We shall grab n00bs with both hands!

[MatthewChow]

There's also another thing I'm just realizing that is wrong...
When you play any NFS games, the first thing the game gets you to do is to drive a fully tuned car (NFSU Integra, NFSU2 350Z, anyone?). That happens exactly as a strategy to hook the player into the game, telling him or her right away that "this" is what they're working for. A beautiful high performance car! That is what shows what the game is about!
With NFSSA, your first experience is very boring by comparison, and so is your first car. Slow and ugly, and in most cases not even tuning it will help...
I think the real NFS games have a way more exciting introduction to them, with NFSSA, I can almost say there's literally no introduction.

If we made the start a little more exciting, fun, intuitive and specially more informative, it would help retention a lot, because the player wouldn't just be there looking around trying to get a clue, it would know exactly what he was getting into, what his end goals are, and thinking to himself "Holy fuck, this is cool!".
We seriously need to work on a flashy entrance and good advertisement.

A few days ago I posted this.
I've been thinking, and I think I could develop a bit more into this subject...

All Need For Speed games, at least from Porsche Unleashed up, have a brief story to place the player in the right mindset. In Underground you are in the middle of a crowded street race. You find yourself at the wheel of an iconic widebody high performance Integra. In the first two minutes you know exactly what Underground is all about! From then on, you basically work to get the experience you had in your first race, leveling up your car to be at the same stage of the one you first drove.
Underground 2 is a similar formula. Rachel lends your car to you and by doing races with her car, you get a taste of what Underground 2 is all about.
Most Wanted, once again, similar formula, but this time even better! Once again, you own this iconic widebody high performance BMW which you immediately fall in love with, you get a taste of it and you get it taken from you in a race. This works even better because the whole game is exactly about you trying to recover that exact car! The ultimate prize.
Carbon, same formula. You know where this is going.
Basically, in all games, you start with this high performance car in your hands that gives you this great feeling of power, that you lose almost immediately. The objective in all the games is to get that power back, the feeling of driving a powerful fast car back. Since the very beginning, you know what the game is about and you got your objective set. It literally tells you "You see this car? This is what you're working for! Get your power back.".
Even non car related games do this. Ever played through the intro of any Saints Row game? It's freaking epic! It's that, it's power, the beginnings have to be exciting and prepare you for what comes next.

Why doesn't NFS:SA have that?! When you start NFS:SA you're this powerless meaningless thing in a Manana who can't do shit. You don't even know what you're doing there! You stand there looking at all these guys in Freerun because you can't Duel any of them as they're at least two tiers above you, but you can't join a quick race either because there's almost no one to race with because you're literally so freaking weak! You can figure out as far as doing Diamond Hunts, but you can't do Magazine Runs because your car doesn't have the 3 star rating yet, you can't really do Time Trials because you know you're slow as fuck so you don't even try, and, you feel like this insect being thrown in the wind and it's just not a good feeling. You leave the game because it's just too much. It's everything but intuitive and you're just not having fun.

That's exactly the opposite experience we have with a good old NFS game. The antonym of exciting.

This is a server based on the Need For Speed series. Copy what makes it successful!

With this, now I start talking about what I think it could help our case...

What does this game lack? Well, for starters, and introduction to itself!
Yes, the freaking title says "Need For Speed: San Andreas", that's why you clicked it in the first place! That tells you quite directly what the server is about, but that doesn't mean that you should be thrown in it like some fart in the toilet! That is no way of presenting a toilet to a fart! Or, I mean, your new players ain't farts, and you shouldn't be throwing them anywhere, you're gotta give them your hand and ease them into your server. Mess with their mind a bit, show them how your book got a good looking cover, like a good seller does, you know what I mean? Show the best you got right away so they know what they got coming.
The way I'd do this, in this particular case, is with a very vague introduction story, like we have in the Need For Speed games. I think Underground 2 is everyone's favorite, so I'm going for something that closely resembles the intro to that one because I even think it fits well with San Andreas' map, as none of the other games had the intro scene in open world freerun.

After making your account, NFS:SA has you transported to a character selection screen where each character is leaning on a Bobcat... Now, what the fuck does a stock Bobcat have to do with the game? You can't even get the Bobcat ingame, so, why is it there? And as far as anything goes, a guy leaning on a Bobcat doesn't tell us a thing about the server! There's no message. Or, actually, there is, it tell us that Bobcat is one of the cars we can select, and it's a lie. Not a good start, in my opinion. Don't remind us of the existence of what we can't have, show us what we can have!
Lets look at Underground 2... You just came from another place, you arrive in a place at the airport and your friend has hooked you up with a car so you can get home. ... That is a good and yet vague introduction! Lets use that!
So, imagine this. You just made your account in NFS:SA. The next screen shows you an airplane approaching San Fierro's landing strip. (I'm sorry for the kindergarten drawings, but I'm in a hurry.)



You are then transported inside the airplane, and this now is your character selection screen! Each character is sat at their respective place in each seat and your camera pans around to each character so you can select the one you want. Imagine GTA:VC's weapon store.

 

You select your character and type in their name. You now see the airplane landing and the screen fading into dark.
(Insert loading screen here if needed)
Fade in, the camera is now point to a car next to a door, your character just outside that door (since that door can't actually be opened) walking towards and entering that car. An iconic widebody fully tuned high performance car.



The car turns on and lets out a powerful cold start rumble, the lights turn on and the camera now rotates to its normal driving position. Your only objective shown on the screen: Reach your garage at Doherty.
Now, this will still be offline for now. There's two ways we could go with this, either make a time trial track and just put a map marker and let the player freeroam at will, experimenting with the car. Maybe the second option is best.





When you reach the Doherty garage, you are presented with a few brief animated tutorial screens explaining activities like the DH, Magazine, Time Trials, etc, and where you can start a race, made to feel similar to those short videos in the Underground games where they explain what Drift, Drag and Street-X are for the first time.

You are then asked to pick your first car.
This is maybe the opportunity to mention the reason why you got to Doherty in that car and why you can't drive it anymore. When you see Rachel, she mentioned she was just borrowing her car to get you home. We gotta come up with something alike, and a reason for you to basically get a Class E for free now.
"You can have one of my crap cars, I wasn't going to fix them anytime soon anyway. Have fun!" - Says your imaginary friend, lol.

In Need For Speed Underground, when you choose your first car, Samantha immediately comments "Outch, that is seriously weak, dude!".
That's gotta happen here too!

You are then directed to enter Freerun, and once you do, you get a message saying something along the lines of "Your car is very weak for racing. If you find out you can't compete, go to the nearest Rent-A-Car so they can hook you up a better ride until you can modify yours."

The Rent-a-car feature:

- Grinding in stock cars is not fun. -

These are pre-modified cars - complete builds - you cannot modify yourself. Their special ability is that when you race with one of these, the RP gained will be sent directly to a pre-selected car.
For example, you just bought a Manana and you can't do anything with it. Can't level up through Magazines, can't be good at pursuits, you can't find races. Instead of being limited to DH, you'd use one of these cars to do these kind of tasks and find races more easily while that whole grind would be leveling up the Manana to a playable state.
This "service" would be free until the player levels up his first car to 100%. Since after that there is no excuse for that car not being able to compete, the rental car is removed and the service gets back to being a Premium only service.
As a premium service, you can have any of the rental cars for as long as you got Premium on, however, they will only level up your selected car up to the 6th tier (just enough to reach a 2/2/2 or 0/3/3 build). 
This system is somewhat similar to when you buy a Premium tank in World Of Tanks or WarThunder, if you ever played those games. To me this is more natural as buyable premium instead of the miserable and completely unnoticed 10% extra RP and $$ we get from having premium. Because, admit it, you only buy premium for the extra garage and vinyl slots...

If you choose to enter the quick race lobby with your stock first car, all the players in the server that are either at the garage or Freerun will get notified that a first time player has entered the quick race lobby. The objective of this is that you, this new player, have the fastest queuing time possible so you don't get the perception the server is freaking deserted, and so the more experienced players that choose to join will be sensitized to go easy on you, noob, instead of murdering you right away, lol.

If and when you do choose to get a rental car, you'll have a more reduced list of cars to select from what an older player simply using premium has. A selection of very different cars that suit different needs and tastes, cars like a AWD Rally Euros or Sultan, an easy to drive FWD Blista, an SUV, a Muscle or a drift build Uranus, so that you can experiment with different styles and plan ahead on what kind of racing you want to do most of (instead of failing miserably trying to drift with a Manana...). I'm excluding Vintage cars because those can be unlocked very early on and I'm aiming at C class cars because they are the sweet spot between fun, drivability, easy match making and competitiveness.

Whatever the car chosen, the first time a new player joins the quick race lobby, the other players will get the notification to make the matching times shorter, but that will only happen in the first race. After completing the first race, that function gets disabled.

After that, it's just a matter of leveling up that first Manana - and once that happens the Rental car gets removed (showing a notification as to why and how to get it back by buying premium) - and it's normal game from then on.

And that's basically my idea to change the introduction to NFS:SA to noobs. I'm sorry for the wall, but I really GTG now, so do whatever you want with this info and see yah tonight!