Best Posts in Thread: Changes to Increase Player Retention

• Background

So earlier today, I witnessed a very familiar scene in Tutorial. Two new players (who clearly knew each other) joined at about the same time. Doing what I usually do, I warped there to talk to them, and get them started. As I was helping a third player who had joined right before them, they said something, then immediately left right after that.

• The Problem

What that noobie said is why a lot of new people leave; "Wow, this server is so dead. There's only four people online???" Before I could even type anything else, they both logged off. Bear in mind, this was at 6:00 P.M. EST, so there was around 60-70 players on at the time. Here's the problem: because the Tab only shows players in the same world, they thought the server was empty! Bear in mind, this is Tutorial, so why should any experienced player be there besides those who come to meet new players? As a result, we get a lot of possible players leaving simply because they think the server is empty. Why should they play on an empty server?

• Solutions

-First Idea
So my first idea is to change the way the Tab works. Change it so it shows every player on the server, no matter what world.
Advantages to this would be: 1. It shows new players exactly how many players are online, not just those in Tutorial, for example. 2. This would make cross-world chatting/teleporting easier, as you can type part of their name, hit Tab, and it'll try to fill the name in automatically. So, for example, say you are trying to message me. You type your /msg, /pm, or /m, then type "clue" (FYI, my IGN is CluelessKlutz), then hit tab. Unless there are other people in the world with "clue" in their name, it will fill in the rest of my name.
Disadvantages to this (that I foresee, please point out any others) are: it could be hard to see all of the names in the Tab.
-Second Idea
So my other idea is to enable the full server Tab only in Tutorial. Honestly, I don't know if this is possible, so I would like the opinion of those more familiar with code. This would therefore only affect players in the Tutorial world, which would alleviate this issue, while keeping everyone else's Tab the same.

• To Be Discussed

So, now I turn this idea over to everyone else. Here are things I feel need to be discussed:
Are there other issues that you can think of?
How easy would this be to implement?
Which variant of this works better for everyone?
Are there other ways to do this?

Thank you all for reading, and have fun!

 

I was under the impression the new Tutorial would be the same world as it is now, with reworked holograms and such.

I am not necessarily disputing this, but I have seen it several times. Towny is a gamemode that appeals to a lot of vanilla players because it is generally very peaceful. The fact remains, this happens, and I want to do everything I can to not get players to just join, but stay.

I completely agree with this, but while I was privileged enough to talk about it a lot with the one actually redoing Tutorial, @Lady_Hestia , I was unaware it was going to be released with the new spawn.

Again, I agree. However, this does not change @XxX_SpiderStrike_XxX 's point:

The majority of players spend their time doing one of two things: making money, or working on towns. Both of which cannot be done efficiently in the Spawn world. Spleef is not an effective way to make money, and neither is Terrarium. I feel that unless the new spawn has more ways to make money built in to it, it's never going to have many people. Usually, if people just want to sit back and relax with friends, they do it in either Towny or Creative. If this is as easy as @Jalapenos describes,

then I think this would be beneficial overall. Besides increasing player retention, it also allows cross-world tpa'ing to be faster, and just makes things feel bigger. It feels good to look in the Tab of say, Beta, and see most of it filled with so many friends.

Just a reminder, if I disagree with anyone, it is because I don't agree with the idea, not the person.