Is it time for PoE to have a proper tutorial?

I personally have introduced 8 players to the game.
The first 2, we all had no idea what was going on, and PoE was hard as hell. It was awesome.
After a week or so, the currency explains itself,you have made 2 characters that sucked, and you are getting into a good 3rd character. Maybe you looked up some builds for ideas, maybe you watched some YT videos. I know that in my case, I did "research" and shared the knowledge with all my buddies. It wasn't too confusing once you got the basics down, we just had to share info we gathered.

PoE has a pretty solid community. Global chats are pretty full, and there are a few guilds that seem like they work together well. The average player is much more extremely knowledgeable in game-mechanics than the average player of almost any other game. This leads to the newbies getting great answers to any of their questions.

I saw "global 101" mentioned above. It's a wondrous idea, but most players won't get into it, as they won't know how. Lets take 101, lets twist it, turn it, and = Crazy idea: Add an "Advice" channel. Many games have it, and I was surprised when such a confusing game as PoE didn't. Make it an auto join chat, and add some pop-up blurbs for it during the Tidal run. We all know global 1 is too full of memers for any real questions to be asked. You are more likely to get "triggered" as a response than a helpful answer. 2 and 3 are little better. Add a new chat channel, impose a few rules, and people will help each other. It wouldn't just be for newbies, many vets have a few questions too. Sure, it might not be as full as G1, but those people who care about the newbie community will hang out there and help. PoE has many dedicated players, way more than enough to make an advice channel work.
(PS: Make the chat symbol the "?" because people are there to ask questions haha)

The idea is solid,but then again if it would be an auto join channel,it would become a spam fest and eventually deteriorate into what global 1 is.
One option would be to create a community-driven help channel that would work similarly to /global 820 which is used for sharing master missions,league specific stuff and help in achievement hunts,overtime it has gone so far that almost anyone who tries to use it for anything else gets instantly reported and blocked from talking in that channel,so if somehow players could kickstart a channel with same ethical etiquette only to dedicate it to helping new players,that would work,the problem is getting it started,and then filling it with people that actually know stuff,instead of people who think that they know stuff.
Then again,as i mentioned - all the info anyone could ever need starting from the very basics of movement and attacking down to rough theorycrfts and heavy maths of game mechanics can be found on forums.
For one reason or another we all come here,this is not a game that you can use forum just once in a lifetime to register account and forget about it,so one way or another,you will come here.

Well there used to be 5055,back in the day it was basically just that,a ''private'' general chat where most people were asking for help on different aspects of the game and things like random spam was frowned upon,but that was several major leagues ago,last i heard it's now just full of elitist-wanabes spamming their T1 items and calling anyone who asks for help a noob. And the biggest reason for that is that overtime that channel became too popular,so the issue is that a ''help'' channel or ''newbie'' channel would be swarmed at times with bad apples,and you cannot expect GGG moderators to sit in chat channels and manually mute anyone who goes off the rails.

The only case where this will actually work is if a group of people will dedicate them selves to mold such channel and manage to create atmosphere similar to other custom channels where almost anything other than the on-topic messages are not tolerated and instantly mass-reported as spam to get the infidel muted.

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Entropic_Fire wrote:

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uffert wrote:

it needs a written guide under the game tab explaining gems links jewels basics of the tree/ascendency but not an in-game one, your first character the one you wil totally mess up is the tutorial
is this punishing yes but that's wat peeps are complaining about the game is to easy: no its not you get gud (ofc some things are broken OP FotM but that wil always be the case)

Most of the people talking about game difficulty do so in the context of power creep at the top end. I don't think anyone would complain if GGG gave newbies an easier time.

Makes leveling new characters a slog though. Perhaps what we need is segregated leveling for multiple characters every league. Newbies and first characters of the league can do the easier story, but secondary characters will have access to more difficult, faster leveling potential content. Instead of quicksilvering their way to maps.

It's not that it couldn't work,it has worked in the past and few private purpose-specific channels are still working,tho with every month the random spam is slowly getting more and more intense the more exposure those channels get,they are usually at their best in start/middle of challenge leagues because that is when the largest number of players use those channels for their specific purpose,thus you have far more players enforcing the rule to stay on topic.
It's like the bigger problem is that these channels are freaks of nature,the planets have to align in just the right way to create a multi-verse where such channel can spawn with the right life forms to keep it clean.

E/g global 820 was created in Forsaken Masters (as far as i know) because bunch of players on reddit wanted a good way to share the spawns thus boosting the exp earning potential,word spread and the channel was doing fine,still is to some extent. Along with it trade 820 spawned since few individuals figured that they could charge for the quests and global did not like it,since the idea was to just share stuff between players,so here we are now with two different channels with two different ideas but for the same general purpose.

Those channels were created for a specific niche of players with a specific need for a specific purpose.
The question is:Who and why would kickstart a newbie channel? Players like me,who have played for years won't do it because we don't need to,then you have a huge portion of new players who just use forum,and even if they wanted to kickstart such channel them selves,they wouldn't know how to even begin.

Topics like these are generally cancerous because they are made for stirring up a pot that does not necessarily exist by a very small minotiry of playerbase.
In this case tutorials to make a game that is supposed to be hard with large learning curve,easier.
The argument that is made is that it would attract a huge player number that supposedly right now avoid PoE because they can't wrap their heads around it,sorry but a tutorial wouldn't help those individuals,the moment it would end,they'd still feel confused in their fuzzy little heads.
Another argument that is made is that PoE is losing players,and/or stagnating - again according to Chris this league set a new record for the number of players,just like previous league did,and the league before that,so clearly the game is getting larger with every new major patch or/and expansion.

As far as i am concerned,the tools are all around you,if you want your hand held by a tutorial which in PoE case would resemble a heavy mathematics lecture to even begin to explain the basics,you really ought to think if you've found a game befitting your needs.

A newbie channel would be the only and best solution,but as with all custom channels,someone has to start one,and then the miracle needs to happen for it to stay true to it's purpose. Not to mention the fact that sooner or later all custom channels die,they don't last forever,at least not in their original state.

We all,the hundreds of thousands of players wrapped our heads around the game,i don't see what has all of a sudden changed so much that the new ones coming would need a tutorial of any sort.
The idea always was for you to create your character and be thrown into a very mechanically complex and heavy game environment that you have to find your own way around.

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Aethroz wrote:

Crazy idea: Add an "Advice" channel.

Love this idea as a solution - and here's how you fix all of the pitfalls that people have been pointing out:

1) GGG makes it a base channel type like Trade and Global. (this solves the 'how does the community do it effectively?' problem)

2) This channel is clicked on for new players by default. Players with more than X hours played will not be in this channel by default when it is created. If the new players try to leave it, a box pops up explaining what the channel is, how they can use it, and how they can REJOIN it if they want to in the future. (this solves the problem of 'global 101 is cool, but how do new players know to join it if they're new and don't know how to join it?' also addresses the problem of it turning into Global 1)

3) Three strikes and you're out. Lots of people have expressed interest in being mentors in a channel like this. If GGG find 3 legitimate reports against you for jerking around in this channel, you can't rejoin, or you get a long timeout from it (solves the spam/troll problem) I would extend this to going off-topic and chatting too. It's sad how 820 has turned into a place where people just shoot the shit because they don't have a guild. That's not what the fucking channel is about.

This isn't about making the game easier. If you haven't clicked on the link in the OP yet, please do. New players ARE coming to the game. They ARE leaving it because the game doesn't communicate enough information or at least POINT THEM TO THE TOOLS that will allow them to get such information.

It's also about managing expectations (which this theoretical channel would be great at). The guy in the thread I linked was mad because in party play he had a full inventory and his unique flipped for someone else to grab. Now everyone here knows that that unique sucked. Like 100% was worthless. But that is IRRELEVANT TO THE NEW PLAYER. That's his loot. He's been conditioned to expect that, and he has no way of moderating that expectation if left to his own devices. That's just one example of many from his super long post. We don't need to change the rules for new players, we just need to communicate those rules to them before their expectations get dumped on.

Nice,good luck with that,really,hopefully it will work.
As for the game getting more complex,not really,at least i can't think of anything.
The masters are easy to understand,so is the crafting that comes along with them,inherently stuff like hideouts come along with it all as well.
Perandus league and labyrinth is quite self explanatory as well.
Since the beginning the mechanics to a very large extent have remained unchanged for the most part,the only difference is that there is now a lot more to do,more raw content,but very little new in terms of complex game mechanics.
If anything the early stages of PoE were much harder compared to how it is now,back in closed beta we had no forum full of guides,the tools we have now did not exist,the game was nowhere near as streamlined and polished as it is now,yet we managed just fine.

The best thing i can imagine that could eventually be added is a specific built-in channel tab for new players specifically created by GGG,right now we have two basic sections which is global and trade,underneath those you can go through however many channels you want. What about adding third section called ''Help'' and make it far more strict as far as reporting goes,right now you need a certain amount of people within a specific time span reporting you for spamming for you to get X minutes mute,what if that section had that requirement halved,thus making it a lot easier to get rid of bad apples.
But again,that would happen with the assumption that people would actually abide by unwritten rule to not go off-topic.