Diary of a new Player on the HWS-Server

Day 1 - Wednesday

Newby found in the steam list a game called “Empyrion” and buys it with the spare money he got from the NMS-Refund.
He installed the game and looks in the list for the most crowded server - HWS Europe.

A few clicks later, his rescue-pod is falling on Earth. He didnt looked much around, this game is new and all is soooo exciting. After he claims his materials from his Pod he runs around, looking for the tutorial missions and armed with his pistol.

“Aaaahrg - Spider” Death…

A few minutes later he got his backpack back, the spider is still hunting him, but hey, thats survival.
He runs around and find some meteor and he starts mining, as he see´s another newby player

“Aaaahrg - Player” Death…

Damn, all in his backpack left is the T1-Drill and a little bit of the other stuff, but hey thats survival…
He runs around and find some meteor and he starts mining, as he see´s another player

“Aaaahrg - Player” Death…

No chance to get back to his Backpack, they are camping there at the meteor with three people and a big bad CV.

“Newby: help”

“Chat:
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 2
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 3
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 4
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 5”

“Newby: HELP I AM STUCK ON A PVP-PLANET AND THEY KEEP KILLING ME!!!”

“Chat:
Old-Two: type CB:Reset
Old-Three: you need to type cb:reset to choose another planet
Old-Four: борщ & водка”

After the third attempt he gets it managed to reset his player and start all over on a PVE-Planet. A few clicks later, his rescue-pod is falling on Phobos. He didnt looked much around, this game is new and all is soooo exciting.

“Aaaahrg - Spider” Death…

Day 2 - Thursday

Newby got some nice materials together, he build a small base near the water and he is looking forward to get his very first Small Vessel. Everything is nice, everybody here looks helpfull, somebody gave him a T2-Drill but he couldnt use it anymore because he doesnt get the materials to craft the fuel. But thats okay, in a few minutes he gets his Starter T1-Small Vessel…

Day 3 - Friday

EVERYTHING IS GONE!!! All the stuff he was mining, his ship, his base, EVERYTHING!
How could that happen? Lets ask an Admin…

“Newby: Admin online?”

“Chat:
Old-Two Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 2
Old-Two Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 3
Old-Two Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 4
Old-Two Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 5”

“Newby: AAAAADDDMIIIINNN!!!”
“Server: Yes Newby?”
“Newby: I´ve lost everything, it is all gone i thought this is PVE-World not PVP?”
"Server: There was a wipe today.
“Newby: What? I didnt know that”
“Server: CB:Wipe”
“A lot
of
Text”
“Newby: Ah okay i didnt know that, can i have my stuff back?”
“Server: Okay i am in good mood - here is your ship and base back”

Day 5 - Sunday:

Newby got a lot of stuff together, he is proud of his SV and got a nice assault rifle to kill the evil spiders, as he reads in the Chat:

“Old-Three: Anybody needs a lift before the wipe tomorrow?”

PANIC! ANOTHER WIPE!!! And newby still doesnt have found Zascosium and Erestrum for his CV.

“Newby: Where can i find Zas and Ere for my ship i need to get away from the wipe!!!”

“Chat:
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 6
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 7
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 8
Old-One Thanks for upgrading your autominer to lvl 9”

“Newby: HELP HELLO I NEED ERE AND ZAS FOR MY SHIP WHERE DO I FIND IT???”

“Old-Two: Try Planet XY”
“Old-Three: Look at the market”
“Old-Four: борщ & водка”

No chance to get to that planet, no money to buy something, and no idea how the market works… Lets take the offer and fly with the ship to the PVE-Planet.
All his stuff is packed and he figured out how to dock his SV on this huge space ship with all these nice people and some other Newbys together, the travel starts and he gets his ride to Destiny (Full and overcrowded at this moment, but hey thats okay, we only lift some Newbys over here so they can settle somewhere else)

Destiny… Clear Water, nice Air, what a wonderfull place to live.

“Aaaahrg - Spider” Death…

Day 6 - Monday

He escaped the evil wipe, build his base on Destiny, totally ignoring the message that 9 People should leave the planet. He found a near base that offers free food (Yes there is one on Destiny) and he figured out how the market works. In his One-Person-Faction he got the “Trader” in his name and he enjoys the
Supply-Package because he can build a huge CV to travel the Universe (and maybe lag someone to death) - lets go to Earth and kill some Newbys…

What do you think, where does it go wrong? Where do we take the Newby at the hand instead of letting him play as the game is intended?
In this few days the newby didnt even take one look at the website and he still doesnt know something about the Story.

Sorry for the long post, here is a space potato:

8 Likes

So true :smiley: i laughed when reading this ^^

All newbies should begin by playing a bit in single mode to learn the basic, then normally when you join a dedicated server, you must be wondering “hey, maybe there are some rules and others stuff i need to check before”, and magically you see the link to the website before clicking on HWS server before logging in :smiley:

And the best you avoid asking so many noob questions and don’t waste time from the awesome admins who can work on a beautiful universe instead of drama/noob/drama/noob routine :confused:

3 Likes

Ha, that was good! Thanks for that. I love your hidden feature that you not even need Zas + Eres for a CV xD
Imagine a world where we have so much time, that we could write such funny things all the time… ha… dreams.

But yeah… as I can see we have ~30 new people every day. Not everyone stays of course… otherwise we would have by now ~4000 players on HWS :grimacing:

So one idea was to make a HWS Feature Tutorial series on Youtube. With the given time maybe useful. Still people need to find the link - very difficult nowadays…

I will make very soon the new PDA with all information in there again. Still people need to find the link. They had to download the PDA and “install” it - very very difficult.

We could even more spam new people ingame with chat but then you can’t read anything.

So better the community is helping and we provide still all information on Discord + Steam Group + HWS Forum + HWS Website + HWS Connect + Empyrion Forum + Reddit + Twitter + Email… oh common…

3 Likes

We, the old-ones are helping where we can, even if we explain the third time how to reset yourself or get things to work. But i think at one point we should “train” them to read more, on the website, in the forum, in discord… A main problem is that the newbys dont listen. They take the main information out of the advice and the rest is gone in the wind.

I know its hard to gather the right informations from the chat, because there is so much that you have to read

…and its all confusing, even if you played on a smaller server before. Thats HWS - a lot of features and stuff other servers dont have.

And i wanted to mention that the circle is closing, many newbys dont learn from other people´s misbehaviour:

How can we teach them not to repeat stuff like this? Best way would be not doing stuff like this.

Oh, and it wasn´t my intention to offend any russian players, i dont know many russian words and i am sorry. But the chat gets even more confusing when people write in different languages.

Ill reather stick to борщ & водка. No bugs. Good post and even better space potato. I dont know, think that everyone who stays and discovers what is true game like just leave and maybe give it a try in year or two when escape pod will be enough polished. Only chance how to play this game for longer time is that you are realy into scifi, realy want to play this and you can find all info you need if you want. No need to change anything.

2 Likes

Idk, I wish there was a way we could force a certain amount of essential info for newbies in a way that they’ll actually use it, like CB:wipe and CB:reset for example. It’s frustrating to have to rehash the exact same thing you said 5 minutes ago because a new person logged on and didn’t read any of the colored text when selecting their planet.

Something like a window that pops up when you enter the game the first time.

1 Like

I fear it will have same result as showing them picture of Space Potato. Only thing they will search for in that window will be cross to close that anoying damn window which keeps blocking access to game. Its like HWS Campaign warning about difficulity of starting there. It was same on mercury on HWS 1.0. Huge warning about starting there being very difficult and still they kept bringing starting resource packs. When i asked if they need help as surviving there is for ppl who realy knows game already they told me they are new to game and want to restart elsewhere. Overconfidence is worst enemy.

Guys do we realy feel sorry for ppl which are unable to read, unable to spend hour by learning basics in single, unable to just see one YT video about game? Honestly i dont feel sorry at all and i think its wasting of time to try to create 20 bulletproof ways how to inform someone about wipe.

But i made good experience with Andrea using caps lock, her shouting cannot be missed or rarly. So thats the way how to inform someone about trying to read or typing cb:wipe. You dont follow warning say good bye to your property.

At start of 3.0 there was Gold event on Black Hole. Before restart which was expected to change planet and wipe all there me and Rexx spend about 15 minutes to spam chat to warn fialkovzky which was mining there with friend. Also violet message was appering for whole day. I was making jokes that while thats only message in different colour on chat noone will read it and i was right.

You will teach this guy to read more likely than common Empy player.

That exact conversation happens every time i log on lol…

You did miss one big other part of that convo…

Newb logs back in (after wipe)

Newb 'Where is all my stuff, My ship my resources…WHERE???

Global chat…

Newb… "IVE BEEN H A C K E D!!!

My face at this point :expressionless:

1 Like

Well a solution to this problem isn’t really that hard. You just need to think a bit out of the box and use the tools you’ve already got. Basicly you just create a welcome message like this:

“Hello [Name Player], Welcome to HWS (etc etc). Please read the story on our website as it contains essential information to play on our server. You’ll find a hidden word within the story. Type: CB:HIDDENWORD to enable all features on your account”.

And well you could like detect when the new player builds a base, sv, cv or whatever and threaten to destroy it unless they type the hidden word.

It’s not fool proof and new players will most likely start asking other newbies for the hidden word etc, but at least now you can just point your finger to the website whenever something is asked they should already know.

1 Like

Soo true, Whizzle. It was basically the same for me, I started on a different server and got to know some of the ropes there. Then I switched to HWS, started on PvP for the first time and got mercilessly wrecked 3 times. I took the hint and reset in PvE.
There’s really a lot of stuff to learn about Empyrion and they do not have a real tutorial yet. And what with missing chat tabs and settings you have a hard time getting help unless you use forum and Discord.

Anyway, as we talked about on Discord, I totally agree that newbies should not be helped so much in chat but be motivated to check the website. All important rules and stuff are there and it is just plain annoying to see the 10000th instance of “why my base gone?” explained by helpful players who are nevertheless ultimately very inefficient because this way the newbie will never check the page but just continue asking, asking, asking.

Great text, loved it :slight_smile:

1 Like

Funny story, thanks for posting, early attempts at this game were fatal for me as well. There is a learning curve, but then it gets better. :slight_smile:

Although, even after playing the game a while, something will still kill me every now and then.

1 Like

A tutorial for beginners made by icecube:

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: HWS Police - General Discussion