Right now the get help feature seems to be a complete failure. A few people use it once at the start of set, and never seem to even visit their threads. Those who do see threads that, b/c they are anonymized, are a bit difficult to look at. It seems silly, but I think people really benefit from seeing the exact status report of the country.

I have a few ideas of how to improve it, and I'd like to hear alternative ideas/tweaks to my idea. Here's how my idea would work:

We have a group of qualified trainers. Perhaps you need a t10 or t20 finish to qualify, but it shouldn't be too hard to find many willing/qualified trainers.

At the start of set new players can ask to be part of a training group. Each trainer gets assigned a # of players, hopefully in the 3-5 range. I want more then 1 or 2 to a group, b/c I think new players learn a lot from comparing themselves to other new players.

This group of people then (trainer+5 trainees) gets a forum on boxcar or one of the other hosting sites, where they can upload statuses and compare countries. There will be no attacking allowed between countries in a group (including obvi the trainer's country), b/c they can see each others stats, but allowing alliances seems fine.

Finally, I suggest making it a bit competitive, revealing the group rankings at the end of set.

It oftentimes seems pointless to respond to the help forum because it's doubtful the person will ever see your response. I suggested in B&S they add a field for the submitter to include a question or a statement about their country as well, so we see more than just a country status with no comments.

The best thing would be if our responses to that thread were messaged automatically to the country...

Bobby, if the newbs in your idea are active enough to do all that, I don't think they'd be newbs for long anyway, do you?

hopefully by end of set, no they wouldn't. I think a key, whatever system we go with, is having notifications sent directly to player in game.

I like the idea of a message, or big link, on the front page when they log in to their country alerting them to a reply.

The trick would be finding players ready to learn and stay active.

I'm not convinced there aren't a few around each set. But I agree that's a big issue as well.

But, qz and Pang have said we need to lay the groundwork and have a system in place to greet a horde or active, new players before they will go advertise on facebook or wherever else.