Next Meet and Greet: TODAY, September 10th, 3 PM Eastern, 12 Noon Pacific at the Namco Theater! Sponsoring Organizations: The All Mighty Club DanceMobClub Hi Everyone! I'm scheduling some events to help veteran Home users get together, socialize, make some new friends and then go out into Home to look for new users that might have questions about Home or need other assistance. From what I've seen pretty much every veteran in the Home Community is answering questions and helping new users where they can. I'd like to see if we can do it in a more organized way, and also in a way that will allow us to socialize and meet some people from the forums that we may not have met before. I'd also like to use these events to reach out to Home Clubs, Magazines and support organizations to enlist their support for these events and possibly have them schedule time for their organizations to send groups of people out into Home to find new users that need assistance, If your Club, Magazine or supporting organization would like to become a 'Sponsor' of these events please reply to this thread and I'll add the name of your organization to the list of sponsoring groups in the first post here. Initially I'd like to take a 2 part approach to assisting new users. First, I plan to schedule two weekly Meet and Greet Events. One on a weekend day, and one on a weeknight. I think we should start slowly because we all have family, work and school commitments we're responsible for, but I think a lot of our veterans might be able to spare an hour or two once or twice a week to help out. It would be great to see clubs and support organizations choose some other days and times to go out into the community to assist new users where possible. Here's the plan: Meet at the Namco Theater at 3:00 PM Eastern 12 Noon Pacific for a meet and greet with other prople who are participating. We can socilize there for a while, then we'll break up into groups and try to go to places where we're likely to find new users that need assistance or have questions. When my friends and I have done this in the past we've found that just hanging out in front of Harbour Studio at the spawn point is a great place to meet people with questions about Home. We should try to hit as many CP instances as possible. We can also schedule an after event for people to report back on their experience and talk about the kind of questions they answered, and some of the people that they met. I'd also love to see people talking about their experience here in this thread to give others an idea of what to expect. I'd recommend that everyone that wants to participate visit the HomeStationMagazine site and read through the excellent FAQ that Keara22hi put together. That will prepare us for almost any question that we might get. I think its important for us to identify ourselves as members of the Home Community, and not representatives of Sony. Second, an this is the hard part for long time users with a lot of friends, it would be nice if some of the participants would be open to adding a new user they've met to their Friend List for an hour or two and showing them around Home a bit. Maybe show them a favorite personal space, or take them to places with fun games like Aurora or Sodium. This will have to be up to the individual of course, but there are a lot of veterans like Y2David that still do this regularly. Maybe he could provide us some tips on how he manages his Friend's List. Hope to see you at our Meet and Greets, and please do provide feedback and talk about your experiences assisting new users in this thread .
Thanks to everyone that came out to help today! It was a very interesting experience and I had fun just mingling with friends and talking to new users. I found it to be a very positive experience. We drew a crowd wherever we were and had a lot of people show interest in what we were doing. The most interesting response for me was also the most frequent. A lot of people came up and asked us why we were out there talking to new users. Some long time Home users came over and thanked us for being out there. A few said that they had never seen anyone out in Home looking for new users that needed help and that it was great to see us there. A few new users asked us why we were out helping people and answering questions because let's face it, a lot of people just don't talk to new users and it was kind of shocking to them to have people out actually looking for them and answering questions. We gave a lot of advice on what to do in Home, where to find free items, and how to make friends. DarthGranny was there giving people advice on getting away from default clothing and suggesting to everyone that they buy a $10 keyboard. Y2David offered personal space tours and Keilyda gave advice on where to go to find free clothing items. Burbie52 steered people to the alphazone site to see a list of free items in Home. Thanks to Y2David, PrincessVirginia, DaytonaPartyGirl, kwoman32, Keilyda, DarthGranny, JABM91, ann18, Burbie52 and RockStarBadBoy for helping out today. Also, thanks to those that stopped by and helped out for a while with questions. I didn't get all their names. We've made this a weekly event and hope to be able to schedule these more frequently as we get more people participating. Here are a couple of pictures I took today. We first landed near the spawn point by Harbour Studios in CP and hung out there for a while. DarthGranny said that she often goes to the first bench in the plaza and has good results meeting people so we moved there. DG was right, people tend to spawn and run off when they get to CP, but we met most of the new users and answered a lot of questions at the benches!
