Hello - I just picked up GoIO yesterday (having never heard of it before) and although just engineering on a ship with equally inexperienced randoms for the first hour or two was entertaining in its own way, playing with an experienced captain who knew how to fly and how to communicate clearly was a completely different experience.
If a new player joins during a surge of new players and doesn't play long enough to wind up on a ship with a GoIO regular, I can imagine they would never see just how fun the game can be.
In the interest of retaining more new players, if something could be done to show them the potential of teamwork as soon as they get into the game then more might stay.
Two ideas come to mind. The first should be easy and quick to implement, though at the expense of interactivity: just record some staged footage from the perspective of an engineer/gungineer where the captain gives orders (with light explanations). The clip could begin with no enemies in sight, so the captain tells the crew over voice comms to search the skies for ships. The recording player would pull up their spyglass and after a few seconds they'd spot a ship and then verbally report it to the crew. (Maybe it would be some distance away and the captain could tell the player to buff the main engine to close the gap faster.) Then some more instructive orders like "Man the gatling to take down their armor. When the hit markers turn red the gunner will take out their hull with the mortar."
I'm sure you get the idea - just have a concise video that shows how a proper crew operates and gives some flavor of the game's mechanics without drowning them in details about ship builds and tactics (or other captain concerns), and then have that video playback the first time a new player clicks on the Tutorials button. Really I think videos for each role might be nice since you can rewind a video and watch it very easily, whereas the tutorials have text which a player can accidentally skip and then only see again by running through the tutorial all over.
The other idea would be to have a more elaborate interactive tutorial which basically runs the player through a scenario like the video I described, complete with canned audio orders from the AI captain. However this would be much more time intensive to implement, and really the goal isn't to teach the player how to perform a particular task, it's to show what it's like to be part of a well-oiled flying death machine - so I think a well made video would serve nicely.
As it is the only video I bothered to look up before playing was the Total Biscuit video, which did more to illustrate the complexity of the game than the fun of the game.
Cheers
