Guild Wars 2

I see the NPE in two parts, the trait revamp and all the stuff added in the rest of the NPE.

With the non-trait NPE, I can see what they were trying to do. I just don’t think they did it well. Dumbing down the starting areas is the wrong way to go, they needed to explain things better instead. First time you pick up a bundle, there needs to be a pop-up saying that it replaces your weapon skills and how to drop it to go back to your weapons. Ditto with transformations. Vendors should still sell everything they used to, it’s not that long before it starts to make sense to people.

They also really DO need to take veterans of the game into account with the changes. Yes, these changes are for a new player. But do they really hope that the new player will play just one character and that’s it? No, they want them to make more characters. By making the starting game less interesting, they’re making it less likely that the person will stick around as long once they’ve figured the game out.

Recently, I was running around with my 80 ranger with his grey wolf. I got a /tell asking me how I had a different pet. This was out near Claypool in Queensdale. For a new player to have gotten that far and not even know one of the simplest basics of their class tells me that the NPE isn’t teaching as well as it needs to. It didn’t help that I couldn’t send him to Claypool to charm a pig, I had to tell him to go to a starting city and look around for animals there.

As for the trait part of the NPE? Well, just mentioning it makes this post invisible to the devs, but I’ll do so anyway. It’s stupid and backwards to the point where even ANet can’t pretend that it’s a good idea (and that’s saying something, these days). Claiming that we asked for it is like saying that a toddler that asks to be picked up is really asking to be launched from a catapult because they wanted to go up.

Still absolutely disgusted by it, along with many other changes in both feature packs. Near enough the whole game is intolerable now.

It’s not that bad, but it does give a bad first impression.

It’s pretty bad at the start because being forced to have only 1 skill for a while, is pretty lame.

It starts to get good around level 20. Level ups give you stuff you can actually use, and other interesting tidbits as you level that are helpful for newer or more casual players. The annoyance of trait locks tends to make the last 20 levels kind of a drag as you’re just waiting to get to 80 at that point.

I do like the existence of the leveling backpack though. The ineffable stuff though is another story.

I think the progression is actually well designed in the middle but the beginning and end could use more help.

Overall, it is much better than post-trait unlock leveling and adds some novelty to leveling, but still leaves much to be desired.

Souto.2716:

I just don’t see why veterans are angry by this change…

In the first place it isn’t targeted towards you. It’s like pve players getting angry about spvp/wvw mode changes.

Not a good analogy. sPvP/WvW changes would only affect sPvP/WvW, not PvE at all (map completion notwithstanding). NPE changes affect every new character, whether it’s one crated by a totally new player or one created by a vet for whatever reason.

Souto.2716:

Secondly, and seriously more important, the changes make it so a player is more familiar and has more experience with how each specific skill/utility/trait work. It’s not being dumbed down, it’s being explained in better detail.

Actually no, it doesn’t. As other people have pointed out, before when unlocking skills, you got familiar with each weapon skill as it unlocked. Now whenever you switch to a new weapon, all skills are unlocked at once with no time to practice or familiarize yourself with them. Kinda runs contrary to the whole “we don’t want to confuse new players” idea.

Sizer.5632:

The NPE is fine, new players seem to like it and all the “veteran” players that complain about it seem to just be doing so just because they want to have something to complain about (seriously 1-20 takes a few hours at most, or 0 hours with scrolls)

Your mind-reading skills need work.

Traced.3495:

Still absolutely disgusted by it, along with many other changes in both feature packs. Near enough the whole game is intolerable now.

Sadly, yes. And Anet’s attitude since the 9/16 patch of pretending that all the complaints and suggestions of how to improve things don’t exist doesn’t make things any better.

Souto.2716:

I just don’t see why veterans are angry by this change…

In the first place it isn’t targeted towards you. It’s like pve players getting angry about spvp/wvw mode changes..

If you throw a paint bomb into a group of people it doesn’t matter that only one of them was the target, they are all going to be a mess. If a company does something that they know is going to affect people other than the, “intended target,” group then those other people are also being targeted.

If a player does not participate in WvW or SPvP then changes to those game modes do not really affect him during his open world PvE play. On the other hand any veteran who plays a new character is affected by changes that were supposedly not targeting him.

Souto.2716:

Secondly, and seriously more important, the changes make it so a player is more familiar and has more experience with how each specific skill/utility/trait work. It’s not being dumbed down, it’s being explained in better detail..

Where are specific skills, traits, etc explained in better detail due to the NPE ?

The NPE is still an unnecessary change to the leveling system that didn’t need to be done.

The trait changes at least had potential, but were done badly. The NPE is just utter dreck.