http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/13/call-of-duty-red-orchestra-2-interview/

I saw this article a little bit ago and it says something interesting about CF I think.

I'm going to go back to the beginning. At the very start, the skill gap in CF was considerably smaller than today. There weren't a ton of people who were accomplished MUDers, and few of them played CF. Even if they did play CF, it wasn't so incredibly similar to other MUDs that they could instantly dominate. There was also a much lower gap between even the best CFer on thepoint.com or maple.can.net. After all the world was much smaller, and the choice of preps, tactics, and equipment was a fraction of what it is today. Grab a purple potion or two, kill the red dragon, wield the nightmare blade and go to town.

At this time CF was pretty popular. Lots of players. Lots of group fights, lots of ganging and full looting and general mayhem. In fact, the skill gap was small enough that random people that stumbled across the game could get into it, and if they could get a few friends to join in, they could essentially compete with anyone. Sure they would still get killed and fulled on a regular basis, but then if you are playing the text game equivalent of CoD, you expect that and you just wait for a re-spawn.

One of the things we've known for some time is that CF is incredibly difficult to get into as a new player. The amount of ramp up time to be even marginally competitive is a barrier few new players are willing to get over. We've sort of hand-waved at what we could do to lower this barrier, but I think we lacked a clear idea of what the goal is.

Now, I'm going to preface this by saying I'm not even sure that compressing the skill gap is something that CF should be shooting for, but if increasing the number of players is the goal, I think it is probably the best thing we could do to accomplish that goal.

So, what are steps that CF could take to compress the skill gap between the very skilled (vets) and the brand spanking new?

As a test, I'm also posting this to reddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/MUDCarrionFields/comments/1d8yo3/compressing_the_skill_gap/ which would allow folks to vote up good ideas if they chose to use reddit to respond... Maybe it will be worthwhile, maybe it won't.