This is pretty much as far as I got in ArcheAge when I attempted to peek in and see where things were at. I’ve mentioned this before, but a lot of games out there do an absolutely horrible job at welcoming a returning player back to the game. I’m not talking about the little goodie bags that were waiting for me – but there was no indication as to what I had been working on, what I needed to be working on, what had changed since I had been away, or what I should work towards next. What I did know was that my character was level 40, she had a bunch of quests on her, and 700 gold plus relatively full bags that seemed to be mostly consumables.
I know that in order to get back into a game your best bet is usually not to revisit your old characters but to create brand new characters and get familiar with all the ins and outs – but I rarely ever want to start from scratch, and I don’t necessarily feel that players should have to. What I’d like to see is some sort of special UI that pops up for players who have been away from the game for XYZ amount of time, with options on revisiting skills, quests, what’s changed, what’s new. Maybe an in-game browser highlighting the very important changes. If it could somehow take a peek at your last logged in date and calculate notes from there, that would be simply amazing and would be a great step in getting me to re-join your game. As it is now, there are very few games I can pick up from where I left off and know what the hell is going on.
I did have a lot of fun logging in my pirate character. As you can see by the character info panel on the left hand side, she has almost 1,000 crime points. She hasn’t been killed in PVP though so she hasn’t had to go to trial. Most of her crime points (OK, all) are from stealing crops that were not on farms, and for uprooting other players crops (also not on farms). She’s my “evil” character, if that’s still a thing. Unfortunately, just like my main character I had no idea what I was doing or where I should go or what I needed to do. This second character is level 32, and I remember zero about her class. That being said, logging in is pretty much all I did before logging right back out.
I suppose that’s just a hint for me to start over if I want to re-learn anything about this game..
I feel the exact same way. Unless I start over, my chance of regularly logging into an old MMO again is pretty slim. I usually login just to see what’s up, but it typically feels like nothing’s changed. Then I just logout never to return.
A returning player tutorial would be nice if they updated it say once a year and emailed old players to give it a try. Probably not worthwhile development work to do it anymore frequently.