You'll get more Krilcovs than you will actual players, they'll disappear for six months and only then return and try to be half-assed productive. Like Stevers, who despite his bizarre behavior actually contributes to things now. Admittedly addressing the skill gap will not only help newbies get up to speed faster but also allow returning vets to not give up in frustration due to the timesink.

If you want to address the skill gap you need to address the skill gap baseline. I think only the imms and players who frequently manage to make cabal leaders can address the question 'What should a player who has been playing for a year generally know and how can we expedite this process down to three months?' or some similar question.

I think that a player who has been playing for a year:

1) Should have a solid grasp on how to play/gear at least 3 classes and a general idea of how to PK with at least one even if they are completely PK averse. At least one of the above classes should generally be warriors, assassins, rangers, offense/defense shapeshifters or bards. (chosen on the basis of utility, gear reliance, and ease of use respectively.) A corrollary to this is they need to know how to at least check all the protected cities and ranking areas opposite their current alignment for PK, but I don't expect a year old player to know how to check for people to kill who are spamming skills.

2) Should know how to regear all the way up through level 30 fighting mobs that are no more than lucky blows and finishing within 10 minutes of their ghost timer wearing off with both a return potion and 5k copper in their inventory regardless of class or level.

3) Should know the general layout and have memorized/be able to look up the shopping lists of all the protected cities and the 3 largest non-protected cities but not necessarily all the shortcuts in and out of them.

4) Should know enough about the a/b/s system to at least find their sienna and have a general idea of the standard difficulty curve to the respective wand locations but ONLY if they play MORE THAN ONE mage class. Without feeding them ALL the locations, but probably picking a dozen and maybe 3 aura locations can't hurt just because shield is already built in on a reasonable timer for all the mage classes and the 3 aura are just to give a general idea where to start looking and what kinds of mobs to ask about IC from there, a more specific idea than 'lol check anything related to magic'. The reason you don't reveal more than that is because the scarcity of alternate, class-specific sources of stoneskin, aura and shield with the appropriate drawbacks are plentiful enough pre-40 to PK even players more skilled than yourself at a modest gold cost (I wish you didn't have to kill the shopkeeper mobs to ensure a repop of these limited items when under limit however).

5) Newbies should also be encouraged to stay below level 40 for that yearlong time period, and the reasoning for doing so needs to be explained straight up: "Over the course of normal gameplay killing mobs you need to explore or get gear from you will gain 1 level every 3 days roughly, and will get a more solid grasp on your class as well as learn the layouts, shortcuts and secrets of the lower level areas faster with a wider margin for error than you will powerlevelling to hero and inevitably deleting in a week due to the skill gap." Cabal politics are independent of that explanation, in every cabal but Empire you can't be booted for not levelling.

That is a ton in even just a year but it's pretty much a good solid timeframe for remaining competitive assuming about 3-6 hours of play every 7 days.

Now, how do you get a player up to speed on all that in a 3 month timeframe? Because just giving it all to them in a wiki won't work either, you not only need to give access to the information but streamline the process such that it's faster (but not the only way) to ask groupmates, cabalmates, or Heralds about it IC, but also need to ensure that at general points along that 3 month timeline these issues are guaranteed to come up and therefore the newbies know what questions to ask. The latter is probably more essential than just giving them the info itself, and this info needs to be answerable on the newbie channel, or at least allow people to point to something more specific than 'ask IC'. 'Check the wiki' should be a legitimate answer with a disclaimer that the wiki won't have the entire game, or even all the non-explore areas archived.

People can turn off the newbie channel so relaxing the limits on 'spam' will markedly improve how much people learn from it both newbies and vets. Imms can still step it and shut down discussions of, for example, 'Skill X is countered by tactic Y or Z except when edge A is in play...'

The nuances of edges do need to be explained more bluntly with regard to mechanics in the helpfiles. Example: Student of Vice/Abyssal Adept/Infernal Adept will, RNG allowing, boost the base level of your servitor mobs as well as make them easier to bind. And you can elaborate the conjure spells with 'As with all conjure spells, more mana can EITHER or BOTH extend the servitor's stay by several ticks or increase the servitor's level potentially giving it access to a wider variety of skills/spells and improving it's melee against lower levelled foes.' and 'As with all binding spells, more mana increases the chances of success beyond your charisma, which is helpful when dealing with servitors above your level.' Then add 'CONSIDER' and the Veil helpfiles to the conjure and bind helpfiles.

I get that writing the helpfiles gives ways to explain stuff ICly in order to avoid breaking immersion but it's more confusing than it is helpful to the theme of the game.