Guild Wars 2

So the first free trial week after the New Player Experience was implemented has come and gone. My question is, did the NPE changes work?

Can someone at ArenaNet give us some numbers on the increased new player retention brought about by the NPE changes? How many continued to level past the point where players typically stopped before the NPE? How many went on to buy the game?

I know I’m not supposed to bump threads, but I also know I’m not supposed to create multiple threads about the same topic. A dilemma.

But I am interested in whether ANet plans to give us some sort of blog about how successful the NPE changes were in retaining players during the free trial week. When they reveal that a significant percentage of new trial players continued past the level where people used to stop playing and that more free trial players went on to buy the game than after any free trial before, it’ll really help us vets to realize that while the NPE changes diminished GW2 a little for us, it was for a good cause.

And it would be great just to know that new players are responding to GW2.

I suppose I should throw out a question for the community as well. During the free trial week, what we’re your experiences with new players? Did you interact with many? Did they seem to need less guidance now that the game has spread the learning curve? Any anecdotes about positive reactions to the game on the part of newcomers?

I’m surprised they didn’t change the hearts so that you must talk to the NPC first, and accept the quest, before you can do it.

I would like to find out about the success or failure of the NPE. I doubt we will hear anything about the failure, because of all the grief that ANet has already gotten for implementing that before working on something to bring back old players and to maintain the interest of current players.

As for your questions in your second post. I don’t know if any of them can be answered. I thought ANet made changes so that the trial accounts couldn’t talk in map chat or whisper to prevent gold spammers from disturbing players.

I will never know as I have all the classes leveled to max. I have enough leveling tomes that if I ever wanted another of the same class I won’t have to level it regularly. After hearing some guildies talk about the leveling process, I have zero desire to see it in action.

I would think it’s too early to tell even if they wanted to. Since they haven’t given out hard numbers since launch, I really doubt they would answer this even if sufficient time has passed, which hasn’t imo.

They won’t give out any info unless it shows what they want it to show. Even then they will never show the data. I’m sure most people are interested though and we would all really like that info though.

If it worked, though, they should be happy to demonstrate it to us.

Hopefully soon there will have been enough time to collect the data and put it into pretty charts for our consumption.

they won’t give us anything. Unfortunately it seems that ANet is horrifically opaque in their business and development practices

I don’t believe that there is this mythical legion of untapped potential players out there who were previously deterred by the way the game was.

I also think the focus should be on retaining veteran players rather than replacing them with a constant supply of newcomers.

Though, thinking about it….who is going to raise more income in buying new dyes from the gemstore….is the game set up so that only new players are a form of reliable income?

I had a brother try it. He played my account right around launch until level ~10 as an Elementalist. Wanted to get someone I know playing the game. Put simply he didn’t purchase the game, even with the 50% off sale.
I haven’t had a chance to ask a bunch of questions on what didn’t work, but he didn’t even get as far as he did at launch.