Guild Wars 2

A little bit of perspective on this:

My six year old has his own account. We bought him one for his fifth birthday, because when he was four, he kept begging to come play on my account, and one day he spent all my money on buying bronze harvesting tools (that was before the account wide bank). Well, I was sick of that, so I just got him his own account, and if he wanted to spend all his copper and karma on garbage, fine.

Obviously at age just-turned-five, he was not familiar with MMOs. I had let him play my ranger in LOTRO a bit but it was way too hard for him because there was so much back-and-forth on the quests and at that time he was just beginning to read; he couldn’t follow the quest instructions and he didn’t have the intuitive understanding of how a map corresponds to where you are in the real world. He basically would run until he found a body of water and could swim around. :-P

I figured GW2 would be an improvement, because you could complete quests (hearts) just by being in the area, and it only told you about the stuff that was nearby. GW2 is also pretty good about having the NPCs shout at you if they want you to talk to them, which reduces the need to read.

SO.

When he first got the account, here are the things he could not understand:

1. Traits – how they afffected his stats, which ones were useful, how they triggered
2. Targeting enemies (e.g. the fact that you could have two Inquest Assassins in your field of view, so the one you’re looking at might not be the one you’re actually hitting)
3. Purposefully moving the camera to have a better view of what he was doing / understanding how the camera interacts with the terrain and being able to correct it
4. Armor and weapon stats, including runes and sigils
5. Buying and selling strategies (ie what to keep, what to sell/salvage, whatever)
6. Skill cast times and how they affected skill cooldowns
7. Conditions
8. The chat function (thank goodness)

Here are the things he was capable of understanding when I took the time to explain them (not an exhaustive list):

1. Gathering, and how you have to have a gathering tool equipped
2. Talking to people with icons to get stuff (hearts, karma)
3. Talking to skill point guys would trigger a fight
4. Use skill points to buy special skills
5. To compare armor, highlight it and compare the tooltips, keep the one with the higher number (oversimplified, but that’s what he could handle at the time)
6. Yellow name foes are not aggro but can be fought; red name foes are aggro.
7. The downed state and rallying
8. Waypoints
9. Changing what is in your hand changes your skills.’
10. Push down button twice to dodge
11. Sending items via mail to mommy or daddy

Here are the things he came in understanding intuitively:

1. Click on something to fight it, push icons on screen to fight it.
2. When you start out, you don’t have many skills, but you learn more as you go.
3. Hey look! there is a shiny light up there! Maybe I can jump up to it. I’m here, what does it do? Says push F. Ooh, a video! I can replay the video a lot! Cool!! (aka, he freaking loved vistas)
4. When you walk past something, it opens up on the map and says discovered. oh hey look! I see a diamond! a square! A heart, I need to help that guy!
5. Every time I do something “grown up”, flashy lights make this red bar on my screen get bigger. Ooh, I am level 2 now!

I just logged him in and did /age on his biggest character, a level 68 engineer, and got the following:

You have played this character for 152 hours 48 minutes over the past 578 days.
Across all characters, you have played for 294 hours 10 minutes over the past 644 days.

For those who can’t do the math, that comes out to 27 minutes a day, which is actually more like 2.5 hours once a week. My guildmates have run him through the story dungeons up through Sorrow’s Embrace; he’s leveled high enough for CoF but hasn’t had computer time since then. He’s able to follow along well enough that he gets credit for killing things, doesn’t die any more than the adults do, doesn’t wipe the group.

His other characters (one of each profession) range from level 13 to level 26. I regretfully had to tell him, when he walked by and saw me making this post, that he has probably lost access to some of his skills on most of his characters. His answer was “well, that’s okay, I’m still really strong without those skills, because I have good armor and weapons.” But realistically, I expect him to be frustrated at how many things he cannot access on some characters when he CAN access them on others.
[character limit, contd below]

In the past year and a half, his reading and map skills have increased exponentially. If we were sports fans, I know he’d have collected and memorized every single baseball card in existence; since we’re not, he pores over the GW2 Official Player Guide book and memorizes the names of skills :P. Like, for fun. When he’s supposed to be putting on his pajamas. rolleyes

Other than that, I would consider him a really normal 6 year old kid. He’s CRAZY about Legos, likes to watch Wild Kratts and Timmy Time, enjoys gymnastics, makes his bed nicely but complains about picking up the crayons after coloring, loves to ride his bike but can’t quite do it without training wheels because our sidewalk is all tilty… you know the type.

• He has figured out how to deposit his materials (which I periodically go in and sell on the TP for him since he doesn’t do crafting).
• He understands targeting a little better, but can still get confused if there are same-named foes around.
• He’s started to figure out how to send /say messages and /tells, although we have a rule that he can’t talk to anyone that I haven’t put on his friends list.
• He is amazing at watching for buffs and debuffs, both on you and on your foes (walking by while I’m in the middle of a boss fight: “wow! 25 stacks of bleeding! And 15 stacks of vrunalarblilty! [ sic ] you guys are so good at this, mommy.”
• He’s as annoying as heck about giving play advice, especially when you are downed. (He still would rather try to rez you than kill the thing you have targeted when you’re downed, so there are limits to his understanding of that whole mechanic.)
• He still doesn’t have a true understanding of which stats are most useful to him, but he does have a general idea what the stats do and how to pick equipment that works for him.
• Similarly, he is able to alter his traits whenever he is in the mood to do so.
• He is familiar enough with his right-side skills (7-9) that he can swap them out to fit the occasion or his mood.
• He is able to change his look in the wardrobe and frequently runs out of transmutation stones.
• He has learned that it’s not really helpful to keep things for his alts, and got a copper fed salvage kit, so he salvages anything green and under that he doesn’t want for the present character, and sells or banks yellows.

This is a child who is just entering first grade, playing his first MMO.

So in case it wasn’t obvious, let me sum up the point here:

TL;DR: My kid got this game when he was five, and he could play it functionally, although he leveled slowly. Now he is six, and he plays well enough that he could probably fool a pug into thinking he was just a non-verbal medium-noob adult. He did not need the ridiculous leveling changes that were made, and many of them would have probably caused confusion as the gameplay changed as he went along.

If a five year old can do it, it’s not too complicated. They shouldn’t have changed it, because it wasn’t broken. When the only justification for your “improvements” are that leveling isn’t fun because you took away the trait-at-every-level fun, maybe you need to rethink that, too.

Removing the ability for new characters to learn at their own pace is ridiculous in the most literal sense (e.g. enjoy this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y ridiculing the changes). Furthermore, making these backwards steps apply to new characters on existing accounts with higher-level characters is, in a word, painful.

PS. Don’t even bother commenting on my parenting skills. I give less than zero cares about your opinion, will ignore your advice/opinion and continue doing what my husband and I feel is best for our individual family, and will not respond to you. Unless you’re supportive, in which case… :-D But regardless, this post is not about that, it’s about the game being so easy a caveman little kid can do it, and about the game staying “smarter than a first grader.”

Usually this level of hand-holding doesn’t come in until an MMO is on its last leg and doing anything it can to grab and maintain new blood. This is just pathetic that it’s come to this just after 2 years.

Yeah its a shame they crippled it… I only hope we can create enough focus that this will get reverted… I really have my doubts though. Thanks for the post though, it really puts things into perspective.

A lot of people are using either the very young or very old in hyperbole to talk about how much the changes simplify the game, but they really ought to give those groups more credit. Yes, there are ways to make game environments more intuitive to other audiences, but the problem isn’t that there’s too much noise from the various aspects that needs to be blocked out, it’s how they teach the game to begin with. Though I don’t think they did a bad job on that score initially, this was always a game you could start off very slowly if you wanted to.

If i will have a kid on my own i will let him play with me also! and he’ll/she’ll be my support >:) haha

about the changes. yes it is so ridiculous. level gated. >.,<

I hear you on this my 9 year old has had a necro and ranger for about a year now and with 0 help managed to work out what to do and enjoyed it thoroughly. Ive even found her out in wvw running round and somehow managed to get s few kills! She also took a golem for a walk to which a few people werent happy bout but thats a different story! Lol

I wonder if part of the reason they did this was to avoid having players make new characters just for the rewards/keys/mining/etc. Now no one is going to want to make a new character unless they are specifically speed running straight to 40 to actually use in WvW or something.

Has he made a new character recently? What’s his opinion on the leveling changes? I read on another thread that Anet made a child cry because they could no longer use one of their skills. That alone is a bad sign.

So a five year old could handle it with no problems perhaps they are aiming to get 2-3 yr olds playing it?

honestly its a shame they think this game is so complex it has to be dumbed down like this.

it was a really bad decision to put time and energy into completely ruining the lvling process with all this hand holding.

TehPwnerer.7215:

Usually this level of hand-holding doesn’t come in until an MMO is on its last leg and doing anything it can to grab and maintain new blood. This is just pathetic that it’s come to this just after 2 years.

“I can’t understand why, after 2 years of making changes that people didn’t like and refusing to reverse them, we’ve lost much of our player base. Clearly the solution is to make it easier for more new players.”

1 FLAW WITH YOUR POST. Your son is 6 and not this 5yo I intended to read about in the title.

sunset.3056:

1 FLAW WITH YOUR POST. Your son is 6 and not this 5yo I intended to read about in the title.

1 flaw with your reply is that you didn’t read OP.

Lol very clever… my 4yo nvr got pass lvl 3 until after patch tht forced her to lvl her char pass lvl 6 just so she can use dyes again loool.. her interest in game is only to mixmatch armour n make pretty..

sunset.3056:

1 FLAW WITH YOUR POST. Your son is 6 and not this 5yo I intended to read about in the title.

He’s six now. He was four when he started playing the game “the old way” and it was fine. He was five when he got his own account, playing the game “the old way” and it was fine.

Now the game is dumbed down past where he needed it when he was five years old.

Talindra.4958:

Lol very clever… my 4yo nvr got pass lvl 3 until after patch tht forced her to lvl her char pass lvl 6 just so she can use dyes again loool.. her interest in game is only to mixmatch armour n make pretty..

Sounds like she’s well ahead of the curve.

So the one thing they changed that actually affected his early(?) experience was conditions? :x

I say bravo that you’re trying to get your child involved in your hobbies, and especially bravo that it’s worked out so well. I’m sure you’ve had at least a couple panic moments, especially about the kind of language that tends to fly around in places like map chat, so I’m amazed at the dedication it must’ve took for this to go so well.

10/10 parents, and thanks for posting an honest bit of feedback about how absolutely insipid these new changes are.

I play with my daughter, who’s 7, and a lot of this rings true (although your kid, OP, has more advanced levels and actual dungeon experience - we’ve only just started discussing dungeons!).

We logged in for a short spell yesterday afternoon, found our characters to be a little more broken than they had been the previous day, and spent some time laughing at a how to dodge tutorial. My kid wants to know what the point of that is, as, in her own words, "but I already know how to dodge."

She still found the game fun, but wondered about the lack of things going on in Metrica Province (to the point that after her bedtime, I made a new character to experience the new levelling process, and I concur: there is a lack of (NPC) life and interest, in comparison to the previous map).
^_^