Why did newbie games end?

[Radical Rat]

Newbie games were great, and dearly missed, but as the worst says there really just weren't enough newbies flowing for games to reliably fire, and near the end of the Newbie Queue, games would often end up with 50+% non-Newbies anyway.

Something that might help is finding a game that allows Hydras, and seeing if someone might be willing to play alongside you. Having a known trustworthy person to ground you and bounce ideas off of can be extremely helpful

[Radical Rat]

Seems like the consensus is that new players have to conform to make the community accept them. Can’t say that’s going to be the best policy if you want to gain a newer player base at any point in the future.

And I disagree wholeheartedly that these actions aren’t due to elitism. But we are all allowed to have our opinions. Mine just happens to be coming from first hand experiences over the past month.

What exactly do you mean by "have to conform" here?

[Radical Rat]

as a newbie i'd like to say in favour of newbie games that trying to follow the current newbie advice to join either an approved open or simple normal format game took me over a month to get into a game anyway. was the newbie queue significantly slower than that when it closed?

No, however that pace was only maintained because frequently Newbie Games would launch without the normally required amount of actual Newbies. You can go look for yourself how things were in the Archived Queues section of the forum. The idea was that removing the Newbie Queue and funneling Newbies into the other queues instead would improve the wait times, and make for a quicker transition into games.

In practice, the other queues feel largely unchanged to me, they ebb and flow as they did before, and clearly we now have a significant gap in the Newbie experience. Hopefully this gap can be addressed soon, in one way or another.