Guild Wars 2

Colin, thank you for the reply.

Here’s the thing about this update thus far: I get where you were going with this and I actually like the UI changes when leveling. Those really do help feel like something good has happened, etc.

Problem is I think the entire experience will be overly drawn out for brand new players and horrifically tedious for vets that like to alt. Simply put, good idea but poor implementation. I do hope that some of those bugs get fixed sooner rather than later, but I also want Anet to understand that you all have lost a lot of revenue with this. Retaining regular customers is far more beneficial than trying to make new ones, and this update hurts both of those lines of revenue for you.

krosis.7598:

Hey there. Playing for the first time in a very long time (over a year, minus a holiday or two), due to leveling changes. I still have my old 80 (created on the first day of GW2), but I’m starting over.

I like it better, so far. I’m hoping I’ll get direction to head to the city at some point, as I feel that’s lacking, and I really wish you offered a clearer understanding of the skill point achievements rather than “come back later”. It took me awhile to understand that was because I don’t have any skill points just yet.

Otherwise, I enjoyed creating my sylvan guardian – we’ll see how long I keep it up. gating the exploration points was a weird idea, though.

I’m not a WvW person. I want more Personal Story, and I want to see much more done with our housing area, as the backpedaling from what the company talked about during beta was very disappointing for someone who wants a unique experience.

Folks who think people who don’t raid or PvP are “casual” can go suck an egg – I did my time in WoW, I want something different (and unique) to play.

Thanks again for giving me a reason to come back.

The Personal Story will take you into the city. I think it is the level 20 episode that will.

That’s really nice Anet but me and plenty of people are ALREADY leaving your game (especially since Archeage comes out TOMORROW) I bought your game 2 years ago at launch because Guild wars 1 was an incredible experince that explored numerous cultures in ways that hadn’t really been done in fantasy games.

You’ve lost the faith of long time customers and they are spreading the word to your new ones.

You dun goofed.

King Slacker.1843:

I think the fundamental issue is ANet went 100% after new player metrics with blinders on. They completely ignored retaining current players. No common sense was applied.

I can’t argue with that.

I think if Anet doesn’t fix their fundamental issues, the game is doomed anyways. This strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning.

No. The game had a lot going for it a launch, especially after several months after they had reduced the number of horrendous bugs that were in the launch version. It’s not that Anet’s strategy was doomed from the beginning. It’s that their strategy failed from poor planning or implementation, in this case both.

Arenanet seemed to want to do a lot with the Living Story, but it’s still hardly picking up steam even after limping along so many times in the past. Either through poor writing or poor execution, LS has just failed to interest people with the exception of particular patches which were particularly interesting or (more often than not) had in-game rewards or mechanics which were worth playing while they were there. Even now, the revamped questing UI and the story achievement system have done more for Living Story than the actual STORY.

Living Story wasn’t inherently doomed. It just didn’t live up to the goals at some part of the process, and the whole story suffered as a result since it never really recovered from its shortfalls.

This recent patch is different. Rather than failing to branch out into a new area that Anet’s been dreaming of, they are changing the existing game that we are already playing into one that many players including myself find less fun. This is why you see so much backlash. If something like Living Story, Super Adventure Box, or some similar project fails: it only really affects that project and players who were interested in that content. Other players only complain because that time and resources could have been spent on something else. But when you go and change the entire leveling system and it fails and it’s a buggy unbalanced mess, that affects everyone who is not exclusively playing level 80 content. It’s not one of those “Oh I don’t like to fix sign posts, this patch sucks” kind of problems. It is a larger and more pressing issue that affects more players in more ways. It doesn’t help that a lot of these changes are unpopular in the first place….

anzenketh.3759:

The Personal Story will take you into the city. I think it is the level 20 episode that will.

All level 10 chapters will, I believe. You always need to visit your home instance or your Destiny’s Edge member.

I don’t think you’re seeing the bigger picture of what you’re doing here, ArenaNet. You are locking content away. I mean, I can still place myself in the new player shoes. I remember I was a bit confused at first, I wasn’t quite sure where to go. Nor did I know what my buttons did the first time I went into the Downed State. But your philosophy of telling me that I can simply pick any direction, run for a bit, and as a result, adventure will find me—helped me get through the leveling experience. It was amazing, I’ve never had this much fun leveling in a MMO before, and I’ve played my fair share. Please take this as the compliment it is. Sadly, this isn’t really the case anymore.

You’re for one limiting players more than you did when I leveled up. But you’re hardly improving on anything. You’re not teaching them the fundamentally important things. Yes, such as dodging. The new tutorial for that is relatively alright, but could do with a bit better explaining. It should be in the starter instance as well. Downed State, there’s no real time given to a player for learning this, so you learn through multiple encounters with the state as-is, slowly taking in what each button does each time you get downed, while you wait to die as you read the tooltip(s). You simply needed to, forcefully down a player, taking them step by step through the skills of the state, pausing the action, nothing hitting them, without a timeout period. Then once things have been explained, put them through the test of using the state against an enemy, cheering them on for being awesome once they rally. The game could do with a few tutorials. But of course, please make it possible to skip them.

You are holding the players hands, way too much. There’s no excitement in exploration when you are at all times presented with an arrow telling you where to go. The whole idea of, pick a direction and adventure will find you, is lost. You’re told where to go. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to follow it, but as a new player, you probably think that’s the ideal way to go about things and will do just that. You’ve in a sense robbed them of the exploration sensations and joy this game can provide.

Why not provide this compass initially to send the players to their very first heart? Explain how hearts work in detail, how there’s in pretty much all cases more than one way to finish the quest it represents. Then point out that near every heart, there will usually be events to find, which will even contribute to the nearby hearts completion, directing them to a nearby event and its tutorial. Take them from that to their first story instance, explain how this works. And so on forth. The game needs tutorials, not for you to be locking options away. It’s not rewarding to see that you’ve “unlocked” the ability to use dyes. That you are allowed to be rewarded for visiting a Skill Challenge and/or Vista you might already have found. Something rewarding would be to get 5 dyes unlocked at some level. To get an appropriate Rare weapon for your mid-range character with a selection of Sigils to customize it with. You know, rewards that players feel rewarded by. Another way to increase the feeling of rewards for this game, is to stop making it so we can’t salvage our Karma things. I know it was exploited early on, but for crying out loud, it’s almost two years after the incident! It’s time to make Karma rewards feel a bit more rewarding again. To make it not feel like spending Karma on gear as you level up is a waste. Because who likes to destroy their rewards when they outlevel them, with nothing in return. Salvaging, that’s different.

You really need to think a bit more about things you do, before you do them. You had plans of removing ranks in sPvP, because you were going to implement a Seasonal Ladder system to this game mode. The reasoning for removing ranks, was “… to give PvP players ways to set goals and work towards them …”, by.. uh, removing something which was already a goal for players. You have great intentions, of that I’m sure, but this outrage should have been obvious. If you want to retain players, you need to make the game feel rewarding, not by locking things away, but by actually letting us do and get rewarding things. A good start would be to allow us to salvage/vendor our Karma items. The new collection system already helps, I’m excited about killing mobs, certain events and dungeons. I have over 4000 hours played and I’m excited.

If I was to put your new player experience into a picture, it would probably be something like what’s going on in this screenshot I took yesterday, it’s just confusing.

anzenketh.3759:

krosis.7598:

Hey there. Playing for the first time in a very long time (over a year, minus a holiday or two), due to leveling changes. I still have my old 80 (created on the first day of GW2), but I’m starting over.

I like it better, so far. I’m hoping I’ll get direction to head to the city at some point, as I feel that’s lacking, and I really wish you offered a clearer understanding of the skill point achievements rather than “come back later”. It took me awhile to understand that was because I don’t have any skill points just yet.

Otherwise, I enjoyed creating my sylvan guardian – we’ll see how long I keep it up. gating the exploration points was a weird idea, though.

I’m not a WvW person. I want more Personal Story, and I want to see much more done with our housing area, as the backpedaling from what the company talked about during beta was very disappointing for someone who wants a unique experience.

Folks who think people who don’t raid or PvP are “casual” can go suck an egg – I did my time in WoW, I want something different (and unique) to play.

Thanks again for giving me a reason to come back.

The Personal Story will take you into the city. I think it is the level 20 episode that will.

Level 10 PS should take you to your home instance at least once depending on the story arc you chose. My Mesmer went twice for the Norn Story I picked. My Sylvari Ranger went 1 time to hers in the line I picked (maybe twice as well I might be forgetting a step)

Level 20 starts out in the home instance from what I can recall.

anzenketh.3759:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Traveller.7496:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

There are definitely bugs and some external miscommunication with the system and I want to listen some more before discussing.
Chris

This is interesting.

Chris is saying there has been external miscommunication about the new system. Could it be that you guys realize you went too far with the removing of functions and level gating it too extreme, and it was not supposed to dumb down the game quite this much?

Hi Traveller,

No not really. I m referring to some videos etc that aren’t quite factually correct in all areas and thus there are some misconceptions being propagated by those that have not played the through NPE yet.

Chris

Don’t want to de-rail the thread this was in so I thought I would clear this comment up a bit by starting a new topic.

There is some misconception about a lot of things that are level gated videos/some comments don’t tell the entire story. A lot of things that people think is level gated actually is not. This is due to the UI shows a Unlock symbol on some of these items. But in reality just like WvW and sPvP you can still preform the actions at Level 1. You are just unlocking the hint about the items.

The following are level gated items:

• Weapon skill 2 (Unlocked at level 2)
• Weapon skill 3 (Unlocked at level 3)
• Profession skill F1 (Unlocked at level 4)
• Rally(downstate) (Unlocked at level 5)
• Off-hand weapon slot (Unlocked at level 7)
• Weapon skill 4 (Unlocked at level 7)
• Underwater Combat (Unlocked at level 8 with underwater weapon skills 1 and 2)
• Personal story (Unlocked at level 10 in chapters every 10 levels)
• Weapon skill 5 (Unlocked at level 10)
• Utility Skill 1 (Unlocked at level 13)
• Underwater skill 3 (Unlocked at level 14)
• Weapon Swap (Unlocked at level 15)
• Down Skill 3 (Unlocked at level 19)
• Profession skill F3 (Unlocked at level 22)
• Underwater skill 5 (Unlocked at level 23
• Utility Skill 2 (Unlocked at level 24)
• Profession skill F4 (Unlocked at level 24)
• Adapt Tier Traits (Unlocked at level 30)
• Elite Skill (Unlocked at level 40)
• Master Traits (Unlocked at level 60)
• Grandmaster Traits (Unlocked at level 80)

The following items are not locked but do not appear on the minimap until the specified level.

• Points of Interest (level 7)
• Gathering Nodes (Level 9) – Nodes may have been removed in areas before this level. No there is no potato famine there is plenty of potato in Metrica Province.
• Vista (level 10)

Please note I do not necessarily agree with all of the changes. Specifically the changes to unlocking of weapon skills please see my feedback at the following link.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Learning-Curve/first#post4389552

All other items that are being reported as level locked are likely not. If you have a question about a particular item feel free to discuss it.

If you think I missed some or my information is incorrect please feel free to tell me so I will research it then inform you the results. I currently have enough characters spaced out on levels enough that I can get to most of the levels in a somewhat timely manner.

The majority of my source is http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Level_rewards and me playing with the system itself yesterday to level 10.

Well, I can see what they intended with these changes now, to keep first time players playing for a longer period of time they wanted to speed up levels 1-15 (Should have mentioned this in the blog). To compensate for that they also moved skill unlocks to later levels, in order to spread it out and not overload the first time player with information, yet keep them engaged with leveling.

The problem is they moved some needed skills and even traits too high up in levels, there are still dead zones and now some of the early levels are tedious with skills missing until later. If this was all intended for just the first created character on an account and then you wouldn’t have to worry about it on alts, then that’s fine. If you intended this for every single newly created alts, then it’s a terrible system.

As for retention, I think Anet choose the wrong area to focus all their efforts into. WoW didn’t get 12 million accounts because they redid their leveling experience, which was worse than gw2, they got it by the word of mouth of their existing customers. Who by 1.5 years after release had an expansion with two new races, new zones, new dungeons, new raids, new pvp content. They provided a lot for both new and veteran players, which further reinforced the veterans to encourage their friends to play.

The gw2 starter experience could have used tweaks for sure, but not the complete overhaul it got. The end game of gw2 suffered because development time went into the new player experience and china release, and now not even veterans can recommend the game because of that, we all lose in the end. There’s a huge lake of mmo players waiting to be hooked into gw2, it’s too bad Anet decided to go fish in the nearby pond instead.

MatthewMedina.5419:

I want to clarify one point I’ve been seeing expressed. This is one type of retention. There’s another type of retention where new players try the game and churn out before they even get to the point where they’re seeing the potential the game has to offer. Yes, a certain amount of people will just do that; they’ll log in to see what it’s about, have their curiosity satisfied, and move on. But we were seeing a lot of places where people who would otherwise have become active users were churning out prematurely because of the issues that we’re addressing with the NPE.

As Colin stated above, we can’t talk in detail about the ongoing development to drive retention for our veteran players, but I just wanted to make the point that the NPE was deliberately designed to address the early game retention issues, and ensure that Guild Wars 2 can benefit from a strong and steady influx of new players into the game.

Oh Mathew, if you thought people were turned off by the leveling system that got universal praise from critics and fans alike. I beg to differ. Remember when Colin talked about how dynamic combat would be where you would not rely on auto attacks most of the time (swing a sword again and again). That still happens. Or when dynamic event were suppose to ever changing. Guess how fast those chain quest regurgitate after you just completed them? Or if all progress would stops because they are still buggy.

How about all the enemies who were built to be HP sponges that pose no threat. Or better yet the hard content that was upped by artificial tacky difficulty content (health sponge and timer related). Furthermore quite of few of these events and hearts provided crud for rewards. Keep everything to a universal boring method, and never spicing it up with different dynamic rewards. You know like certain unique material/skin rewards are guaranteed (not RNG) rewarded to those who complete certain events.

The AI constantly fight against itself to understand it’s own environment (instead of taking advantage of it). Let’s not forget about all those collisions environment issues that instead of fixing you made it harder to range the target. However you can still attack certain said targets by standing on a 5 foot boulder with certain weapons, but they can’t attack you. Also how about that stubborn policy Arena Net has about the Ranger pet about not being able to be stowed permeability (with all of these AI problems). At least give them that until the rest of this mess is cleared up.

The lack diversity in game modes for PvP and that of the different location for WvW (not the same borderland copy & pasted two more times over). As of a matter of fact some those players left because it took you so long to fix things like the trading post or even getting out the looking for group tool. Since they should have been done a few months after the release. Or better yet not to release the game until it was done; which even include that Zhaitan fight. Which was stated by CJ was rushed for the release of the game. Guess how many new people simply skipped through to the end with YouTube, just to see that anticlimactic fight that has been forever immortalize on the internet now. It does not help that I can say, “it’s still like that two years latter.”

I could go on about the real problems, but I would digress for a long time. The leveling system honestly was not one of them. It feels like all that was done to give the excuse there was a problem with the leveling system, because how well the game was received in China (compared to other countries). So it was just copy and pasted to us. Instead of any major tweaking whatsoever. Also Colin please stop saying “we release or talk about thing when we believe they are (close to being) ready.” Since this was clearly one of many updates that clearly was not ready to be released. It’s half finished and buggy. Which is something you even state yourself about this refurbished leveling system. It just makes you look like a hypocrite.

Sokia.3710:

King Slacker.1843:

I think the fundamental issue is ANet went 100% after new player metrics with blinders on. They completely ignored retaining current players. No common sense was applied.

I can’t argue with that.

I think if Anet doesn’t fix their fundamental issues, the game is doomed anyways. This strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning.

No. The game had a lot going for it a launch, especially after several months after they had reduced the number of horrendous bugs that were in the launch version. It’s not that Anet’s strategy was doomed from the beginning. It’s that their strategy failed from poor planning or implementation, in this case both.

Arenanet seemed to want to do a lot with the Living Story, but it’s still hardly picking up steam even after limping along so many times in the past. Either through poor writing or poor execution, LS has just failed to interest people with the exception of particular patches which were particularly interesting or (more often than not) had in-game rewards or mechanics which were worth playing while they were there. Even now, the revamped questing UI and the story achievement system have done more for Living Story than the actual STORY.

Living Story wasn’t inherently doomed. It just didn’t live up to the goals at some part of the process, and the whole story suffered as a result since it never really recovered from its shortfalls.

This recent patch is different. Rather than failing to branch out into a new area that Anet’s been dreaming of, they are changing the existing game that we are already playing into one that many players including myself find less fun. This is why you see so much backlash. If something like Living Story, Super Adventure Box, or some similar project fails: it only really affects that project and players who were interested in that content. Other players only complain because that time and resources could have been spent on something else. But when you go and change the entire leveling system and it fails and it’s a buggy unbalanced mess, that affects everyone who is not exclusively playing level 80 content. It’s not one of those “Oh I don’t like to fix sign posts, this patch sucks” kind of problems. It is a larger and more pressing issue that affects more players in more ways. It doesn’t help that a lot of these changes are unpopular in the first place….

The strategy I was referring to there was specifically the Feature Pack. I didn’t mean from the beginning. I have 9 alts at lvl 80 (working on 10th) and loved the game up until the trait system got messed wth. The trait system mess dampened my enthusiasm and compounded with the “Feature Pack” is now making me really look forward to DA:Inquisition.

Here’s a real fact for you I don’t think your cooperation has processed yet. There’s more of us than there are of you and our collective brain power is quantitatively larger than yours. We are playing your game. We are observing the facts. We’re informing you of the facts. You are choosing to ignore them.

Just posting to show some support for the patch and prove the ragers who pretend like everyone ever hates it wrong.

I’ve got 18 characters, 6 or so are under level 15 and from wandering around with them a bit I suspect I’ll enjoy the new system a lot. I like the way it’s made and while there’s a couple things I’m not 100% happy with (because nothing’s perfect :P) I think overall it’s darn nice, moving in a good direction and I can’t wait till all the early post-patch bugs are fixed to go find that friend of mine I tried to get into the game months ago who quit after the intro mission because she got overwhelmed and too confused about how things worked to continue.

Thanks for the good work.

ColinJohanson.2394:

SkiTz.4590:

Colin, just clear up one thing – There is 0% chance EU/NA GW2 gets a VIP system?

We’re absolutely not bringing the China VIP system to NA/EU, correct.

The cynic in me can’t help but notice that Mr. Johanson wrote “the China VIP system” and not “any VIP system”.

Transparency is a very big issue here.
If these things had been properly tested ( on a public test realm for example), much of this conundrum would have been avoided.

Darmikau.9413:

ColinJohanson.2394:

As for content for level 80 people, I agree, we need more awesome stuff there too. However if you don’t keep people at early levels, you don’t have level 80 players to ship content to, and our development team was asked to fix the very clear issue of early player retention. Anyway as for level 80 this is a post about new player experience specifically, not level 80 stuff. There is a great CDI going on right now about guilds in (and more coming soon) where you can help give feedback on what you’d like to see the level 80 guild experience be in particular!

I think the real problem here is that you’re basically acknowledging that new players are more important than veteran players. “Our metrics weren’t up to standard for retaining new players” basically reads to the jaded community as “Our publisher wanted us to bring in even more new blood to buy gems” and that, by your metrics, the absolutely terrible PR that followed this is outweighed by the number of players you think you’ll keep. You don’t care about the people who have been playing since the first days of Guild Wars 1, and the Roleplayers who immerse themselves in this game, or the people who are still devoted to all the different aspects of PvE, PvP, and WvW. You only care about two different categories of players: spends gems, or doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter how much somebody loves this game, or how much they immerse themselves, or how long they’ve been playing; if they don’t spend gems, they’re not valuable to you. That’s what this game feels like to veterans.

I can’t imagine how much work went into these systems which could have gone into features for veterans. That’s the real insult. We’ve been waiting two years for expansion content that’s never come. We’re still missing features that should have been present at launch, like Guild Halls, and we’re missing actual new content like new races, Cantha or Elona, new weapons, new skills, new cultural armor, new dungeons, etc. And two years down the road, so much effort goes into this, a system to keep new players, instead of the things the game has needed for years, while at the same time including a bunch of weird ‘fixes’ that just alienates your established users more.

I know you can’t tell us what you’re working on, but if you’re not aware, the whole online community is basically speculating at this point that you’re secretly working on an expansion because they’re so hopelessly demoralized by the content we haven’t gotten. People really just can’t fathom the possibility that you’re NOT working on an expansion. But, if you’re not, I suppose that’s not all bad. You’ll have the new blood now to replace the old blood, and you’ll need it to keep getting the gem numbers you want, since GW1 players and GW2 veterans are leaving because they can’t believe it’s been this long, and Anet still can’t prove they’re capable of delivering content and features to their most dedicated users.

Sometimes I really can’t believe this company is the same one that made the original Guild Wars I love so much.

All of my +1’s for you. Summed up how I feel almost perfectly.

ColinJohanson.2394:

SkiTz.4590:

Colin, just clear up one thing – There is 0% chance EU/NA GW2 gets a VIP system?

We’re absolutely not bringing the China VIP system to NA/EU, correct.

hi colin!
just to be clear, becuase it came up in our discussion: you’re not bringing the chinese VIP to NA/EU. but will you make instead a new one just for NA/EU?

thx in advance for your answer!

ColinJohanson.2394:

- There is misinformation: Numerous systems that show up in the level up guide that teaches you about things in the game when you gain levels are not locked out, the system simply tells you they exist in the game to help give you a better list of things you can do. Just because it’s included in the level up guide, doesn’t mean it’s actually locked out. You can dodge from level one, jumping puzzle from level one, etc.

Maybe if it actually listed them as ’’hints’’ or something instead of ’’rewards’’ it would be more obvious. I, a player since beta weekend 1 with ~5k hrs into the game was extremely confused by this at first too.

Tyops.5894:

First: GW2 is easily one of the worst offenders among the games that I’ve played both in the egregiousness of bugs and in how easy it would have been to spot the unintended ripples.

SWTOR, ME3, any Bethesda game, and either Dragon Age game say hi.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Wanted to pop by and give another update on where we stand, as well as to help provide some information on some of the more common misconceptions we’ve seen floating around as well:

- There are bugs! We’ve seen the content direction system (the little arrow) pointing people at super high level maps when it shouldn’t, some systems/features not unlocking as intended for all characters on your account once your first learns them, some systems level gated that aren’t intended to be, balance issues where certain levels appear to be very out of whack, etc. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, our team is working to figure out what happened here and fix these as quickly as possible.

™.

Instead of wasting time investigating those crappy changes which no-one want it stay, how about just revolt everything back before the patch?
These level gated stuffs will just drive away the last of new players you so badly want to recruit. People will feel so blended, boring, and weak at low levels because you lock everything away and they have to “GRIND THE LEVEL ASAP” to do stuffs that every old players can do.

I started GW2 since launch and I enjoy all the old setting, and I think I’m free and able to do whatever I want no matter my level. Now you just block everything on all the new characters so they’ll find this game very blend (no vista, no skill point, no everything)and grindful because they’re so useless before they reach a certain level.

Dinasis.5294:

The one thing that just absolutely irks me to no end is the popups for level up rewards, renown quest rewards, and—to a lesser degree—reward chests for world bosses, map completion, achievement rewards, etc.. It gets me on a couple of different fronts. First off, the popup is gigantic— far bigger than it needs to be. Seriously, is there an interface scaling setting I just haven’t noticed in the last two years?

The other side of it is that they’re annoying. All I can think of when I see those things shaking and flashing in the corner of my screen is Crash Different, in particular the line about psychological warfare and terriers (the line starts at about 1:41 and I grant the whole of the video is likely outdated, but for this, it’s relevant). Do I really have to click on it when I’m still in the middle of combat? No, but I want to because I want it off my screen as quickly as possible.

I do have a suggestion for a solution. If I’d brought this up when I really grew to dislike it after the popup was implemented for Renown Quests, I probably wouldn’t have thought of this first, but take a card from Microsoft. Do something like the balloon popup in the Notification Tray on the Windows Taskbar. Have the chests and the reward buttons appear by the minimap as they do now, but when you click on them, have an informative balloon pop up next to them. Fill it with icons for what was awarded, make them clickable to call up the hint system for things like dodging or stat increases, but please, please make it automatically fade away and dismiss it if the user doesn’t keep their mouse on it or dismiss it manually.

Or, you know, they could just do like they always did it BEFORE all of this feature patch nonsense and the general direction that they have been taking this game for quite some time. You could get a mail when you complete a renown heart. You see the little letter fly towards the top of the screen, and you click on your mailbox. You get a nice letter from the NPC telling you how much you helped them out and how much better fed their cows are now (or in the case of the ettins, a very bad Engrish letter about how much you helped the ettins) and you click the little button to collect your coins. If you can’t be bothered to do that when you complete the heart, you would just wait and do it later at any time when you decide to open your mailbox. If you don’t like NPC letters spamming your mail, you could always delete them after collecting the coins. Although, I don’t think any of these letters counted towards your max letter cap, so I always kept them because they were cool.

But, what do I know? The old system couldn’t possibly have been better, more fun, not much more difficult to use, easier on the eyes, and only slightly less intuitive than all the pop-up UI stuff that we have now. I mean, that’s just crazy talk.

I truly pity you if you never got renown heart rewards the way they were meant to be rewarded to you. The current pop-up UI is an insult. It’s not any easier to use (well, ok it is easier to use in the sense that it is so annoyingly obvious that you have to click on it) and it just clutters the screen for no reason.

I wonder if I still have that ettin letter in my mailbox? I hardly ever use the mail anymore.

Actually my engineer is almost as old as launch. I’ll hop on her for a second. OK, here is one. I believe I got this from completing one of the heart quests in Metrica Province:

Chaos Krewe Leader Pachoo
Fine Work

Your assistance with the skritt has been very helpful to my krewe. I don’t know how you managed to keep your composure with the mangy rodents. The skritt are such a nuisance. They’ll never learn that hoarding chaotic material is hazardous to their health.

- Pachoo

Rose Solane.1027:

Odeezee.7362:

Carbon Footprint.3421:

A quote from the Forbes website on customer retention:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexlawrence/2012/11/01/five-customer-retention-tips-for-entrepreneurs/

“Never Underestimate the Value of Retention

For those who feel that customer retention plays a relatively minor role in helping a company grow a healthy bottom line, here are a few statistics you might be interested in. According to Bain and Co., a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. And if those numbers don’t impress you, Gartner Group statistics tell us that 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. Still not sold on customer retention? One final statistic provided by Lee Resource Inc. should give you plenty to think about: Attracting new customers will cost your company 5 times more than keeping an existing customer."

Just sayin’

no one is arguing that ANet should not retain customers, what people such as myself are saying is that ANet are going after the WRONG people to retain first (non-existent/brand new players) and not their current customers.

This is probably not something you want to hear but from a business point of view ArenaNet is probably going for the correct group of people. I don’t know how your situation is but I spend much more on gems in my first year than I did in the second year. And the same goes for a lot of my friends. So making sure new players stay in the game long enough that they start buying gems makes more sense business wise than entertaining the veterans who don’t buy gems any more.

The problem with veterans not buying gems is something ArenaNet should address in a different way. But you are probably aware that ArenaNet does not want to do that. And they probably have the numbers to back that up. I guess the current pricing is more profitable. I don’t like it (the gem situation and the focus on new players), but that is what it is.

Well I’ve stopped spending anything on the game because each patch seems keen on pushing me towards quitting. Makes no sense to spend any money on a game that you are on the verge of quitting.

Without a clear and definitive sign(none of this “nothing is off the table” shenanigan) that things will get fixed and improved(or at least back to previous levels -_-) nothing is going to be spent.

What keeps veteran players, playing? Expansion

What gets people who left the game to come back? Expansion

What makes new players want to level so they can play with their veteran player friends? Expansion

Pretty simple actually.

There is a great CDI going on right now about guilds in (and more coming soon) where you can help give feedback on what you’d like to see the level 80 guild experience be in particular!

Nothing about guilds could improve my level 80 experience. I’m waiting for the CDIs after his one that address more important elements of the game.

As for the rest of the NPE stuff, I’ll wait for you to sort out the bugs and then give it another pass. Personally, I am very upset. I miss the old interactivity of the original 1-15 zones. I agree that you could do a better job of explaining your systems, like having a tutorial that teaches the downed state, but pushing these features back into the game does not improve anything.

I miss the pre-April trait system, where you could start unlocking traits at level 11 and having a solid and diverse build by the mid 20s. The game feels so much weaker without a lot of traits with, and while I have plenty of 80s, I started a new character right before the Trait patch (luckily skipping the need to unlock individual traits!) and level 30 at the time he went from having two minors and a major to having nothing, and at level 42 now he still has almost nothing to work with, when prepatch he would have just reorganized to a Master trait!. I barely play him anymore because the grind is just no fun.

If you genuinely believe that it will bring in and retain new players, then I suppose it’s your call, but I think you have removed a lot of the elements that made me prefer this game over other games I’ve played, and I’m not sure it would have retained me.

I’ll also not as an aside that if level 1-15 is meant to take little time at all, then those “jump to level 20” scrolls now have much less value. Since so many things are now locked until 40, maybe consider upgrading those scrolls to jump you to 40.

MatthewMedina.5419:

As Colin stated above, we can’t talk in detail about the ongoing development to drive retention for our veteran players, but I just wanted to make the point that the NPE was deliberately designed to address the early game retention issues, and ensure that Guild Wars 2 can benefit from a strong and steady influx of new players into the game.

If this is true, then why are people like me, who have been playing for at least a year and thus obviously stayed past the “early game,” still subject to the restrictions and level gating from the NPE?

HandOfKane.5409:

Tyops.5894:

First: GW2 is easily one of the worst offenders among the games that I’ve played both in the egregiousness of bugs and in how easy it would have been to spot the unintended ripples.

SWTOR, ME3, any Bethesda game, and either Dragon Age game say hi.

Have not played all of those, some of those definitely have a rep for being quite buggy that certainly doesnt help their brand. I personally never buy a Bethesda game at launch. Many others don’t either.

I still maintain that “one of the worst offenders among the games that I’ve played”.

Is the best thing that you can say about this game’s QA is that it’s …literally not the worst?

It’s still really really bad, and I believe this is a big problem.

ColinJohanson.2394:

With the addition of the new rewards, messaging, and level up screen to make leveling more exciting: we also wanted to make sure you had that feeling of excitement more often early on in the game, and presented new learning on a more regular cadence. So we greatly sped up leveling from levels 1-15. Many of the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time, we just staggered them out across the levels since we sped up leveling to make the game feel more rewarding early on.

There’s a key group here that everyone’s ignoring that are going to have more problems with this patch than most: Players with lots of mid-level characters getting their foot in the door. While this doesn’t apply to me directly, a lot of my friends play this way and I’m worried for them. There’s a lot of level 20-some characters out there who have already pushed past the initial 15-level area back when it wasn’t such a breeze, and now have to wait even longer for systems that, before, they were just a few levels away from unlocking. That newly minted Level 30 who was saving up skill points for the first elite skill unlock is going to be pretty upset when they log in and have to get another 10 levels first.

Yeah, it’s a small problem relative to the total player base, but that’s not very much comfort to the people left high and dry in the middle of the level system.

Tyops.5894:

HandOfKane.5409:

Tyops.5894:

First: GW2 is easily one of the worst offenders among the games that I’ve played both in the egregiousness of bugs and in how easy it would have been to spot the unintended ripples.

SWTOR, ME3, any Bethesda game, and either Dragon Age game say hi.

Have not played all of those, some of those definitely have a rep for being quite buggy that certainly doesnt help their brand. I personally never buy a Bethesda game at launch. Many others don’t either.

I still maintain that “one of the worst offenders among the games that I’ve played”.

Is the best thing that you can say about this game’s QA is that it’s …literally not the worst?

It’s still really really bad, and I believe this is a big problem.

Never stated that games with worse bugs excuse this one. GW2 has issues with its bug-fixing too *cough*mesmers*cough*. I just said that if you think this game is bad, you mustn’t have played very many games of this size.

i fall in love with this game when it was released, loved that you could do ANYTHING you wanted from level 1, don’t gate content from new players or people rerolling alts, i wanted to play again GW 2 with this patch but seems i will play something else thanks for ruining my favourite Mmo.

Biggest fail in patch are this Turning off Spvp and WrWpvp for new players and ranger not being able to control pets till 20+? just horrible

HandOfKane.5409:

Never stated that games with worse bugs excuse this one. GW2 has issues with its bug-fixing too *cough*mesmers*cough*. I just said that if you think this game is bad, you mustn’t have played very many games of this size.

I have.

It’s still sadly and comically bad.

All in all, I would be very concerned if I were Anet about communication right now. Several popular mmorpg and other gaming sites have had articles stating how bad this feature pack has been received by the client base. While it has been stated in this thread that the idea was to ensure that new users stayed, the fact that it is gathering such negative feedback on multiple sites is bad PR for getting new players to retain. I would say that while Anet has had bugs, it has never been THIS bad. The uproar from this pack however may be enough to disturb the force.

My suggestion is a sticky about engineer/community relations feedback to keep the playerbase in the loop on the fixes and what is being done. Otherwise you will loose the PR and perhaps hurt your brand for western audiences. Just some feedback.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Snip (Sorry for doing so, error said messsage length too long)

So what does this mean from a lore perspective of the game, currently the ending part of the personal story has been turned upside down so that you go straight to cleansing Orr and then reinvade Orr to go kill Zhaitan. Many characters you now meet you act like you’ve known them for awhile and then suddenly later you act like youve meet them for the first time, and parts of the story were cut out entirely. As noted here http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2g02mx/the_personal_story_doesnt_make_sense_since_the/ and on the bug one here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Personal-Story-parts-missing/first#post4395639 which goes into more in depth detail the story now is a convoluted mess. Are you guys planning on fixing this? or reverting it back to the way it was originally which to be honest seems the better decision? Cause as it is, you’ve basically done a major retcon that destroys the story and confuses anyone that does it. On top of this, there was never any warning of such a change coming, it just showed up on the patch notes that
"
Chapter Focus:

Chapter 7 is now focused on helping Trahearne cleanse Orr.
Chapter 8 is now focused on defeating Zhaitan.
"
No one I’ve talked to wanted this, no one I’ve read about was even expecting such a change. Why would you go back now and do such a thing, some didn’t think the story was that good I admit, but now its just all over the place.

anzenketh.3759:

Fos.4185:

I can play my personal story once I exited the starting dungeon area in the old system. Now I have to grind all the way to level 10. That’s not " the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time " Colin.

That was not changed for that reason. The reason why they changed that was to fix the flow of the story itself. This in my opinion was a required change. my wife stated her big gripe was that she did not like the frequent interruptions to the story bits with leveling. Now she won’t be interrupted on new characters she plays. She was a little confused about the change (She does not read patch notes) but she basically took it as oh so I need to level up more to access them ok.

Except that the level gating isn’t the only problem with the PS. There are several continuity errors as well (Eye of Zhaitan, invading Orr after you had invaded Orr already for Trahearne’s ritual, “fear” storyline taking place after Battle of Fort Trinity, AC unlocks before you find out the reason for going there in the first place, etc.)

Once I realized much of the negativity surrounding the NPE was due to misinformation, I logged in on a new character and forced myself to slog through the first few levels (which are, in fact, dreadfully boring). It does get better fast, though. I’ll wait a little bit for the bugs to be sorted out and then continue my alt-oholism as planned.

However… If I started a brand-new character today, I’m not sure I would even get through those levels before giving up in disgust. Because I like relatively complex combat, and I like rich worlds with tons of stuff to do, and the game would be hiding those things from me.

ColinJohanson.2394:

There are bugs!

Why this game doesn’t have something like Blizzard PTR (Public Test Realm) where we can test the build for a month before release to the real servers?

Basically our test servers are the live ones, we are beta testing the game at the moment with our real accounts.

NeHoMaR.9812:

ColinJohanson.2394:

There are bugs!

Why this game doesn’t have something like Blizzard PTR (Public Test Realm) where we can test the build for a month before release to the real servers?

Basically our test servers are the live ones, we are beta testing the game at the moment with our real accounts.

^this. Colin even said it. They have so many real time metrics in place that they just test on us. hence why we get new content like guild missions and mini dungeons and then they are never added to. they just keep piling systems on top of systems. that’s why there are multiple groups of people that like different things and no one agrees on what they want. We all want new content added to existing systems and there are so many that they can’t possibly keep up with it all.

The worst part of the new features pack for me has been the negativity on the part of veteran players. That the negativity stems largely (though not exclusively) from misinformation does not help at all.

Blackjacks.9856:

You’ve lost the faith of long time customers and they are spreading the word to your new ones.

You dun goofed.

+100
Not even advertising this game to people anymore. Even friends in the game store, who know I buy a lot of their gem stock, are surprised I’m leaving the game, until I explained why. Now they’re advising me to try Destiny, ArchAge and The Secret world.

If so many things we dislike about this feature pack are in fact unintended bugs not meant to go into the live game, then you really, really need to inform of us which changes those are, immediately. As it is, it is honestly a bit hard to believe you, especially when they seem to match closer to how the game looks in China, as it would be more convenient for you to not have two different base games to maintain.

Saying that this feature pack is not for veterans so it does not matter if we like it or not is very short-sighted. The game has to work for veterans as well, not just completely new players. Veterans buy additional character slots to level more characters, veterans bring in their friends to play with them, and veterans should be able to enjoy replaying the game from the beginning.

Taking out parts of the personal story is unacceptable. The “Greatest Fear” story arc is a favourite of many players I know, and one of mine as well. Not being able to play them anymore is very, very upsetting. I paid for a game with that story arc included, I bought gems to support the game with that story arc included, and this is not that game anymore. You ought to inform us if this is intended or not, and if so, then explain how on earth you came to the conclusion that doing so would be acceptable. A lot of people tend to stall on their personal quests in the later stages since they can be very tedious or difficult when you are playing them alone, so using the metrics excuse of them not being played as much as others does not cut it since your metrics does not show the reason. And in any case, you cannot really remove existing content that others have been enjoying for years over some people not liking it. If you are to go down that road, you would have to remove Trahearne since he seems incredibly unpopular among the players. (…Please do not actually remove Trahearne, I like him a lot.)

Additionally, I would like to know how removing the ability to feed cute animals helps retain new players. That was my favourite heart when I was new.

ColinJohanson.2394:

As for content for level 80 people, I agree, we need more awesome stuff there too. However if you don’t keep people at early levels, you don’t have level 80 players to ship content to

No no and absolutely no. This game has sold over 3 million units, you’d think that is quite enough to keep the studio of 200-300 people running and investors happy. You’d think so but no, the dropoff rate of people around launch was massive when people found out that there’s nothing to do once you ding 80. Since then you have added more customization to the cash shop, fractals and living story. Too little too late. This game does not need any more new players that run out of things to do once they hit 80, what you need is to retain the godkitten people. Veterans are leaving all the time (or taking extensive breaks) because the development is focused entirely around catering to whales and people who want to do the extremely casual living story. Nothing wrong with being a whale or wanting the casual story experience but what about the actual gameplay. Veterans have been happy with very little for a long time so when they heard SAB isn’t coming back they felt really betrayed, that kinda stuff was the only gameplay content this game had been getting and hearing there are no plans for more is a huge blow.

Your metrics say that not a lot of people played the difficult content like aetherpath or the hard parts of SAB, sure, but you have to realize the cause and effect. The reason why this stuff is not popular is because you failed to retain the ‘hardcore’ audience that came to GW2 from other MMO’s, mainly WoW. There was no challenge here, there was no things to do. This game still only poses one well designed dungeon boss called Giganticus Lupicus, the other great boss encounters are all either zerg content or have been removed since their inclusion. That stuff stayed largely undiscovered by the people who wanted the hardcore stuff because of how much this game lacks direction, not a level-gated tutorial of how to press space bar.

For every step forward this game takes two steps back, the most recent feature pack was half a step forward and ten steps back, ruining the freedom of early-game discovery and sense of wonder. New players are strapped to a kiddie ride that shows them the attractions of the game the way devs want them to see them, essentially grabbing the controller away from the player. Sure it appeals to those people who really have no idea what they are doing but making it the only way is definitely a mistake. Make a ‘disable new player experience’ check-box into the options menu that anyone can uncheck and go back to the previous model and there’s no reason for anyone to feel betrayed or left out. Forcing a veteran ele who decides to roll another ele to wait until lvl 24 for earth attunement is dumb beyond comprehension

NeHoMaR.9812:

ColinJohanson.2394:

There are bugs!

Basically our test servers are the live ones, we are beta testing the game at the moment with our real accounts.

Make no mistake: we are beta testing the game right now. The leveling revamp was a huge project that needed a lot of time and testing to work out balance issues, not to mention the general bugs that you get when you try to make any change to a game of this size. The fact that we have PREDICTABLE scaling issues is a testament to the fact, on top of all of the other “bugs”

For example, did you know that if you go to the profession trainers in Queensdale, they will tell you that you aren’t experienced enough yet to learn traits, even if you talk to them on a level 80 character? I guess the profession trainers in starter zones only see your downscaled level in a similar way to how the new compass system seems to think that everyone is already at level 80

There are so many bugs, they should have found any one of them within five minutes of play testing. Hell, I found a bug within five minutes, and I wasn’t even play testing the game or specifically trying to find bugs in the system. A couple of hours later, and there were at least two more bugs that I came across without even looking for them.

The 9/9 patch wasn’t just bad, it was laughably bad.

None of this explains why the Farmer Diah renown heart, among others, was dumbed down to such an insane degree. Doing those early hearts were some of my fondest memories of early GW2. Now they’re nothing but a brainless speed bump.

Just quickly read through page 1 of this thread – maybe this has been answerd somewhere in the pages after (which im not reading yet) but it says vistas showing on the mini map should happen at level 10 right??

So why am i not getting them showing on my level 47 character??

I loved this game (and GW1 for that matter) but this really is one of the worst updates ive ever seen implimented. Not feeling the love as much now.

Even more annoyingly I talked my friend into buying the game the other week and shes now going to roast me good and proper.

It’s all perfectly clear.
Personally i think that all those features (FP 1 and FP 2) are seen from the wrong point of view, from too many players. I think we should look more to the whole Guild Wars 2 as a game. I mean this: new maps, new game modes, etc… those are not game features. I think Anet is simply taking care of an aspect of the game that cannot excite us like a new map or a new game mode…but if u think more about it, all those features make our game experience always better. They are small things maybe, from our (the players) point of view, but they are incredibly important. Basically, we can work on every single thing we do in the game much better and faster (or slower if we choose to) and it’s much more funny. Ok, we still don’t have a proper recognition for high level veteran PVPers maybe, but we have everything we need to wait a bit longer while they work on more urgent matters (…and it’s not 2 years; we’ve seen so many things in 2 years and you know it, so don’t start with this, flaming people ^^ ). Let’s just enjoy this game, that we love so much (ALL of us) and wait while they work on such great things like the last Features Pack brought along. I’m goin’ back to my Alts now, enjoy them and every single aspect (old and new) this game has. Well, that’s my idea ^^
Great work, ANET!
PS: Sorry again for my “personal” english

drnuncheon.8029:

ZerosLune.6720:

Most of what Colin says makes sense. Gating things farther away in level terms, but making level up more quickly so it takes the same amount of real time makes sense, and help feeling the first levels as more rewarding.

Yes and no. They are equal from a pacing perspective, but if the enemies you face from say levels 30-40 are balanced based on the idea that you’re going to have access to an elite skill, then it’s going to increase the challenge when you wind up facing them without one.

I do not believe there is any enemy in the game balanced around the idea of having an elite skill. I use my elites so infrequently I often forget I have them. This is across all 8 professions. The only exception might be the Signet of Rage/Warbanner on my warrior. Signet because … nice boons. Warbanner because I only switch to it when I know I’ll be needing it.

Unlike GW1 where you can have an entire build centered around an elite in GW2 an elite is more like a slight flavor adjustment.

I just want to say that I appreciate the dev’s coming here and telling us what they are thinking. There’s a lot of rage on the forums right now (me too, I hate the new systems and will not level another character until this is straightened out).

Regardless of the quality of the patch, it’s not easy to come here and post with all the bile and meanness that is going on.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Wanted to pop by and give another update on where we stand, as well as to help provide some information on some of the more common misconceptions we’ve seen floating around as well:

- There are bugs! We’ve seen the content direction system (the little arrow) pointing people at super high level maps when it shouldn’t, some systems/features not unlocking as intended for all characters on your account once your first learns them, some systems level gated that aren’t intended to be, balance issues where certain levels appear to be very out of whack, etc. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, our team is working to figure out what happened here and fix these as quickly as possible.

- There is misinformation: Numerous systems that show up in the level up guide that teaches you about things in the game when you gain levels are not locked out, the system simply tells you they exist in the game to help give you a better list of things you can do. Just because it’s included in the level up guide, doesn’t mean it’s actually locked out. You can dodge from level one, jumping puzzle from level one, etc. There also appear to be a lot of folks chiming in who haven’t actually played with any of the system, and are making claims that aren’t remotely true.

- There are some things happening at the wrong levels. Things like utility skills and elites are intended to come at approx. the same time they used to in actual game time, we sped up leveling for levels 1-15 and had them slide back in levels a bit to offset that pacing, they are not currently where we want them to be in the level up system. This was an oversight, and will absolutely be fixed.

- Not all of these changes were made as ways to teach the game, some of them are to provide a better sense of pacing, reward and progression. Early on we want to give a sense that you’re rapidly gaining new abilities, rewards, and learning new things as you level up. We added the level up reward messages, and the actual rewards themselves, and took abilities you’d usually use around that point in total game hours and presented them as unlocks (or things we teach that are already unlocked) to help give a better sense of pacing and progression.

With the addition of the new rewards, messaging, and level up screen to make leveling more exciting: we also wanted to make sure you had that feeling of excitement more often early on in the game, and presented new learning on a more regular cadence. So we greatly sped up leveling from levels 1-15. Many of the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time, we just staggered them out across the levels since we sped up leveling to make the game feel more rewarding early on.

- In general, this system is intended to be not only better for new players, but our hope is by the time it’s all in place you’ll find via the better rewards from levels 1-80 via the level up guide, the better rewards from personal story, the faster leveling from 1-15, and the ability to toggle the content direction system to help you with map complete will make this a better for experienced players as well.

- Over a years worth of testing with new players found we were absolutely able to keep them both more engaged, and more likely to return to keep playing Gw2 as a result of the intended system. That is at the end of the day, a win for all of us since all of you need more people to play with! However: if we find in the live environment that isn’t true and we’re not retaining new users better, we’ll absolutely both share that information with you, and continue to iterate to make it better. We keep very real time metrics of player retention for new users, and we’ll know very quickly how effective the work we’ve done is. I want to make it clear: what we used to have absolutely wasn’t good enough for our standards of retaining new users. Before we do some of the other things we want to do with Gw2, we had to fix this, period.

- Finally, I want to add that a few things (hello traits!) are things that can be improved for players who make multiple alts, we’re aware of this, and though company policy prevents us from discussing what’s in development: I can say we know Gw2 can be an even better game for people who love making alts in the long run, more info: when it’s ready™.

Now this is the type of communication the community has been asking for! Thnx!
Next time please also include the information if the ‘cow harth’ is as intended or a bug.

Vayne.8563:

Thanks you for this. I never doubted you for a second (ask everyone else lol).

Still is must be a little bit shocking for your Vayne. I mean, you told us how you did not like the old system but liked the new system.

Now it turns out many thinks of the new system don’t work as intended so will be fixed moving back more towards to the old system you disliked.

TooBz.3065:

Regardless of the quality of the patch, it’s not easy to come here and post with all the bile and meanness that is going on.

It’s this bile and meanness that will turn me off of GW2 faster than any features pack ever could.

ColinJohanson.2394:

SkiTz.4590:

Colin, just clear up one thing – There is 0% chance EU/NA GW2 gets a VIP system?

We’re absolutely not bringing the China VIP system to NA/EU, correct.

For Now™