To All the Veteran Players and Server Admins, Be Kind to New Players!
First off, this is a personal post, though also part of my job.
Squad is seeing a well needed influx of new players this week and moving forward. One of the selling points for Squad is the teamwork based nature of gameplay. It is now up to the veteran community members to actually extend their hand out and welcome the new playerbase into their squads, on a daily basis, and show them around our little corner of the gaming internet.
That means:
Not locking squads to non-Clan members.
Not kicking new players from squads if they are floundering.
Taking the extra step to help total strangers get acclimated to Squad's game mechanics and gameplay style on a regular basis for the coming weeks, during each and every gaming session.
Generally providing "teachable moments" admonishments instead of defaulting to the "kick that noob" mentality when dealing with seemingly clueless new players.
Be a good human being to those who might not have a strong grasp of the native language on the servers. In many ways, the future of Squad is going to be spread out across the globe anywhere there is high speed internet access.
Run some training squads, name them training squads, and take on the task of getting new players up to speed in Squad.
Be nice enough to point people towards the online manual, which is being updated and will be available hopefully on release day. EDIT: manual can be downloaded here:
http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/393380/manuals/Squad_EA-Manual_1_0.pdf?t=1450454625[1]
Invite new players into your gaming clans/groups, let them see and participate in the larger community that has developed around Squad, PR, Arma, etc games, grow the communities as a whole and we all do well.
The larger clans should break out and run 2 or 3 separate squads, filling the squads out with new players, and working in a mindset of multiple squads working together. Bring in a few clanmates in each squad, use the buddy system with new players, anything you can think of to get new players a good experience during their first impression of Squad.
No racism or prejudice.
I'm sure there are more things to be said on the matter, but I hope I get the point across with the list above.
The trailer has had ~80,000 views as when I'm posting this thread. Hundreds of thousands of other videos and streams and hundreds of articles. With all of us putting our good foot forward to invite new players into the fold, we could see a much higher conversion rate of new players into long term members of the game community.
In closing: Don't disrespect the Squad Devs and the tens of thousands of man hours they have invested over the last two years by acting like a jag-off during the Early Access ramp up weeks. And in return the Devs will continue to work our butts off to radically alter the state of FPS gaming on PC.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/393380/discussions/0/458604254424644880/
before so many noobs joined up to the free weekend I had some AMAZING games and enjoyed it so much I bought it after an hr of play..but...now I'm finding it hard to get into a decent squad as 90% of the ones I join have trolls or teamkillers on them etc and its all the noobs doing it.
