New player experience suggestions

I'm thinking a lot about the future of gw2, expac coming and steam release

I would like to share a small thought :

I remember when I used to play my first beloved thief in 2013 and skills were not bound to levels! (edited!) :

(main part of the post)How does new players feel when they are introduced in the first story chapter (and first gamplay) and can only use one weapon skill and heal?How can Anet improve their first experience/impressions?

(personal random thought)I remember that was very fun to try random combo and rotation from the very begin of my adventure, like trying to backstab mobs to train for PvP (which I was looking forward to play back in that days). The true sense of discovery was given by the new weapons and the new skill you gained with them and their combination. The progression given by utility skills unlocked from level 9 if I remember correcly, was very good, there are so much utilities that you can unlock and try even in the core game!

(personal random thought)I feel like they tried to copy other mmorpgs progression system, while weapon skill and weapon swap concept are unique and non comparable to them.

(personal random thought)There are a tons of other improvements that arenanet could do to improve the newcomers experience WITHOUT looking at the other mmorpgs as example. Gw2 is unique, take advantage of this quality and enhanche its strengts (weapon swap, skills based on weapon and playstyle flexibility).

What do you think? About the main part of the post, mostly? :D

Added some guideline to stay in topic

So your first new player experience is to go back to the old player experience.Anet must have had reasons to move way from that so why go back?You could join spvp from level 2 even back in the day so why were you training on pve dummies instead of jumping into spvp?

Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other.

yes, they could make the very first big encounter more interesting than just spamming 1.

Otherwise they need to do something to the leveling experience, especially from around 15 to 40 it's very bad for new players. You can only do map hearts and map event (and pvp) and the gap between real story quests is huge. A lot of new players get bored here, because they got not teasing of what the game will actually deliver later on. So should be more teasing for new players and i think there should be more possible group play accessible earlier on.Here are some concrete suggestions:

• a new dungeon from lvl 15 or 20
• making stuff like DRMs or some T1-fractals accessible way earlier from any main capital (and scalable)
• a new quest line that will fly you around the world to beautiful and interesting lands to tease you the beauty of the world and lore (could happen between personal story chapters on lvls 15, 25, 35,..)

@Linken.6345 said:So your first new player experience is to go back to the old player experience.Anet must have had reasons to move way from that so why go back?You could join spvp from level 2 even back in the day so why were you training on pve dummies instead of jumping into spvp?

Because I knew that i would suck if i join PvP lv 2, and also i was looking forward to WvW actually, I made an error in my sentence.Yes, I think there were reason to update to new player experience, but they did it in a bad way for a game like guild wars2, this is what i said in the post. Feels to me like they just copy pasted the standard mmorpg progression system and this don't work in gw2

@Danikat.8537 said:Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other.

No I don't remember this part, may be one of my pause periods, anyway if you compare what we have now with something worse, it may feel good, but just compare what we have now, to the initial release, this is what I'am comparing in this post, imo was much better.Whats your opinion?

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other.

That was the initial release. That's how unlocking weapon skills worked from day 1 until the September 2014 feature pack (which is when the new player experience update came out).

As I said I don't think it was worse necessarily, there's pros and cons to both systems, but I don't think it was fundamentally better or worth reverting back to, it just trades off one set of limitations for another. At least this way all professions have the same limitations on getting their full set of weapon skills.

@"Keidnard.9170" said:yes, they could make the very first big encounter more interesting than just spamming 1.

Otherwise they need to do something to the leveling experience, especially from around 15 to 40 it's very bad for new players. You can only do map hearts and map event (and pvp) and the gap between real story quests is huge. A lot of new players get bored here, because they got not teasing of what the game will actually deliver later on. So should be more teasing for new players and i think there should be more possible group play accessible earlier on.Here are some concrete suggestions:

• a new dungeon from lvl 15 or 20
• making stuff like DRMs or some T1-fractals accessible way earlier from any main capital (and scalable)
• a new quest line that will fly you around the world to beautiful and interesting lands to tease you the beauty of the world and lore (could happen between personal story chapters on lvls 15, 25, 35,..)

I totally agree, introducing to dungeons at lv 15-20 would be great for new players (with some great dungeon - also balancing and fixing existing dungeons would be a dream), I would love two new dungeon at level 15 and 25 (since if you ignore story mode dungeons are actually lv 35, 45, 55 and so on). If only one, lv 20 story + 25exp would be the way i guess.

Also agree with DRMs style quests from lower levels (in another post I suggest to tranform some story chapter in DRMs format), would be Imo much funnier than standard story chapters (personal story is very borig lol).

The third point I guess would be hard to implement, but who knows.

Anyway we re going out of topic xD, do you think going back to "old player experience" would provide a better new player experience? (lol that sounds like a joke)

@Danikat.8537 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other.

So my memories are broken? lol. Anyway u had at least 2 weapon skills at lv 1 (or WS2 was very fast to unlock) right?

If you are right (and what you said has unlocked in me some fragments of memories ), I would have rather preferred a rework of the same system. Bounding skills unlock to experience is better than bounding it to levels -in a game like gw2, skills given by the weapon are learned using that specific weapon (sounds in line with the concept).

They could have reworked the amount of experience needed to unlock skills, lowering it by a specific amount, and lowering this to a quarter for a class like elementarist, where u have to unlock 20 skills intead of 5. (also incentivize player to fight more "random mobs - those not needed by quests" to unlock skills)

Anyway, weapons skills bound to level feels bad to me, if they want to keep this, they should unlock at least skill 2 at level 1, so new players can actually do something more fun than afk spammin 1 for the first 10 - 15 minutes of gameplay.

Do you think a rework of the old system would work better than the current one?

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other.

it was very fast took a kill or 2 to unlock second skill

If you want to accurately remember what it was like at launch, there's this: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Skill_bar&oldid=405183

@TheThief.8475 said:There are a tons of other improvements that arenanet could do to improve ... improving existing things isn't how game development works.

@"Danikat.8537" said:It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

It wasn't tied to levels but the unlocks are faster at higher levels

With the current system weapon skills unlock ...slot 2 at lv2slot 3 at lv4slot 4 at lv6slot 5 at lv8

but you are lv2 as soon as you exit starting instance and walking near a single map objective(PoI/wp/etc.) gets you to lv3Characters also gain exp as essentially 2x rate for levels 1-15

The old system was tedious if you wanted try different weapons while at low level. At higher level both are more ore less the same the same.Old system requires killing stuff to unlock each weapon's slots individually. Current system requires killing stuff to unlock each slot across all weapons. Both can be reduced to "killing stuff".

Both system can be a bit tedious but the old one can be worse depending in some situation.

@Svarty.8019 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:There are a tons of other improvements that arenanet could do to improve ... improving existing things isn't how game development works.

This is why dungeon are dead and PvP is dead :)

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

With old sistem you could unlock all skills for 2 weapons at level 4, ignoring quest and exploration to kill things and unlock skills, now you are somehow forced to explore and do quest, since, if you don't it takes a lot of time to level up. You had more freedom this is a fact.

Don't tell me you can always level up by just killing things, no one would do that for no reason, to unlock skills maybe, yes :)

The starting missions should probably be reworked as tutorials, dodge, jump, fight, breakebars, combo fields , stats, weapons ,skills all that and then it should plop you into the world is on fire mission. They should probably remove the story per level thing and let you fail when you get too high, also it should bump up the difficulty.They did themselves disservice by trying to pander to the inept people , people will not learn if they do not fail. Also I know they like to leave people to do their own thing but the people get bored and the thing they like to do is leave so Arenanet should try to force people to do some stuff .They are in a sore need of new new player experience since the old new player experience is 6 years old and it is also garbage for todays standards . They have to make Really good first impression, the first mission is cinematic but gameplay wise is boring, this is not TV series the gameplay should entertain the people from the start.

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

Now you dont have to unlock any weapon at all and its twice as fast to level 15, that is also a fact.

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

Killing mobs is one of the worst ways to accomplish anything in the game. Meanwhile exploration is one of the things the game was designed for.

So in your opinion encouraging people to do the wrong thing is good but pushing them towards doing the intended thing is bad because "freedom". Are you a politician or planning to become one?

Don't tell me you can always level up by just killing things, no one would do that for no reason, to unlock skills maybe, yes :)

Do you just plan to stay at lv4 forever?

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Svarty.8019 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:There are a tons of other improvements that arenanet could do to improve

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@"Danikat.8537" said:It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked.

Don't tell me you can always level up by just killing things, no one would do that for no reason, to unlock skills maybe, yes :)

I mean, when i play an mmorpg what appeal me the most is the combat system (for example FF14 is a gorgeus game but i can't play it because i don't like combat system at all), killing things is best way to learn how it works and if u like it. If you want to level up faster you explore, if u want to unlock skills faster, you kill mobs, what's the probem with it?

You also say that exploration is one of the things the game was designed for, doesn't it apply to combat too ? LOL

@Svarty.8019 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:

@Svarty.8019 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:There are a tons of other improvements that arenanet could do to improve

The bible of design.

@"TheThief.8475" said:I remember when I used to play my first beloved thief in 2013 and I had already all 5 weapons skills at level 2! : wasn't it so much more fun than now?

No. Because when you got more weapons later on you have to "Grind" again to unlock their skills. With the current system once you unlock the skills, they are unlocked on every weapon you try ever after. There is nothing more annoying than getting a brand new weapon and having no skills to use. They made unlocking the skills of your first weapon slower, but they did speed up the unlock process for multiple weapons considerably.

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"TheThief.8475" said:I remember when I used to play my first beloved thief in 2013 and

I had already all 5 weapons skills at level 2

! : wasn't it so much more fun than now?

So how would you improve the system? You think it is ok as it is? Should they add skill 2 at level 1 or update the current tutorial quest?

@TheThief.8475 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:I remember when I used to play my first beloved thief in 2013 and

I had already all 5 weapons skills at level 2

! : wasn't it so much more fun than now?

Its ok as as so quick to level anyway, I do it the rare times I run out of tomes for key runner.

@Linken.6345 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@TheThief.8475 said:I remember when I used to play my first beloved thief in 2013 and

I had already all 5 weapons skills at level 2

! : wasn't it so much more fun than now?

Man i don't want to be rude, but you are not the subject of the post, new players are. You already know the game and it's ok for you to press 1 for 5 minute or so on a new char. For new players first impressions, who knows.