@jip I think help with the learning curve is already well handled by tutorial content creators and the #gameplay-and-training community. Giving those efforts more visibility is one of my goals, although I'm not sufficiently familiar yet with the landscape of existing tutorial content, especially in russian, and would appreciate help in compiling a relevant list.
I'm happy the programmers are doing what they can to increase player retention. I still think a more focused community can help where scripts cannot. For instance, a human host has the opportunity to be nice, gets friended more, then their lobbies fill faster. They have the ability to pick good random maps from all the mediocre ones. They can adapt their lobby size to timezone-related wax and wanes in the player count. They and their friends can direct new players willing to get better to those very useful resources I mentioned earlier, tutorials and the discord channel for training, and doing such would be easier if we were more familiar with these resources. They can moderate lobby chat and do their part to change the culture around kicking noobs from all welcome games. But most importantly, robots suck at making good first impressions and don't make friends. This is crucial to having new players return to our game rather than going and playing whatever the latest steam release is.
But there is one coding-related feature I'd love to see, maybe you know who could help me: lots of people don't mind playing with noobs among them, but there's no equivalent to the !setons rallying cry in #aeolus to summon them. Could a bot be put together for this purpose? Who do I bribe?