It has its places, like MMO PvP, or PvP in general. While "figuring it out" seems intriguing, you'll never be competitive until you "reinvent the wheel". In a game such as this, I rather figure it out myself first and then look for more ideas from others.
And short. As short and sweet as possible. The initial gearing up tasks are fine for that and I agree there should be a "Play tutorial --yes or no" pop-up. The supposed "challenges" (that aren't) are just things you do during the course of normal gameplay. They'll tick off on their own.
I can't understand it because I can't understand why so many players today choose to hand over their own creativity and agency to someone else straight out of the gate. I have had people tell me they're not creative and, so, prefer to be handheld in RPGs, for example. Fact is, though: no one is not creative by nature. By societal conditioning to be productive alone almost from the day they're born? Maybe. One of the great things about video games is that they invite us to exercise those creative muscles.
People do it for PvE too, though. I can sort of understand the "efficiency" angle -- the min-max mindset. People are going to share their insights and strategies for optimizing builds, etc. I get it if I'd just as soon not pursue it myself. Takes the fun out of it for me.
As for watching YT videos and stuff, I dont understand that either. I only do it when Im absolutely positively stuck with something and need to get myself unstuck. Definitely not as a first resort. As for "meta", thats quite an easy concept, really. A lot of games force you to unnatural variety just to squeeze the most game time or money out of you, so people look for the "meta", which basically means "1 ring to rule them all" or "skeleton key" or however you wish, that does the job and doesnt require hundreds of hours in irrelevant content they dont care about. Every game usually has at least 1 OP thing that is just better objectively, not different but literally better, and thats what "meta" is all about, getting that one OP item and go do whatever the player wants to do rather than has to do.
I think you're misusing meta a bit there.. sure, any hacky way to beat a game Can be considered meta. The term refers to "gaming the game", but a meta can be healthy as well. Something like dota lives by small changes to the meta, and the game is kinda playing That game, not the actual game ..
Doing them now is what gets you the points, of course. How would you suggest it be implemented?
In other games they would just give you the points outright for skipping the tutorial.
As Kyogi said, just let you skip it and get the points. It hardly matters to get the points for free since you can complete all intro challenges in just a few minutes (running to the trader to turn them in can take longer). So getting free points isn't a big deal, imo. It would feel really bad to have the option to skip a tutorial but not be given the points you would get for doing the tutorial. At that point, I would keep doing the tutorial even though I think it should be optional.
Yes, but they're tied to "challenges" in this one, atm. Are you saying, just get rid of those in the challenge window as well? What would comprise the tutorial? I'd say just the short list of objectives would do that awarded the points with no need even to visit the challenges window. Players will stumble across the challenges window on their own if they want to track what's been unlocked over the course of the game.