I believe that ICO should grow, and not have its growth hampered by players at the top.
I would suggest that the online community have a "big brother/big sister" statistic to encourage high skill players to take new players under their wing to train them.
The new players would be able to comment on this program as to the efficacy of the teaching (after the lesson they would receive a prompt), and no player with fewer then 100 games WON could be a "big brother/big sister".
Other new players would be able to see these comments and determine if this is a safe online player to learn from (considering the negative press the online community gets).
This would negate angry smurfs alienating new players from the online community as bogus "teachers" and would allow for well intentioned high skill players to build a reputation of building the community.
Sounds good to me.
I'm not that worried about smurfs creating problems: if they're interested in not letting Sins online die I see little motivation for them to pretend to be teachers, trounce, and taunt noobs who appear genuinely interested in learning how to play online. That said, this assumption of rationality is far from reliable...
But the biggest obstacle to this sort of thing is the lack of communication infrastructure on ICO. There's only one tool that can be used: the chat box, which is usable, but unfit for anything remotely complicated. When I first started playing online, I was even a bit surprised that Sins players had even been able to organize what they use for 5v5 matches on their own. The best way to direct newer players, I think, is to give them a link to the forum here so they'll actually be able to discuss strategy, organize other newbie games, and chat - but the process of registration etc probably deters people, and even then they might not come back after the first few visits. One idea is a built-in web browser or something (way too much to ask for), or prominent buttons around ICO which open external web browsers to the forum or something... but the point is, something needs to be done to make it easier to players online, especially newer players, to communicate with other players. Even a sort of messaging system which can handle larger amounts of readable text would be a serious improvement. The difficulty of organization and communication for players on ICO is a very serious problem. Not that it isn't doable - but it could really use something else other than the general chat box.
Although I'm no expert, I'd be happy to tutor newbies...
