quest in the main questline if we're too low. Perhaps greyed out but indicates the NPC and level we need to be before we can attain it.

I'm not in favor of a quest tracker, but that's partially because A) I like as little of my screen as possible to be taken up by UI clutter, and B)I don't mind reading the quest journal entries to find out what I need to do next. The real problem is the sometimes vague entries, but that's something that would be better fixed with a rewording than implementing a quest tracker.

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

So far two quests have left me with question marks. The journal entry did not accurately depict the next step.

I.e. the emote quest, since it didn't have any info about the emotes.

And the companion quest, where after I gave a nickname to the companion, I wandered around for an hour and checked in several times with the companion assigning NPC waiting for an update.

Unfortunately for both of these, I resorted to outside resources to resolve.

The most important thing for the quest tracker (and tutorial messages) is an option to toggle them off.