It's a walkthrough. The point of a walkthrough is to orient a new person to the site. People are absolutely welcome to not use the walkthrough and learn for themselves, nothing wrong with that. But those folks who want a walkthrough are looking for a little more in-depth engagement. Walkthroughs that don't actually walk you through aren't walkthhroughs.

Clicking around the site is advantageous, yes, and a valuable learning experience. But it's incredibly frustrating to be led through a walkthrough that says "you have a half hour to learn where everything is on the site or I will penalize you by failing this quest of yours! And guess what, you don't get any information from the FAQ and you can't post for help."

The experience was so frustrating for me I still remember it years later and clearly have opinions about it. If there's a way to mitigate some of that frustration for newbies with a few functionality tweaks, I don't see why it's so outrageous a suggestion. One link back to Sarah's quests in the walkthrough would have been great.

If it's so terribly important that newbies be forced to click everywhere on the maps instead of getting a little bit of navigation help on their first hour on site, I'd rather not ask them to do it during a quest. Or give newbies a special quest that isn't limited by time, but that gives them a neat newbie prize in which it's beneficial to them to actually click around site.

As it is it feels like a setup to fail.

Many virtual pet sites offer tutorials for the new players to give them a basic idea on how the things around the site work, and how to navigate the pages. People will have plenty of time to learn more about how to play after they've completed a simple tutorial stage.

If there's one thing I do think that needs changing is the forum rule. I feel as though the wait time to post is just stupid. But yeah a link back to Sarah's would be helpful in that instance to. I mean there's a link back for Shinwa when doing her quest. I just don't suppord links for everything but, instead, step by step instructions on how to find it so that you can learn that way.

I'd be pleased to see the forum post rule changed too, I think that would be helpful - at least regarding the newbie and help forums.

yeah..."hi, I'm a newbie but yet I can't post on the two essential forums!" Just doesn't work very well lol

One thing I think would be very helpful for newbies is info on certain achievements. The Account worth and the single pet achievements are super easy for newbies to earn, but I think they need to be triggered and by the time you figure out how, you may have already gone past the point where they are easy to get. I figure the achievement system is one way to encourage people to stick around and if you can get them hooked on earning them early, it might keep them coming back.

ALL OF THIS. I've been here for over 3 years and I still don't understand battling. QuQ It's all over my head. Literally all of it. I train my pet in hopes that one day I'll magically acquire the knowledge of how to battle properly. It would be good to define things used for battle and explain why they're useful. And if this does become a tutorial I'd like to have access to it instead of it being a new players only thing.

The on-site battling documentation is really, really bad. There isn't even any tier information outside the forums. You have to venture to there to have any clue what's going on and that's something I really don't like.

I didn't use the forums here for ages as I found them totally overwhelming and I'm sure there are lots of people in a similar position. Particularly when you start playing, there's just so much to take on that you'd never know where to hunt for information and how to process.

Not sure what the current tutorial is like, mind, because I've been here for ages. Apologies if this overlaps.

Is there any way you could have... say, timed events, ? Alerts that go out to players after x days to help break the site down. I'm thinking something like the Alexander quests from the Reading Drive last year or the Tempest plot this year. Every day or two for a couple of weeks, you'd get a new event which would help break down a portion of the site for you and keep you coming back for more. Tutorial quests, fundamentally.

So say 12 hours after registering or something, you get a walk through of quests, restocking, where to find items, shops etc. Say something like, 'I'm looking for something in the Sacred Lands! Please go there and find the Cavern of the Curious, bring me back any item from this faraway place.' With some pointers if you're stuck: 'Check out the lands on the Explore page'.

Then 24 hours in, you have a quest where you have to restock a couple of items and add them to your wardrobe. Add a small reward for completing the quests and add a 'Hey, congrats! Come back later/tomorrow/in two days and we'll talk about battling/achievements/games/collections/pets and treasures/site navigation!'

Just something to break it down and make it interactive, as lots of people learn by doing things. Again, I'm not sure how guided the tutorial is.

(apologies for how long this is, whoops!)

I really love 's idea. When I join a new site I don't typically like to do a tutorial right away. I want to explore on my own, learn what I can, then maybe, at that point, take a look at a tutorial or something for stuff I might have missed. If I join the site and am immediately presented with a tutorial, I really can't absorb it as well because its just tossing a bunch of stuff at me all at once. But give me a "task" every few days designed to give me that tutorial information and its way more likely to stick with me.

Yeah I wouldn't say a time limit, but maybe more content released at certain intervals. So you can go back and do something (and maybe go back and do something again, without rewards) at your own pace if you want to, but more options open to you over time to keep you coming back before you start to comfortably find your own feet.

And yay, more on-site battle information! :P I think the best guide with have is 's here... and that feels pretty condensed to me haha.

An alternative is to make the tutorial non-linear, so the player is presented with basically an index of topics, and can choose which they want to learn about. Each of those topics can have a short quest associated with it, and it gets checked off on the index page when they've completed it. That way people can go through at their own pace, and learn about the things that matter most to them.

You can have it so the guide is always available (like through the Subeta tab or something), so it can be used as a reference long after a player has finished all the tasks.

ALL OF THIS. I've been here for over 3 years and I still don't understand battling. QuQ It's all over my head. Literally all of it. I train my pet in hopes that one day I'll magically acquire the knowledge of how to battle properly. It would be good to define things used for battle and explain why they're useful. And if this does become a tutorial I'd like to have access to it instead of it being a new players only thing. ^This!!

YES more battling information please! (also think it's one of the more stable things that subeta can cash on (both in terms of time, and money) for a player, through opponents, weapons, etc.)

I would love to have more official battle information! I've been here for almost 5 years and I still feel like I'm swatting at spiderwebs with my eyes closed while battling lol.

I think we all end up with our own ways of doing quests in particular - I always open the shop search link in a new tab, so I don't have to find my way back, but if I didn't, I think I'd struggle to find my way back to the quests (especially if for some reason I couldn't use the back button), to hand the item in. So especially for newbies, but also for everyone else, a little link just to head back to the quest that you're doing, would be great. If not, then maybe instead of the tutorial taking you straight to Sarah's quests, how about it tells you how to get there, so you can find your way back (especially useful for when you've completed the tutorial and want to do more quests too!) :)

I agree on the battling information - it took me years to get to grips with that, and I hate to think what stats my battle pet could have, if I'd started training her back when I started, instead of leaving it for so long!!

Back when I first joined Subeta, I tended to lurk the forums rather than chatting, and always got lost when I tried finding my way around - I know the navigation has improved since then, but it's still very easy to get lost when you're new! A lot of tutorials on tend to just abandon you after the tutorial, and assume you're ready to tackle the site as a whole (whereas sometimes you still feel confused about the whole thing), so I think 's idea is great, to have like a mini-quest type thing to encourage you to go to another land, or try a game you maybe didn't even know existed :)

This suggestion is worthwhile and will make the site more user-friendly.

There's plenty of information available but the problem is that it isn't comprehensively, cohesively, and consistently organized. (That's part of why I like to point out 's topic to new players; it's a nice step in the right direction.)

Most people tend to ignore the forum stickies and even those can become outdated. Useful threads also get pushed down from time to time. The kinds of guidance that are being discussed here should be easily accessible to people who are forum shy or whatnot anyway. Stickies can be a good resource if they're maintained properly though. The CW forum shows one of the best examples of stickied topics being read, used, and followed regarding information like art standards for custom wearables. I really like the Illustrated CW Denial Guide, and something that catalogs information like that outside of the forums would be extremely useful.

I would definitely like to see a non-linear, and non-sP dependant tutorial system. When I started, I did the first couple of tutorial steps, but once I found out that you made money by questing, I did all the quests I could. Within no time, I couldn't access Sarah anymore. It also wasn't clear to me back then that Saggitarius wouldn't give you quests until you had more (how much more???) sP, which I recall was frustrating--especially since no one on the forums knew either, as it had been ages ago for them.

I'm also with everyone else on this thread that a battle guide would be fantastic.

I love this topic and all the suggestions here ;-;

The idea of making an index of mini guides, each with a "task" assigned, is fabulous. It gives people time to move forward on their own and also opens the possibility of having help for each part of the site :3 If I don't want to check the battledome now, I can still check it in three months and the tutorial will still be there for me!

The battledome is a critical area imo, it's definitely not easy to understand for a random new player (especially without battling experience) and it is a bit upsetting that there's no official word on it... to be honest, even the SubetaPedia articles do need a bit of reviewing imo :x

I'm not sure if this information is in any of the guides, I didn't see it on the FAQ but I might've missed it - either way, it's really important to let newbies know in an official topic of things that could potentially cause them trouble, like what happens if they fill a random container at Peka Glade and feed to their pet, or if they zap their pet with valuable items in their inventory... also, things like what are Loyalty Boxes and when you get them (I'd still love for newbies to get a 1-month GA on their first anniversary -cough-) and how to change usernames and pet names / maybe even telling them how it used to be before. Following the same line, it'd tell them how to get their pet genders changed or removed and how to get extra wardrobe slots/layers! Basically, all the random things that you can do with items and you'd never guess otherwise x:

Random edit with something else: whoever suggested that Sarah accepts adopted pets instead of just created ones, I support it! It might not be a real pets pound, but it'd be good to have some more incentive to adopting ^-^