Guild Wars 2

He raises something I’ve been concerned with for sometime.
My initial GW2 experience was to build a mesmer and drop him at around lv.50-ish.
I still find levelling a character tiresome. All the good content is lv.80 or higher level maps.
The only reason I got where I am in the game was rejoining for the halloween event, to get a character to 80 and really experience what the game has to offer. I know it’s going to take a backseat to HoT, that’s fine for the time being (or it isn’t, but I understand why it’s the way it’s going to go down,) but the levelling system really needs to become more engaging than every so often jumps in stat growth or a mission every ten levels of grind.
I’m not quite sure how that’ll finally be achieved and the new specialisation system certainly takes some of the pain out of the grind, but perhaps hardmode instances for bonus xp/rewards, making missions accessable earlyier than your level as an option and similar challanges could really take some of the grindy feel out of 1-80.
This isn’t me trying to get down on the game, or even the intended levelling experience. I just want more people to get to (and stay long enough to,) discover things like the thrill of PvP, the comradare of WvW and the fine-tuned, quick-as-you-can mass glass cannoning of PvE, all of which come into their own when you’ve lv.80 exotic/ascended.
I hope HoT is coming with such changes. If it’s not however, know that I and others hope for a more dynamic levelling experience.

He raises really good points. no matter how good the new content they put out is be it HoT or Living Story, for new players first impression is what sticks and matters the most. You can’t blame ANet for not trying to work on this, however, I don’t think anyone would say that they have succeeded in any major way.

Personal Story narrative at launch was fragmented for the lack of a better word and the only way to get the full story was to play through it taking advantage of different races and choices (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if all it would have given you is context and detail, but they executed it really badly… well see below). I guess the way story journal bundled stuff up was their attempt at addressing some of this fractured and messy narrative, however, without a total overhaul on the available choices fixing it is impossible.

Example: if you are an Asura, they should have made the late game choices either greatly emphasize the steps where Gorr story takes part to you over the story of some random NPC from human side of the personal story or even lock out some choices based on that and include some sort of “after action” reports for the choices you have no access to or didn’t choose (namely for the very last segment of the story, where these issues are really relevant, which is probably why they tried to reorder them in the first place, although they royally botched that up).

In my opinion what ArenaNet needs is either really stellar gameplay or great narrative, ideally both… even if HoT can deliver on these perhaps, if new players don’t get that far because the early game certainly doesn’t it isn’t really all that great for anyone just now coming into the game. Since there is this huge buffer of uninteresting narrative that can’t be skipped at least not entirely (and honestly, while lot of the core zones have great little tidbits and things in them for the inquisitive to find, I wouldn’t want to level a toon entirely in PvP or WvW let alone open world PvE).

I think they should just remove leveling all together, have a mastery system for all traits/specializations/etc.

Start players with the base stats of an 80, but not have traits/etc. and rename the levels of zones to “Easy, Medium, Hard, Difficult” of how the level of zones used to be to represent the difficulty of events and completion.

Add an interesting meta event to every single zone and be done with it.

Then do the same for personal story, but let players attempt them at any difficulty they choose, same with zones….if a new players wants to try Frostgorge, they should be able to, they won’t get 1-shot by a deer but will have a much more difficult time without traits etc.

Zietlogik.6208:

I think they should just remove leveling all together, have a mastery system for all traits/specializations/etc.

Start players with the base stats of an 80, but not have traits/etc. and rename the levels of zones to “Easy, Medium, Hard, Difficult” of how the level of zones used to be to represent the difficulty of events and completion.

Add an interesting meta event to every single zone and be done with it.

Then do the same for personal story, but let players attempt them at any difficulty they choose, same with zones….if a new players wants to try Frostgorge, they should be able to, they won’t get 1-shot by a deer but will have a much more difficult time without traits etc.

Perhaps the most interesting take on the issue I have seen… and especially around the time Orr was a hot topic (along with “press 2 to kill a dragon”) I saw quite a few suggestions related to personal story and PvE thrown around.

And this one would certainly be futureproof (ie. when new content is added if a player was drawn to the game because of said content the existing content doesn’t present a huge speed bump).

Zietlogik.6208:

I think they should just remove leveling all together, have a mastery system for all traits/specializations/etc.

Start players with the base stats of an 80, but not have traits/etc. and rename the levels of zones to “Easy, Medium, Hard, Difficult” of how the level of zones used to be to represent the difficulty of events and completion.

Add an interesting meta event to every single zone and be done with it.

Then do the same for personal story, but let players attempt them at any difficulty they choose, same with zones….if a new players wants to try Frostgorge, they should be able to, they won’t get 1-shot by a deer but will have a much more difficult time without traits etc.

Definatly an interesting preposal. I still think levels are uselful though for tiering out the experience. Perhaps a suitable compromise would be to reduce the jump in required xp from lv.17-20-ish on so that you level reasonably quickly, but are still encouraged to explore at least some areas fully before wandering into the big, bad orrian/maguuma areas, fresh out of the city.
I think making combat/events more rewarding AND difficult would probably be better though. You risk leaving those maps empty if you simply make their xp rewards not exist at all.

One of the big benefits of guild wars 1 was low level cap; I hoped that GW2 would just do away with levels altogether but the chased WoW instead. Now with the trait rework and down-scaling changes the whole concept of levels is looking more ridiculous, all the balance issues, all the junk gear, wasted items and pointless vendor trash, what for? Just to have a painful learning experience for new players and an excruciating grind for everyone else. Massive waist of dev and player time.

I’d still suggest some sort of method to adjust either your personal level, the level of an instance or the level of the zone/events in it so people can get more challenge from their game.

Be it some UI that manually adjusts your level lower in comparison to the surroundings, some kind of mode so instances can be higher level or a game-wide mode that changes the contents’ difficulty whole-scale for the zone. Something should be done to allow players to challenge themselves without having to intentionally thrash another aspect of the game (the build system).