Guild Wars 2

I think as GW2 ages and starts putting out expansions they have to be careful not to fall into the WoW-trap of forgetting about the levelling experience and then defaulting to simply ‘skipping’ the levelling experience when it’s too far gone.
I don’t mean putting in anything massive and single-playery… but more just little tidbits to make the leveling content more engaging, because afterall if a new player sees all the Path of Fire and wants to start GW2 he is faced with either 80 levels of barren worlds and basically single-player content in an MMO… OR he’s told to just forget 90% of the game and ‘skip it’ directly into a max level character for the new areas (and in doing so miss out most of the GW2 experience).
Some of the kinds of changes that should be implemented are:

Pacing

The pacing of this game is absolutely crazy and should’ve been fixed a long time ago. After having quit for a long time and coming back and re-rolling to re-do the leveling experience I realised that the pacing of this game, in terms of when you get skills and how your character develops is not thought out well. From level 1 to level 10… you get access to something like 25 different skills.. many of them which do very similar things. New players (and even old returning players) are completely flooded with what ‘appears’ to be a huge number of ‘weightless’ choices before they realise that the skills aren’t radically different from the others.
I propose some sort of system to slow this skill gain down and distribute those skills over the next 30-60 levels. They should do this by allowing your class to pick a weapon and swimming weapon at level 1, and only give the option to ‘learn to use’ another type of weapon every 10-15 levels. This ‘paces’ the game out a lot more and keeps people looking forward to things, thinking “I can’t wait to hit 30 when I can try out X”. This serves as a powerful motivation to keep people playing through the game after the initial ‘fun’ of a new game is over.

It also adds a feeling of actual character ‘building’ that’s missing from the game. If you wanted to play a ‘supportive’ guardian style, now you have to make sure you learn the staff skill for it (at the expense of something else giving the player a meaningful choice). (At the moment the only character building is the trait system and elite skill system, one of which is hotswappable and thus feels more like a weapon attachment system in Call of Duty, then an actual RPG character building mechanic.)

Leveling

MMO’s make the mistake a lot of the time of associating two players co-incidentally hitting the same mob.. as player interaction. This forms the basis of world-bosses, many dungeon encounters, and most heart quest-player interactions.

They should add at least 1-2 REPEATABLE experience giving and Social heart quests to each map. These can take the form of things like races. Competitive noughts and crosses, a 1v1 dueling event possibly, a small tower defence minigame… things like that.
The focus of these games is player-player interaction (not necessarily fighting or competing with each other, but also co-operative).. where that interaction is MORE than just ’we’re both hitting the same mob’.. but will require players to pay attention to each others actions and even communicate.

The purpose will be to add a more social levelling side-stream, so that you can EITHER do the quests of the zone and go through the story… OR you can participate in the ‘mini games’ to level up. (and yes, there are a lot of leveling alternatives now, but almost none of them properly take advantage of a social game).

By adding these two new features you can ensure that new players to the game experience ALL the content the developers spent the last 5 years developing in an enjoyable way taking FULL advantage of the fact that GW2 is an MMO and not just a single-player game. This will then translate into more end game players who will purchase more expansions and cosmetics.

Designing a new cosmetic will only boost sales of that one cosmetic. But doing something like this.. will boost the sales of cosmetics and expansions of ALL FUTURE CONTENT… (which in the end will mean a lot more profit then just making a new dress and selling it).

I searched the forums to find a thread on New Player Experience, and thought I’d found exactly what I was looking for here. While I completely agree with your first paragraph that Anet shouldn’t forget about the leveling experience, I’ve had three separate RL friends try out GW2 in the last two weeks and gave the same feedback: ITS BORING starting out. So I have to give feedback that the current pacing of the new player experience needs moved back in the direction it originally started in.

I hadn’t made a new character and actually played it since the New Player Experience was released, so I gave it a shot, and was horrified to find that my new ranger started out with a longbow and only the autoattack skill. Half an hour later I was level 4 and still had a longbow, and now could autoattack and use two other skills and heal myself. This is beyond baby steps and has been giving my new player friends the impression that this game has terribly boring combat. Just point at an enemy and hit 1, then maybe 2. Over and over again.

When I try to explain weapon swapping and utility skills and elite skills, it’s a huge bummer to tell them they won’t unlock until level 10, 19, and 31, respectively. Forget about traits and combos.

It’s mind boggling to me that Anet thought new players were so grossly incompetent that they couldn’t handle having access to their full skill bar until they had potentially spent weeks travelling around Tyria. This presents a crippled view of the game’s combat system and requires a new player to stick around for the views and the story IN SPITE of the limited mechanics of the game.

If it had always been this way, I’d still advocate to speed up the pacing, but I remember swapping between attunements on my elementalist back when the game was released and then picking between various weapons and learning their skills too, that was impressive, not confusing, and it really makes me sad to see people checking out the game for the first time in four or five years and turning around and walking away again.

good ideas , however i think learning new weapons every 5 lvls is better than 10….lvl 1 starting weapon , lvl 5 new weapon , 10 , 15 , 20 , 25 by the time u are 45 u have learned nearly all and have 2 lines opened to choose from …

the content from 1-80 doesnt change at all , kill mobs , click things , is repeatitive to the max , the 1-80 content needs some hearts that are races , mini games or something to spice it up instead of go around killing mobs or breaking spider eggs (yeah AGAIN!).

it would be cool if some dungeons were able to be instanced and soloable (with the help of some Npcs ) , hardly any1 does story mody nowadays and tons of players avoid doing dungeons at all ,