Guild Wars 2

(1/2)

While I applaud ArenaNet for seeking to address the problem of how potentially confusing the new player experience is, there are many things that are poorly implemented and/or missing the mark so as to make the new player experience atrociously bad.

I am a commander in the [TTS] community, and we exist, in part, to make sure that people that may not have a large enough guild can learn and participate in the larger, more complex fights that Guild Wars 2 has to offer. In short, we exist, in part, to teach. I want to start by saying this because I feel like I know a thing or two about how to teach people the mechanics in this game, I do it every night when we do our raid cycle.

Problem has always been that there is no tutorial in this game for the complex mechanics. Players old and new could level up all the way without ever explicitly being told about combos, for instance, or would not understand the importance of movement and dodge during combat because they were never introduced to it explicitly or forced to rely on dodge to survive the leveling experience. Downed state would be something players would figure out eventually because they had to, but it was still quite a jarring experience for newer players. “I’m dead, but I’m alive still? What”

In the end, I think ArenaNet was right to focus some resources on the new player experience to make sure these sorts of things are explained to the player, especially new ones that may not have any clue and (potentially) no friends in the game to whisper about these sorts of things. If anyone says that the new player experience was fine before the update, I’d wager they were already a veteran with enough time in the game to figure these things out. The obvious demographic for these changes are those new players that lack a network of friends to rely upon to learn the game, and so I will direct my critique of the new player experience with that in mind. Imagine yourself completely new to this game with no one to whisper when something confuses or baffles you. This player is (rightfully) the target of these changes.

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of my critique, there are many things that I like about the new player experience:

• The new leveling up reward interface is really cool. It feels exciting and looks fairly grand. It is also pretty explicit about what you get for getting to the new level. This is cool, no two doubts about it.
• The new rewards for leveling up (outside of base stats and unlocking skill slots) is pretty darn cool as well. Usable gear and all of that other stuff is always welcome.
• The pacing of leveling seems to have been improved at lower levels. I cannot speak to anything above level 7, but I can tell you it seems much faster up until level 7. This is a good thing for a number of reasons.

However, the major complaint about the new player experience seems to be the (over)reliance on level gating key portions of the game play. While I can understand the complaint from the point of view of veteran players (myself included), I also strongly believe that the change is counter-productive in solving the fundamental problem of the new player experience. Why do I say this? Frankly, the new player experience still does a relatively terrible job of addressing these fundamental gaps in knowledge. The route of hiding core mechanics of the game, to be unlocked or explained later, seems to me to be a poor choice for teaching these mechanics. I also believe it to be bad from a pedagogical point of view because the stepped learning may encourage bad habits that will be difficult to break later. (Elementalists not really switching attunements comes to mind, for example.)

I think a better solution would have been to implement a class specific tutorial instance, to be done after the first personal story instance. I can, in some ways, understand why this was not the route taken, as it would have taken developer resources away from other projects going on at ArenaNet whatever they may be. The tutorial instance would have been the best solution because it could explicitly introduce the mechanics in question, rather than rely on popups that people will likely just close without reading anyway. It could cover:

• Dodge
• Weapon skills
• Weapon swapping (here it makes sense to sub in attunement swapping as the teachable for elementalists – necessitating that at least two attunements be unlocked; ideally all of them would be available)
• Combo fields
• The importance of mobility and active combat
• Downed state
• Underwater combat
• Profession skills

The instance could be done for each class in the Mists so that it can share many assets (therefore minimizing resources spent – would only need logic and new assets per class). This way, each class specific version could go into details about stealth, pets, attunements, adrenaline, initiative, etc.

(2/2)

Here’s how I imagine it would work, and because it is an instance, the devs would be able to craft the content so that each step of the tutorial would be gated and more informative than just a popup.

For dodging, the devs could put a key behind a dodge wall which would open the next area with mobs to unlock a few weapon skills. Here, the player would be greeted with a defend event where a certain amount of mobs would spawn that would guarantee a weapon skill unlock. Once that defend event was over, the tutorial instance could introduce the weapon swap mechanic through something that would require a ranged weapon. (The assumption is that the instance would start people off with a melee or close range weapon.) “Hey, try to hit that statue over there, it looks quite far. Try to equip that long bow/staff/etc in your second weapon slot!” Once this portion of the tutorial was done, it would move the player on to a tutorial about the downed state and resurrection. After this portion was done, the tutorial could move to under water combat (just an introduction, one would assume the player would be intuative enough to figure at least some of the things taught above would apply underwater as well.) At this point, the tutorial would have to branch to cover specific class mechanics such as stealth, pets, adrenaline, initiative, shatters, etc. I have no good ideas for this part, but a good old brainstorm should solve that. Finally once the professions skills and mechanics have been introduced the game would move the new player into the game world as before. Now, the completely new player with no one to whisper for help has some idea about weapon swapping, the downed state, underwater combat, dodge and profession skills. If it were up to me (and obviously it isn’t) I would also revert the trait changes made in April and put a trait portion into this tutorial, but you can’t have it all I suppose.

This system would seem to be much better in addressing the problems that the new player experience was meant to address. Best of all, the instance itself could have an NPC that gave veterans the option to skip. “I’ve seen the world, let me out of here!” So that the experience would be optional for the people that either want to figure this all out on their own or have level 80s already. Again, I want to stress that I believe that locking skills/mechanics behind the levels doesn’t solve any of the fundamental problems stemming from the lack of a proper tutorial. I don’t understand why ANet didn’t just spend the dev resources to develop a proper tutorial, rather than this level gating stuff that makes the game more like other MMOs with arbitrary unlock points.

Feel free to add suggestions, critique my suggestion or agree with me! The more productive the conversation, the better ANet can make the experience.

I agree with the attempt to make it more friendly for new players, but the execution is just absolutely terrible.