The thing is, Genesis has a VERY steep learning curve. You're being thrown in deep water right off the bat with very few clues as to how to handle it (you could compare it to a 10 year old child, left alone in the street to start its life on its own right then and there, it does have some basic knowledge and understanding but is in no way prepared for what awaits it in the world).
The Newbie Land gives you some basics but after you leave it, you're like the child mentioned above - you just have no idea what to do and what can possibly happen to you. Modern games have spoiled people, especially MMO type games, where you're being led by the hand from start to finish. You progress through areas of increasing difficulty. In Genesis it's quite different, it's all mixed up. You have your orc temple near Sparkle, where newbie can kill easily and not so far away you have giants who can smash even bigger players to a pulp, and they're aggressive to boot.
In the real Genesis you also have a lot of things that experienced players learned to avoid but newbie has no clue about. Some examples would include: random exits (often paired with invisible exits), traps, faerie dragons, NPCs aggressive towards xxx but passive towards xxx, questmasters sending you to other domains, various transports (wagons, ships, chariots and what not), dragonfear, orc camp with huge orcs in it, where it's easy to get lost, right in the middle of the road from one newbie area to another etc. etc.
I think that adding the newbie area was great but it can be misleading a bit, as it's designed just like your regular MMO today, not like Genesis.
In the past, I was starting out Gen with some irl friends and this is really what kept me going. We would play then meet in the bar and recall stuff that happened in the game over a beer ("Dude, why did you take us to this blasted forest? We all got lost and spent over an hour to get out!" or "Damn, we've shown this Argossian Guards the meaning of proper fighting, didn't we?" *the highest of fives*). Also, at the time there were a lot of people active in the lower level ranges (5-7 Cadets online 24/7 was pretty much standard) so you did most of the things in team rather than alone.
We really should ask some true newbies what are they thoughts on Genesis. I can make new characters and get them to grow because I've got enough years of experience playing this game that I'm able to avoid the risks, I know where to go and what to do. If I didn't I'd probably get frustrated after a day or two and just leave.
General point being: It's damn hard now for newbies with our relatively low low-level playerbase and that I believe most of them come to try it out alone and not with friends who could share some of the burden.
Any ideas how can this be solved? Could creating a general newbie knowledge base (with maps, quests, leveling guide which Gub's creating etc.) and putting it on the main page help?
Edit: Because a picture is worth a thousand words and there's a similarly hard game to Genesis out there (incidentally it's ASCII based too) I thought I'd throw out related images.
Just substitute Dwarf Fortress for Genesis and it's all real.
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