As promised in Live Help! Here's my super awesome list of things where explaining them would be super awesome; also includes super awesome bonus suggestions on ways to explain!
A lot of these would be situations where a little bit of effort would prevent a lot of confusion and help the guides have more time to answer other questions, so without further ado:
- Frogs take ten minutes to deliver. (Simply put this somewhere on the buy page. Would be good to maybe have it in super bold letters the first time you buy something, too. But I don't only suggest that it's the first time you buy things because people apparently miss a lot (see *ed point in list) and it might be a bit harder to implement something like this whereas putting it on the buy page would be simple.)
- People can pick up things in your house! (This SUPER needs to be explained because people view their houses as safe. They might go into someone else's house and not be able to pick up items on shelves, and think that the items on their own floor are safe, for example. Also, they might not understand which items in their tower are safe and which are not, and while a lot of us know to look at the changelog that isn't going to be obvious to newer players. (Relatedly, what the heck is up with the "placed items in towers" bug? Fixed? No? If not, can we have some really good communication about this please?) Losing items of yours that you thought were safe can be really discouraging.)
- Bag slots; explain why you're not able to acquire the item you are trying to, when you don't have the space for it. (I just tried to buy an alchemy kit with a full inventory and the message says: "Well that didn't work. Your purchase failed :( It could be the seller stopped selling, or ran out of inventory, or changed the price on you." Er, it could be absolutely none of those things! And it would be super easy to add that to the error message. Same with grabbing bags/boxes from your butler when you don't have a bag slot. It's not intuitive a lot of times for there "not to be space" when you clearly do have space *in* the bags.)
- Not quite sure what's up with the confusion about going back to the world because it's explained in the tutorial. But there have been more than a couple newer players who, from what I could tell, were in the tutorial, and were asking about it. So possibly off topic (i.e. it *is* explained), but could stand to be looked at again, maybe. (edit: see this thread for example)
and
* Possibly a bit in the tutorial like "hey, there's an encyclopedia link on the main page and it's searchable and will give you tips!" and "hey, sometimes things will pop up on your screen [like that you have to squish grapes to get out of hell] and you'll really kind of want to read them!" Shouldn't really need to explain stuff like this, I wouldn't think, except sometimes, reading live help, I see that it really kind of is. This one wouldn't be as straightforward to address as some of the other ones but it's maybe worth a thought. I think it (especially the one about the encyclopedia) could be done in a way that is non-condescending, and I think it'd be helpful - but I'd understand if it would be seen as awkward for the game to refer to non-in-game things.
I may add more as I think of them!