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Posted by: Lucius.2140

Lucius.2140

But the thing is, I don’t like the updates in other MMOs for the most part. I went from update to update in Rift and I didn’t like any of them. Rift could have come out with an update every day and it wouldn’t have made any difference to my enjoyment of the game.

This game has less updates this year, probably because of China. That’s done now. But the updates they do have interest me personally. So I’m here.

If another game comes out that has stuff that interests me personally, then I’ll try it out. But so far, no other MMO has come out with content for me.

Its more about the 2 years than only this one, but supose you have your updates x2 and the ones complaining get some updates too (not so much as yours lol). Pretty much that not happening is the problem.

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Posted by: V Man.8512

V Man.8512

I think you made a big mistake back in April by making the traits that much harder to acquire. I guess if you just started playing after that it would be fine but to have one set of pre-patch characters that have everything unlocked as default, then anything you made after the patch automatically feels inferior. It’s like you have to do a lot more work for no extra reward. For something you got for free before.

Now with this new patch you seem to have taken that even further, although I cannot really comment on the specifics. I just hear quite a bit of discontent and I’m very glad I got my characters to 80 already.

Off topic a bit – but WHY did you not add a way to hide the personal story / world completion text? It has annoyed me since launch, and was one of the main reasons for working my way through the story – to make the bloody thing disappear! And now it looks even more obnoxious with that stupid circle thing, and when you complete the story it doesn’t even disappear any more!! So now I have to get world completion just to make my UI a bit cleaner? Come on Anet.. it’s time for some UI customization options.

PLEASE

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Posted by: phys.7689

phys.7689

I think you made a big mistake back in April by making the traits that much harder to acquire. I guess if you just started playing after that it would be fine but to have one set of pre-patch characters that have everything unlocked as default, then anything you made after the patch automatically feels inferior. It’s like you have to do a lot more work for no extra reward. For something you got for free before.

Now with this new patch you seem to have taken that even further, although I cannot really comment on the specifics. I just hear quite a bit of discontent and I’m very glad I got my characters to 80 already.

Off topic a bit – but WHY did you not add a way to hide the personal story / world completion text? It has annoyed me since launch, and was one of the main reasons for working my way through the story – to make the bloody thing disappear! And now it looks even more obnoxious with that stupid circle thing, and when you complete the story it doesn’t even disappear any more!! So now I have to get world completion just to make my UI a bit cleaner? Come on Anet.. it’s time for some UI customization options.

PLEASE

i believe you can get rid of both, check the options when you hit the escape button and go to options, i think its in the top right side.

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Posted by: Scellenia.4952

Scellenia.4952

Part 1 (Message are limited to 5001 characters …)

Hi there , i’ll try to focus on what is wrong for me in all that, unfortunally i didn’t read all the thread so some point can be already developped and sorry for every mistake i can do because this isn’t my natural language and i’m not good at all in english (and talking in our localised forums is like talking in a empty hole so … i try for this time)

Second important point is that i’m extremly disapointed with the last patch , it changed so much my mind that i , now, take absolutly no pleasure to play.So call me hater if you want or i don’t know what some “fanboys” can say … i know from where i am , i know my story with Guild wars and Guild Wars 2. To like and support something and being so disapointed by this is different to a stupid “hate” or “change reject” .
By this fact i’ll try to don’t be too negative and clear as i can but sorry if some point will be negative because this get me in nerves for real in game :/ and i don’t like that.

So let’s go :

1) I think this new UI with arrow and “see the square near you there is something” extremly intrusive and forced. I don’t need it, i don’t want it , this break my immersion and this is not an option … Why ? Why have i to support this ? For new player ? i’m not.
I don’t mind if you can “activate this” for new player, options are cools but i don’t want it because now i can’t log a character without feel insulted by a visible UI who say to me what to do.
Your Story , immersion , you know ? It’s the game sold to me at the release not “follow the Big Arrow and don’t use your brain for anything”

2) Scalled Story mission : It was already scalled by the power of the ennemis so there is no need to “block” story for to say “go level up”.You have an important mission , your general say to you to quickly prepare for the fight and … oh no , go kill 200 skritts and help Pascal the farmer.
The Main story was already boring because of bugs and some long things and now you have to break it for to “level up”.
Same here , immersion , my story ? Isn’t Zaithan more important than going to "the heart in your UI who’s shining with a text saying go there !!! ? How are we supposed to live the story and respect the character if the game itself don’t do it ?
Imersion is dead , welcome to GPS land :/ that’s my feeling

3) Miniature changes : just a small thing here and it’s out of topic , but seriously how can you do a “collection” update while not thinking to people who actually collect them … how many people with inventory full of their double ? they have to sale them or buy bags ? What’s the point of doing a “better” if it’s worst in same time ? :/ It was obvious . The new tab don’t class with Miniature collection 1,2 or 3 too , strange to forgot that when you sell them by this 1,2 or 3 thing. I don’t think someone should have to use a wiki for to know what he buy at the store.And a last thing about that , yes have a auto miniature at spawn is cool , except that the mega-server regroup people and after say “there is too much people so we don’t show miniature” , so … i didn’t see so much my miniature since i’m supposed to see them easier.In fact i see it less than before :/
Something is wrong here , not extremly important but there is a problem.

4) This horrible arrow showing where is the heal button , and hiding debuff each time i’m low health … sorry, really sorry, but this is stupid.One time when you’re in the tutorial mode , why not but after .. it’s kind of insulting.(I guess and hope it’s a bug but if not, .. really ? :/)

5) Disparition of ressource spot at starting location : Well it’s simple here … why ? It’s not for to protect the debutant of a mining spot .. and it’s again more sad when 1 week after you sell a plant spot for personnal instance. (made me think to the jcj forge where could build “finnish” deleted and now you have to “buy them” in store … )
I don’t want to be hard but when i buy a box of Guild Wars , i can hope addition but i totally not hope you retire things for to sell them and that’s how i feel them.

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Posted by: Scellenia.4952

Scellenia.4952

Part 2 (Message are limited to 5001 characters …)

6) Character & Story : I noticed a great improvment in the Living Story Season 2 , more dynamic and more character development but this put in relief a big problem in theses parts. I , most of time , don’t care about the heroic character because of a lot of little things.
A simple example is the Rytlock sword mission , all the instance they say “don’t let this mob approach the zone” , but all of them just don’t care about him and strike useless ghost.But each time i’m on the ground rox run all the entire zone for to help me to revive even if i don’t need it.
Conclusion , when it happend what happend to Rytlock i’m supposed to feel concerned but my only though is “Pff stupid Npc doing stupid things”.
Same for Logan who’s supposed to be a heroic figure but always say “go to the fight i rest here” even in front of a door on the ex-Lvl8 Human story ^^’.
I think a good “new player experiment” should more focus on implication in the Storyline (Like in Living Story S2), and not in a Shiny gps and Storybreak each 2 feet , things who put him far far far far far away of the story.

7) The new aptitude Locking system (Buy them in gold or do the “mission” for to unlock them) : I think this is horribly confusing for a new player , again a “go everywhere but not in the story” thing , and sometimes there is no logic about the mission and the reward. (same logic that to loot a dungeon armor by going in a pvp match … Sometimes i feel you want so much people do what you want they do that you forgot that logic and story is a native thing of Guild Wars , I didn’t buy GW2 2 times for his fabulous store, but because it was the new chapter of Guild wars.)

Of course i understand that the development of a game need money , and i’m not basicly “against store” , i understand it’s important but … The gem for Gold thing and the Black Lion Key Farm was the good junction between the “Paid things” and the “you can do it by playing” , fight it mean fight a good part of players who will buy the game , character slot and extensions.

In my opinion This NPE look more like an New Anti-Farm Experience (with visual irritating addition :p) but i’m pretty sure people farm because they have nothing else fun to do , so blocking them after more than 1 year and say “go E-sport” is like rejecting a big part of your original fans.

I think you’re in a dangerous path because Guild Wars 2 would not exist without Guild Wars and … doing new things is normal , but force player to do what you think they have to do is , for me, a Kill-comunity thing.

I’ll stop here, because it’s already too long and i’m really sorry about my bad english.
Just, please … , think that if a foreigner original fan feel the need to come here do a post in a language he don’t use well … it’s perhaps that you touched something too important , and to force people to go where you want thinking “it’s better” is an attack to their freedom to play like they want.

Mmorpg , Massively multiplayer online Roleplaying Game

I like Guild Wars, and even if i’m so so with Guild Wars 2 i liked a lot to run everywhere , kill things on the way, farm when i see spot , just live an adventure , and i really like the design of the world … let us play and live.

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Posted by: Illysharia.7286

Illysharia.7286

A wild “Changes Coming to the NPE” thread appears! You ran out of endurance and cannot attack.

Seems to me most of the complaining has withdrawn, one week after the patch. So I’m not sure why this is such a huge issue. Some people will still complain of course, but the pendulum, if you haven’t noticed, is swinging back.

For a whole week, people have provided ANet with extensive feedback.

For a whole week, people have been creating separate threads, each about a personal experience (because nobody likes megathreads where you get lost on page 2!), receiving similar feedback from other players from similar threads and defence from the ever-present forum’s White Knights.

For a whole week, people have been wondering what has actually been heard and what not, what is a bug and what not, and had to keep repeating their criticism over and over again to counter the force of the same people from White Knights who kept repeating the same “everything is awesome” in every thread they saw.

After a week, people got sick and tired of it, they ran out of will and had no desire to repeat the same things again and again. Someone left the forum, someone stopped reading the threads, someone left the game. The White Knights stayed, feeling that the victory is near and the “toxicity” is finally being driven away.

After a week, a “Changes Coming to the NPE” thread finally appears. The White Knights says that everything is fine and that people are getting confused by the amount of dissatisfied people because having to read forum names is overwhelming; red post in the thread agrees that repeating your feedback is baaad – missing the point that for a week that very feedback had to be repeated over and over again without being acknowledged and because it had to be repeated to counter the forum defence forces.

So yeeeah, after a week, “the pendulum, if you haven’t noticed, is swinging back”… if you avert your eyes from the facts that people are not only sick and tired of repeating the same things, but also told to stop posting their negative feedback, and only the most stoic people still care to write and oppose the White Knights which are now the ones claiming to officially representing the “vocal majority”.

Now, to keep this post constructive, I’ll quote my tl;dr of the patch, because I have no idea whether it got noticed in the hundreds of other threads or not:

Highlights of my view on the leveling changes:

Best:

  • Rewards. Rewards are always good, but only if they’re something new, not if that’s something you take away from someone and then present as a “reward” back. So, a trinket or a booster is a good reward; unlocking downed skills is a bad reward.

Worst:

  • Weapon skill gating. Learning skills for each weapon one by one was the most intuitive, best and exciting feature when I got this game – and I never played a serious RPG or an MMO before! I killed mobs and searched for events to kill more to check what that next half-learned skill with a cool name did… then I searched for new weapons and did it again, because it was fun, and fun is the best reward I can get from a game. This should definitely be brought back.

My personal “fix-it-fast-and-make-it-better”:

  • Stop calling “Asura Gates”, “Trading Post” and other core features “rewards”! That’s a very large part of that widespread misconception. Instead, turn them into hints and clearly name them as such, even if it stays in the same reward pop-up; like, “HINT: Trading Posts are now displayed on your minimap! You can do X and Y with them! Check it out if you haven’t done so yet!”, not “You have unlocked Trading Post, yay!”
<snip>

And by the way, do you know what I’m leveling that new warrior alt for instead of using an older one? To gear it with Leyline weapons and armour. And if I drop it now, these money won’t be spend by me and people like me anymore.

Cheers.

100% agree.

As we’ve seen with this change, and the Trait change, they are going to continue full steam ahead and ignore the tidal wave of negative criticism. Nothing is going to make ANET change their colors, not even their paying customers.

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Posted by: PookieDaWombat.6209

PookieDaWombat.6209

Everybody that hates the NPE is going to take over the discussion after all the fixes have been released I believe. You’re going to see multiple posts by the same people that hate it, and it’s going to seem like a lot more people dislike the new changes, when in reality, it’s just those same people that really want to make their point across. And not that there is anything wrong with posting more than once, it is a discussion after all, but you get my point.

I mean you can see the evidence of it now, with people complaining in one thread over the subject, and then having some of those same people from that thread start up new threads on pretty much the same topic.

I do agree that some minor changes need to happen, but hopefully Anet doesn’t give in to the pressure and make a complete 180 to the NPE, because I believe some of these changes are good for the game.

So I can’t wait to chime in when all the fixes are done. Should be interesting.

I agree with you about this. I think it’s premature to gauge how NPE will play at the current time, because we do know changes are coming.

And yes, you do see some forum members making the same points again and again. That truly is not helpful to the review and discussion, in that the devs would prefer a focused, clear, concise statement rather than realizing “Wait, it’s that same person, saying the same thing for the 19th time.”

While i get the reasons and sentiment here Gaile, from our perspective, many of us played it ArenaNet’s way back in April regarding the trait changes and we went ignored for 4-5 months before we got a single reply back from anyone over there while that post made it to roughly 40 pages of both complaints and feedback, only to be told to re-summarize the points because it would have been too much to pour through the entire thread. That was building. For FOUR months.

So no, now people are going to continue to make thread after thread to make sure that their voice is heard and the forum is flooded so it cannot be so easily ignored. The fact that these posts can’t be buried to page 3, 4, 5, or 6 now makes it so these things HAVE to be addressed before it gets to the next feature patch.

Now, I’m willing to drop feedback from my time now with the new system now that i have played it though to level 40 with my third test alt. Question is, do you guys want that feedback in this thread or a specific thread for said feedback? i ask because I don’t want to “add to the noise” if there is a plan for a focused feedback thread on the NPE in particular, but I want to be sure that whatever i right up will be read and not be asked to summarize it later.

[OTR] – Greck Howlbane – Guardian
Soraya Mayhew – Thief
Melissa Koris – Engie – SF for Life!

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Posted by: duckideva.6358

duckideva.6358

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.

Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.

Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )

Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.

Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.

To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.

Cruella LaDucki: Have corpses, will travel
Torwynd Trueheart: Here I come to save the day!
NSP – Quak Resident Duchess L’Orange

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Posted by: Illysharia.7286

Illysharia.7286

Everybody that hates the NPE is going to take over the discussion after all the fixes have been released I believe. You’re going to see multiple posts by the same people that hate it, and it’s going to seem like a lot more people dislike the new changes, when in reality, it’s just those same people that really want to make their point across. And not that there is anything wrong with posting more than once, it is a discussion after all, but you get my point.

I mean you can see the evidence of it now, with people complaining in one thread over the subject, and then having some of those same people from that thread start up new threads on pretty much the same topic.

I do agree that some minor changes need to happen, but hopefully Anet doesn’t give in to the pressure and make a complete 180 to the NPE, because I believe some of these changes are good for the game.

So I can’t wait to chime in when all the fixes are done. Should be interesting.

I agree with you about this. I think it’s premature to gauge how NPE will play at the current time, because we do know changes are coming.

And yes, you do see some forum members making the same points again and again. That truly is not helpful to the review and discussion, in that the devs would prefer a focused, clear, concise statement rather than realizing “Wait, it’s that same person, saying the same thing for the 19th time.”

While i get the reasons and sentiment here Gaile, from our perspective, many of us played it ArenaNet’s way back in April regarding the trait changes and we went ignored for 4-5 months before we got a single reply back from anyone over there while that post made it to roughly 40 pages of both complaints and feedback, only to be told to re-summarize the points because it would have been too much to pour through the entire thread. That was building. For FOUR months.

So no, now people are going to continue to make thread after thread to make sure that their voice is heard and the forum is flooded so it cannot be so easily ignored. The fact that these posts can’t be buried to page 3, 4, 5, or 6 now makes it so these things HAVE to be addressed before it gets to the next feature patch.

Now, I’m willing to drop feedback from my time now with the new system now that i have played it though to level 40 with my third test alt. Question is, do you guys want that feedback in this thread or a specific thread for said feedback? i ask because I don’t want to “add to the noise” if there is a plan for a focused feedback thread on the NPE in particular, but I want to be sure that whatever i right up will be read and not be asked to summarize it later.

Exactly this. Their previous actions (and current actions, really, as the Trait thread still isn’t resolved) and policies have forged what is now being seen. When you give feedback, and it gets ignored, you give more feedback in the hopes it will be acknowledged. When that still goes ignored, you try again, but some of the civility starts to wear off. Eventually it becomes toxic and non-constructive because of how management/CR deals with their community.

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Posted by: alcopaul.2156

alcopaul.2156

just saying hi to gaile gray. you were a part of my guild wars 1 fun experience.

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Posted by: Dark Jericho.8609

Dark Jericho.8609

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.

Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.

Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )

Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.

Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.

To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.

This is an interesting read. Frightening too, actually.

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Posted by: Lishtenbird.2814

Lishtenbird.2814

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

Thank you for your post. I’ve studied some psychology and read on game monetization, so your post is close to what I feel – and it was very interesting to see these thoughts delivered in such a sensible way. I really do hope ANet won’t turn to the evil side and will instead work on the game to make it (once again) worth supporting with your money. Draining money from people today is easy – you just showed us how it can be done; having these people next to you tomorrow to get some more money out of them again is hard and requires dedication and loving your product and your customers.

20 level 80s and counting.

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.

Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.

Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )

Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.

Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.

To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.

This is an interesting read. Frightening too, actually.

What I find interesting is that this does not hurt the level 80’s only those working on alts. So people do not venture into alts as much, meaning fewer sales of character slots, but with the shear amount of skills available, and needed, it would be a ‘convenience’ item, to save time (designed into the game to be more than slightly punitive). Interesting point and something to think about.

Note: Both the hunting for skills and the unlocks for sale WERE available in GW1.

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Posted by: duckideva.6358

duckideva.6358

Well, the thing is, once you get to 80, you’re way more likely to start an alt than you are to do most anything else, unless you’re a dedicated dungeon, fractal or wvw runner.

And once you start that alt, you’re faced with a wall of locks that weren’t there before.

At first the player is annoyed. They will go do some of the unlocks, and realize that some of the unlocks are impossible depending on which server you’re on, or what times you play, or if you can rearrange your life to be there when the event happens.

Frustration!

If the player could then throw up their hands, and buy a $20 gem card that would stop him from having to deal with any of that nonsense again…the gem cards would fly off the shelves into eager hands.

It’s actually pretty brilliant from a operant conditioning standpoint. Assuming they unlock the traits in the gem store. If they don’t, then I have no idea what they’re on about with the trait changes. It’s just frustration for the sake of frustration.

Cruella LaDucki: Have corpses, will travel
Torwynd Trueheart: Here I come to save the day!
NSP – Quak Resident Duchess L’Orange

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Posted by: anzenketh.3759

anzenketh.3759

Unlock quests were added because players asked for it. They had a system like it in Guild Wars 1 for skills.

Don’t try to blame players for the trait unlock system. That is NOT on us. At the bare minimum we would have done it better, allowing you to unlock all adept traits by level 11 if you focused on them, all the Master ones by level 40, and all the Grandmaster ones by level 60 (and obviously the level at which you unlock each tier would not have been pushed back). All level 60-80 unlocks would be for the “new” traits that got added after launch.

Long story short, having easy access to a variety of traits makes this game SO much more fun, and lacking that access makes the game SO much more dull.

How would you put in a system that allows for newer and less experienced players to have the time they needed to learn things while making it easier for experienced players to speed up the process and have more freedom?

One, new players NEVER needed “more time” to learn the game. Time was never at issue. What they needed was more training, more explicit “here is the system and how to use it,” like the new dodge trainer. Just taking the existing ability roll-out and spreading it out over more levels solves nothing. If their goal is to make the game easier to understand, the solution has nothing to do with spreading the skills out more, and more about adding tutorials.

For example, instead of moving the downed state to level 5 and only giving you half the abilities, they could put it at level 2, which you hit when you reach the tutorial boss (rather than after), and then the tutorial boss is guaranteed to one-shot you at least once, putting you into downed state, but then leaves you alone, while a message pops up highlighting the downed state options, and then after about thirty seconds to a minute you are auto-rallied. Problem solved.

I understand your desire for more freedom and customization at the early levels. I wish there was a way that ArenaNet could fulfill that desire without removing the reason why the system was put in place to start with.

1.) Did we ask specifically for the trait changes no. But we did ask for more meaningful horizontal progression. We asked for a system similar to Guild Wars 1 to where we unlocked skills.

2.) We can not come to a agreement there as you are basing your information of observation and I am basing mine off mine. ArenaNet is basing the changes based on their information and observation. For understanding the reason behind the level gate please watch the following.

Specifically pay attention to front-loading information on players. This is why things were put behind a level gate. Level 5 takes maybe a half a hour. It is estimated that you can get to level 10 in about a hour or two.

Do I agree with all of the changes no. Do I find getting weapon skills is rewarding no I think they should be unlocked as you use them to teach the weapon. I find the tutorial instance (I call it that due to you can never go back and complete it) extremely restrictive.

I am not for a all out removal of the system. It has made a lot of good steps in the right direction. However it does need to be polished. I am withholding my feedback until all bullet points in the opening post have been addressed. My reasoning for this is I can give feedback on a system as it was intended.

In Game: Storm Bluff Isle — Anzz, Anzenketh Kyoto

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Posted by: Illysharia.7286

Illysharia.7286

Well, the thing is, once you get to 80, you’re way more likely to start an alt than you are to do most anything else, unless you’re a dedicated dungeon, fractal or wvw runner.

And once you start that alt, you’re faced with a wall of locks that weren’t there before.

At first the player is annoyed. They will go do some of the unlocks, and realize that some of the unlocks are impossible depending on which server you’re on, or what times you play, or if you can rearrange your life to be there when the event happens.

Frustration!

If the player could then throw up their hands, and buy a $20 gem card that would stop him from having to deal with any of that nonsense again…the gem cards would fly off the shelves into eager hands.

It’s actually pretty brilliant from a operant conditioning standpoint. Assuming they unlock the traits in the gem store. If they don’t, then I have no idea what they’re on about with the trait changes. It’s just frustration for the sake of frustration.

I agree. There was another game I used to play that is under a new management that loves the Cash Shop. You could sit back and watch it all play out formulaically. A change was introduced that was designed to be tedious —> months went by to let it really sink in —> new Cash Shop item introduced to alleviate the time gate.

It just seems that GW2’s design is all about gating now. It’s the perfect environment for what I illustrated above.

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Posted by: HHR LostProphet.4801

HHR LostProphet.4801

The old system works FINE. Revert ALL the changes except for the level up reward.

Old system doesn’t work fine though. The old system works fine for you. Colin was quite definitely sure that it wasn’t good enough after having tested it. Which means that their testing is greater than any one person’s opinion. Changes had to be made.

All that’s really on the table here is altering the changes, because it won’t be reverted.

So wow, much… wow.
One would expect that they’ve tested their game enough before release and they came to the conclusion that it worked. And apparently it did, that’s why you, I and everyone else are still here. The NPE got, as far as I understood that, developed solely based on opinions from people who didn’t continue playing but participated in a survey why they didn’t continue playing. Those people however, who stopped playing and participated in the survey, are a very small minority of people who tried this game.

(edited by HHR LostProphet.4801)

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

Well, the thing is, once you get to 80, you’re way more likely to start an alt than you are to do most anything else, unless you’re a dedicated dungeon, fractal or wvw runner.

And once you start that alt, you’re faced with a wall of locks that weren’t there before.

At first the player is annoyed. They will go do some of the unlocks, and realize that some of the unlocks are impossible depending on which server you’re on, or what times you play, or if you can rearrange your life to be there when the event happens.

Frustration!

If the player could then throw up their hands, and buy a $20 gem card that would stop him from having to deal with any of that nonsense again…the gem cards would fly off the shelves into eager hands.

It’s actually pretty brilliant from a operant conditioning standpoint. Assuming they unlock the traits in the gem store. If they don’t, then I have no idea what they’re on about with the trait changes. It’s just frustration for the sake of frustration.

As a business person, I like the idea and wish I could work in your field…just to hear these pitches on monetization (a term which always reminded me of terms like carnies and rubes). As a sudden flash of insight, companies should talk to carnies about the tricks of the trade! They know them all!

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Posted by: Tachenon.5270

Tachenon.5270

Those people however, who stopped playing and participated in the survey, are a very small minority of people who tried this game.

I haven’t seen anything about a survey. Where is this information?

The table is a fable.

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Posted by: HHR LostProphet.4801

HHR LostProphet.4801

Those people however, who stopped playing and participated in the survey, are a very small minority of people who tried this game.

I haven’t seen anything about a survey. Where is this information?

A dev has said that, If I remeber rightly, about the NPE changes a while ago. You may find the post on the dev tracker.

The subtext was that they’ve asked 10k people who didn’t continue playing why they didn’t continue.

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

The old system works FINE. Revert ALL the changes except for the level up reward.

Old system doesn’t work fine though. The old system works fine for you. Colin was quite definitely sure that it wasn’t good enough after having tested it. Which means that their testing is greater than any one person’s opinion. Changes had to be made.

All that’s really on the table here is altering the changes, because it won’t be reverted.

So wow, much… wow.
One would expect that they’ve tested their game enough before release and they came to the conclusion that it worked. And apparently it did, that’s why you, I and everyone else is still here. The NPE got, as far as I understood that, developed solely based on opinions from people who didn’t continue playing but participated in a survey why they didn’t continue playing. Those people however, who stopped playing and participated in the survey, are a very small minority of people who tried this game.

Yes, they tested their game before release. However, they tested it on the game playing public that has a high interest in PC based MMO’s.
They are either moving the game into the non-MMO crowd (console players that are having a hard time adjusting to the controls in a PC based game, for example) or into the non-gamer crowd completely (people that do not know how to WASD, let alone dodge).

These were markets they either did not consider, or more likely, thought the games learning curve was able to allow these people the ability to learn as it stood. Once they did the exit interviews with this demographic they found the system needed to be redesigned to accommodate the lack of familiarity that these groups had with the genre…and this game isn’t even a standard of the genre..it’s so different that most MMO players still balk today at a lot of the features.

This is not white knighting for the company, but it does explain what they are doing. You might disagree with the implementation, but they are also trying to accommodate some of the more annoying issues with the changes for the long term community. However, the base changes will not change as they have been shown to help new players learn better (by stated research done by the devs). As long as this leads to stronger retention numbers, this is a one and done set of changes, with possible small changes to increase that number more. If not, total reworks might come again in the future to attempt to help this metric.

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Posted by: HHR LostProphet.4801

HHR LostProphet.4801

The old system works FINE. Revert ALL the changes except for the level up reward.

Old system doesn’t work fine though. The old system works fine for you. Colin was quite definitely sure that it wasn’t good enough after having tested it. Which means that their testing is greater than any one person’s opinion. Changes had to be made.

All that’s really on the table here is altering the changes, because it won’t be reverted.

So wow, much… wow.
One would expect that they’ve tested their game enough before release and they came to the conclusion that it worked. And apparently it did, that’s why you, I and everyone else is still here. The NPE got, as far as I understood that, developed solely based on opinions from people who didn’t continue playing but participated in a survey why they didn’t continue playing. Those people however, who stopped playing and participated in the survey, are a very small minority of people who tried this game.

Yes, they tested their game before release. However, they tested it on the game playing public that has a high interest in PC based MMO’s.
They are either moving the game into the non-MMO crowd (console players that are having a hard time adjusting to the controls in a PC based game, for example) or into the non-gamer crowd completely (people that do not know how to WASD, let alone dodge).

If you change the game to please a minority but annoy the majority, you’ve done a bad job making this game desirable for the majority. And that’s what these NPE changes are all about.

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Posted by: Khisanth.2948

Khisanth.2948

Would you consider making traits account unlocks instead of individual unlocks? This will lead new players to content through requiring them to do it, but keep it from annoying the kitten out of people creating alts. It makes sense with how the NPE is now, and would be amazing.

this would solve the problem of trait unlocks being repetive for alts, but it would solve almost no other problem. It wouldnt solve the initial goal focuses of the trait revamp, which my guess is

more rewards that are tied to playing the game
more progression
a good system framework for how new skills/traits should be introduced.

It solves at least one other problem. Some people had a “PvP character” much like how they did in GW1. This was viable in GW1 because PvP characters had access to all skills/runes/inscriptions/etc. unlocked on the account. Not sure the exact things you would lose in GW2 right now but at the very least a new character won’t have the most recently added grandmaster traits even if they were previously unlocked on another character.

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Posted by: Rococo.8347

Rococo.8347

Hello Gaile and Chris,

the main problem at the moment is a lack of definite info on what changes we currently see WERE part of the intended design.

You have a bunch of frustrated players that im sure are happy to help you bug search and look at future design changes – BUT at this point a lot of wasted energy is going into speculating about what may be bugs or intended and filling up the forum with issues that no one knows if they are bugs or not.

It would be much clearer easier and better for everyones mental health if you just produce a simple list of INTENDED changes to design. Then people can either make a quality of life comment on the design aspects they hate OR produce bug reports in the bug forum section – then you have a clear split of incoming info pre filtered for you and we all know what points to lobby on that we don’t like and what points will eventually be dealt with by the bug team.

Because at the moment im just not levelling atall or playing the PS as I have no idea what has changes forever, what CAN be changed back and what is a bug….

Clear communication is key!!

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Posted by: Asmodeus.5782

Asmodeus.5782

Right, I’ll throw my question in…

Is there even a point in discussing returning some old functionality and content to hearts and events? Bundles, the usual bunnies in Wayfarers, the Inquest shark in Metrica, the golem suit in the very same Metrica, putting out fire with water, picking up mines in Plains of Ashford, feeding cows, rooting grubs out with rakes in Caledon, countless others?

I just completely fail to imagine how such a bland leveling experience, consisting solely of combat and pressing F can be used to attract more players than the old system, I really do.

Language is a virus from outer space.

William S. Burroughs

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Posted by: ShadowDragoonFTW.3418

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418

Take per example elections (for president per example), do the polls they usually do at that season really take in account “all” the people involved? No, usually it’s just a “sample” that can reflect what the majority could think about.

Right, except for the fact that most polls regarding stances on elected officials are wildly inaccurate. That’s why there have been a LOT of “upset” elections, because people were basing estimated votes on polls that were grossly inaccurate. It’s also why presidential elections in the U.S. are always so up-in-the-air. No matter how much poll data you get, it doesn’t help give you a good enough idea on what the final numbers for the votes will look like. It’s an estimation a lot of news outlets use, but it doesn’t actually give them anything of substance — just a talking point that they could get from literally anywhere else.

It sounds like you’re a young kid, so I’ll understand if you don’t quite understand this concept yet. The next presidential election is coming up in two years. Pay attention around then, you’ll see what I’m talking about with polls being inaccurate.

Baelyyrn [Zero Brigade]
Mechanist Gregory [BEER]
Arondight Unfading [ZB]

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Posted by: Vayne.8563

Vayne.8563

Right, I’ll throw my question in…

Is there even a point in discussing returning some old functionality and content to hearts and events? Bundles, the usual bunnies in Wayfarers, the Inquest shark in Metrica, the golem suit in the very same Metrica, putting out fire with water, picking up mines in Plains of Ashford, feeding cows, rooting grubs out with rakes in Caledon, countless others?

I just completely fail to imagine how such a bland leveling experience, consisting solely of combat and pressing F can be used to attract more players than the old system, I really do.

Bunnies in Wayfarers are still there, they’ve just been moved downhill. Not disagreeing with you, just informing you so you know.

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Posted by: ShadowDragoonFTW.3418

ShadowDragoonFTW.3418

YOU may not feel the need to unlock the weapon skills asap and that is your prerogative. What you should remember is other people have different play styles and desires from yourself. Getting all weapon skills unlocked early on has always been my first primary goal on a new character, so I can get the feel of them and have any of them ready to go if I may need them in a certain situation.

My point was, however, how many of those weapon skills do you actually need unlocked at level 1 or 2 or 3? I can’t see any circumstance where anyone would be swapping weapons that often at early levels.

Yes, have a couple of different sets unlocked for different reasons (a melee set, a ranged set, a shielding set), but there is no real practical reason to unlock everything right away.

That may be your preference, sure, fine, I’m okay with that. But I’m saying its not necessary, and you submitting complaints about why you dislike it is one thing, but I personally think it’s hurting new players with the recent changes. You may like it because you already know most of your weapon abilities, what-does-what. For new players? The jarring swap of weapons and the wave of new abilities is probably not going to go well.

I know when I first started the game (hell, even my first time playing each class after getting a significant portion of the way through the game on my main), it took me a long time to learn all my weapon skills, and I just thought it was so much better to be able to learn them one at a time on a weapon-by-weapon basis. If I had learned new classes and their weapon skills with the system as it is now? It would have been a lot more frustrating for me.

Baelyyrn [Zero Brigade]
Mechanist Gregory [BEER]
Arondight Unfading [ZB]

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Posted by: Nevets Crimsonwing.5271

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.

Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.

Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )

Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.

Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.

To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.

Anything that is a huge gold sink is already monetized.

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Posted by: Asmodeus.5782

Asmodeus.5782

Bunnies in Wayfarers are still there, they’ve just been moved downhill. Not disagreeing with you, just informing you so you know.

That’s why I wrote ‘usual’. They are completely timid now, maybe one tried to assault me when I was completing the heart. Their AI has been almost completely neutered. Those poor, hated, beloved beasts might as well not be there at all.

One of the most iconic events of the Wayfarer’s, praised by Angry Joe as the best thing he ever found in an MMORPG has been turned into a “player friendly experience”. The saddest thing about the starting zones changes so far. Even worse than the skritt in Plains of Ashford, cows in Queensdale… Maybe about as sad as the Maguuma shark.

Language is a virus from outer space.

William S. Burroughs

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Posted by: Vayne.8563

Vayne.8563

Bunnies in Wayfarers are still there, they’ve just been moved downhill. Not disagreeing with you, just informing you so you know.

That’s why I wrote ‘usual’. They are completely timid now, maybe one tried to assault me when I was completing the heart. Their AI has been almost completely neutered. Those poor, hated, beloved beasts might as well not be there at all.

One of the most iconic events of the Wayfarer’s, praised by Angry Joe as the best thing he ever found in an MMORPG has been turned into a “player friendly experience”. The saddest thing about the starting zones changes so far. Even worse than the skritt in Plains of Ashford, cows in Queensdale… Maybe about as sad as the Maguuma shark.

Ah okay, sorry about that. Well I liked it quite a bit at the end, but in the beginning, I really REALLY hated that event. With a passion. I didn’t realize you could scare the rabbits away. Some people love that event, but many that I know can’t stand it. I know this because we often do zone completion with the guild. The other one people didn’t really like was the trading one with the Jotun…oh and one in a charr zone where you’re stealthed and have to sneak past everyone.

But yeah, I like that one now…well I did before the patch.

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Posted by: ZudetGambeous.9573

ZudetGambeous.9573

…… these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.
…….

EVERYTHING Anet has ever done in terms of gem store items is in TOTAL disagreement with this statement. I read the rest of the above quoted post and see a bunch of educational slathered mumbo jumbo claiming “evidence” and “tenancies”, but no actual FACTS that lead any non-delusional thinker to believe Anet ever intends to sell performance advantage items in the gem store. Going on and on in a thread to try and convince others of your delusional interpretation of past updates (while trying to impress readers with terms like “behaviorists” and “bioethics”) is kind of pathetic….state what you think and back it up with some FACTS and move on. If someone wants your “credentials” with your opinion, they will ask for them.

Fact:

Performance advantages have been available in the gem store since day 1.

/thread

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

The old system works FINE. Revert ALL the changes except for the level up reward.

Old system doesn’t work fine though. The old system works fine for you. Colin was quite definitely sure that it wasn’t good enough after having tested it. Which means that their testing is greater than any one person’s opinion. Changes had to be made.

All that’s really on the table here is altering the changes, because it won’t be reverted.

So wow, much… wow.
One would expect that they’ve tested their game enough before release and they came to the conclusion that it worked. And apparently it did, that’s why you, I and everyone else is still here. The NPE got, as far as I understood that, developed solely based on opinions from people who didn’t continue playing but participated in a survey why they didn’t continue playing. Those people however, who stopped playing and participated in the survey, are a very small minority of people who tried this game.

Yes, they tested their game before release. However, they tested it on the game playing public that has a high interest in PC based MMO’s.
They are either moving the game into the non-MMO crowd (console players that are having a hard time adjusting to the controls in a PC based game, for example) or into the non-gamer crowd completely (people that do not know how to WASD, let alone dodge).

If you change the game to please a minority but annoy the majority, you’ve done a bad job making this game desirable for the majority. And that’s what these NPE changes are all about.

We, on these forums are nowhere near the majority. We might be more informed, but we are no where near the majority.

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Posted by: Palador.2170

Palador.2170

…… these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.
…….

EVERYTHING Anet has ever done in terms of gem store items is in TOTAL disagreement with this statement. I read the rest of the above quoted post and see a bunch of educational slathered mumbo jumbo claiming “evidence” and “tenancies”, but no actual FACTS that lead any non-delusional thinker to believe Anet ever intends to sell performance advantage items in the gem store. Going on and on in a thread to try and convince others of your delusional interpretation of past updates (while trying to impress readers with terms like “behaviorists” and “bioethics”) is kind of pathetic….state what you think and back it up with some FACTS and move on. If someone wants your “credentials” with your opinion, they will ask for them.

Here’s a fact for you: The gemstore carries items that ease leveling. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experience_Booster is a good example.

There’s NO reason to say they won’t add in another “ease of leveling” item that helps you unlock skills and traits. As it is, you can already use gems to get gold to help pay for trait unlocks. They are ALREADY able to profit from these changes. Paying gems to bypass the skill point cost as well is hardly a huge leap.

Sarcasm, delivered with a
delicate, brick-like subtlety.

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Posted by: Vethaera.6319

Vethaera.6319

Getting back to the trait issue, as a new-ish player I’d like to throw my hat in the ring.

Unlock quests were added because players asked for it. They had a system like it in Guild Wars 1 for skills.

Don’t try to blame players for the trait unlock system. That is NOT on us. At the bare minimum we would have done it better, allowing you to unlock all adept traits by level 11 if you focused on them, all the Master ones by level 40, and all the Grandmaster ones by level 60 (and obviously the level at which you unlock each tier would not have been pushed back). All level 60-80 unlocks would be for the “new” traits that got added after launch.

Long story short, having easy access to a variety of traits makes this game SO much more fun, and lacking that access makes the game SO much more dull.

I began playing GW2 in May, so I’ve only ever experienced the new trait system. And I can tell you that I really resented it when I learned about the old system. If I’d only discovered GW2 a few months earlier, I’d have all my traits to play with, but I don’t. It feels like new players got kittened.

The old system actually made more sense to me — buy a book, learn the traits for your current level, play with them for a while. The current thing with suddenly at lvl 30, having a gazillion traits to find and unlock, was overwhelming. The EotM unlocks aren’t so bad — if you happen upon a good karma train, you can get them done in less than an hour of following a commander tag around. But I also have to annoy the hardcore WvW players in Eternal Battlegrounds, who think my presence there just hampers the war effort and who aren’t willing to help a PVE player unlock a trait. Especially not the grub.

And you know what? They’re right.

How would you put in a system that allows for newer and less experienced players to have the time they needed to learn things while making it easier for experienced players to speed up the process and have more freedom?

One, new players NEVER needed “more time” to learn the game. Time was never at issue. What they needed was more training, more explicit “here is the system and how to use it,” like the new dodge trainer. Just taking the existing ability roll-out and spreading it out over more levels solves nothing. If their goal is to make the game easier to understand, the solution has nothing to do with spreading the skills out more, and more about adding tutorials.

For example, instead of moving the downed state to level 5 and only giving you half the abilities, they could put it at level 2, which you hit when you reach the tutorial boss (rather than after), and then the tutorial boss is guaranteed to one-shot you at least once, putting you into downed state, but then leaves you alone, while a message pops up highlighting the downed state options, and then after about thirty seconds to a minute you are auto-rallied. Problem solved.

That would be a beautiful solution. Make it part of the story. I learned how to aim a ballista from skill points in Snowden Drifts and Bloodtide Coast. Impress the locals! Prove your skill! That made a certain amount of sense to me and made it part of the flow of things. Do something similar with dodge, instead of making it the contrivance it is currently.

Count me as one of the ones who wants to unlock all my weapon skills right away, so I can settle back and play with them and find out what I like. I did that with a low level necro I was messing around with before the patch — I made sure I unlocked everything, because I’d heard about the coming changes. I was furious when I logged him in after the patch and found his offhand weapon was locked and level-gated. You took away some of my progress.

Already-existing characters should have been fully grandfathered.

Reverting the utility slot skills to earlier levels was a step in the right direction, and as a player leveling a mesmer, I really appreciated that change. But some of this other stuff is not well done at all. It’s better to add content to help new players who are lost, rather than impact the ones who aren’t.

And it really, really looked like you think we’re stupid. That accounts for a great deal of the more rageful player comments, too.

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.

Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.

Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )

Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.

Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.

To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.

Anything that is a huge gold sink is already monetized.

Confusing faucets and sinks for the economy do not equate to monetization, unless you are making the point of purchasing gems to convert to gold, which IS monetization. The 300 gold cost of Commander tags MIGHT be monetization IF the ultimate outcome is that people forego the opportunity cost of time in lieu of gems. I’ll predict that this won’t be the case, since Commander Tags are not useful to most people and that 300 gold should only take about 40 hours of game time to accrue, if you maximize your mat farming/champ runs properly.

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Posted by: JusticarArkiel.1564

JusticarArkiel.1564

A continuation of my post on page 5, seems I forgot to mention another bothersome change, and forgot to detail what can stay as-is:

1. Final annoyance is the stat bursts and resulting slumps. A new player cannot reliably face an enemy even a level above themselves if the player is in one of these stat slump portions. Before, we could decide whether or not we wanted to take the risk, because our stats were usually pretty close to theirs. Add the fact that we have these stat slumps to the fact that we are often forced to fight enemies that are a few levels above us while in this stat slump, then the stat burst change is not a good one. I would suggest putting it back the way it was, as the only reason it never seemed “rewarding” was simply because we never got a message saying “Your power has gone up by X, your precision Y, etc”.

2. First keeper: level up rewards. I believe this is a good system, as before your only reward for leveling was a skill point (if over level 5), a new set of gear (sometimes), and a trait point (if the level achieved was one of those that give the points). Now you get relevant rewards based on each level, such as a rare aquabreather at some level (I forget which) and on-level weapons with good stats. This can be kept, with just the minor tweaks of getting rid of the “tutorial” unlocks at certain levels for veteran players. “Learning” I can use the trading post or guild bank after having 7 level 80s and leading my own guild is kind of annoying.

3: Another annoyance that I remembered: that blasted arrow for your heal skill that always appears. It’s annoying, it certainly shouldn’t be occuring on level 80s, it has glitched sometimes and covered my heal skill so I can’t click on it, and its likely to get you killed just because of the distraction of it. A healing skill isn’t really a new concept for MMOs, so new players for GW2 should be able to grasp the concept of the 6 skill being your heal. If not, make it part of the tutorial instance. When you enter, a box can appear (like for that dodge “tutorial”, which is equally annoying when it won’t stay away) that points to your heal skill and says “This is your healing ability, remember to use it so you don’t die horribly and with much pain”. Would be a better solution that having an arrow constantly pointing at the skill until you click on it for curiosity’s sake.

That’s all I got, combined with my earlier post on this thread. Hopefully this’ll help out with fixing the problems.

Edit: Also people, less rage on this thread. I’m angry too, but instead of raging at everything, I’m attempting to give them lists to work off of to fix it. If we all gave lists of what needs fixed, how it needs fixed, and what can stay, they can get the changes done quicker and correctly. The “I HATE ALL THESE CHANGES” posts aren’t helping.

Fix what you have before you build something new

(edited by JusticarArkiel.1564)

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

And it really, really looked like you think we’re stupid. That accounts for a great deal of the more rageful player comments, too.

Personalizing these changes is the problem a lot of people are having. You are not the target of these changes. Stop thinking that every change is for, about, or deals with you personally. Stop being offended that others might need to learn things differently than you. Stop being hateful to players that need these tools to learn by calling them names.

Note that your other points are valid and salient, whether or not I agree about them, but this one statement says a lot about peoples self centered expectations and the general ‘gamer’ culture’s overarching problems.

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Posted by: Arghore.8340

Arghore.8340

Seeing technically i already gave these suggestions earlier, I guess I can repeat them here:

levelling & unlocking skills
I rather liked the unlocking of skills by use, but I can also see the ‘wish’ to gate the unlocking of skills in a levelling system. But just giving the players a new skill at each level, working for all weapons (aka. you unlock skill 3 on all weapons when you level, even though you may not even have touched this weapon) doesn’t seem right to me at all … What I do not understand is why both systems were not combined…

lvl1: Skill 1 and slot 2 are open, using skills 1 fills up slot 2 while playing and unlocks the skill.
lvl2: Reward the player with a different weapon, then the starter one. The player can now open up this other weapon.
lvl3: Skill slot 3 opens up, using a weapon unlocks the actual skill
lvl4: Skill slot 4 opens up, using a weapon unlocks the actual skill
lvl w/e: Skill slot 5 opens up, using a weapon unlocks the actual skill

If a player uses one or two weapons, then after lvl w/e, the system is exactly like it was for us old players, a new weapon will have skill one to use, and using that unlocks the other skills. At the same time, new players are slowly gated into the weapon skills by unlocking the slot at a level gate, and unlocking the skill by using the weapon (preserving that feel of ‘when using this weapon I’m getting more proficient’). To me this feels like a ‘best of both worlds’ solution…

Down-scaling
This New Player Experience, is the 2nd or 3rd time you guys made the low level content easier, in order to deal with the changes to the system. Yet, you do not seem to have altered down-scaling at all to compensate for these changes.

I used my lvl80 WvW only Charr Thief to walk/kill from LA to the human starter area for testing – ‘build’ = Soldier Armour with Carrior Trinkets and Undeath Runes (generally use pistol/knife condi).

By now a scaled down lvl80, has 3x the amount of HP any foes have, and these foes deal about 1/5th of the damage the lvl80 does. This resulted in me being able to run from LA to the human starting area, killing everything in sight, with just the ‘unload’ (pistol/pistol #3 skill) and using ‘roll for initiative’ if I agro’ed 3 or more foes. In general it took 1 unload to kill pretty much any foe (except for veterans that took 2,5x), while they took down about 1/15th of my HP, IF they managed to hit me at all.

So in an area where I was scaled down to 1500hp, the foes generally hit me for 100hp (on a telegraphed skill), while I hit them for 500hp, which was all the HP they had.

This ‘scaling’ worked the same way where ever I was. So where I had say 5000hp, foes had 1000hp, I hit them for roughly 1000, while the foes hit me for 200hp.

I will say that I still managed to get downed, to the west of the human starter area, in the field with cows and invading bandits, there is this bandit camp where one can easily agro 10+ bandits, especially after the event in the field ended and foes run back to that location. Restricted to only unload and roll for initiative and one heal, by just standing there, I managed to get hit say 25x to down me.

This just has to change , because ‘one hitting’ foes ruined the experience for the low levels around me, I could unload/kill foes b4 most of these players even got close to these foes.

We are peace, we are war. We are how we treat each other and nothing more…
25 okt 2014 – PinkDay in LA

(edited by Arghore.8340)

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Posted by: Ohoni.6057

Ohoni.6057

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Traits are already on the gem store. If you don’t like the unlock quest for a given trait, you can buy it for gold. If you don’t have enough gold, you can “Get More Gold!” using the convenient button on the TP, which gives you free gold (in exchange for gems).

1.) Did we ask specifically for the trait changes no. But we did ask for more meaningful horizontal progression. We asked for a system similar to Guild Wars 1 to where we unlocked skills.

“We” didn’t, some random GW1 yahoos did, and they should have been ignored, as they were by the GW2 community at large. If they did want to add horizontal progression, it should have come by adding NEW elements at level 80, not by altering the existing sub-80 game in any way.

Specifically pay attention to front-loading information on players. This is why things were put behind a level gate. Level 5 takes maybe a half a hour. It is estimated that you can get to level 10 in about a hour or two.

So “spreading things out” accomplishes nothing. Again, the solution has nothing to do with padding out when you learn things, it is entirely about properly training players to use the tools they are given, by both optional and mandatory tutorial elements that walk them through those tools.

I began playing GW2 in May, so I’ve only ever experienced the new trait system. And I can tell you that I really resented it when I learned about the old system. If I’d only discovered GW2 a few months earlier, I’d have all my traits to play with, but I don’t. It feels like new players got kittened.

Yeah, I feel for you. I had most of my characters to 80 by then, and I’d been starting a new character right around the time that happened. I’d gotten him to level 25-30 when the patch hit, and he went from having two minors and a major to having only one minor. On the bright side, he got grandfathered into the old system since he’d already been created, so all his sub-GM traits are auto0unlocked, otherwise he still probably wouldn’t have any useful traits.

I know how there’s a tendency to say “in my day, we had to walk up hill in the snow to school, both ways,” but honestly, GW2 players that started at launch have it so much better than any players that have come since.

“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”

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Posted by: Annette.6278

Annette.6278

Trouble is, many of us existing players actually like complexity. That’s what keeps us making alts, keeps us trying new builds…

The NPE works directly against this. The trait change works directly against this.

There’s a fundamental mismatch here, and I’d love to hear ArenaNet talk about it. Or even acknowledge it…

Absolutely agree. I feel better that not only I think in this way.

GW2 is almost a perfect MMORPG. Please, DON"T make it in such way like we are stupid.

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Posted by: sirian.4981

sirian.4981

Well, the thing is, once you get to 80, you’re way more likely to start an alt than you are to do most anything else, unless you’re a dedicated dungeon, fractal or wvw runner.

And once you start that alt, you’re faced with a wall of locks that weren’t there before.

At first the player is annoyed. They will go do some of the unlocks, and realize that some of the unlocks are impossible depending on which server you’re on, or what times you play, or if you can rearrange your life to be there when the event happens.

Frustration!

If the player could then throw up their hands, and buy a $20 gem card that would stop him from having to deal with any of that nonsense again…the gem cards would fly off the shelves into eager hands.

It’s actually pretty brilliant from a operant conditioning standpoint. Assuming they unlock the traits in the gem store. If they don’t, then I have no idea what they’re on about with the trait changes. It’s just frustration for the sake of frustration.

Well the player can buy gold with gems and use that to unnlock traits.

You have to remember that in this game every gold sink is a potential revenue stream.

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Posted by: Asmodeus.5782

Asmodeus.5782

Trouble is, many of us existing players actually like complexity.

Bingo.

Language is a virus from outer space.

William S. Burroughs

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Posted by: Chris Whiteside.6102

Previous

Chris Whiteside.6102

Studio Design Director

Next

Hi All,

I am up to date with the conversation. We are discussing your thoughts internally and continuing to work on the story steps. Once I have some more new I will update the thread.

Meanwhile I just want to communicate with certainty that NPE was not implemented in order to increase monetization from the BLT. It was designed for brand new players to the game. And it is for that reason that we are working with you to understand how to better refine the system.

Chris

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Posted by: sirian.4981

sirian.4981

Something has been tickling the back of my mind since the April update, which became clear focus after the 9/9 update.

It is my contention that Anet has brought economic behaviorists on board, and has attempted to overlay the reward/punishment monetization/skinner-box system of F2P games on top of the existing infrastructure, and these current changes are a precursor to skills and traits being available on the gem store.

Before I get elbows deep, it’s only fair to mention that I studied this type of industrial psychology while pursuing my PhD in bioethics, ergo I may be seeing shadows in the cave, and assigning malice to actions that may just be incompetence. Also fair to point out that I’m on the board of a software publisher, (one that shares no market space with Anet), and we constantly get pitched by monetization “gurus” who talk about their methodologies, so I have more than a passing acquaintance with this type of game theory.

Monetization and Skinner-Boxing of games can range from things like Zynga’s CEO’s theory of “fun-pain”, which we don’t see much of in GW2, to premium currencies, which all MMOs have always had, to pay-to-win like Korean grinders, but the most powerful of all the skinner-box techniques is Reward Removal. (See Puzzle and Dragon as an example of a masterfully designed money extraction skinner box. )

Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value getting the reward. The effect is more powerful the longer the person has had the reward.

Traits are an example of this playing out; Players who have had the game for long enough that they have leveled a character in the original system valued the trait system. Traits were a reward for playing the character. Therefore, when traits were “removed”, i.e., placed behind artificial barriers, players felt “robbed”, “cheated”, and as though “Anet hates it’s players”. (To borrow phrases I’ve seen lobbed about the forums.) Hiding the story quest until lvl 10 is another example, as is removing all the fun stuff to do in the starter zones.

To effectively monetize your playerbase with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful the effect becomes.

If, for example, traits went on sale in the gem store today, we all know that people would buy them. Sure, people would complain, and some people would quit the game, but the vast majority of people who are not going to do 65 different things to unlock their traits would just buy them, or ignore traits all the way around except for accidental unlocks.

Therefore, my premise is that the reason 400 response threads about traits have been completely ignored, while pushback on level gating skills resulted in changes, is that traits are going to be a monetized part of the game.

Anything that is a huge gold sink is already monetized.

Confusing faucets and sinks for the economy do not equate to monetization, unless you are making the point of purchasing gems to convert to gold, which IS monetization. The 300 gold cost of Commander tags MIGHT be monetization IF the ultimate outcome is that people forego the opportunity cost of time in lieu of gems. I’ll predict that this won’t be the case, since Commander Tags are not useful to most people and that 300 gold should only take about 40 hours of game time to accrue, if you maximize your mat farming/champ runs properly.

For someone with a decent job that comes out to two hours of work. You can farm money 20 times faster than you could farm the gold equivalent.

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Posted by: Roybe.5896

Roybe.5896

Well, the thing is, once you get to 80, you’re way more likely to start an alt than you are to do most anything else, unless you’re a dedicated dungeon, fractal or wvw runner.

And once you start that alt, you’re faced with a wall of locks that weren’t there before.

At first the player is annoyed. They will go do some of the unlocks, and realize that some of the unlocks are impossible depending on which server you’re on, or what times you play, or if you can rearrange your life to be there when the event happens.

Frustration!

If the player could then throw up their hands, and buy a $20 gem card that would stop him from having to deal with any of that nonsense again…the gem cards would fly off the shelves into eager hands.

It’s actually pretty brilliant from a operant conditioning standpoint. Assuming they unlock the traits in the gem store. If they don’t, then I have no idea what they’re on about with the trait changes. It’s just frustration for the sake of frustration.

Well the player can buy gold with gems and use that to unnlock traits.

You have to remember that in this game every gold sink is a potential revenue stream.

It’s a gold sink, not a revenue stream. Revenue stream implies that there is some level of profit. Trading gems for gold is an appeasement tactic that costs the company profits because the exchanger did not supply the business real money.

This is a problem for this model because, I believe, more people play the ‘avoid to pay’ game, more than they offer money to buy in game gold. To maintain profitability, the ‘avoid to pay’ game necessarily has to become painful enough to warrant the exchange for opportunity cost, i.e. make it so long to reach your goal that it’s less painful to pay 2-6 hours of paid labor than the 50 hours of gameplay to make your goal. By increasing uncertainty in the availability of products in the gem store, you also increase this pressure.

My problem right now is that there is no way to gauge how far this monetization plan will go. This is one reason why the devs have to hold their cards so close to the vest…remembering it might not be their choice to do this, NCSoft is running the show. If they are moving down this path, and they tip their hand to soon, the ‘smart money’ will abandon ship immediately.

One other thing I would like to put out there. In this post in this discussion

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Changes-Coming-to-the-NPE/page/7#post4421761

buried in the business/psychology terminology is a very repugnant business idea. By giving someone something, getting them accustomed to it, then removing it, and offering that item for sale is done daily by drug dealers. I find it interesting that this might be a plan for the future, but it’s also distressing. This means that more things that we enjoy can be removed, changed, stretched out to change the opportunity costs involved to tip more players into the gem store with real money than in game currency.

(edited by Roybe.5896)

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Posted by: eyestrain.3056

eyestrain.3056

Earlier today I took a team of fresh newbies on their first dungeon run through AC. I chose story mode because it’s so easy you can stand in the necro wells and come out smelling like roses. The new players most enjoyed the opening cutscene and were relieved at the end that they didn’t wipe horribly their first time. I hate to think how hard it’s going to be on them to go into explorable mode without access to stability, condi cleanse, traits, or high dps. It’s a level 35 dungeon but with so many things missing from their builds I don’t think it’s fair to level 35 players. People new to the game won’t understand skill isn’t the reason things are going badly, especially when the game has been holding and petting their hands up to that point and assuring them they’ve got the combat system down and combat doesn’t require utilities or traits.

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Posted by: Asmodeus.5782

Asmodeus.5782

Be careful what you wish for, eyestrain, for the catacombs might get nerfed once again. Right now the right amount of 80lvl players for this dungeon is 3. 2 will do too, most likely.

Language is a virus from outer space.

William S. Burroughs

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Posted by: sirian.4981

sirian.4981

Hi All,

I am up to date with the conversation. We are discussing your thoughts internally and continuing to work on the story steps. Once I have some more new I will update the thread.

Meanwhile I just want to communicate with certainty that NPE was not implemented in order to increase monetization from the BLT. It was designed for brand new players to the game. And it is for that reason that we are working with you to understand how to better refine the system.

Chris

For concrete suggestions:

1. Look through each bundle individually to determine if it should be removed. Many of them were good additions to low level play and should be brought back.

2. Integrate teaching into the unlock system. New players should have a simple effective environment to teach them how to use all these things they are unlocking. The dodge tutorial should be heavily improved to have a series of challenges, ideally integrated into a fun quest or going back to one: Picking up bundles of hay to feed to cows is a great way for lowbies to learn how bundles work.

3. The current system is clearly worse for older players. You need to give older players something so they feel like losing access to a lot of things they liked is worth it.

BTW, people are coming up with conspiracy theories because a lot of people think these changes are obviously awful and can’t imagine they were made for the stated reasons. And this isn’t something every game experiences. When WoW completely revamped leveling the reaction was very positive.

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Posted by: Cuddy.6247

Cuddy.6247

Rejoice! Elites now unlock at level 31, and it seems 1-15 is still inhumanely fast. We’re getting closer to the alt-friendly mark!