As I’ve said many times, I used to be an editor. Not a copy editor, or line editor, but an editor nonetheless.
One of the lessons I learned a long time ago is that anyone can take a line from any book, or a number of lines and make the book look less good than it actually was by focusing on those lines. It’s actually quite easy. Dissecting a book piecemeal almost never makes a book better. There are overriding concerns that the book has to deal with as a whole that make a book successful or not.
What I see a lot on these forums are people dissecting individual tiny bits of an update and trying to make it look like the game is bad, the update is bad, the thing they specifically don’t like is bad.
The simplest example of this is something like the warrior nerf. People say why did Anet nerf the warrior. I was having fun. I was enjoying the game.
Then you point out that the warrior greatsword 2 skill did more damage than any other #2 skill in the game by a huge amount. And people said, well, yeah, why not just buff the other classes, that would be the smart thing to do.
But anyone who really stops and thinks about it would know how bad that would be for the game. If you buff all the other professions until they’re equal to a warrior, which was clearly overpowered at least in some areas of the game, then every single encounter in the PvE game becomes trivial. You would then have to adjust every single creature and dungeon and fractal in the entire game, every dynamic event, and what would you likely end up with.
One profession that everyone said was overpowered. You’d have to buff every other profession up to that, and it would never end. The time it takes to nerf a skill or two that was out of whack is minimal and frankly manageable. The amount of time it would take to buff every other skill of every other profession and then buff everything in the game to compensate would be ridiculous and wouldn’t allow time for anything else.
Anet doesn’t look at any system in isolation. Everything they change effects everything else in the game. And so we get to the New Player Experience.
Anet is looking at increasing the number of players in this game, perhaps at the risk of annoying players who are already playing the game. I’m sure they’ll find the right balance and compromise so a minimal number of people are affected so badly.
But a lot of what we’ve seen is people picking on individual points, not whole systems and that’s where the problem lies.
It’s easy to pick apart a book. Terribly easy. Even the greatest book. Because books aren’t about individual lines or words. They’re about something bigger.
The first 20-30 levels of play in an MMO for the largest bulk of the playerbase represent the smallest amount of time. Most people will spend far more time with their character at 80 than they will spend with it at all the levels to 80 put together.
This experience was not made for old players to do better, even though there are some benefits in it for old players. It was made for new players, who everyone seems to think they know about.
The MMO genre is a swamped genre. It’s filled with games made for people who have spent years playing these games. There is an untapped market out there of people who never really played these games but could, if someone would actually give them a change to get their feet wet.
Does it matter if you dance in front of a cow or feed it? Sure. It matters. But I’ve played this game for thousands of hours and I’m relatively sure I didn’t spent 1 hour of it feeding cows. And these are the types of complaints we’re getting.
The dumbing down only covers levels 1-10 or about an hour of play time. I can see where some might find that annoying. What I can’t see is the depth of the player reaction to what is essentially a change to the earliest experience in the game.
Yes, it was always going to need to be tweaked. But it’s still a relatively small part of the game.
People might argue that you get your elite at level 40, it’s half the game now. But because they increased the speed of leveling 1-15, it’s no longer half the game. And Colin has said you get your elite skill at about the same number of hours played. People are distracted by an arbitrary number that is the character level.
I’m sure that in the days ahead, changes will be made that will make most people happy, but sinking an entire update for what ends up being essentially small details out of a whole cloth is a bit like sabotage. You can always find a weakness to exploit in any game if you really want to. Try pulling back and looking at the bigger picture. You may like it, or you may not. But it’s what developers have to look at. I don’t think everyone on the forum necessarily sees that.