There is a tl;dr.
Hello, I am a Sins player from long ago, years ago, since the original release of the original sins! BUT thanks to the Steam sale, I bought Rebellion. To the point! I played Demigod, and we made a lot of mistakes building a player base. As someone who wants a player base to play with, I've got some suggestions; take them or leave them.
(Lists are always the most creative way to post)
1. First, if you want to help new players, BE NICE. They may suck, they may rage, they may tell you that you're a complete and total jackass who should go to hell. Who cares, be nice or they will never come back and never get better.
2. If you REALLY want to help players, especially ones that get on the forums (which by definition makes them better than the average noob) someone with experience should setup a Ventrilo/Teamspeak/VOIP server and start hosting tutorials. A mixture of noob and non-noob players is best (With Demigod, at one point, this almost doubled the player base). Now, VOIP does WAY more than a guide or text based chat ever will, and when you hear someone talk, the humanizing bit helps keep everyone civil***.
3. Where are the multiplayer guides? (EDIT: I mean integrated rebellion specific guides, compiled. I look at the guides up and I simply don't know which one to trust.) Last I checked, taking a battlecruiser as your first capital ship was a bad idea, but I can't seem to find guides in this forum confirming or denying that... (Maybe I'm blind, maybe they haven't been written, but I did search "Guides," "Strategy" and a few other things with some interesting search settings... no luck.) Guides go a long way to helping new or returning players and level the playing field a lot.
4. You have two weeks, maybe three. If they aren't hooked by then, you've lost them.
On a more, hm, individual note, does anyone know if I can run this on a VirtualBox vm? I've been trying that until my windows box gets back from some lovely warranty work I'm having done.
Anyway, it's good to be back, and I hope to see everyone in game! (even if my computer doesn't get back for the next two weeks...)
***Also, due to the length of sins games, this really helps make sure everyone either finishes, or agrees on quitting, or at the very least, understands the impact quitting has on their team.
tl;dr Don't be a horrible person, use VOIP to help noobs, where are my guides?1?!?!?
EDIT: I put this in mulitplayer because I wanted people to read it (I don't know how active the community it is) but if a mod thinks it belongs somewhere else, Rebellion, please move it.
