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[Column] Guild Wars 2: New Players Will Have It Rough
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
September is here, which means Guild Wars 2 is going to go through some big changes. Lately PvP has been the center of attention, with new features announced, and the launch of some exciting tournaments. However, we saw a huge shift this past week, showing more attention towards making the game more appealing to new players, but will these changes actually work?
Read more of David North's Guild Wars 2: New Players Will Have It Rough.
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Imagine not being able to use waypoints. Very scary, I know.
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When i started playing my Elementalist i really enjoyed the game, when I got to lv 20 i kept dying in the solo story content and i couldn't work out why so i put a video on youtube for my friend to watch.
Him: "Why are you not dodging..."
Me: "Dodge?? Say whaaaaaa....???"
What is this ? The 10th time they've redone the same content.
Oh well, you still more out of this game for 30 bucks then any game on planet.
Good work, I guess ?
Ugh. There is no worse way to do tutorials than like this by locking off part of the game until you're supposedly ready for it. It doesn't actually teach anything it's just annoying. Agree with the author here. You could easily redesign that starter instance to teach players everything they would need for the first 10 or so levels of the game.
I remember the new player experience in GW2 actually being the probably best I've seen in any MMO. Why would they change it like this?
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Either lvl between two zones, or level crafting. Leveling crafting will give you HUGE level gains + best gear/benefits for your level
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They have been losing sight for two years now. Quite honestly I'm surprised they can still see anything at all.
Anyhow, it's a waste of text to say anything more, dead horse and all that.
Actually they did communicate why they made these changes on reddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2etzxq/a_fresh_start_the_new_player_experience_in_guild/ck35771
Yeah we thought so too. After tens of thousands of usability testers and interviews with players who tried Gw2 and left leading up to China launch both in NA/EU and in China - we learned we were wrong.
Honestly, we were kind of shocked how many systems, downed included a surprising number of players just didn't understand. For downed, we tried a downed tutorial, building downed into the level 1 tutorial, etc. We found after usability testing with numerous different groups, the best rate of people learning and understanding it came from having it be layered complexity and the solution we went with above. Intuitively that wouldn't have been my guess either initially, but we found people understood it better this way than all other options we tried.
This same level of testing led to the other changes as well. At the end of the day the biggest take away I'd say is: all of us, especially people who go to a reddit to discuss a game, probably know games (and Gw2) really really well. We have millions of users, and a tiny % of them frequent game forums or reddit. Just because all of us, me included, learned those systems well and thought it was all really easy doesn't mean we are the norm
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2etzxq/a_fresh_start_the_new_player_experience_in_guild/ck35jpy
I think that's a totally fair question, as a veteran user I'd wonder that too - why does making the game better for new users benefit me when I want features that benefit me?
The simple answer is: by ensuring the game foundation is solid for new users, we'll be in a place after the feature pack where we can do the kind of things that excite both veteran and new users simultaneously, and we'll be able to retain a much larger percentage of the new or long returning users when they show up. Can't say anything more than that yet - but that's the thinking, you don't need to agree with it, but it's important to know why the decision was made!
Waypoints aren't being locked out....
Yeah AO has massive deserts with copy and pasted large spaces with absolutely nothing in them, BUT IT SURE IS A BIG GAME!
GW2 was one of the easiest games to learn to play in my opinion. If you actually read and follow the tutorial's instead of spamming the "esc" button you might learn to ...i don't know...say DODGE in the beginning levels!
I bought GW2 for my roommate's birthday, and she had never really played an MMORPG like GW2 before. She came straight from MapleStory! She had it down pat in less then a week of play time, and now dodges and kites with the best of them.
I really don't understand this. How can waypoints and downed state be too confusing? If the players they are trying to attract are that bad at games, then those players shouldn't be in that game, it just ruins the experience for everyone. Guild Wars 2 has one of the best experiences for a new player or character.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty easy to learn the downed state and everything. I don't know if they're gimping themselves with this new method, but I highly doubt that things like waypoints and the downed state should be that overwhelming for the average gamer.
Then again, they're supposedly basing it on feed back they received, so I guess there is a reason for it.
Doesn't mean I like it. But then, all my characters are past 30 now, so I don't have to worry about it anyway.
And if someone gets into the game and has a friend that plays it shouldn't be too big an issue. Idk about those that come in alone.
Yeap... if they did a tutorial right at the start before you go fight centaurs or ghosts or Inquest, the game would definitely be less daunting.
For instance, they could down you right at the start to show you the downed state, they could prompt you to dodge so you know what dodging is.
Then again, people tend to skip tutorials because they think they've played every MMO before so this route might be because of that.
This is not a game.
The article contains several wrong informations. The waypoints are not locked for 10 levels as it is suggested. Even with level 3 you can use them. There will be tutorials in each starter zone that teach the mechanic of dodging. The author already lost his bet before he launched it. I get the impression the author is not well informed about the system in China. The starter zone are there to teach basic things about the game. They will do it even better with the Chinese system. Exactly this was suggested by the author.
The flood of posts in several forums - whenever a lager number of players enters the game - about the bad introduction of game features and the missing direction given by the game is a good indication that something was wrong with the experience within the first level of GW2. Arenanet reacted to theses complaints.