Idea Making WarZ Better for New Players

I know, there's DayZ/WarZ 2.0 that's in the works. These changes will hopefully be easy to implement, or would still benefit the community when WarZ 2.0 is released.

So, at the moment, WarZ is almost dead. I haven't seen a server with over 30 players for a while, but instead of dwelling on this fact, everyone would be better off coming up with ideas to revive it. There's most likely 2 reasons why WarZ is not as popular as it was before - old players getting bored due to lack of fresh, new features (which hopefully DayZ will fix), and new players not enjoying the game. The latter is often over-looked when people suggest new ideas, but since I'm a new player on WarZ, I (hopefully) have a first hand experience as to why a lot of new players simply leave rather than stay. There's a few reasons that I think are causing new players to leave:

• The in-game chat is very toxic
• It takes a long time to find good items (tier 4 weapons, diamond armour, .etc)
• The game and the items in it aren't explained very well

Fixing the first is easier said than done - all Brawl needs to do is have more staff on each WarZ server. This has been suggested before, and the common response is that Brawl can't make good WarZ applicants come from no-where. This is completely true, as currently there's only one decent WarZ applicant who's applying and even if he gets accepted, there still won't be enough staff to cover all the servers.

This is really important for new players and old players. When I was online earlier, I got a few kills, and only one person didn't flame in chat at me for killing them. Playing a server for the first time and being told to "f off" or being called a "c***" (both of which happened to me) are not a way to give a good impression for new players. For old players, more staff per server would also reduce the amount of hackers, a common complaint I see on the forums.

Its not very easy to get more staff on WarZ servers, since as I said before there's no way for Brawl to promote more staff when there's very little good applicants applying. However, there are a few things Brawl can do to increase the amount of staff per server, without making the current WarZ mods have to dedicate all their time to the server.

1. Reduce the amount of servers. Right now, even if Brawl was able to find people who don't need to sleep and could play 24/7, they'd need 6 staff members on WarZ to cover all the servers. Considering there's only 3 at the moment, even if they were robots who don't need sleep and don't have lives, they still wouldn't be able to cover every single server. Not only would reducing the amount of servers decrease server costs, and it would mean there'd be more players per server so there'd be more fights, but there'd be more staff per server.
2. Hand-pick some staff - this is a tough one, because WarZ doesn't have many players who would make a good staff member even if they were to apply. If there's anyone who actively plays WarZ who meets the requirements of becoming a staff member, it would be a great step in the right direction. Even if there were only 3 good staff applicants in the entire community, if they were all hand-picked then it would double the amount of staff for WarZ.
3. Ask moderators on other gamemodes to moderate WarZ for once in a while. This one is rather self-explanatory - mods don't really need to be experienced with WarZ to moderate chat. If there's anyone on the staff team who's willing to do this (especially some of the Wild West mods, since Wild West and WarZ are incredibly similar), this would be a huge step forwards for WarZ.

So although Brawl can't accept more staff members since there's not many good applicants, there are a few things that can be done to increase the amount of staff members.

Onto the next point I made above. This, in my opinion, is the biggest issue. About a week ago I played WarZ, and I was in a zone 6 for about an hour. The only tier 4 weapon I got was a spas, and the only piece of diamond gear that I got was a diamond helmet and a sword. This is much longer than a new player's attention span will be, and I was lucky enough that I didn't run into anyone in the area for that length of time, for as soon as I did, I got killed in a fight that lasted about 5 seconds.

I'd guess it'd take me at least 2-3 hours to find full diamond armour, with a few tier 4 weapons, which is way too long for a new player. And even then, when the player does run into someone, they're inexperienced and there's no way they'd win the fight. That'd be 2-3 hours of just searching chests in the same environment gone out the window in a small 5 second fight.

This suggestion is simple - increase the amount of tier 3/tier 4 weapons and diamond armour you find in chests in all zones. Zones 1-3 shouldn't contain tier 4 weapons and diamond armour, zone 4 should be about as good as zone 6 is now, and zones 5-6 should be buffed. In zone 6, it should take no more than an hour to get a barrett, spas and full diamond. Although this'd make gear considerably easier to get, there'd be a lot more fights where everyone has the best stuff.

And finally, there's the issue of not knowing what items do, and whether or not you should keep them. This is very simple to fix - firstly, add the lores on items, so when you put your mouse of them it'll say "When you hold this in your hand, you won't take any fall damage" (for the parachute) or "Right click this for a short burst of speed" (for sugar). Also, advertise the wiki in-game more. Simply add an announcement that says "Don't know something about the game? Check out the wiki at https://www.brawl.com/wiki/mc-warz/".

Aaaand done. This was longer than expected. @ChikenFriedReich @ritzy @Eso

tl;dr: Have more staff per servers (see the numbered list on some ways this can be done, since Brawl can't wave a magic wand and have good mod applicants appear out of thin air), make loot less time-consuming to get, explain items in-game more and advertise the wiki.

 

Well, I agree with everything else in you're post but I just don't understand this bit. I know a lot of WarZ players don't want more servers to be cut - why is this? I usually see every server have no more than 2 people on other than server 1 (and sometimes server 2).

This would definitely help, since if a new player joins and loots for a few hours then gets completely trashed in a fight, for all they know that would be all the gamemode is. I think it'd be even better if they actually experienced one of these awesome donator fights, but showing them how good they are would definitely be a good start.