Players want to have fun and they want to play the game now.  Just in the past 24hrs of my return, I see the same mistakes being made by vets offering advice to new players.

It is alright if players are not perfectly optimized or they do things that are fun now that may not be smartest thing if they plan on playing for a year.   I know you guys are super-nice, but I think you may be hurting new player retention by offering such long-term advice rather than just showing the players how to have fun now, doing the fun things in the game NOW that they want to do.

Telling players not to build armies or attack stuff.  Or just this morning I heard someone offer advice to a new player that they really shouldn´t be crafting until they had 4 or 5 cities.   You guys love the game and maybe that is smart advice, but new players don´t love the game yet and do not want to wait to have 5 cities until they do the things in the game they think will be fun.

Yeah, it probably is a bummer in a year when you have your 6th city and realize " hey, maybe I should have put a few of them on 7 food spots".. or whatever..   But the truth is I think you guys are way over-doing it and not allowing the players to have fun early in the game with the advice you give.  I would imagine the ratio of new players that last long enough to where the long-term advice even matters is very low.

I think a lot of the boredom of early building might be because without the decision-making regarding res, you are just pushing whatever button and waiting.  It also completely eliminates the need to use vans to pull resources, which I am finding makes things more interesting.  I actually care about my vans now and make decisions on which res I need to send them to.   But if you are getting 10,000 res every few hours from vets, who cares about the 200 per hour you can get from vans.  Today I purposefully had to send my vans further because I needed wood ( being an orc).. and it felt like a wise decision to bypass the closer rez source and go after what I really needed.   Those are the types of decisions that make 4X games work.

Not having to care about which rez to build, not having to care about vans, being told not to build armies... I think all of those things contribute to the boredom many people talk about with the early game.

My 2 cents: When I was a new player, shipping tons of res to newbs was just getting off the ground. I received a couple of shipments and appreciated it but I was not expecting more and made my way through the usual issues, making mistakes and armies and the whole nine yards. Eventually I had to rearrange things and it wasn't the end of the world. The mistakes I made were all the usual ones but I don't regret a second of it. I understand vets want to help newbs have a better experience but sometimes, experience is the thing. If you don't experience life in Illyriad first hand, how can you appreciate it to the fullest?

I think the only advice I would give now is to tell newbs to just do what they want to do. Want to build an army, do it. Want to craft, do it. Whatever it is, this is a game and nothing is eternal and if all goes wrong, abandon and start over, no biggie.

I continue play because of growing wealth. I went into offline-idle play type as a primary way recent year(s).

Heard G0dsdestoyer sold his 10million cows.