I remember the original starting areas, one for each race.
There wasn't much more in the way of explainers or new player help than is currently available on mainland.
Those served well enough at that time, iirc.
Also, iirc, Silan came into being due to the lack of enough new players to spread out over each of the racial starting areas and Silan was the "play for free" extent of the game.
As it now stands, with intermitent flows of new players, Silan mostly works. In slack times, Silan can leave a new player in a situation where there's no help for the higher level missions. That's not a good thing, imo.
I think, maybe, one of two "fixes" would help.
1. Keep Silan but give mainland characters the ability to port to Silan with an automatic reduction in skills and equipment appropriate for Silan, so new players can get direct aid and assistance when Silan pop is too low to provide such.
2. Abandon Silan and adjust the various capital cities with the tutorials and missions already on Silan.
There are some veteran players that keep characters on Silan to provide direct aid and support, but those players are not always ingame or have things to accomplish on their main characters and so not always on hand to assist new players.
There's a rather small window of opportunity to grab a new player sufficiently to keep him/her playing and potentially paying to play.
The more paying players there are, the more resources the devs have to improve our beloved game. This should be important to all of us that enjoy Ryzom.
There wasn't much more in the way of explainers or new player help than is currently available on mainland.
Those served well enough at that time, iirc.
Also, iirc, Silan came into being due to the lack of enough new players to spread out over each of the racial starting areas and Silan was the "play for free" extent of the game.
As it now stands, with intermitent flows of new players, Silan mostly works. In slack times, Silan can leave a new player in a situation where there's no help for the higher level missions. That's not a good thing, imo.
I think, maybe, one of two "fixes" would help.
1. Keep Silan but give mainland characters the ability to port to Silan with an automatic reduction in skills and equipment appropriate for Silan, so new players can get direct aid and assistance when Silan pop is too low to provide such.
2. Abandon Silan and adjust the various capital cities with the tutorials and missions already on Silan.
There are some veteran players that keep characters on Silan to provide direct aid and support, but those players are not always ingame or have things to accomplish on their main characters and so not always on hand to assist new players.
There's a rather small window of opportunity to grab a new player sufficiently to keep him/her playing and potentially paying to play.
The more paying players there are, the more resources the devs have to improve our beloved game. This should be important to all of us that enjoy Ryzom.