Could we Add a "Newby" Arcanum Forum, please?

Would it be possible to add a NEWBY Arcanum forum? We know there is a new herd of newbies buying the game right now (I'm one of them). I just answered an intelligent private query from someone who may have been afraid to post publicly and get DISSED. My answer was probably useful to more than one person.

It would be nice to have a newby forum where these questions could be confidently posted and answered only by those who are kind enough to want to respond.

 

This forum is for asking those "stupid newby style" questions.

if you want to make it better, then maybe all that should happen is we should become more tolerant of gravedigging, so that the topics that keep recurring could be stuck into a nice FAQ for new arcanum players.

 

I'm not saying I'm entirely against the idea, but there are already quite a few faqs out there for Arcanum. A great one on this site, even. And there are walkthroughs, complete and quest-specific, item banks, character profiles, guides to creating new characters, etc. Can't the newbies just look there first? Why create a new faq for newbies to completely ignore when they are already ignoring all the ones that are already there?

 

No, what really needs to happen is for people to not be bothered when people ask stupid questions in H&T, they should only get angry about stupid answers.

 

There are at least two problems with newbies looking in FAQs and walkthroughs, and we can be tolerant of both:

(1) Many Newbies want to find things out for themselves, and KNOW that faqs and walkthroughs will tell them too much. Instead they come here asking for much less than they would find in the faq. Good luck to them.

(2) Anyone who is exprienced in the game knows how to find anything quickly in the faqs. Many newbies do not. Until you learn a fair amount of terminology, it's not easy to frame your questions or do useful searches.

 

People need to be tolerant and helpful, not quick to put someone down because they think they know so much. It may turn out that while the person asking the question is a newbie to this game, they are not a newbie at all to gaming, but if they are a complete newbie to RPGs they still deserve a polite and considerate answer because everyone has to start somewhere. We should all try to help out the newbies and make them feel comfortable.

 

Indeed. And people should tolerate grave digging a bit more...it sometimes IS easier to dig something up than to start a new one.

And yes, this is supposed to be the newbie place. I mean, this is H&T after all, right?

oh and about the search, all the thing said above and also that if a newbie makes a succesful search, sometimes even the topic names popping up are spoily and might ruin someone's gaming experience.

 

heres an idea, get a spoiler flag on threads. and have an option that will make all the threads with spoilers disappear from your screen?

moderators could then set or reset the spoiler flag, and the user that starts the thread can set the flag.

and if the same thing could be applied to each post, then that would be great.

 

Now that spoiler flag sounds like a great idea. There's often a fine line between being cryptic and being a spoiler on some of these questions, so it's hard to know exactly how much to reveal to someone asking a question. I mean, do I want to give them a complete answer or do I want to be cryptic and give them just a tiny hint? It would help a lot if the person who asks the question knew what to ask for, but that's part of being a newbie - learning what to ask.

As for the searches, I've tried the search function and quite frankly, I've found them pretty useless. For the most part I've been buried in useless junk or gotten absolutely nothing. I've almost never gotten a good, useful search result with a reasonable number of results that were all on the subject I was searching for. The first person who tells me I don't know how to use a search is going to get flamed, so be warned! :x I've used a lot of search functions on a lot of sites over the years and, quite frankly, they all seem to get more feeble and useless as time goes on.

 

i suggested the spoiler flag in the feedback subforum, but unless its easy and someone other than me, (im too lazy) finds/writes the mod its not going to happen.

edit: looks like someone found it.

 

Sinbad, I'm so totally with you on the search. In every forum, they always yell at n00bs, Use the search damn lazy bums! But as it is now, the search is so damn useless. I get better results using straight googling than forum searches, and google usually finds the answers from the forums much better.

BTW that spoilet flag sounded good.

 

Well, I don't think that we need to tolerate gravedigging, why don't newbs just ask the damn question? There really isn't any need to dredge up a 2 year old topic on Virgil, why not just make a new one? I don't know about the spoiler flags, I think we should just make a policy. Like you've said, they would come hear if they dn't want spoilers, so why not be vague in all our answers unless they specifically ask us not to be. This is "Hints" & Tips right, not Full Length Explanations & Tips?