Green Leaf Read-Only Restriction

Every week now, I see that Torn is breaking record player counts, typically influenced by thousands of new players a day. While that is fantastic for the state of the game to see new life flooded in, I believe it is also leading to a flood of the forums by players who immediately blast random questions, s**t posts, and other half-baked ideas and thoughts into the forums at random when they've less than 14 days under their belts.

As a way to help mitigate and moderate this, I propose a simple and minimally restrictive "read only" status that is tied to green leaf status. I have played plenty of other browser based games where you had to reach a certain level to make your own posts or have a certain amount of play-time, and I think Torn doesn't have to be any different.

By implementing this restriction, we are ensuring that for the first 14 days, new players are reading before posting. This gives them time to answer their own questions via the plethora of guides and numerous experienced players they can reach out to through Global, Trade, or Faction Chat.

The bottom line is, with all the additional advertisement on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, Torn is going to get a much different type of new player base than they have historically. And to combat a wave of posts flooding the various forum pages, this restriction could help both mods and players alike.

Open to dialogue and other thoughts.

EDIT: I'd modify the above to specify that green-leaves can still post in faction forums and can participate on others - my focus is that they are not creating their own posts in General Discussion when it:

A - doesn't belong there

or

B - Is a question they could answer by reading Baldr's Guide or something else that is very basic and easy to access if you spend some time reading and learning.

Agreed, maybe a tutorial could work as well. This could help answer many questions by doing tuts first.

Agreed!

I see stupid shit posted by older players too. The difference is, green leaves don't know any better so what's the older player's excuse? 

However, sure, I'm for this one because it's an effective tool for combating spam. Helps make staff's work lighter so they can fed more people for dumb ass reasons. :P

Totally agree - older players can post stupid stuff just as much as experienced players.

However, they're going to be the exception, and not the rule - whereas a lot of the new players who come from these new advertising sources (TikTok and Instagram aren't exactly known as bastions of literacy) will post many more shit posts - and they'll keep doing it as the stream of new players will be consistent.

The goal for this, as you put it though, is not to moderate content but to minimize work for the volunteer staff and make sure that the new players are actually turning to the really solid tutorials and guides offered on the games and by George before blasting a question answered 5,000 times already.

I agree but suggest an addition to this being a specific forum for green leaves as well. I enjoy hosting small giveaways to new players, which is my main concern, so maybe that forum could be where only people past green leaf status can create new posts and only people in green leaf status could reply? Or maybe just altogether green leaves can't make new posts but can still leave replies, as asking specific questions they couldn't find in the post or on the forum would also help in learning. Although I would be willing to sacrifice this for the sake of keeping the forums more in line. I definitely agree that new players should be doing more reading than posting while trying to learn!

So perhaps we can limit it to "no new forum posts" and only allowed to post in existing forums.

This way they can still do giveaways, ask questions on the tutorials section, and interact with their faction as needed - but won't be blowing up global asking what a RW is or how to make friends or money.

Agreed

From what a newbie in my faction said recently, there's actually a newbie forum already. Unlike Green Leaf, its available till you hit level 15 I think?

I'm not the biggest fan of the "f**k all the newbies they never add anything worthwhile" thing, but it seems like its getting to the point its needed, there's way more non related ChatGPT posts of late.

To your third paragraph, yeah honestly, I'm always happy to offer advice on things, but there's only so many times I can screenshot a passage from Baldrs Guide and send it to someone on Discord before I lose my mind.

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Yeah we got an influx right before easter of a bunch of 7+ yr accounts making stupid posts and asking noob questions.  So it's not always green leafs.

I'm generally in favour, with a couple of exceptions. Obviously, the New Player forums should be open to greenies. I don't think that needs much explanation. But also faction and company forums should be open to greenies. If you have a faction that's geared towards helping new players get going and learn the ropes, the new players you're helping out should be allowed to post in those forums, same for companies. I foresee that making the New Players forums an even more bustling place than it already is, but maybe that's not a bad thing considering how much New Player Chat improved after making changes.

I have long since been an advocate for this. 

It should go by the time played stat, and not age. 

Q&A forum is the only one that they should be allowed to create a new thread in. I'm all for limiting them even responding in other fourms, but feel that may be a little heavy handed. 

Bump

bump

I agree but don't believe our input matters as this is more of a how to run the game than a feature.

I think it would be fine if the restriction was to not be able to create a new thread in GD for certain period of time.  

How many times we see multis, feds, restarts, create a new account and create new threads right away.  Some simple way to eliminate or minimize that would be nice. 

In full support of this. 

Honestly burnt out from seeing low quality, and shitpost threads in GD now. I'm staying away from that forum for now just purely because of the burnout.

It's a good thing there's an actual game that's the main focus, because GD is just painful to read through right now.

That is exactly how I feel.