Promo sites and all that may get new players to the mud, but what happens then?

**Note: I'm going to focus on one problem in this post, but feel free to expand the discussion to include other first-impression issues**

Levels 1 through 10, and the Academy in particular, introduce an awesome game focused on roleplaying and exploration. CF is also an awesome game, but it's not THAT game. CF, at its core, is focused on player killing. Therefore, the introduction to the game is currently deceptive, however awesome that introduction might be.

This may be part of the reason you have trouble retaining people once they hit the tough PK ranks. Not only is it tough, but it's also a completely different game than was sold to them. Those first few levels make a promise, and the game breaks that promise.

I am a newbie who was completely sold on the mud because of its Academy. Compared to the learning areas of other muds, the Academy rocks. But I came out of it with a warped idea of what the mud was about. I heard from topmudsites advertisements that the game was tough and that PK was unrestricted; but what I experienced in the first 10 levels of the game convinced me that despite all that, the game was focused on roleplaying and exploration, and that PK was some incidental option to keep the old-timers around. The truth hit me like a ton of rafts.

In fact, the problem can be even worse when your promotions say the mud is a PK mud, because even the Newbie Academy can seem like the breaking of a promise. "What?! I can't PK until I'm level infinity?" Then, "Oh, this is nice after all." Then, "What?! Why are people killing me instead of mobs?" Only a truly unreasonable player would say all of those things aloud -- but our emotions don't have to be reasonable, and they have a lot of decision-making power.

On the other hand, we can't ignore the fact that new players need to habituate to the mud environment before you throw PK straight at them. So how might we introduce new players to the PK focus of the game in small steps, starting at the earliest levels?

Furthermore, I think Seantryn Modan must be destroyed.