getting-started
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EverQuest Next looks to players to improve the new play experience
Sometimes, existing players don't really know what new players need. But EverQuest Next Landmark is still very new, and everyone who's in the game is still very much learning what can be done. So the development team at Sony Online Entertainment has turned to the players to ask what can be done to make the new user experience for players that much easier. As the thread opener from lead designer Darrin McPherson explains, sometimes as a developer it's hard to see what a game is missing simply because you're too close to the game. You know how all the systems work; you built most of them, after all. Players, on the other hand, can find holes in explanations that might otherwise be unavailable. If you've been playing around in the test and want to add your thoughts, head over to the official thread and let the team know what's intuitive and what isn't.
Choose My Adventure: Earning my Firefall rocket boots
The votes are in. The people have spoken. Now, it's time to play. Last week's Choose My Adventure column, the first one centered on Firefall, presented a couple of choices related to the very basics of creating our character and giving him or her reason to fight. Voters enthusiastically chose a beaten-down man with one hope for redemption -- and unwittingly fulfilled my personal fantasy to create a game hero based on Nicolas Cage's character in Con Air. Voters also chose from among Firefall's five battleframes, with the jack-of-all-trades Assault frame beating out the smash-it-in-the-face Dreadnaught frame by just 26 votes. So, to recap: We have created a character who's an ex-con with no reason to live, handed him an assault rifle, and dropped him into a violent world where pretty much anything goes. This is getting good.
Storyboard: Breaking into roleplaying for the first time
Roleplaying is probably harder to do than any other game activity. The first time you run a dungeon or take part in PvP, you might fail horribly, but that's a matter of practice and statistics. But the first time you get up in front of a group of other people to roleplay, you're essentially acting on a virtual stage on which anyone can see you, with no lines, no stage direction, and no indication whether you're doing it right or not. And if you screw up, your indication that something went wrong will just be a wall of stony silence. So it's intimidating. It's all the anxiety of jumping into a new social group with added anxiety over whether your character is interesting enough for anyone to care. I'm not going to pretend it's not, but I can offer some advice to make your first attempt as smooth as possible. And hopefully provide some useful tips to recover even if everything goes horribly wrong.
Gold Capped: Earning gold for absolute beginners
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Aaron wrote in the other day to say: Despite having played WoW for years I'm a complete gold-making newbie and my characters are all dirt-poor because of it. I decided it was time to start playing the gold-making meta game so I've been reading through issues of your Gold Capped column, and while I've really enjoyed what I've read I'm afraid I'm still at a loss as to where to get started. Obviously I don't have a lot of upfront capital to jump-start my endeavor, either. I was wondering if you've ever written or would consider writing an article for complete, absolute beginners such as myself. Unless you started the game with rich friends, this is something that everyone has to go through. People getting into earning gold from scratch often don't have any clue where to start, and they often have a bunch of incorrect ideas about what they need to get going.
Storyboard: Getting into the scene
So, I lied. While I had originally been planning on something different for this week's column, I had a new topic more or less thrown to my doorstep from Bio Break. It's all well and good to talk about roleplaying as if everyone has been doing it since small times, but there are plenty of players with a vague curiosity who have never tried it out. For them, roleplaying is like heroin, vaguely promising a good time while always seeming dangerous, with the failures so publicly visible that... You know, I'm dropping that analogy right now before it starts looking terrifyingly appropriate. The point is that people are interested who aren't sure quite where to start. Thus, we're taking this week to put together a few things that help make it just a little easier to get into the joy of roleplay without getting bored, unintentionally stepping on toes, or winding up as the butt of everyone's in-character jokes. We can be a catty bunch. But you can get started without drama or too many issues, and it's not as bad as you might think.
Mystery Motorola Droid (Shadow?) spotted with Verizon branding, set to be starting somethin'
Why hello there... you. Over at the HowardForums, a certain "wnrussell" has uploaded a picture of what looks to be a Getting Started manual for a Verizon-bound Motorola Droid that we can't recall ever seeing before. There's unfortunately no other information provided at the moment, except maybe a hint from the filename: Shadow. Is this the same 4.3-inch phone we've been seeing rumored for some time now? At any rate, we gotta say, this is a pretty attractive device -- and if that's a new hue for Motoblur, we're all for it. Now how about pulling out a secret slide-out keyboard to make our lives complete... [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
iPad 101: User Guides and other helpful resources
You've bought your iPad. Congratulations! So are you ready to learn all the ways you can get the most from your new purchase? Here's a quick run-down of some indispensable resources as you're getting up to speed with your new purchase. Read the manuals: The iPad User Guide (pdf) provides an in-depth review. This user manual is not included in the iPad packaging. Instead, Apple hosts it on its support site. This 154-page long (!) guide covers all the basics for using the iPad and understanding how it works. If you'd like to convert this PDF-formatted guide into a format (called "ePub") that you can use to read on your iPad, there's a handy website called epub2go that will handle the conversion for you. After transforming the file to epub, just drop it onto your iTunes library and sync it to your iPad. You'll be able to read the book using Apple's free iBooks application. It won't look as nice as a standard ePub document, but you'll have it in mobile form. Take a guided video tour: Apple has posted videos that introduce many of the iPad's new features, including Safari, Mail, Photos, iPod, and more. You can watch these videos to get an idea of how each of these features work, and pick up a few pointers along the way. These aren't really meant as tutorials; they are marketing videos, but they can also work to introduce the iPad to you. Read our iPad 101 series: TUAW regularly posts tips and tricks for new users via our 101 posting series. In addition to the iPad, we often post Mac 101 and iPhone 101 hints, suitable for those just getting started with a new platform. These write-ups help introduce new concepts and don't assume that you're already an expert.
The Daily Quest: We were all newbies once
Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we should be following? Just leave us a comment and you may see it here tomorrow! We may be pros at the game now, but once upon a time, we were just getting started, too. Let us not look down on our newbie friends -- for we were once the same. Instead, today's daily quest strives to offer advice for the new players among us. Tree Burglar's Elder blogging event challenges bloggers around Azeroth to offer their advice to the new player. Light & Leafy, The Angry Dwarfs, A Healadin's Tear, Stories of WoW, and World of Warcraft Philosophized wrote up some great advice applicable to newbies of all shapes and sizes. (And, of course, you can check out Blog Azeroth for even more.) Restokin discusses rotation basics for the new Moonkin. Alterac Volley offers ten tips for leveling quickly. Can Tank, Will Travel wonders if today's well-informed newbie is the same as the newbie of yesteryear.
The Mog Log: Starting new in Vana'diel
Getting started with Final Fantasy XI can be rather daunting the first time. You might be lucky to have a friend right there holding your hand through the starting areas... or you might accidentally wind up vendoring several thousand gil worth of items because you didn't properly grasp how the auction house works. Or you might throw away a bunch of zinc ore because it's taking up too much space. Or you might put yourself on everyone's blacklist by accidentally locking your chat mode in /yell. You can draw whatever conclusions you want about my early memories of the game. They're not pretty. Assuming you've mastered moving, the basics of looking around in your inventory and interacting with NPCs, and so forth, it's not always immediately evident what you're supposed to do, what the best job for a starter character is supposed to be, and so on. Thus, for those of you newly interested in the game, we have a small guide on some of the less immediately transparent elements of the game. (For those of you who already know Sky and Sea inside and out, you can skip ahead to the end. I can promise there's something there.)
All the World's a Stage: Attitudes about roleplaying for the first time
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.We've talked before about getting started in roleplaying, as well as how to find the right group to roleplay with. But there's also another aspect the question of roleplaying for the first time, which is that inner attitude people feel towards it.I often see people leaving comments on All the World's a Stage, saying that they have some sort of story for their character inside their heads, but they don't let it out, for various reasons. Some don't feel that they have the right social space to let it out, and find it difficult to connect with others in such a way that their internal idea can actually take shape in reality. Others feel as though roleplaying isn't for them, even though they clearly seem to have the gift for it. In both cases, their roleplaying is limited to their own mind, where no one else can hear it or benefit from it at all. For every one who posts something about it on a site like this one, how many more just think about it, and never say anything to anyone?
Getting started with WordPress and MAMP on your Mac
WordPress is among the more popular blog publishing and content management systems available. Some web hosting providers, such as GoDaddy and DreamHost, provide a relatively seamless and integrated WordPress installation process built into their dashboards. However, if you'd like to dip your toes into the WordPress waters and learn what lurks beneath it, but aren't yet ready to make a web hosting commitment (or switch, if your host currently doesn't support it) you can get you feet wet using MAMP.
Getting started with Times, an RSS reader for everyone
Most RSS readers on the desktop look like lists. Times, a reader Mat covered last year, looks like a newspaper. In a "normal" RSS reader, the river of information can become a blur and users may be put off by the incessant noise. Times, on the other hand, aims to make feeds more pleasant to peruse. Check out the gallery to see the curled edges, slight texturing on the sides of the "paper" and page effects. It's the app I'd get my grandmother to use to read RSS feeds, and I think it's a great introduction to feed reading for "the rest of us." Here's how to get started.When you click on a story's headline or body text, the page folds down, and you read. When you're done, you click the folded page and it pops back up to reveal the feeds again. Added to this basic "graze and read" functionality seen on all RSS readers is the shelf (something many readers have as well, like the clippings in NetNewsWire), a place to temporarily hold stories you are interested in. You can read these later and then throw them out. Times isn't intended to be a storage locker or book reader -- it is designed for quick scanning and reading. Likewise, the shelf is only so large and can be set to automatically clear itself at certain intervals.The first thing you'll want to do with Times is customize the feeds. Especially if you are setting this up for someone else (like grandma), you can easily remove the pre-configured feeds and add your own. I recommend not adding dozens of feeds to Times. While power users may scan hundreds of sites, the average person may only make time for a few. NetNewsWire and other readers are better equipped to serve the sort of information overload of a "power reader" and I've included a shot of Feeds and NetNewsWire for comparison in the gallery. Times is designed for some "light" feed reading and aims to make the process more pleasant, not powerful. I recommend no more than 6-8 per category page.Next I'll show you exactly how to set up your own category pages and fill those in with feeds. Then I'll show how to use the shelf and sharing tools. %Gallery-50029%
Breakfast topic: Getting started in WoW
Before I started playing World of Warcraft, I hadn't played any other MMORPGS. As a matter of fact, I didn't even play video games regularly at all. I was always fascinated by hearing horror stories about the crazy things people did while playing Everquest. But I was also amazed by achievements and the vastness of the settings. I've been playing WoW for about two years now. My boyfriend suggested I try it. I was hesitant to begin my adventures in Azeroth. I was afraid that buying the game would be a waste of money. I dragged my feet as I walked into the game store and grimaced a bit as the clerk swiped my debit card. I was dreadful at navigating in video games and was overwhelmed by the amount game knowledge it took to be successful. It took me about ten months to get my first level 60 character. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I first started playing. I really wish I had discovered WoW Rookie sooner. In the end, I discovered that WoW is awesome. I love being part of the community.
Breakfast Topic: Help a newbie!
If you could offer one piece of advice to a new World of Warcraft player, what would it be? It is the holiday season, after all -- time to lend a helping hand to those less fortunate. So for all of the new players reading today, let's tell them what they need to know to survive their adventures in Azeroth (and hopefully make it to Outland, Northrend, and wherever else Blizzard might have in store for us in the future)! I'll get us started: Pick up absolutely everything from a corpse, even if it seems useless. You can sell it for cash -- maybe not much, but it adds up in time. Train first aid! Even if you're a class that can heal itself, there will be times you're low on mana, and you'll be glad you have those bandages. Cooking may sound dull -- but food can provide useful buffs, which makes cooking a worthwhile skill to have. And... if you want to become a successful chef and make all sorts of awesome, higher-level food the easiest way to skill up is to train it up with fishing. (Though fishing is dull, dull, dull -- you'll thank me when you don't have to go from skill zero to skill 375 because you need a rare fish to make your favorite food.) Don't forget to have fun! So what advice would you give a newbie?
All the World's a Stage: Getting started with roleplaying
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the explorative performance art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.For a long time now I've wanted to write an introductory guide on how to get started as a roleplayer. After all, roleplaying is something a lot of people would like to try, but really don't know how to begin. The problem with getting started is that various misconceived assumptions may sometimes block us from trying and dampen our enthusiasm. In the particular case of roleplaying, these mistaken assumptions might be along the lines of: "Roleplaying is lying to people about who you are," and "roleplaying is something weird people do," and "roleplaying is a waste of time for noobs." To the contrary, we have seen in previous articles that roleplaying is actually an exploration of who you are, a way to understand and connect with other people, and, in fact, a variant on things perfectly normal people do all the time anyway. So now -- where to actually begin? Certainly there is no perfect way to begin as a roleplayer, so today I'll outline three basic steps, which you can try and see if they work for you. I would be particularly interested in feedback from people who try out this method as first time roleplayers: if you do try it and have a great time, please come back and tell us about it; or if you try and something doesn't work, come back and tell us what went wrong. It's been a long time since I was a beginning roleplayer, and though I'll do my best to plot a path into this hobby, I only got to be a beginner once! Perhaps other beginning roleplayers will also share their experiences below, and you can see which path suits you best.
Getting started with Quicksilver: understanding the basics
Prompted by a TUAW reader comment on my post the other day about some Quicksilver fundamentals, I thought I would take a crack at posting some short tutorials on what Quicksilver actually does, and how to get started with it. I'm talking about the most basic of the basics here for anyone who is curious but still confused as to what the heck they're looking at the first time they launch Quicksilver. To anyone who can't make heads or tails of it: I don't blame you. It took me quite a while to wrap my head around all this stuff, so I hope I can do you some justice with this post.Disclaimer - I use a somewhat modified version of Quicksilver and I've added a lot of extras, but for this demo I *think* I've properly fixed my copy to look like a default Quicksilver install.Speaking of my screenshot - let's get started.
