Newbies and login screens

Today, I was overcome by the urge to do newbie cleanup. Perhaps I've been spending too much time looking at the dropout statistics from the character creation process. Maybe it was my gods bugging me to get to things that I should have done last week. Maybe it was the coffee I got in the afternoon; that always seems to give me incentive, though it's bad for sleeping.

I ran up a newbie thief character, and got no farther than the cave system before I had my first major thing to fix: movement regen. Movement regen sucks, in that you run out and you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time to be able to go anywhere, even if you only want to walk one room to a safe area so you can sleep. Some brainstorming with myself and an hour later, we now have continuous movement regen. I'm going to boot the code in tomorrow morning.

I originally planned to halt movement regen completely if the character was lagged or melee fighting, but after fighting a bit and running out of movement, it occurred to me that I would -never- get back any movement and might not even be able to flee. Now movement regen is just cut in half while fighting. Regen from equipment or spells isn't affected by this though, in that you always get full regen from effects-based regen.

The other set of changes I made was some relatively minor reorganization of the intro screens. I created an 'Obsolete Options' menu under the 'Advanced' menu, and moved the old login points as well as different ltype selection there.

I plan to make some real changes tomorrow, in that I'm going to move the name selection process to much later on, put email address and some other things in the main menu, and start character creation immediately on connect. The final process will probably be along the lines of:

Create a new character?
Are you blind?
Pick your class
Pick your sex
Existing player/how did you find us
Name selection
Password
Login menu

This should remove at least one screen from the process (the email screen), and hopefully will get people involved in creating the character before they get to the high-dropout phase: name selection. I suspect this will raise the retention rate for new players by probably around a factor of two. Hopefully the stats will bear me out on this.

One other thing I may do is put more character creation options on the main menu, or even prior to name selection. I should probably have Locane come up with an automatic description system as well, so people can pick eye color and the like to get an autogenerated long description.