New player experience sucks

[Vayne.8563]

56 minutes ago, LSD.4673 said:

Ok i got another one for you: Braham is Taimi's brother.

I thought Braham and Taimi are twins, seperated at birth.

[battledrone.8315]

On 9/23/2021 at 11:20 PM, LSD.4673 said:

It really is awful, and too many die-hards defend it to the death -- like many of the game's issues. It's like a stagnant swamp at this point.

 

It takes 8 levels to unlocks just your 5 weapon skills. You spend the first 2 levels only able to press 1 (two guesses as to why the game devolves into face-tank press-skill-1 on any world boss or meta event...). It takes to level 19 to unlock your utilities (!!!), and 31 to unlock your "elite" skill.

That's tremendously stupid. Nothing specific to the game is explained, yet lots of pointless stuff common to MMOs is (you can kill an enemy by using a weapon). As a great example, i remember when i started playing with a friend in 2016. We got to Kessex, and the Toxic Spider started tearing through a whole bunch of noobs who had no idea what to do. To this day high mastery-level players have no idea how to damage breakbars. 

 

You have to get to 71 to unlock the 3rd spec slot -- you know, the sole means of actually specialising and building your character.

 

It's an absolute joke. I've never convinced anyone to keep playing to max level. They always get tired of the repetition by 25-30 and never return. 

I even tried showing someone a world boss a few months ago. It died and he didn't feel like he'd contributed anything...

the levelling process is the smoothest you can find in the entire business. i dare you to find a an mmo , that does it better.

the closest is prolly swtor when they have bonus XP events. i can agree on the tutorials, but they are only really needed after max level.

[Sobx.1758]

19 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

Wow you have completely turned my summary of the level system on its head. I'll have to go right back to the drawing board. All criticism is revoked for this eggcellent system.

If the very base of your claim is wrong -and it clearly is- then your "summary" is inaccurate to say the least and these sarcastic retorts won't change that.

Edited October 10, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[BlueJin.4127]

Many players are not from the US and speak English as a second language. Not being able to use English properly doesn't mean their opinions are any less accurate. That's really pushing it. However, basing your opinion on incorrect information can invalidate your entire point.

Edited October 11, 2021 by BlueJin.4127

[Sobx.1758]

15 minutes ago, LSD.4673 said:

Or maybe -- get this! -- it's a demonstration as to how absurd it is to flippantly write off an argument on minutia...

Hmmm...

"acshully it is level 2 not level 1"

Oops! Better go back and hang myself.

There's a difference between you sarcastically pointing out someone's typo and you basing your opinion on "facts" that are false.

Your claim was some overblown complaint about "spending 2 levels pressing 1!", meanwhile the only instance you have "weapon skill 1 and nothing else" is the introductory level 1 instance, where you're being told how to move using WASD keys. And if you already know what to do, you can skip half of it.

Edited October 11, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[Sarm.5923]

On 10/9/2021 at 2:22 PM, Faridah.8431 said:

Secondarily, the way they integrated unlocking masteries once you hit 80 is awful. If you are genuinely a new player, perhaps you are also playing through the game in story order, meaning you are playing personal story first. Yet once you hit 80, instead of having some method of unlocking (or just automatically unlocking) Central Tyrian masteries, the game repeatedly spams you in the corner of your screen with a popup telling you to basically stop what you are doing and go play HoT or PoF to unlock masteries. 

As a new player, this is exactly what happened to me. And because I was on a free account at the time, I couldn't exctly go to those zones to unlock the masteries, but the game made every effort to remind me to do so anyway. This ended up coming back to bite me later on, and I know it's ultimately my own fault for doing this, but I got so used to tuning out the mastery notices as a result that by the time I finally did start HoT, I forgot to actually spend the capped out EXP several times, and then I'd feel bad for having wasted even more while temporarily stonewalling my progress through the story because I had to grind events to unlock the required steps to accept the next quest..

As for the leveling experience, I know this is just my own anecdote, but I didn't have a problem with the game dripfeeding the abilities to me. I was already pretty overwhelmed as-is by constantly rotating through weapons as I leveled and trying to remember about 60 weapon skills at once (elementalist, weapon spell options * 4 elements) while also getting used to general game mechanics that I don't think throwing access to the entire utility bar would have helped me. I can see how it might feel stifling to a veteran player, though.

Edited October 11, 2021 by Sarm.5923

[battledrone.8315]

2 hours ago, Sarm.5923 said:

As a new player, this is exactly what happened to me. And because I was on a free account at the time, I couldn't exctly go to those zones to unlock the masteries, but the game made every effort to remind me to do so anyway. This ended up coming back to bite me later on, and I know it's ultimately my own fault for doing this, but I got so used to tuning out the mastery notices as a result that by the time I finally did start HoT, I forgot to actually spend the capped out EXP several times, and then I'd feel bad for having wasted even more while temporarily stonewalling my progress through the story because I had to grind events to unlock the required steps to accept the next quest..

As for the leveling experience, I know this is just my own anecdote, but I didn't have a problem with the game dripfeeding the abilities to me. I was already pretty overwhelmed as-is by constantly rotating through weapons as I leveled and trying to remember about 60 weapon skills at once (elementalist, weapon spell options * 4 elements) while also getting used to general game mechanics that I don't think throwing access to the entire utility bar would have helped me. I can see how it might feel stifling to a veteran player, though.

yep, i forgot to spend some points too, and it really sucked, because i hate HoT so much.

mastery system is the worst progression systems i have ever tried. 

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

5 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

Or maybe -- get this! -- it's a demonstration as to how absurd it is to flippantly write off an argument on minutia...

Hmmm...

"acshully it is level 2 not level 1"

Oops! Better go back and hang myself.

But, that wasn't the only thing that was misrepresented. 

[costepj.5120]

It's a long time ago, but I think what taught me some of the finer points of combat was pursuing the old daily achievements.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daily_(historical_achievements)

 

If you look though that list you will find we were encouraged to regularly dodge, apply conditions, remove conditions and interrupt skills. The Community category also has an achievement (Teamwork gets it done) for using combos. I can understand removing these from dailies as they'd become a bit tedious once you got proficient with the different skills, but having a new player equivalent where you had to repeat 10/50/100 times for an appropriate reward could still be a thing.

[Rasimir.6239]

35 minutes ago, costepj.5120 said:

I can understand removing these from dailies as they'd become a bit tedious once you got proficient with the different skills

Aside from this, there was also the fact that most of the old daily achievements were so generic that people would go the way of least resistance and cheese the achievements rather than figuring out how they actually worked.

 

Dodging is a good one. In theory the achievement should've taught people how to dodge. In practice though, most people I know only learned that ranger greatsword auto attach would dodge, and more often than not because somebody told them it's the easy way to do that achievement. Personally I didn't really learn how to dodge until much later, when combat cues became much more visible to help me actually spot the attacks I wanted to dodge.

 

The way the combat system, and especially the visibility of attack animations and cues, has been refined over the years would possibly make achievements like these more helpful today, although I still believe the old ones to be too generic to really motivate people into figuring things out. I doubt however that it would be a good idea to annoy everyone with such tedious achievements just to get the chance of "educating" a few more newcomers.

[battledrone.8315]

26 minutes ago, Rasimir.6239 said:

Aside from this, there was also the fact that most of the old daily achievements were so generic that people would go the way of least resistance and cheese the achievements rather than figuring out how they actually worked.

 

Dodging is a good one. In theory the achievement should've taught people how to dodge. In practice though, most people I know only learned that ranger greatsword auto attach would dodge, and more often than not because somebody told them it's the easy way to do that achievement. Personally I didn't really learn how to dodge until much later, when combat cues became much more visible to help me actually spot the attacks I wanted to dodge.

 

The way the combat system, and especially the visibility of attack animations and cues, has been refined over the years would possibly make achievements like these more helpful today, although I still believe the old ones to be too generic to really motivate people into figuring things out. I doubt however that it would be a good idea to annoy everyone with such tedious achievements just to get the chance of "educating" a few more newcomers.

if you want it to work for casual players, they have to write "DODGE NOW" with big letters in the middle of the screen,

there is simply too much going on at the same time. but then you still have problem with the direction of the dodge.

 

[Sobx.1758]

3 hours ago, LSD.4673 said:

Except it wasn't. Still though, you've at least demonstrated your lack of reading comprehension, which goes hand in hand with the thing about spelling.

Maybe you're not in a position to be arguing abojt something you disagree with?

Riiiiiight....

(don't forget to ridicule yourself about "abojt" btw, in the end typos are a huge deal and prove you don't understand the language you're using -at least according to your previous post in this thread)

On 9/23/2021 at 11:20 PM, LSD.4673 said:

You spend the first 2 levels only able to press 1 (two guesses as to why the game devolves into face-tank press-skill-1 on any world boss or meta event...).

🤷‍♂️

Not only you don't spend 2 levels only spamming 1, but also trying to build an argument that players keep spamming 1 almost 80 levels later because they could only use 1 during the first 5 minutes of the game is just as ridiculous as it's baseless.

Edited October 11, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[Sarm.5923]

I can't blame other new players for spamming 1 because when I was first trying out Weaver, that's exactly what I ended up doing as soon as I noticed that my autoattack activation range with swords is slightly smaller than my actual sword skill reach. Combine that with your character auto-turning to face your enemy, and all it takes is to be rooted juuuust out of auto range one time to "learn" that you really should be mashing that button whether the game's doing it for you or not. And I get so focused on trying to maintain uptime of the sword1 chain that sometimes I fumble with the actual class mechanics of keeping other skills on cooldown and rotating through elements in a timely manner. It's dumb, and I know it's ultimately my own fault and inexperience, but I find it a hard habit to break, especially if you're coming from another MMO where filler abilities like this have to be manually spammed.

But I think the thing I've struggled with the most (and again I know this is ultimately my problem) was that the free leveling experience inadvertently taught me not to really bother dodging attacks unless I have a floor marker warning me. I chalk it up to a combination of being a max-size Charr and slathering enemies in spell effects, because when a lot of mook enemies are smaller than I am, I find it difficult to notice their attack animations when they're caked in fire and I'm eyeballing my cooldown timers. So because I ended up thinking "don't bother, you're going to get hit anyway," I ended up basing my gameplay around that and would just use my staff to AoE down small groups of enemies inside of Sandstorm blinds and try to kite them with chills.

Going into HoT was like being bowled over by a ferris wheel because that didn't cut it anymore. Since I was trying to learn a set of Weaver sword skills, actually needing to dodge things this time (me changing the keybind for it twice made that process slower), and also dealing with not being able to play reactively with my spell 3-4-5s anymore due to being frontloaded with a 4 second cooldown now, I was fumbling as if I was level 1 all over again. 😛

[sasya neko.1985]

i still stand by what i said years ago, it should be something we should be able to disable as veterans, anyone who plays for about 9 years knows how to play but the NPE stops the whole progress to boredom.

[Obtena.7952]

3 hours ago, sorudo.9054 said:

i still stand by what i said years ago, it should be something we should be able to disable as veterans, anyone who plays for about 9 years knows how to play but the NPE stops the whole progress to boredom.

I don't get this comment for two reasons:

1. As a veteran, you get boosters ... LOTS of them, more than you can use unless you are rolling so many alts that leveling isn't a problem for you in the first place. If you are REALLY in a hurry, you can just purchase a 80 booster from the GS. Otherwise, you click a button, you get a level in about 5 seconds. Where is the boredom there, unless the attention span is the length of a fruit fly?

2. As a veteran, you have the means to outfit yourself and have prior game knowledge so leveling isn't a drag if you don't want to use boosters. 

I don't think it should be disabled because that trivializes leveling, but aside from simply handing out free 80 boosters, what more does Anet need to do here? They are more than reasonable in how they accommodate people that do not want to level. 

Edited October 11, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[Gibson.4036]

I learned something from this thread, thanks!

I understand breakbars and cc, but there were so many zone specific random masteries to deal with in IBS that I blew right past the waystations. I had no idea why people popped them up at random world events, and didn't think to research it.

This will be helpful on my relatively CC-lite Daredevil.

________________

On anohter note,  wonder if it would be helpful if they included a "Breakbar or defiance bar damage: X" in the tooltips for every CC skill. At the moment, if I want to know why I'm not being very effective against a breakbar, I need to look up what effects my CC skills apply, then go look at a table on the wiki to see their bar damage.  Or is there something I'm missing?

Adding this to the mouseover skill tooltips would also lead players to go "huh, what's a breakbar or defiance bar" as they look at their skills for the first time.

Just a thought.

Edited October 12, 2021 by Gibson.4036

[Gehenna.3625]

2 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

I learned something from this thread, thanks!

I understand breakbars and cc, but there were so many zone specific random masteries to deal with in IBS that I blew right past the waystations. I had no idea why people popped them up at random world events, and didn't think to research it.

This will be helpful on my relatively CC-lite Daredevil.

________________

On anohter note,  wonder if it would be helpful if they included a "Breakbar or defiance bar damage: X" in the tooltips for every CC skill. At the moment, if I want to know why I'm not being very effective against a breakbar, I need to look up what effects my CC skills apply, then go look at a table on the wiki to see their bar damage.  Or is there something I'm missing?

Adding this to the mouseover skill tooltips would also lead players to go "huh, what's a breakbar or defiance bar" as they look at their skills for the first time.

Just a thought.

There are soft and hard cc's and there is a table on the wiki how much damage each cc skill does to a break bar. The difficulty is that break bars scale as well. And since not all events or bosses scale and not all bosses have the same amount of points on their break bar I can imagine that it would be difficult to get such an indication. Here's the wiki page with the table https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance_bar

[Gibson.4036]

50 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

There are soft and hard cc's and there is a table on the wiki how much damage each cc skill does to a break bar. The difficulty is that break bars scale as well. And since not all events or bosses scale and not all bosses have the same amount of points on their break bar I can imagine that it would be difficult to get such an indication. Here's the wiki page with the table https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance_bar

Yeah, that's the wiki page with the tables I was refering to in my post.

Boss hit points scale too, and yet our tool tips list how much damage a given attack does. I'm not sure on your reasoning why Comet couldn't say "Defiance Damage: 200 (2s)" and Updraft couldn't say "Defiance Damage: 332".

It would put more info in game, rather than having to cross reference wiki tables, and would be another way to communicate to a player "Hey, there's these defiance bar things, and this skill will do more to them than that skill".

 

[ASP.8093]

On 9/23/2021 at 5:20 PM, LSD.4673 said:

It takes 8 levels to unlocks just your 5 weapon skills. You spend the first 2 levels only able to press 1 (two guesses as to why the game devolves into face-tank press-skill-1 on any world boss or meta event...). It takes to level 19 to unlock your utilities (!!!), and 31 to unlock your "elite" skill.

It's really wacky if you compare it to Guild Wars 1, Diablo, Divinity: Original Sin, Hades, &c. Lots of games across a range of genres put a lot of effort into spreading engaging gameplay across the "level curve" (including GW1, like I said!) and GW2 kinda ended up more on the "well, the other MMOs are pretty bad at this so we'll be bad, too" side of the scale.

[Game of Bones.8975]

The only way for you not to have anything to do is if you have all the mounts maxed, 15K AP, all Legendary items across the board, +300% Magic find, all minis, all the dyes, ... need I go on.

 

 

[Gehenna.3625]

13 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

Yeah, that's the wiki page with the tables I was refering to in my post.

Boss hit points scale too, and yet our tool tips list how much damage a given attack does. I'm not sure on your reasoning why Comet couldn't say "Defiance Damage: 200 (2s)" and Updraft couldn't say "Defiance Damage: 332".

It would put more info in game, rather than having to cross reference wiki tables, and would be another way to communicate to a player "Hey, there's these defiance bar things, and this skill will do more to them than that skill".

 

Well that's a fair point. The absolute value could be displayed in the tooltip.

[PeterRedhill.3182]

So it's been like a month or so now since I returned and honestly I still feel the same.  The PoF stuff is fine, but the core world is still boring as hell.  A lot of the classes also don't really feel good until you get their elite specs as well.  I played Guardian and it was ok, but once I got Firebrand now it's fun.  I think a lot of issues I have is the core gameplay loop in the initial core world sucks.  It's just not fun to play.  The later zones get slightly better though. 

Also difficulty spikes are crazy in this game.  I wanted to try out HoT and it was way above what you had to deal with in PoF or the core game.  Of course on my Firebrand I melt things, but actually traversing the HoT zones gave me PTSD.  It's like they designed them around the glider instead of designing a cool map with glider spots in mind.  It's a kitten cluster bleep.  It just starts with this map sucks start working on that glider.  Anyway I'm done ranting.

But I'm not here to have the game changed around me.  I'm just giving my feedback.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

New player experience is still garage. It did not make the na or eu better, it was designed for the Chinese audience, and then forced onto the rest of the regions. 

The reason the story feels disjoined is the personal story was gutted and partially fixed. Add to the fact that ls1 is lost and never coming back (which is a good thing how they handled TM). Player retention was an issue at the start of the game was there was nothing to do once you hit 80.  Go back to patch notes that first year, almost every patch was to add lvl 80 content. 

[Vayne.8563]

47 minutes ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

New player experience is still garage. It did not make the na or eu better, it was designed for the Chinese audience, and then forced onto the rest of the regions. 

The reason the story feels disjoined is the personal story was gutted and partially fixed. Add to the fact that ls1 is lost and never coming back (which is a good thing how they handled TM). Player retention was an issue at the start of the game was there was nothing to do once you hit 80.  Go back to patch notes that first year, almost every patch was to add lvl 80 content. 

People have used this line that it was designed for the chinese audience over and over again since it came out, because the China version was coming out. Proximity in time doesn't equal cause and effect though. 

Anet said it was to do with a focus group of a thousand players that never played the game before, and it had everything to do with the game going free to play in the US and EU.  Chinese players don't want or need a simplified game. Stating stuff like that as a fact is simply spreading misinformation.

[Sarm.5923]

1 hour ago, PMoneyMobileRobot.4630 said:

A lot of the classes also don't really feel good until you get their elite specs as well.

Weirdly enough, for me I had the opposite experience at first. Sure, I was curious about the elite specs, but I had a thing that I thought was working for me in the base game, and I had started googling to see if it was at all viable to just stay regular instead of using one.

Apparently a staff-wielding core elementalist does not cut the mustard. 🤪

Edited October 13, 2021 by Sarm.5923