Requirements for getting out of early-bird should be more obvious

[TheDraconicBard]

Recently made an account to get involved with community creature designs, but I ran into several roadblocks. You have to make 6 posts in order to get out of early-bird status. Okay, no problem.. Except what it DOESN'T tell you is that posts in off-topic don't count. It doesn't tell you whether or not you have to make new posts or if replies are acceptable.

It also doesn't warn you beforehand that you are limited to 4 posts a day, which is odd. All this information should be easily accessible upon visiting the forums with your new account, or maybe while hovering your cursor over the early-bird mark on your page.

In order to make a new post, it also tells you that you need to have your account linked to your steam, and tells you to go to your Account Settings in order to do so. Not a problem in and of itself, but on the Account Settings page, the only account linking option is Microsoft. After about 30 minutes of googling, and actually taking a direct link to a page with a button to link your Steam (the button was broken and simply reloaded the page), I gave up and went to set a profile picture.

Linking your Steam account is done through EDITING YOUR PROFILE, not through account settings

 

All of these things seem needlessly obtuse and anti-user. Sure it might reduce bot activity, but it definitely also reduces an actual human's ability to interact on the forums