How's the new tutorial?

[Mushboom]

I started this game a while ago, finished the vlan, and was a bit worn out from it and stopped there. I didn't get a chance to try the game properly, so I'm thinking of going through the marks to see what it's like. How's the new tutorial, and how long is it roughly?

[Spanospy]

Marks are significantly shorter. Each one is bitesized, and you only need to do a few before you gain access to the rest of the game (though some functionality will be gated behind completing certain marks, just so you know how they work)

From what I'm seeing, they're a great replacement to the prior firewall but don't quite encapsulate the story / hacking stuff you see in the vLAN yet.

Still, they do offer more information on certain things than the vLAN never did. So I'd definitely have fun going through them and then tackling the npc stuff on your own!

[Mushboom]

Seems like I'm having to put the marks aside to go through the "teach.me" script and hit up some abandoned accounts to get money for sys.init. They've got some tedious locks on them. Is it expected we'd need to write some scripts to break through these before finishing the tutorial?

[Spanospy]

The T1 npcs are notorious for being tedious. That hasn't changed for the time being, however you might be able to find scripts that can help you with the locs or provide an alternative way of earning GC (e.g. game / gambling scripts)

[Tikigod]

Originally posted by Mushboom:

I started this game a while ago, finished the vlan, and was a bit worn out from it and stopped there. I didn't get a chance to try the game properly, so I'm thinking of going through the marks to see what it's like. How's the new tutorial, and how long is it roughly?

Returning player here who only really touched the surface of the MUD environment previously but on returning a few days ago decided to make a new user and start fresh with the new Marks system.

Personally I find the new approach much better and actually covering a lot more ground of the fundamentals of what you're really going to need to know.

Whilst the initial sentience firewall sequence now lacks a lot of the narrative padding it had before, it leads you through a more practical directed and informative path in significantly less time.

And once you've proven sentience and stepped beyond the firewall the Marks system expands its offerings significantly and starts to cover subjects like how to script, hardline, Ez_21, how to find targets and navigate locs and so much more in a much cleaner way than anything the game presented previously, as they're now all handled in self-contained environment chunks.


So it's hard to really answer how long the on-boarding takes to get through using the new marks system, as really you can continue to delve into the expanded marks programs once you've entered the larger MUD environment, or you can put it to the side and just freely explore doing your own thing, and then just return to certain Mark programs once you want to explore that part of the environment.

[Soondead]

The marks system does a much better job of illustrating how the game actually works. Still, even though it drops one important lead to finding T1 NPC locs, it would seem that some players aren't taking notes and miss this clue. Then, as they need 1MGC to proceed, they have no idea how to proceed.

If there's just ONE thing people need to learn when going into Hackmud, it's that you MUST take notes. The scratchpad is way too small and cumbersome to use, so I keep notepad.exe open and copy/paste a LOT. The information you need at tier 1 is all there if you pay attention.

Compared to the old VLAN though, with its focus on lore characters, staged drama and an imaginary "laundry list" with locs appearing out of thin air, the marks system is a huge improvement.

[Tikigod]

Originally posted by Soondead:

The marks system does a much better job of illustrating how the game actually works. Still, even though it drops one important lead to finding T1 NPC locs, it would seem that some players aren't taking notes and miss this clue. Then, as they need 1MGC to proceed, they have no idea how to proceed.

If there's just ONE thing people need to learn when going into Hackmud, it's that you MUST take notes. The scratchpad is way too small and cumbersome to use, so I keep notepad.exe open and copy/paste a LOT. The information you need at tier 1 is all there if you pay attention.

Compared to the old VLAN though, with its focus on lore characters, staged drama and an imaginary "laundry list" with locs appearing out of thin air, the marks system is a huge improvement.

Agreed about the importance of taking notes, and that the scratchpad is woefully insufficient for that task especially with all the weird bugs and glitches the scratchpad has when it comes to line formatting once you've filled in enough lines for it to become scrollable.... the entire thing just kind of breaks.

I also keep notepad++ open at all times when playing, with one tab set up for information notes and another tab for actually putting together my own scripts and testing them.


One of the things I did find surprising was how suddenly the marks just abruptly end once you get to the point of initialising your system to level 1, there's no marks covering the market, upgrades or anything like that.... you complete the mark for initialising and then the list is empty.

There's clearly a lot more marks planned in the future, especially given the state of the protocol grid and the fact that the design already illustrates that the presented grid is adaptive in the way that to start with it's a 4x4 grid, once you prove sentience the grid then becomes a 8x8.

It was just surprising to me that the cut off point for the current new player on-boarding ended so suddenly without even covering the concept of system upgrades and how to obtain them.... especially considering the importance of such things for naturally working around certain T1 locks without having to resort to cheating by using out of game information searching.

It almost feels like the mark system was designed with the assumption that by that point the player would split themselves off to using more community sourced guidance like teach_si_x80d.each_other.

The problem with that is that such scripts are presented from outside sources and many new players will likely discard it as a potential scam attempt or if they do decide to trust it (Despite the games frequent reminder not to trust anything) the scripts introduction phrasing makes it sound like the player is going to be forced paired with other players when they're still relatively new and are still getting their bearings and I suspect a lot of people will stop proceeding through such scripts at that point because they want to 'learn naturally' and not through being match-made with another human.

And yes, I know that's not what scripts like teach_si_x80d.each_other actually do, but its introduction is worded in a way that it states that's what it's going to do if the new player confirms they want to participate. And that's going to make many players that don't know the script already, not proceed past the first script call.


All that aside hopefully in the future we'll see the marks system introduce more core subjects that are integral for new players to actually get into, as the existing system is really well done and a huge step forward from what existed before.