Todays Notes

Looking through the guild roster, I found players with lower achievement scores (either new players or alts) tended not to play the game very long. Thought about this today, and yeah, most newbie areas are pretty desolate. It would not be fun to level from the beginning as a new player.

Found some people in Sparkfly fen that I talked to and tried to invite to the guild for WvW mostly, but they are from a different server. What a shame. Its hard to recruit players for WvW since you have no idea where they are from.

My elementalist weaver uses daggers and I have only one skill total in my arsenal that removes conditions and its only 2 every 30 seconds. That is crazy in this day and age.

Disagree about newbie areas being desolate. I see a couple of fresh accounts every single time I start a new character, even when playing at ungodly times. Starter maps have a pretty stable population, but of course they can't compete with level 80 maps. Why should they? That's simply not where the content is. You'll find plenty of people when leveling.

What do you expect when you try to recruit for WvW outside of WvW? Megaservers have been established for several years now

Can't talk about elementalist, but perhaps take the fire trait that cleanses 3 conditions? Ether Renewal is also a very good healing skill for that reason.

I don't find it susprising that "new" players fail to latch onto the game; it happens regardless of the game you play or how friendly the guild/clan is. The idea is to try and recruit new players on bulk and do your best to get them involved while keeping in mind only a few of them will stick around to become your guild's next generation.

As for Elementalist, it's either all or nothing when it comes to condi cleanse. Water and Earth are your go-to traitlines when it comes to condi-cleanse, with Tempest allowing you to use soldier runes for condi-cleanse. If you trait dps, you're simply going to melt, which is (probably?) how it should be.

Most of your ele cleanses come from utility or traits. Cleansing wave and cleansing water help or cantrips with soothing disruption which i use a lot

Weird as it sounds most people will only play most games briefly and then move on for one reason or another. You can see this on games with achievements for progressing through the story or finishing the main story which also let you see what percentage of people have completed the same achievements. It's often a surprisingly low, as in less than 50%.

I'm guilty of it myself. There's dozens of games I've bought, played, enjoyed and just never gotten around to finishing for various reasons, which are often nothing to do with the quality of the game.

I'm sure there are things Anet (and other developers) can do to address it, if they can find common causes which put people off. Although bear in mind last time Anet didn't that was the September 2014 Feature Packs 'New Player Experience' which some people are still complaining about now, even after a lot of the more annoying changes were reverted.

But I still see a lot of other people around on low level maps. Of course it's hard to tell how many are new players and how many are levelling alts or key runners, but the maps definitely aren't empty.