Despite all the Lindens who work on this, they remain resolutely, staunchly, stubbornly opposed to making any corrections to this insanity.

The solution here is to remove the HUD device completely. It's just too prone to bugs and too hard to handle. Orientation has to be far simplified, and remove silly things like "learn how to drive a vehicle" which nobody wants to do, nor can do, realistically, in SL, given the sim seam problem, until they are far more experienced.

People care about appearance, sometimes obsessively worrying about looking newbish -- make it dead simple for them to chose a look that goes on them completely with one click, again, until they can sort out.

Teach them how to walk, get and keep notecards, send inventory, send an IM, use search, make a friend. I personally think those are the 6 most important things that get them to everything else.

I totally agree about Nova Albion. The Lindens are artificially pumping newbies to it now, by adding an additional teleport board to press on at the end of the tutorial. That's forcing newbies to go to an area they find aesthetic or compelling or near their new 1950s condos they want to hawk in their DPW sim, who the hell knows.

On their own, when they were only one of the random assignments of the random script out of the help island (which should be changed to serial instead of random, as it spits up and lands newbies 100 times on just one place and then doesn't load balance), Nova Albion and Miramare did not retain newbies. They didn't come back to it after being dumped there, as it was cold and unattractive and uninteresting in terms of content -- newbies are forcibly set home, but unless they like an infohub, they don't keep coming back. So the Lindens artificially pumped up the LEAST trafficked of the resident-made infohubs for reasons that seem to have to do with their FIC friends having made this infohub.

It's just insane, all of this. The solution to fixing the welcome area/orientation madness is to simplify it down to the very very basics, remove all the junk like freebies and feting, and have ad boards that people can buy, combined with some sponsored newbie helpers, that people can select on their own to travel to and learn skills by doing and finding real friends instead of first getting trapped under a HUD in a stupid vehicle that goes nowhere, then trapped at the bottom of a canal.