[Meta] Newbie Experience (Formerly IC replace rate thread)

[Keychain]

Congratulations on the position, Penguin! You were a great mod for Emperor and I'm sure you'll be an equally great listmod.

I'm very much in favour of collecting information via survey from newbies and would be happy to help out with that.

Getting some more information directly from them regarding their experiences would do a lot to help figure out what factors are important (and which ones aren't) and which are actually within your control.

[Keychain]

Having played as a newbie in a game that didn't really have an IC, it just happened that the SEs tried to pick up the slack.

That was great, but it didn't really negate the need for an IC-like player to generally help us figure out what to do. If you wanted to make this a more standard practice you would need to still make sure that one or more of the SEs is willing to take on this teaching kind of role (I'm just setting aside for now the idea of the mod doing it), in which case you've pretty much got yourself an IC situation going on by a different name but with less ability to troubleshoot it.

Can I ask - what do you consider a shit IC? Like is there some defining characteristic or is it a whole bunch of things?