New player experience sucks

[GuillotineFist.8921]

I started this game during early access, and during this time when you created a new character, you could unlock whatever skills you want in whatever order. You could have a full bar of skills by level 10 ish or lower if you just gunned for the hero points.

With this new player experience you are stuck with so few skills for so long, it is ridiculous. I am glad I made one of every class long before they introduced this feature.

I made a new character to play with someone and this new player experience is frankly mind numbing, and my friend thought so too.  I managed to convince him to stay till max level at least, and he is glad he did.

Isn't the whole "it'll be fun at max level" thing something arenanet originally wanted to avoid? Please consider changing the leveling back to the old free-form experience, or at least make it optional.

[Zentao.6314]

The first 40-60 levels are the tutorial of the game.

Players who create the second, third or xth characters already have boosters and tome of knowledges to make it quicker.

Edited September 23, 2021 by Zentao.6314

[Rasimir.6239]

The reason ANet gave for the new player experience (that has been new since 2015 ... I just got my 6th birthday present on the character I specifically made to try it out back then 😉 ) was that player retention was lacking due to too many people needing more guidance than the original system provided.

 

Back in the early days you had to have experience with the game systems (which you only gain by playing) or do internet research to figure out how to unlock "a full bar of skills by level 10is", and apparently many people didn't do either and felt lost in the game.

 

The NPE isn't aimed at veterans, and as the poster before me mentioned there are plenty of ways to short-cut the leveling process for these veterans that come naturally with playing the game (starting with leveling scrolls from birthday presents, which can get you up to lvl 60 if another of your characters had their 6th birthday already).

 

Are there players that pick up things quicker? I'm sure there are. I strongly suspect though that there are enough people that "need" the pacing the NPE provides them with to actually get into this game, else ANet would've changed things again by now. Why stick with a change if you find out what you had before was superior?

[Danikat.8537]

The system which allowed you to unlock skills in any order didn't even survive to launch, because players found it too confusing. At launch they were divided into tiers and you had to unlock 5 skills from tier 1 to access tier 2, 5 from tier 2 to access tier 3 and so on. They also got more expensive as they went along, so while it was possible to have a character with 1 skill in each of the utility slots by level 10 it still took much longer than that to have a decent build.

 

I've levelled dozens of characters both under the old system and the new one and in this sense I don't find it that different. Yes you have to wait a bit longer now to unlock your first utility skills, but you don't need utility skills to complete low level content. I never found the old system confusing (but then I'm the kind of person who will just push buttons to see what happens and assume it can't go that wrong because it's a game) but the new one does provide a better sense of continuous progression through the lower levels.

[Vayne.8563]

There's a lot of things that could be legitimately complained about about the NPE, but this isn't really one of them.  Originally you unlocked the elite skill by 30, now it's 31. But beyond that the speed of leveling for the first 15 levels was greatly increased. Doing three hearts and nothing else gets you a level now.  It took me about half an hour to get to level five. 

If it takes you an hour and a half to get a bunch of skills unlocked in an MMO...I mean it took much longer in Guild Wars 1.  Maybe the OP hasn't tried to level since the NPE, but it's really fast to get at least all your weapon skills unlocked.

Edit: And if you've played for a bunch of time you probably have enough ttomes to level you all the way to 80 anyway.

Edited September 23, 2021 by Vayne.8563

[mercury ranique.2170]

I think your complaint means you actually need some guidance into levelling. I think the main issue is your gap between your personal new player experience and now. Levelling has not changed since then and neither does unlock speed.
The main issue you have is with levelling. Besides just playing through the maps and exploring, you can also:
craft to level up
use birthday scrolls and knowledge tomes
go into dungeons
follow world bos trains
do guild missions
etc, etc, etc

Literally anything you do helps you to level up. With experience boosters (e.g. the birthday booster) you can speed it up even more.
In your case, I find yourself a veteran player who can use some newfound experience. So use a birthdayscroll to level up to level 30 or 40 (3th or 4th birthday gift) and then use birthday boosters to play the game in anyway you want. You would have access to most skills and traits that way, but still have a learning curve to regain knowledge of the game.

Keep in mind that the new player experience is designed for new players, not returning veterans like  you. In your case it needs some finetuning, hope my advice helps!

[Gehenna.3625]

5 hours ago, Zentao.6314 said:

The first 40-60 levels are the tutorial of the game.

Players who create the second, third or xth characters already have boosters and tome of knowledges to make it quicker.

I think that's the point of this thread...NEW player experience. The first character you create is where the game needs to shine to keep a player. 

 

Also, I think that the max level should've been 35-40 and the remaining levels are superfluous and boring to level. I remember the complaints about this when the game went live and now we have all kinds of level boosters as a band-aid, but ok. Still, a new player should have an experience that gets them excited to play more. That doesn't happen for a lot of players because of the leveling process.

1 hour ago, mercury ranique.2170 said:

craft to level up
use birthday scrolls and knowledge tomes
go into dungeons
follow world bos trains
do guild missions

Crafting costs money to level up. A new player doesn't have that type of gold.

Birthday scrolls are not for new players. So to suggest that to new players is just pointless.

Going into dungeons is not a popular thing to do and you can't do them till you are high enough in level.

World boss trains and guild missions are stuff they can realistically do but it does require joining a guild right away and getting help on how to do them. Otherwise these don't apply.

 

The only thing that you can realistically do as a new player is to use Tomes of Knowledge. For me though the fact that you can skip levels in so many ways (whenever you get to them) indicates that there is a problem with the leveling experience afaic.

[mercury ranique.2170]

19 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I

Crafting costs money to level up. A new player doesn't have that type of gold.

Birthday scrolls are not for new players. So to suggest that to new players is just pointless.

 

I rather dislike it when a one is quoting out of context. It is a bit disrespectfull. I never said that my advice was aimed at new players. As others has pointed out, there is not much wrong with the NPE. My advice was pointed towards the OP who is a returning player. That is something very much different.

[GuillotineFist.8921]

3 hours ago, Rasimir.6239 said:

The reason ANet gave for the new player experience (that has been new since 2015 ... I just got my 6th birthday present on the character I specifically made to try it out back then 😉 ) was that player retention was lacking due to too many people needing more guidance than the original system provided.

 

Back in the early days you had to have experience with the game systems (which you only gain by playing) or do internet research to figure out how to unlock "a full bar of skills by level 10is", and apparently many people didn't do either and felt lost in the game.

 

The NPE isn't aimed at veterans, and as the poster before me mentioned there are plenty of ways to short-cut the leveling process for these veterans that come naturally with playing the game (starting with leveling scrolls from birthday presents, which can get you up to lvl 60 if another of your characters had their 6th birthday already).

 

Are there players that pick up things quicker? I'm sure there are. I strongly suspect though that there are enough people that "need" the pacing the NPE provides them with to actually get into this game, else ANet would've changed things again by now. Why stick with a change if you find out what you had before was superior?

I wasn't a veteran back then either. I find the old system superior to the new one. Playing with a full load out early on is better than having a few skills for so many levels.

In terms of shortcutting, I already had all professions maxed level, this is a concern for new players. It is no good if players quit early on because using only a few skills for so many levels is boring

With regards to people "needing" the slow pacing, maybe it's the slow pacing that causes players to believe they only need to auto-attack and press one or two extra buttons every now and then?

[Glacial.9516]

Personally I preferred the old system where you used weapon skills to unlock them because it felt more fun and engaging (for me) and that it was independent of level. However I also think the old system was substantially worse when it came to alts (and Warriors!) particularly because (if memory serves me) you had to unlock every skill for every weapon. You might swap to a new weapon and find you haven't yet unlocked all of the skills, especially in the case of situational offhands. The NPE system is probably more intuitive to players and more streamlined with what one may expect to encounter in other games (and leveling to 10 doesn't take very long). I think there are as many pros and cons for both systems and so while I thought the old one was more fun and didn't like the changes of the NPE when it happened, I'm kind of ambivalent now and think whichever makes more sense to new players is probably the way to go.

 

Edited September 23, 2021 by Glacial.9516

[Rasimir.6239]

8 minutes ago, GuillotineFist.8921 said:

It is no good if players quit early on because using only a few skills for so many levels is boring

No one is arguing that it is. It's simply a question of numbers. If ANet says they change it because of too many people quitting, then keeps the changes, that makes me assume that the numbers of players quitting because of the new way are more acceptable to ANet than before.

[Zentao.6314]

55 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I think that's the point of this thread...NEW player experience. The first character you create is where the game needs to shine to keep a player. 

 

Also, I think that the max level should've been 35-40 and the remaining levels are superfluous and boring to level. I remember the complaints about this when the game went live and now we have all kinds of level boosters as a band-aid, but ok. Still, a new player should have an experience that gets them excited to play more. That doesn't happen for a lot of players because of the leveling process.

Crafting costs money to level up. A new player doesn't have that type of gold.

Birthday scrolls are not for new players. So to suggest that to new players is just pointless.

Going into dungeons is not a popular thing to do and you can't do them till you are high enough in level.

World boss trains and guild missions are stuff they can realistically do but it does require joining a guild right away and getting help on how to do them. Otherwise these don't apply.

 

The only thing that you can realistically do as a new player is to use Tomes of Knowledge. For me though the fact that you can skip levels in so many ways (whenever you get to them) indicates that there is a problem with the leveling experience afaic.

 

Please don't quote without context and pretend he said the opposite you can build on.

 

IMO this would be kinda overwhelming to let them access all of the skills at level 1 without understanding the game at all.

This way they can enjoy the world meanwhile they slowly access to the full kit, then at lvl80 they will know the basics of the game.

 

+ Crafting is really cheap, leveling cooking to 400 is just 3 gold, the game gives you free gold for every day you login and do 3 tasks

But even without the daily task world bosses, events, map progression so basically everything gives you gold

Edited September 23, 2021 by Zentao.6314

[PeterRedhill.3182]

I personally miss being able to  buy whatever skills I wanted.  But currently I'm only 31 and I'm getting kinda bored to be honest.

 

Just for clarifications sake I have an 80 that I boosted for the first mount, but I haven't played in like 9 years so I started over at level 1.  But honestly I'm probably just gonna quit again.  The games not very interesting, the coop is lacking and the glamour/outfit/transmog system isn't really good.  I wanted to like this game because of how much I liked vanilla GW1 l, but this game continues failing to hook me.

Addendum:

Also it's been a buggy mess the whole time I've been playing.  I've been unable to leave starting zones twice.  I've had so many sound bugs.  I finally after like two tickets can buy gems which now after I have I regret doing it.  It just hasn't been a good ride.  So while I'm not a new player for what this was designed for it's not much better than what we had before outside of being able to buy whatever skills you wanted which was cool.

 

On the plus side the raptor mount is cool.

Edited September 23, 2021 by PMoneyMobileRobot.4630

[Gehenna.3625]

1 hour ago, mercury ranique.2170 said:

I rather dislike it when a one is quoting out of context. It is a bit disrespectfull. I never said that my advice was aimed at new players. As others has pointed out, there is not much wrong with the NPE. My advice was pointed towards the OP who is a returning player. That is something very much different.

I think it's clear from his post that he is playing a new character to level with his friend and that his friend is new to the game. So he "suffered" through this leveling experience with his friend, which also is the reason he couldn't use the leveling boosts available to him.

[Zentao.6314]

1 hour ago, PMoneyMobileRobot.4630 said:

I personally miss being able to  buy whatever skills I wanted.  But currently I'm only 31 and I'm getting kinda bored to be honest.

 

Just for clarifications sake I have an 80 that I boosted for the first mount, but I haven't played in like 9 years so I started over at level 1.  But honestly I'm probably just gonna quit again.  The games not very interesting, the coop is lacking and the glamour/outfit/transmog system isn't really good.  I wanted to like this game because of how much I liked vanilla GW1 l, but this game continues failing to hook me.

Addendum:

Also it's been a buggy mess the whole time I've been playing.  I've been unable to leave starting zones twice.  I've had so many sound bugs.  I finally after like two tickets can buy gems which now after I have I regret doing it.  It just hasn't been a good ride.  So while I'm not a new player for what this was designed for it's not much better than what we had before outside of being able to buy whatever skills you wanted which was cool.

 

On the plus side the raptor mount is cool.

Leveling a character is part of every MMO.

For me it's fun to do events like map completion (heart, vistas, poi), world bosses, dynamic events, dungeons, etc. because literally everything you do gives you XP.

 

With some cheap food you can level up a character in one week at max, which is pretty fast IMO.

It's only boring if you want to level up a character in 2 hours which would make the whole leveling system pointless.

[PeterRedhill.3182]

1 hour ago, Zentao.6314 said:

Leveling a character is part of every MMO.

For me it's fun to do events like map completion (heart, vistas, poi), world bosses, dynamic events, dungeons, etc. because literally everything you do gives you XP.

 

With some cheap food you can level up a character in one week at max, which is pretty fast IMO.

It's only boring if you want to level up a character in 2 hours which would make the whole leveling system pointless.

So I did all of the dynamic events that would pop up and generally wanted to do map completion.  It's just after like a week of doing it off and on when I got off work I don't really want to anymore.  I'm sure there's other options to level I'm just bored and kind of burned out from it all.  I think it might be how awful the combat feels of how I can't seem to really click with any one profession.  But I can tell you with a certainty it's not a speed issue.  Regardless of what you may think.  Honestly it's kind of telling how quickly you tried to pin something like that onto me.  Speed isn't the issue it's the quality of it all.  Every heart feels the same and the actual gameplay loop is lacking for me as a player.  I've tried several times to get into this game I think I just need to move on as it's not for me.

[costepj.5120]

I'm sorry to say, but if you are "burned out" after a week, GW2 (or any MMO for that matter) may not be the game for you. I have logged 14,000 hours in GW2 and still find plenty of fun things to do every day. Including manually levelling a new character to 40/60 every week (for some black lion keys).

[PeterRedhill.3182]

6 minutes ago, costepj.5120 said:

I'm sorry to say, but if you are "burned out" after a week, GW2 (or any MMO for that matter) may not be the game for you. I have logged 14,000 hours in GW2 and still find plenty of fun things to do every day. Including manually levelling a new character to 40/60 every week (for some black lion keys).

I could just be burned out by the genre in general.  It's been about a good solid 20 years of hopping from one mmo to the other.  Though right now FFXIV is just exploding, but I have everything at max level in that game and nothing to do.  And Wow is dead to me for various reasons over the years.  Deleted my battlenet account and never looked back.  But as I said I always loved GW1 and subsequently I've always tried to love GW2, but it's just not for me.  But no this isn't my first mmo.

[Gibson.4036]

34 minutes ago, PMoneyMobileRobot.4630 said:

So I did all of the dynamic events that would pop up and generally wanted to do map completion.  It's just after like a week of doing it off and on when I got off work I don't really want to anymore. 

I'd suggest that's why. The map completion. It's really not necessary, and makes things into more of a chore. Plus you will outlevel maps so quickly because this game throws experience at you for everything.

The core world is best experienced organically, just following events, doing hearts as you encounter them, checking out corners that catch your interest, and moving into a new zone whenever level appropriate.

If, down the road, you want map completion for building a legendary  or for the bonus rewards, it's a lot faster on a geared up level 80 with mounts.

[Bristingr.5034]

28 minutes ago, PMoneyMobileRobot.4630 said:

Though right now FFXIV is just exploding, but I have everything at max level in that game and nothing to do.

See, I tried FFXIV and I was just BORED after getting to Level 10. It felt so... cookie-cutter, a clone of any generic MMORPG. Additionally, the amount of quests that pile onto you was overwhelming. I uninstalled that game because if they couldn't keep me interested in the beginning part, where did they expect me to pay monthly for it?

[PeterRedhill.3182]

10 minutes ago, Bristingr.5034 said:

See, I tried FFXIV and I was just BORED after getting to Level 10. It felt so... cookie-cutter, a clone of any generic MMORPG. Additionally, the amount of quests that pile onto you was overwhelming. I uninstalled that game because if they couldn't keep me interested in the beginning part, where did they expect me to pay monthly for it?

I can't really argue that, but you cannot deny it's rise to prominence.  It has just exploded in popularity.

For me it replaced Wow, but I have been playing FFXIV on and off since 2013.  I bought this game in 2012, but as I said it's never really stuck with me.  Though this time I've spent more time playing it then the most I did last time which was back in like 2012.  But I'm here still talking about it so I might just take a week off and try again.  I'm just getting so bored with it.  I'd rather not force myself to play it.

[Randulf.7614]

They changed it to this way because of feedback and metrics from new players showed they either didn’t like the freer design or found it confusing

[Sylvyn.4750]

1 hour ago, PMoneyMobileRobot.4630 said:

I could just be burned out by the genre in general.  It's been about a good solid 20 years of hopping from one mmo to the other.  Though right now FFXIV is just exploding, but I have everything at max level in that game and nothing to do.  And Wow is dead to me for various reasons over the years.  Deleted my battlenet account and never looked back.  But as I said I always loved GW1 and subsequently I've always tried to love GW2, but it's just not for me.  But no this isn't my first mmo.

Were you around for EQ?  Talk about a grindy treadmill just to level up, let alone camping mobs for days or doing a raid that took 4-6 hours just to have a chance at a rare drop to gear up your character...don't miss those days!

[Klowdy.3126]

You unlock your weapon skills pretty quickly, and there really isn't a need for more than that until 60. Utility skills are fun, but not even remotely necessary for such a long time. I know it depends on the class, but once you open up GS3 on the guardian, you have the only rotation you need to kill everything. Leap in, spin, auto everything that's left, repeat. I run passives while leveling almost exclusively, lol.

[PeterRedhill.3182]

4 minutes ago, Sylvyn.4750 said:

Were you around for EQ?  Talk about a grindy treadmill just to level up, let alone camping mobs for days or doing a raid that took 4-6 hours just to have a chance at a rare drop to gear up your character...don't miss those days!

No, I want to say my first was Earth and Beyond and then I played Wow and hated it and then I played GW1 till around the end of the Burning Crusade.  I've honestly never wanted to play Everquest.  I don't remember why though.