Seriously. I know you have a video planned to explain what changes you are planning to make to the tutorial part of the game so I wanted to make this post in advance of that but..

You are seriously selling your product short by not putting your pilot in the hot seat and straight into the battle from the first minute they press 'login'.

Just send them straight into the fight and show control buttons on the top of the screen with some stylized voicework and replacement ships if they happen to conc out (SVG for Serco, Warthog Defender for UIT and Centurion IBG for Itani). Show the ships at the picking screen (redesign them to look sexier) so that people get a unique sense of their race apart from just Blue/Red/Yellow and send them straight into combat guns blazing.

Just whatever you do, please do not think that adding voicework to your historical approach of doing a tutorial is going to see a substantial increase in subscription conversions - you need to think about what you want to showcase first, and layer tutorial elements on top of it later and you'd be bat-shit crazy not to showcase the massive combat scenarios (whether it be hive or deneb style, I suggest hive for UIT and Deneb style for Serco/Itani) that occur all the time in actual play.

Sorry for the blurted rhetoric but I just played the tutorial for the first time in a long time and it is god awfully boring I'd forgotten how much so.

Now everyone feel free to post tutorial ideas and hijack the thread with your vision of the revised tutorials and so help me god if Alloh uses ONE bullet point or fancy substitute text-based organizing system in my thread I will hunt him down and do bloody murder to him!

this is true, the current tutorials are only helpful to players who grow up to be boring like traders or miners

-And they still aren't helpful
-There is too much text
-Have to click next too much
-You talking all the boring text instead isn't going to fix it, might make it worse
-Actually I have decided it will make it worse

I actually agree with this. Good games that you play typically throw you in a combat situation incredibly early. I like the idea of letting new players (for just this combat tutorial) play with a really nice ship, specifically their race's signature fighter, allows them to get a feel for combat. Fighting lumbering oruns in your own lumbering piece of crap is kind of meh. It's like throwing rocks at a herd of cattle. Most game tutorials that throw you into the mix right off basically give you "training course" that looks like a real combat situation. One by one, there are obstacles that inform you on how to overcome them in some way or another. I could see this working for vo, especially if you choose a linear approach. You could a hollowed out asteroid with tunnels (which I know some of that already exists). Really, you could even make this first instance singleplayer before actually logging on to the real server. Incorporate some of the deneb skirmish stuff to give them an idea of the larger battles that happen.

You really want to showcase the game and all it offers right from the bat, at least a taste of it. This has my full support.

+1
There's nothing much exciting in the beginning of the game, it does get quite boring after a while.

+1

When I first logged in, wanted to try PvP, to see what it looked like... and not to read text walls... Then, I gave up...
For some reason, I came back with a topic "wish-list" style, and from some of the answers, decided to give it another chance and subbed. Then got a mentor who teached a few PvP moves, and got addicted :)

So, hell yes, give all players a PvP taste from minute 1. No matter if it is instanced, or with ships way higher than the ones he starts playing.
Give them a few tokens, each one valid for 1 PvP instanced match with a certain combat ship.

+1

a combat simulator at the training station has been suggested before. Like X-Wing Alliance: you can try various scenarios, view all the ships, etc. without affecting your "real" game stats. For vo, just limit the repeatability of these, so new players don't stay in the training sector forever.

I'm sure you're aware of this, but it needs to be said: the tutorials still refer only to PC controls and conventions, or so the Andoid trial users report. Channel 1 is a constant stream of "how do turn on physics mode? "how do I complete training 2?" and "It won't let me take training 3" (the mission list available in space is confusing training sector news)

Only if that is an OPTION... and demand a small test, like go out there, kill 3 training bots and bring their remains to escape training sector!

VO is not point'n'click ... dozen of keys, new concepts as hard as a serious flight sim... so most newbies will be really lost there, and consider that VO sucks at combat simply because they have NO CLUE of what can be done, and that he's not flying an airplane in space...

Then, if the newbie dies frequently, offer hiim to do tutorials...

You guys probably have been playing this game for so long, and haven't seen a true newbie trying it... this can make thing MUCH WORSE in the future... if newbies now ask all those dumb questions as "how I dock", just imagine what happens without tutorials???

omg, a combat simulator at the beginning sounds great! And make it so you can have a limited number of "practice matches" before you go into the real verse where two noobies fight each other to get a feel for the depth of the pvp. The amount of times I hear complaints from noobs about being owned by vets from the get go anywhere they fly is driving me crazy, have them get a chance at the start to maybe win a few fights and get a feel for better ships like the vult, cent, etc. Also of course add in some common pvp tips voiced over, ghost would be a great go to guy for that particular area as he has plenty of experience teaching pvp.

Alloh, the existing flight part of the tutorials basically just dumps you out in space and then guides you through using the ship. Which is basically what you'd end up doing to implement TRS's idea here. It would take a couple minutes to guide the player through the controls, and then send him off to do some fighting.

So it would pretty much be the same as what we already have, just in a different order and possibly with better ships and more aggressive bots. You'd start right off in the ship, rather than first "learning" how to buy and equip one. It could do that part when you return, or after you die.

Hooray Alloh! I had no trouble reading your post! Hooray for paragraphs :P

Crusader, Ghost has actually offered to do voicework the last time he was on 100 and we were talking about it, I believe mecha offered too. From the looks of it though it will be Incarnate himself because he has the good microphone setup and to be honest his voiceovers on the kickstarter video were fantastic.

The only thing i'd like to see in addition to voiced instructions is a bit of character voice acting going into the initial scenes, but it's not a huge priority.

What I do want to see is either

A) less emphasis on the backstory as a vehicle for deciding which race the player chooses and more of an emphasis on the actual gameplay differences (i.e. the ships etc..)

OR

B) more gameplay relevance to the backstory and a unique gameplay experience for each race beyond just having different colour chat names

So Pup gets a pink slip according to trs..

Yes.. I know. No, voiceovers are not going to read the same way-too-long text as now.

Yes, we should dump the player right into combat. Good thing that's what we've been working towards with the client-side tutorial (currently exclusive to mobile) for a couple of years now.

No, there are separate tutorials for Android vs PC, with different conventions. But if 80% of PC newbies don't read the directions, what do you think 80% of android users do? Yes, these will be refined, corrected and distilled as well.

In summation: Yes, great!

Vendetta's training sector does a decent job of showing some different interesting avenues of gameplay right off the bat, including some risk-free combat, exploration, and possibly even docking with a cap ship. The tutorial and training missions are better than what I've seen some other MMORPGs do. Maybe it's my age, having grown up in a time when MUDs were the best multiplayer internet game for free around, but I never minded it when a game asked me to read. Localization of the early missions would be nice. Like CrazySpence, I don't think voiceovers would add anything, and they might detract a whole lot.

Vendetta Online was the first game I ever considered subbing to, and that was so the devs could continue to work toward their vision of what Vendetta Online was supposed to be. It looks like the game is taking some big steps in that direction with the kickstarter stretch goals.

I am generally against the idea of 'simulators' or other forms of instancing within a multiplayer game, unless they are absolutely necessary. The simulator thing worked for X-Wing, but that game included permadeath.

There is such a thing as overwhelming a new player, although the opposite extreme of hand-holding isn't good either. Honestly, I think Vendetta gets the intro pacing about right. There will always be some players who get bored before taking the first training mission, and some players who think they've seen it all after 2 weeks. Vendetta's tutorial and training missions are in the Goldilocks zone; that is this 32 year old gamer's opinion.

sjwest: Seriously? you're worried about the implications for pup getting free ships or something? Be more of a carebear, unrats are coming back and I guarantee you they're more of a threat than pup will ever be. Hell i'm damn sure more likely to kill you with absolutely no regard for any rules whatsoever and absolutely no remorse when it comes to breaking local station laws or tanking standing with my massive stockpile of procs in a fricken skyprom - and you're worried about pup?

Phaserlight: Respectfully - you're a bit of a weirdo :P I don't think the duality of purpose that the tutorial actually functions as was considered when it was designed. It serves only to educate the player, not to sell them the product. But it needs to do both at the same time and that means putting new players in a great ship in a combat situation and making it spectacular from the get go. The reading and the inquisitive journey doesn't have to be lost, but it shouldn't be required reading.

Incarnate: I'm more interested in hearing your views on the race selection thing, but I'm sure you'll consider it in the video. If you take one thing away from the thread I'd hope it's that the way players are introduced to the races really isn't serving them or the game as a whole well - sometimes i'm surprised everybody isn't a UIT.

Btw, +1 to the OP forgot to mention that. As for nation stuff, maybe add in a cutscene similar to what ghost did on youtube for his trailer with itani and serco ducking it out over the comm and in the ships.

I think this could be something that really changes the whole "noobs not sticking around past 1 day" thing that tends to happen.

ghosts vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o05w4wCojzE
sorry to shamelessly plug this but it seemed pretty epic to me, especially if made into a more professional quality product. (also add a skip option maybe?)

well the roleplay voice overs would ideally form part of the opening fighter scene, the problem is to do that they have to hire voice actors or get really creative in the office. It certainly would add to the immersion but on the downside it sets an expectation for the rest of the games missions.

Or they could just host a competition for each part and have vo players send in audio files for them, saving them from wasting their valuable coding time recording voices. I've seen it done successfully before, and I'm sure any vo player would love to have their voice in a cutscene.

you can't meet the quality required for a production game - incarnate has professional recording equipment he used to do the kickstarter Vid, it's not going to be high enough quality to use like that.

Incarnate, can we know the conversion rate, I mean, the % of newbies who subscribe after playing the tutorial? I guess this data can't be made public, of course, but it costs nothing to ask.

In web analytics we do what's called 'split-testing' - so say you have a campaign that you're marketing to an audience - you create a number of different iterations of the campaign according to a theory of what factors might be the most influential in converting to a sale. Then you examine the differences between the conversion rates and it gives you useful statistic data on what factors cause increases and what cause decreases in conversions. If I was selling VO that's one of the first things i'd want to try with the tutorial sector to see how much you can optimize conversion rate.

I'd also be interested in rough % conversion rates, but I wouldn't be surprised Irbis if they didn't design any sort of analytical tools into it because it seems to be only taking into account the educational aspect and not so much the marketing one.