Concept: Newbie protection

[dcode]

Hi everyone,

additionally to a possible tutorial I recently thought about some sort of "newbie protection". One idea is to automatically enable a "training mode" for new players, so that they can participate in any game out of competition. This means that a player in training mode can play any game but will only receive XP and is excluded from skill calculation. However, training mode should be limited to a maximum amount of games, let's say 10, and must contain the possibility to deactivate it instantly if the new player already knows the game and does not want to use the training. Of course, other players in that game must be able to see that a player is in training mode. If players see this, I hope that they'll help the new player out a bit while knowing that they are playing the game mostly out of competition

One advantage of this would be that "beating newbies" would become a little harder / more uninteresting and, as a result, new players would not feel so ultimately bad initially and maybe pick up the game for a longer time than just quitting it because of severe frustration after the first few games.

WDYT?

Epic idea.

Epic idea.

This!

I understand, that the topic is veeeery old, but it sometimes concerns me and probably other more or less skilled players, not less than newbies.
I think, the general idea is to make a possibility to create unrated games: all vs all, surv, coop and so on. There are a lot of use-cases:

• temporary bad internet connection (you're not in home, for example)
• new maps testing
• you teach friends to play, especially on short maps (when it's difficult to chat and play well at the same time)
• custom game rules (i saw some games like 'only guns' or even 'only tesla')
• you just got very tired
• etc

So, sometimes you just want to play without any risk to your skill. As the side positive effect, that could reduce number of twinks, because i'm sure some of them were created just because of that reason.
I see the implementation like at chess zones: some kind of a checkbox 'rated/unrated'. At the server side, that becomes a boolean property of the game object.
Another maybe-useful side effect: that could make 'send to random' and 'send to next' games also rated. If all the players wants to play rated STR, for example, why not? However, it could change some balance, so probably it could be disabled to create rated STR/STN. But unrated game creation, if all the players just want to fun, in my opinion, don't change the skill balance at all, just create that possibility to play ONLY for fun, without some rating effects