TL;DR at bottom.
Hello, I would like to once again bring light to the life of noavis. I will be rehashing a few ideas here, as I feel that we need to bring light to this subject once again.
As Cub's post in another thread got me thinking, we won't be around forever. Most of us, anyways, as much as we joke that it's a place that can never be left. The people who actually quit did not go out with a bang; but in dreaded silence because of what the site has become.
Policy has been a fundamental value of Epic Mafia tradition. It likely got started due to new players being, well, new. Not knowing how the game works, sui'ing, vegging, hammering wrong, throwing the game. All are factorial enough to hate noavis.
But are we bringing our own demise? While sandbox still gets a hearty amount of new players, we chase off a plethora more due to our distaste for them. Policy, not offering help, and a general negative attitude befuddles me. Shouldn't we be trying to grow the community, instead of trying to destroy it?
So, I would like to bring a few ideas back into the table, and hopefully generate more, and hopefully we can either stop policy, or better yet take steps against the reasoning to policy in the first place, but would most likely require lucid to do quite a bit of work.
Make more default avatars. I really liked this idea, having a giant pool of default avatars would make new players not get stuck with the ugly noavi, and would go unnoticed by most live by policy players.
Revamp the entire mentor system. The fact of the matter is that the mentor system does not get much attention, and you either have to actively seek out being a mentee, or be in a close relationship with your mentor, and at either point of time you'd likely have enough experience to not necessarily need one. My suggestion for this is rapidly increase the amount of mentors, but moreso let mentors add mentees without needing a mod to do it. That way, if new players are on the site, we can encourage people to link them to the mentor page to PM any of them to become a mentee, instead of constantly policy'ing them, reporting them, and publicly shaming them for not having experience.
Try to help noavis yourself. Woah, big one right. Answer their questions, refuse to policy, and don't be a butt to them. This is probably the most difficult one, but I hope EMers will be able to see where I'm coming from.
TL;DR: Don't harass noavis and cause our community to shrink, not grow.
