[Discuss] Timers for locked options

[Andrew Asche]

This thought occured to me last night when I was clicking through
options on my newly immigrated character, and clicked "Change Class".
I was told something to the effect of "You cannot change class this
quickly after joining a realm.  Have more patience.", and I thought
that that was a rather ambiguous statement.  As I've been playing for
a while, I can guess that the limit is probably something like 2
weeks, like most other locked options.

But for very new players to BattleMaster, they might not realize right
away just how slow-moving of a game BattleMaster is built to be.

For a new player, they create a character and are met with quite a lot
of options that they are not allowed to use, namely voting, changing
class, etc.  There are more, I'm sure, they're just not coming to me
at right this moment.  And while I"m not protesting the time limits
themselves, I think they are both good and necessary to give people
time to "break in" their character and BattleMaster experience as a
whole, I think it might be prudent if these came with timers like,
"You will be able to do this in X days".  That would do the following
things...
-Make new players realize *right away* the speed at which BattleMaster
moves.  For a lot of online games, "Have more patience" might mean
something more like "Try again tomorrow."  If a new player, expecting
that kind of pace, tries the option again and again several days in a
row, and continues to be thwarted, they may just leave in frustration
at not having any idea *when* they will be allowed to do these fun
sounding things.
-For the first few days in the realm, a new character cannot access
the Character List of that realm, and thus cannot actually *see* how
many days they have been in the realm, unless by going to the family
page, clicking "Edit Data", clicking the small "View" link, scrolling
down, and subtracting the creation date from the current date.  While
that would seem obvious to most of us, a new player likely has not yet
gained that level of agility with the features.

I think it would be to everyones benefit that an option refused due to
the newness (Is that a word?) of a character should carry along with
it information as to how much longer it will be until they will be
able to do it.  That way, if they don't like it, they can simply leave
right away, rather than trying to play a few days and just becoming
completely frustrated and leaving for that reason.

And, I think it'd be easy to do, since the script has obviously
already calculated/checked, whichever, the days they have been in the
realm, it needs only to be printed.


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