Let's talk about the in-game welcome screen!

Marketing wants to make money off the Welcome Screen? Well, how about they put two chits up in the market place. For 500 SC you can disable the WS for a month, for 2500 SC you can disable the WC for the year and finally for 4200 SC you can permanently disable it.

Alternately, how about bronze/silver see the welcome screen every time the log in. Gold subscribers (paying customers) don't get blasted with outdated marketing materials every day, perhaps once, upon login, every 7 days?

Give us a reason to look at it. If you can't do that, let it die.

if i cant customize it with what i want to see on the welcome screen..and i don't have the option of disabling it if i want too

then i prefer not to have it all..as in its current form its annoying and i close it as soon as i log in

I have seen the screen load 1 time ever, I close it before it ever gets a chance to load and will always do so i do not care at all what is on it and never will, you could post on it you are giving away $1,000,000 on it and I still wouldn't look at it. it is worthless and slows down my load times. to bad disable pop ups do not work in game too.

Wow, you know I'm impressed that you brought this discussion to us, Roshen. Some of these responses just nail it, so I'm impressed with those too.

I can compromise on seeing it once a week or two. Every day is extremely excessive imho. I'd be happiest if it would no longer increase my load times and lag.

I never read it. I'd be more inclined to if there were relevant game updates.

So far, my cat is still beating your welcome screen in confirmed toon deaths, 9-1.

I almost don't want to say this, as from the overwhelming response so far, the best option would be to get rid of this abomination, but, this is something marketing should think about. I personally would pay at least 20 bucks a year to have this window never open, per account.

That's how little I use it.

That's how annoying it is.

That's my perceived value of it (negative).

would like to see the welcome screen done away with, or at least a way to disable it.

I never use it much less read anything on it.

I already pay a monthly fee as a Gold subscriber; you're suggesting I should pay additional fees to not see pop-up ads that take up most of my screen? That's a horrible idea.

Roshen, I appreciate your asking for feedback, but I'm afraid that at this point, people are already so annoyed with the welcome screen, that they'll close it instantly out of habit no matter what you do with it. I know I'm already at that point.

That being said, if you absolutely must keep it, here are the main problems with it IMO:
1) The window is way too big. When I log in I want to see my character's surroundings, especially if where I camped isn't entirely safe. I have a widescreen monitor & the welcome screen takes up about 80% of it. I shudder to think of what it's like on smaller screens.
2) It provides no useful information. I'd vote for an event schedule with precise start & end dates (not "being released in March and April"), date of next patch with estimated downtime (most people in-game don't know about these until the half hour countdown), and start & end dates of marketplace sales.
3) It takes too long to load. If the screen already had information on it when I logged in, I might look at it. If I've already spent time waiting for my character to load, I don't want to spend additional time waiting for a superfluous marketing window to load.
4) The screen is too busy & hard to read. The screen is mostly filled with large, pointless graphics; while the text is relatively small & yellow on top of a background graphic that contains a lot of yellow as well.

Unfortunately, for all these comments, you know Marketing will just read the section after "If you absolutely must keep it..." and translate that to "Here's what our customers have asked for..."

The second it is possible to (legitimately) remove the Welcome screen once and for all, I will never look at it again. This, functionally, is no different to how it already works, it just removes an extra keypress/click from my routine of "log on, server select, character select, close annoying Welcome popup, load spell set, summon replacement NORENT items..."

Count me as another person that hits ESC as soon as I enter the world, so I rarely see it, even with my FibreOp connection and new PC.

To make it useful, it really does need to be updated regularly. If you are doing Weekly updates of content, then that's one of the places that that content should be advertised. Similarly big announcements, like Heroic Characters being available, and/or upcoming expansions should also be in there. Marketting should be secondary.

If you can find the coding time, I would change how it comes up:

1. Let Gold members turn it off by default.
2. Have a way to bring it up from in game if you do want to see it. Treat it like a newspaper/newsletter basically, so we can read it at leisure if we want to.
3. Biggest change: Do NOT bring it up if you are in a combat zone. But instead, bring it up the first time that session that you enter PoK/PoT/Bazaar/Nexus/Guild Hall/Guild Lobby/House/Neighbourhood
4. With the changes above in mind, make it bigger; so you have a mix of news and advertising; ideally you want a 50/50 mix at most, instead of being ALL Marketplace.
5. If possible, provide a way for the Guild to leave messages that would appear to guildmates. (For example, "Upcoming Raids" or "JoeBob is now an officer. Send him your condolances" or similar messages that are guild only.

Kill it with fire, and the people that thought it up in the first place so they can't ever make anything else this horrible again.

Replace it with this.

Let them live and give them EQPlayers to work on as punishment !

Your data will soon be submitted to eqplayers....

*popup*
*popup*
*popup*

Not quite sure if that is a good idea, Yinla.

OK you win, now get them out of the code team who are adding another pop up when we camp!

Hmph!

I wish they would put in loyalty and Station Cash amounts and whether or not I have claimed my Legends of Norrath cards yet. Give me the specials going on and events, and stop trying to sell me on your other games. If I wanted to play your other games I would go there and play them, but I am not paying you a monthly subscription to get more ads. Keep them to yourself.

How often would you like to see it be updated?
every week with new updates about upcoming patches or fixes or bug fixes whatever is relevant to stuff about the game Everquest not the associated games we don't play like LoN, or whatever game is not Everquest.

Do you read this in-game?
right now like everyone here NO! it takes up to many cycles trying to load, and half the time like stated when minimized, reopen it comes up white blank screen, so one shot to read it or log out then back in to read it. I would prefer it to be gone completely but if it has to stay on then this is what I would like to see

I would love to see friends list on it someplace to see if anyone is on from guild or friends. at a glance. maybe patch notes someplace on it after a patch not sure if that can be done but that would be easier then trying to find it someplace on the website.

What type of content would be most useful to you on this welcome screen?
friends/guild friends online
patch notes
any updates bug fixes or something
new zones or upcoming patch info
any new content that has been added or will be coming whatever is relevant.
guild MOTD maybe
fellowship MOTD maybe
any related news

I've never actually looked at it. It's my instant reflex to hit the escape key as soon as I log in so I can go about with my questing.

IIRC this was in there originally, but got taken out because of issues on the PVP servers, as it allowed you to /friend somebody, then use the Welcome Screen to determine which zone they were in, even if they were /anon.

If you really want to do the community a favor. Find a way to disable it.
It is annoying and I never look at it, but since I box I have to hit escape even multiple times.
Actually it is super annoying not just annoying.