Guild Wars 2

What is this? take away all we had before and spread them back to us with level gating and got the guts to pad our heads and say " these are our generous rewards to you as you level". And when facing an unprecedented backlash, they came out and say “there are bugs”. excuses, excuses , bugs, bugs and bugs everywhere. We are not kids that you need to hold our hand to play game, and we weren’t born yesterday to believe those kind of excuses . Honestly, there is better things in life to enjoy than to look for the kind of fun by popping kids’ balloons in the park. What next? level gating maps too? Anet, don’t insults our intelligence and ability to play, and you are not our mom to tell us not experience enough to do activities. I don’t need to be at certain level to dodge, and god forbid, even to pick up a goggle and dive. As far as ideas go, having “new ideas” are not the same thing as having “good ideas” . Why spending all these times to implement stuff that no one asks for, not even thought of it, while leaving out issues that were brought up since the game started?

This update as I ran it was very insulting to me as a player since launch and a previous Guild Wars customer. The hand holding and babysitting is not needed. The bugs in the game however it would be nice to fix.
While understand you as a company need to make to make money because you don’t charge monthly fees, taking away the story line and allowing us who use one slot for newb chars to run for keys is just mean spirited in my opinion. It forces us to buy gems. Yes, those who can pay do, but for people on limited income the option is to farm to pay the insane amount of money for gems that you can do on TP. I never understood how in the world it could be so unbalanced, then I realized it was not player driven, but game driven. To buy 100 gems for in game 14 gold and then try to sell those same gems and only have 5 gold, its very obvious, IMO.
And taking away the train runs for Champions. Why was that so necessary?
I have made it to Dry Top and I am so confused about the bloody map and getting around, I won’t go there. I find myself logging on less and less. And for me that’s a problem because I made my daughter, my two cousins and her husband, and my best friend and nephew BUY the game to play with me. And they did. I had zero complaints until this major update. I loved and promoted the heck out of it. On social media everywhere. I have to remove it now. Thank you Anet.

The new player changes are mostly the result of complaints, most of which I remember from back at launch.

Shifting the utility and elite skills by several levels doesn’t really matter in the big picture. Utilities received the biggest level change, but all they did was smooth them out compared to when the elite unlocks. Due to the increased 1~15 leveling speed, the amount of time spent to unlock those slots is roughly the same. They did say they were going to adjust them however.

People complained about the lack of progression when leveling up. As a result, now we have the unlocks.

People complained about how long it took to unlock all their weapon skills, especially Elementalists. Level gating them was actually one of the suggestions at the time. It might take a little longer to unlock all 5 slots now, but it’s much faster to unlock all 5 slots on all the weapons. A lot of people didn’t even have all their weapons unlocked by 80; underwater weapons especially. Considering how bad some of the classes have it with their starter weapons however, they really need to start with 2-3 skills.

People expecting the traditional experience complained about the lack of it. People expect to be able to quest their way through an MMORPG. What happened was these people were only doing the personal story and hearts, which simply wasn’t possible. These people felt like they had to grind to keep up with the personal story due to the level gaps between each step, and in order to level, they had to complete multiple zones for the hearts.

The compass is obvious. People are so accustomed to following the arrow, that they don’t explore. The compass is basically a 100% map completion helper, which allows you to keep up in level instead of having to go to another zone, which was a common recommendation back then.

Some of the unlocks are only visual and are causing misinformation. Dodging, vistas, gathering, the TP, WvW, SPvP, Asura gates, equipment slots and whatever else are all available without having to unlock them.

Some of the unlocks don’t make sense however. Skill points for example shouldn’t be locked and instead simply be hidden from the map like vistas. Elementalists shouldn’t have to wait so long for all their attunements.

Shikago.4915:

And taking away the train runs for Champions. Why was that so necessary?

From the low level zones? Yes. Champ trains were hurting new players, though some liked it. Some people thought it was cool, while others became biased towards what GW2 had to offer, thinking that was all there was. Some people even got sucked into it and ended up doing only that to level 80. Chat harassment towards those not following the “rules” was probably the biggest factor however.

I was going to return to playing the game. I created a new character and experienced this level gating for myself.

I will not be playing anymore until they change the game back to the way it was.

Sorry, Anet, you permanently lost a customer until you remove this ridiculous content gating.

I play games for fun. This is NOT fun.

O god. I tested the new player experience by making a new Character and It makes me want to stop playing this game……That is kittened up. (Only tested Human area and got to lv 5 and stopped testing) WTF happened to Queensdale =_=. Am I playing another game? It feel like all other MMO out there. Lv 1-15 area use to be most fun areas of the game. There are so much going on and so much work done on the area. Much more than most of the world maps.

I have over 3000 hours on the game with Eternity and The Moot and it makes me feel that way….. I am writing a long essay to Anet and hope they read.

Don’t underestimate the player? Well true, some of the new leveling changes are just wrong. Why are some of the core Features Level Gated like the downed status. I know the Level needed to activate this is low enough but players aren’t really learning what to do when downed with this method.
I think there is a much better way to introduce downed to new players and this method was also added with the last patch. We have a dodge station where people can learn a bit about dodging. A similar station where an NPC gives some information about the downed status and sets you downed with a puppet to kill would do much better than level gate this feature.

I can understand why Anet is doing this after seeing the average player for 2 years stumbling at simple things like the marionette champions or the constant whining about content that “is” too hard where in reality this content is only a bit harder than open world stuff. But Anet is doing this the wrong way, Level Gating is not a good method to teach players new things, instead players feel like the game is taking them for an idiot, and no player, idiot or not wants to feel like this.

To teach players stuff you need an actual tutorial and have some stations where they can test it practically.

And a last point, I don’t see any benefit for babysit alts from veteran players, it feels even more insulting for them.

I doubt this is a matter of underestimating those that stick around, it’s a matter of overestimating the people that the marketing department convinced to give the game a try and didn’t stick around.

I feel more insulted as a person who plays games more than anything. I am fully aware that there are people who don’t have time to learn everything quick, or just don’t have the motor skills for hotkey mouse+keyboard gaming.

But this is like you are trying to make a game built for people who have never played games before, people who have never been gamers. Here spam, your 1 key 80 times, now spam your 1 key, with some 2 mixed in every 10-ish seconds. >.>