In one of his short posts yesterday, @ph1102 listed a couple of common sense things a newbie should and shouldn't do to improve their experience on Hive or thrive to do better in certain areas. I agree with all of them! Maybe except with the power down thing, nobody should even explain this to anyone. They are common sense, after all.
But then I thought that if you go to other social media platforms and need to know what is the recommended usage, you usually find that somewhere. Of course, they often abuse their users breaking their own rules (or making unclear rules), but that's a different thing. I was referring to something like FAQs or tooptips.
AI generated.
Today, that came back to my mind, and I remembered the Splinterlands case, and how much they lost by not having a great new player experience. They have the excuse that when they started, nobody was interested in that and users kept coming to their platforms because Web 3 gaming was the hot thing in crypto. But not anymore. Now they need to fight for their users. And they do.
But it took about a year to implement the New Player Experience (NPE) to Splinterlands and they are not finished yet, but almost there. That meant totally recreating all their webpages from scratch using a different technology (while the game was live, so maintaining both the new and the old versions), tweaking the game economy until it became uneconomical to massively extract value from the game, updating the design continuously, allowing new players to play most of the game without buying a spellbook, upgrading the Challenge and now Training (formerly known as Practice) mode. keeping documentation and support articles up to date and adding new ones, changing the descriptions of abilities and rulesets to make them clearer, adding in-game tooltips, etc. That's all I can remember at first hand without checking the docs.
They still have to release a campaign mode which will be PvE and slated to train newcomers on various aspects of the game. With this campaign, they will add a new SB set of cards that will be given to the new players throughout the campaign (and can be purchased too), with underpowered cards compared to what can be purchased in normal chests or rewards. But it's free and a great way to learn to play.
This new campaign mode will be later used as a platform for other targeted campaigns for all players.
My point is to draw attention to the massive transformations that were needed to better cater to new players. And I can tell you that all Hive front ends can improve a ton on this aspect. Some more than others, it's true. But catering to new user experience is something that takes a lot of development work and time, as you have seen in the case of Splinterlands described above, and I understand why there would be a reluctance to push it hard in that direction. Splinterlands probably wouldn't have done it either, if for them it wasn't almost an existential threat to continue as it was before.
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