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[Your View] How can we improve Monk Guidance?


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Monk Guidance; Your View


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Hello everyone!

 

Recently, the Community Team’s been talking about how we can improve monk guidance on LotC.

 

The team is interested in hearing y’all’s thoughts. How can we improve guidance? What do you like or dislike about guidance? Is monk guidance helpful at all, or is it completely useless?

 

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What is Monk Guidance?

Monk guidance is essentially what the Community Team uses to help teach new players about the server! We teach them the essentials to roleplaying; things like emoting, chat commands, common rules that are broken by relatively new players. We also take them to the nation(s) of the race they applied for. For example if a Human player applied, we’d take them to a settlement such as Oren or Haense!

 

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Who does Monk Guidance?

Monk guidance is done by monks of course! More specifically Wilven Monks, which are the persona’s used by the CT team for introducing new players to the server, and maintaining Cloud Temples beautifully kept grounds.

 

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Why are we changing Monk Guidance?

We are trying our best to reduce the amount of OOC communication between the new player and the CT member performing the guide, to help them understand the basics of roleplay as well as get acquainted with the chat commands. Practice makes perfect, of course!

 

We’d like to see more players who are new stay on the server. Sometimes new players find it difficult getting engaged into roleplay when they don’t know anybody around them, or are even too nervous to engage.

 

Creating a good first experience for fresh players is our top priority, and expanding and changing the way we do monk guidance is a good step in the right direction for helping make that first experience a meaningful one.

 

Monk guidance right now seems kind of tedious, it’s like a half an hour tutorial that you can’t get out of when you first start playing a game. To change that, we’re trying to make the monk guidance more enjoyable for new players as well as Community Team members!

 

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How can we improve Monk Guidance for New Players?

Have you ever had a negative experience with the monks?

 

As a New Player, were you helped by a monk?

 

Did the monk guidance give you a better understanding of how the server works?

 

Why or why not?

 

Do you think that monk guidance is beneficial to players who are new to the server?

 

As a new player, were you left feeling more confident after being helped by a monk?

 

Do you feel that the monks are necessary for assisting new players on the server?

 

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In my over 7 years of being on this server, I have never once seen a Wilven Monk

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im second!!! (i dont have anything to say except Im early and that I am here before this thing, hopefully if my prediction is right, blows up)

Edited by Ayoou
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I feel like monks are horribly underused. Last CT post said there were 2 players guided to Renelia by monks and I don’t even remember seeing a single monk come there. Yesterday I had the first actual monk. Most of the time I find myself having to contact new players who applied as Dark Elves living in my charter myself, even though the CT should be the ones guiding them. To me it has always felt like it’s just a thing that the CT do if they encounter a new player at CT.

Also, how does the CT management avoid bias with monks? It’s super easy for a CT to just guide a player to their own settlement even when it was not mentioned in their app. If such cases are stumbled upon, then how does the CT react to that and will they punish members of their team who intentionally take new players away from other charters? It still to me feels like a super unreliable way of getting new players and one that can easily be abused by the team.

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Resurrect Monk Bonk and let his glorious eyebrows take the wheel. 

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ANSWERS

Spoiler
  1. How can we improve Monk Guidance for New Players?
    1. Currently, I don’t know what monks do for new players. I’d say that monks should be available in game as much as possible to assist player’s questions, but also I’m sure new players have more varied problems that they need full community integration to solve.

 

  1.  Have you ever had a negative experience with the monks?
    1. No, but I dislike that the monks are these mysterious, unheard of faction that works only to enact the most confusing rule on the server. I want to see them out and about, almost as part of the event team. 

 

  1.  As a New Player, were you helped by a monk?
    1. No. I have never been helped by a monk, sans the bread chest on the 3rd map that players were banned from taking too much bread from. 

 

  1.  Did the monk guidance give you a better understanding of how the server works?
    1. No, not at all. When I first joined the server I was pretty confused.

 

  1.  Why or why not?
    1. There wasn’t a monk there, so I think the lack of presence was what mattered. 

 

  1.  Do you think that monk guidance is beneficial to players who are new to the server?
    1. I honestly do not know. I PM new players and try to help them by giving them jobs, voting info, and helping them pick a town to live in. That seems to be beneficial. Can you show me what monk guidance is?

 

  1.  As a new player, were you left feeling more confident after being helped by a monk?
    1. Again, I was not helped by a monk.

 

  1.  Do you feel that the monks are necessary for assisting new players on the server?
    1. Personally, I hate this question. I don’t know if the monks are necessary. What I know is that for years they were the weird project of an Admin, and other than that, they have never been operated with any creativity that I have seen.
    2. What I want to see is something reliable, which I think means outlining end goals for when a player is considered “not new”. Wether or not some odd monks make this happen, we need to have a good understanding of what integration means. Housing? Joining a group? I think players who can never place a block of their own and don’t have a reliable RP source are likely to leave. 

 

 

 

MY THOUGHTS ON RETENTION

 

Spoiler

 

This question of player retention is bigger than the Cloud Temple monks, and more people need to engage with new players. The idea of the CT monks is in the back of my mind, because the monks are going to leave the player at some point to fend in the world. Integrating into the server is a different problem if the CT monks are just there to show a noob the basics of RP and some chat commands. 

 

Regardless of if the Community Team pivots towards a more long term strategy, the bedrock of player retention is still going to be their integration into a faction, group, or nation. New players leave this server for four reasons in my eyes: 

 

1) They get dogged in CRP/PVP and quit.

2) They can’t build anything.

3) They can’t find anyone fun to RP with.

4) Our rules and chat system are hard to understand.

 

Joining a community solves all of these problems, as communities have rights to defender default, restricting and granting building perms, providing continuous RP, and can clarify rules and plugin questions. This is why I think getting a house or joining a group is important for retention.

 

These problems are everyone's to address on the server. Telanir recently wrote about give and take, so I think we should be giving more to new players. Otherwise they might not understand why they can’t build anything, or why they can’t become a wizard, get confused and quit. 

 

 

MY QUESTION FOR MONKS

 

Spoiler

Can you post screenshots of the work you do? I don’t know what you’re doing. I never see you. 

 

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As a totally new player that joined Monday, I think the guides and whatnot on here need a major revamp more than Monks need to change anything in-game yet. 

 

The list of mods to install is outdated and you don’t find that out till after you’ve downloaded everything. 

 

There’s really no explanation whatsoever about the economy or how it works and how it’s 100% player-ran besides voting, and that literally everything is reliant on RP and that there’s no rank system or anything like that that other RP towny/faction servers tend to have (this was the biggest hurdle since 99% of Minecraft RP servers have some sort of admin shops/ranks/towny). 

 

There’s really no explanation whatsoever about any plugins the server has, nor is there really anything about locking/lockpicking which seems like a pretty vital thing to know as a new player since unlocked chests can be stolen from.

 

 

There’s really no explanation on creating other persona’s, and how that’s handled if you have 2 or more characters. 

 

There isn’t any explanation as to what you should actually do as a new player starting off, as the new player guide is just a more in-depth review of rules and breaking down what RP is and that (IMO) does absolutely nothing on what you should expect to do as a new player when you first join.

 

Like as a new player, I have no idea wtf to do besides joining a Kingdom and then...? If the info is out there somewhere, it’s really hidden and not easy to find. 

 

Edited by Walterdog12
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2 hours ago, yopplwasupxxx said:

In my over 7 years of being on this server, I have never once seen a Wilven Monk

 

Hi! This is how much monk guidance we’ve done so far in the past 2 weeks: 68fd921c4eed8adee10da1a625bca259.png
https://gyazo.com/68fd921c4eed8adee10da1a625bca259

As you can see, we do monk guidance, just unfourtunately, you probably don’t run into us. It happens. 

 


 

1 hour ago, Luminaire said:

I feel like monks are horribly underused. Last CT post said there were 2 players guided to Renelia by monks and I don’t even remember seeing a single monk come there. Yesterday I had the first actual monk. Most of the time I find myself having to contact new players who applied as Dark Elves living in my charter myself, even though the CT should be the ones guiding them. To me it has always felt like it’s just a thing that the CT do if they encounter a new player at CT.

Also, how does the CT management avoid bias with monks? It’s super easy for a CT to just guide a player to their own settlement even when it was not mentioned in their app. If such cases are stumbled upon, then how does the CT react to that and will they punish members of their team who intentionally take new players away from other charters? It still to me feels like a super unreliable way of getting new players and one that can easily be abused by the team.

 

Hi. Monks are not underused, we actually roleplay them and guide new players every day. Unfourtunately, since there were only 2 players guided, they probably just weren’t while you were there, as that’s two very specific instances. We offer monk guidance to everyone. We add to their accepted response to run the /creq command. We PM them after acceptance on discord asking them to run the command. If they don’t run the command, we unfourtuantely cannot sit around in CT waiting for a new player to appear ❤️

 

We watch who is sent where. There have been concerns brought to me by management with certain individuals, and each time, it’s been handled, so we are looking out. And when a nation is receiving a lot of new players, I instruct my team to initially suggest alternate nations (unless the player specifically requests said nation). This occured about five minutes ago due to the high number of Oren players. I announced that CT members should focus more on the other human nations since we’ve guided a load to Oren so far. 

 

If you have any specific instances that you’d like to discuss, reach out to management or myself in PM’s. Abuse is certainly possible in everything, even with applications. It is very easy to abuse practically everything. That doesn’t mean it should be rid of. The abuser will always be punished, but that doesn’t mean that the system in question should be removed altogether if a few abuse. 

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When I first joined years ago, I know the monks were a thing but they never approached me. I know it’s important to reach out, but lots of players are too nervous to bother someone they don’t know. So, especially in WS chat, it’d be pretty useful for monks to directly approach new players who seem confused, even with just a /msg.

 

Secondly, the monks really are super mysterious and confusing. They live at Cloud Temple, but they have little to no lore or reason for being there or for knowing the lands. I think this adds to the issue that most monk guidance has ooc chatter; there’s little to go off of irp. Thus, I think it’d be helpful to establish a more structured base for the monks, give them some more intriguing lore, and have them be more involved in the world itself. They can retain their neutrality and even have that be enforced ooc, but I personally believe that players would feel like they’re actually learning to participate in the server better when they’re interacting with a people who are involved. Likewise, it would give monks more of an incentive to rp as their characters and generally be around for when new players need help.

A third idea, that could be more flexibly changed and would probably require more thought, would be a volunteer system for established players to guide a new player. Some sort of sign-up or mentor system located near the Cloud Temple (or in the forums/Discord) that new players could voluntarily sign up for themselves. I think that would take a load off monks who don’t have all the time in the world, and allow new players some more freedom in the kind of help they receive, especially since they’re already interacting with grounded members of the playerbase. The volunteers could focus on general info or be nation specific, allow the new player to establish themselves in a community, and the new players would have square choice in who guides them, to avoid any nation pressure or bias.

 

By all means, this system may not be perfect and could use much refining, as most of it is just thoughts spewed from my mind within the last five minutes, but I think something of the sort would open up the resources a new player can access and encourage many to explore the world alongside someone who willingly introduces them to what they’re most familiar with.

The monk guidance system is flawed, but it’s a concept that could grow into something great. I appreciate the concern and efforts to improve on it, so keep it up!

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When I joined in Vailor I got guided around by a rando dwarf player who spent the entire time in looc trying to convince me to play a dwarf instead of the human character I was on.

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I think there are two main issues that I see with new player guidance on the server. And correct me if I’m wrong, I can’t observe the entire process myself.

 

  1. Too few CT members for each player and a lack of personal resources/time.
  2. Too much reliance on staff members to curate experience.

A:  This isn’t a criticism of the CT as it is a fact of life. There are a lot of new players that join the server. CT’s have their own lives, and even their own characters (*shocker*) to play when they log on. The amount of immediate support to guide/assist new players personally ingame (which will always be the best method) may never match the demand. I think that in addition to CT members assisting new players individually, we ought to network with the existing infrastructure of recruiters in different nations. They have the time and want to give new players the best possible experience (for retention purposes), and will do so far longer than any individual CT. If we have a blend of CT support and verified recruiters from different nations, it is the best possible combination for a new player.

 

B: Same issue as above. It’s a manpower problem. I’ve been really gunning for a tutorial island build. When I was GM way back in the day, we were actually planning it for the 4.0 release, but it got sidelined for whatever reason. Have a mandatory cute floating island that runs through all the basic pointers. This gives both the new player & CT more to work with and eases the manpower problem. If you can automate a portion of it, I say fly with that.

Edited by Treshure
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I think it’s important to get players involved in RP they will remain invested in so they don’t just go to a city and log off after 20 minutes. Encourage them to become a guard, or be a tavern worker, etc. Not just “join a nation!!!1!” When I joined in Vailor, I was recruited by a Kha player into a guild, and I probably wouldn’t even be playing LOTC today if it wasn’t for that. It’s because I had something I was invested in and a reason to play LOTC. It’s important to give players a reason to log on other than “you can roleplay” because that alone is really vague and leaves someone with so many options, but most of the time new players wont know how to look for those RP opportunities.

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I got accepted about five days ago.

 

Right off the gate I think I can honestly say I would’ve probably quit if I didn’t bump into a select few players. It’s just overwhelming, so many things that I had to learn on the spot with no tutorial. I think before even going out in the world there should be some tutorial world that shows me how to emote, how to use the #chat system, how to lock chests, how to lock doors, how the world is set up maybe with like an in game map or something. I guess having a monk to show me around would’ve worked, but if you’re a new player like me who happens to log in when a monk isn’t around then you’re out of luck I guess. It should just be a plugin/NPC’s doing the tutorial for you. Anything that relies on players to do will only work in certain time windows.

 

Secondly, trying to find out how to do stuff aside from RPing was a total mess. As someone who likes the RP, it was a little weird seeing how much OOC I had to deal with in order to get stuff. I arrived at the Dwarven city as a new guy, and the process of getting a house or a mining permit or whatever else was based entirely on being in a discord and talking to people OOC to try and get access to certain things, and on top of that there was a bit of a wait time since I had to wait for certain people to log on to add me to doors and things. This lead to literally days of not being able to do much and being kind of lost. I can say now that I’m like 5 days in and dealt with all of the OOC talks to get access to things, I am starting to get the hang of it. But if I happened to not be willing to wait those several days for access to stuff, I probably would’ve quit.

 

 think there needs to be plugins that help out new players like me in the start of the game as a tutorial. And there needs to be plugins in general that let me buy a house in a city or buy a mining permit and get access to my house or the mine without having to talk to five people on discord, or filling out a google document (which I’ve already had to do a few haha). Maybe some kind of Kingdom plugin where the leader can just set criteria, set a price, and anybody can come in and buy it if their character meets the criteria to make the purchase. That down time of having to wait for people to log on to give me things was pretty lengthy, and I can see a lot of people quitting because of that.

 

TLDR: I don’t think the monk idea of manually giving players tours is a good streamlined solution, I think plugins can deal with this much better. There also needs to be more plugins that support not having to go through all of the OOC paths of google docs, discord, etc. I’ve probably engaged more in OOC than RP trying to get set up.

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I personally joined about two months ago. I already had a few friends on the server so I was pretty well off in the beginning. When I had gotten accepted I saw that the CT member has said that I could /creq. I personally thought the whole thing was embarrassing and was afraid to do it anyway. I feel that if the monks were perhaps played more actively around CT or in more populated areas, maybe going up to new players and asking if they need assistance might work out better for both the monks and new players.

 

To sum it up, I just feel like the monks should be more actively roleplayed in CT. It might just be me not seeing them, but they should be there more. Or a tutorial island, that might be fun too.

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Have you ever had a negative experience with the monks?

Yupper-do I sure did. I watched a Monk bring a Snow Elf to HELENA before Fenn even though players were in Fenn. Though I heard that that got taken care of it was still alarming As someone who is helping run a nation that is really reliant on the new Snow Elves that come in I feel that a monk should check the person’s application really quick to ensure they are being guided to the right place. If they say that they are from such and such nation they should be brought there and even be able to ring the rally bell if necessary. There is more than likely someone who is willing to come on and help the new player rply and oocly if we are told about it. The lagpocalypse hit nations hard and trying to recover from it can be difficult for more race built nations, and you cannot expect one or two people to idle for 12-14 hours a day doing almost nothing waiting for the new players to come back if there is a notification system.

We didn’t even get an incoming-new player ping for someone into they were already in our Nation with the Monk guide that brought them. 

 

As a New Player, were you helped by a monk?

 

Yes- and it was a wonderful experience since they made sure I got to the nation I needed to get to and introduced me to a few people who could help. You specifically Muffins. 

 

Did the monk guidance give you a better understanding of how the server works?\

 

Yes it did, because they taught me everything about emotes, emote colors, chat channels, the whole works. Granted- this was almost a year ago now (I came onto the server the last week of June last year). They were kind to myself and were even willing to rp with me a little and made sure I was fully settled in and talking to other players before leaving me for my RP journey. Though I never saw that Monk again- I am still thankful for them. 

 

Do you think that monk guidance is beneficial to players who are new to the server?

 

Yes, specifically for those who need a specific destination they need to be brought to. Once again, as a race-based nation and a player who had chosen my character for that nation they should be brought to the specific place as needed to prevent people from swindling them and bringing them to the wrong place. Bandits are also a pretty big issue as well since new players know so little as it is it can be overwhelming.

 

As a new player, were you left feeling more confident after being helped by a monk?

Yes. 

 

Do you feel that the monks are necessary for assisting new players on the server?

Yes. I do. Of course certain races like Elves and Humans are free to explore and chose their new destinies- but if a person wants a specific nation they should be helped by a non-biased member to get them to that nation. And to teach them the rather complex nature of the server itself- though I do agree with the point of few that if we had a cleaner UI to the help system it would be so so much better.

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