Guild Wars 2

Something needs to be done regarding the new players, Anet. While I welcome the new players most clearly have no idea about the basics and they can easily be discouraged from returning.

I find it sad when you see that player in the match who is lost making dumb mistakes and then someone calls them out on team chat. I’ve had many a chat lately with new players who are frustrated about not knowing what to do. Often they just run with the group and think it’s deathmatch and don’t even understand the strategy behind conquest. They understand that they may have cost the match and don’t return.

I know that us vets, who stuck it out, learned through trial and error but then again that system isn’t meant for everyone. If you want to keep a steady flow of new players into this game mode something needs to be done to teach the basics. One method could be bringing back practice arena and requiring 25 matches before they can do unranked. I know that you can practice through custom, but that’s not obvious for these players. Maybe allowing players to designate themselves as PvP mentors through the commander system would help new players to identify those who are willing to teach and help. No idea how complicated that would be, but just an idea.

Make a tutorial for the basics and strategis of each map as a rec to play unrabked and make them play atleast 25 games before going into ranked

You know what would be cool to have in the PvP lobby ? An NPC who talks about the different meta builds and who who gives a clear descriptive statement of the different counters to any build for a general purpose.

Players like helsith have done great videos in past that teach allot about map play. Anet never will so we should be promoting these more or making our own.

Make unranked give the same rewards as ranked. As i expect anyone playing ranked are playing to win, and any laziness when it comes to recording your footage and reviewing often tells me that they’re not doing everything they can which in my eyes is

Dis ru specting mah onor

Anet does not do anything, they don’t even listen to OS players. You should look to Blizzard more often guys.

I needed about 100 games to get rotations and maps to a level that i say it´s OK for ranked… An the other thing is to know and be traind in the class you play. Going ranked and then swap to a class you never played in PvP before should be a no go …

Tutorial has been asked for quite a long time.
I vote for AI matches like DOTA2, even if the bots are stupid, you can atleast explain that Conquest is prior to killing.

Kythan Myr.4719:

Something needs to be done regarding the new players, Anet. While I welcome the new players most clearly have no idea about the basics and they can easily be discouraged from returning.

I find it sad when you see that player in the match who is lost making dumb mistakes and then someone calls them out on team chat. I’ve had many a chat lately with new players who are frustrated about not knowing what to do. Often they just run with the group and think it’s deathmatch and don’t even understand the strategy behind conquest. They understand that they may have cost the match and don’t return.

I know that us vets, who stuck it out, learned through trial and error but then again that system isn’t meant for everyone. If you want to keep a steady flow of new players into this game mode something needs to be done to teach the basics. One method could be bringing back practice arena and requiring 25 matches before they can do unranked. I know that you can practice through custom, but that’s not obvious for these players. Maybe allowing players to designate themselves as PvP mentors through the commander system would help new players to identify those who are willing to teach and help. No idea how complicated that would be, but just an idea.

I think the commander thing / mentor thing is a great idea. It seems like a fairly easy technical implementation that could really help guide new players looking to learn.

Its not anets job to teach people how to play,thats up to them.How did we learn to pvp ? By practicing and by actually playing pvp and dueling.Theres no need to handhold only if people bother to learn their classes and how pvp works and how to rotate,which is something that comes naturally after playing a while,or it doesn’t.

Do some hotjoins and unrankeds where it doesn’t really matter if you win or lose,if only to practice.

Yeah, I think a mentor system will be very nice – nothing better than player feedback in such an interactive mode of play.

Scripted tutorial showing crucial rotational knowledge would be nice, like an instanced story kind of thing (I dread the bugs).

If we can get AI updates for the class NPCs in HotM, it would be great as well. I mean, we don’t have to go as far as getting pro players to program these NPCs with meta builds and move priorities (like the FF12 Gambit/Macro system), but at the very least, teach the most used combos so we can practise dodging them. The current NPCs are like 50 metas ago.

Caedmon.6798:

Its not anets job to teach people how to play,thats up to them.How did we learn to pvp ? By practicing and by actually playing pvp and dueling.Theres no need to handhold only if people bother to learn their classes and how pvp works and how to rotate,which is something that comes naturally after playing a while,or it doesn’t.

Do some hotjoins and unrankeds where it doesn’t really matter if you win or lose,if only to practice.

This is how I learned. This is true, however, it is their job to a degree. I would bet you that most of these new players don’t even know what a hotjoin is or how to practice.

You know when you first started PvE? There was this thing called a tutorial, it taught you the basic mechanics of the game. The basic mechanics. If you were here at launch, they didn’t have much of a tutorial, however after a few months they completely revamped it because new players were leaving because they “felt” there was too much of a learning curve.

They went from not holding hands to doing just that. I didn’t need a tutorial, but then again I’m not everyone else. Not everyone learns my way or your way. It seems that a lot of people jump in to the game have no idea what to do, get frustrated and leave. Anet realized that then and did something about it to retain and alleviate these issues.

Today, for some reason, probably because of the update, I’ve been in lots of matches with 2 or 3 new players to PvP per match. One person had no idea what PvP even meant. A lot of these new players, like I said earlier, don’t even understand the concept of capping or rotation. They don’t know the terms of home, far, and mid, They don’t understand bunkering, backcapping, etc… Maybe this is the very first PvP match of their life and they’ve never played 1000s of hours of DAoC, LoL, WoW, and the like.

Ideally, a player would come in and be identified as new and the players would educate the new guy. That doesn’t happen, instead they get cussed out, flame and shamed into never coming back. In fact, they eliminated the viewing of levels due to the negativity of vets seeing that at match up. Sometimes, someone takes the time to mentor or educate, but that is rare. When these matchups happen it is not enjoyable for anyone on that team. It’s not enjoyable for the vets by losing precious time, and its not enjoyable for the new guys not knowing the basics.

They used to have something in place to teach new PvP players, in fact they had an arena in HotM behind the main gate that looked just like a tutorial place. So at one time they had thought about it.

Bottom line: if they want to bring in and retain new folk they need to have a way for people to learn the basics of conquest. Not how to be good at it, but at least understand the basic strategy of conquest.

The basics of conquest are not that hard to learn though, i think its more about the issue on when to move off a point or bail from a fight and to cap something else or when to just decap and move off again and when not to.Thats not something anet can learn them imo that can only come from actually playing pvp alot,and then still people make bad decisions all the time.

Kythan Myr.4719:

They used to have something in place to teach new PvP players, in fact they had an arena in HotM behind the main gate that looked just like a tutorial place. So at one time they had thought about it.

See, this is the funny thing, they didn’t think about it – that was in fact its entire purpose! There was a tutorial you got dropped in the first time you entered HotM. It demonstrated capture points, reviving, and finishers. At some point they decomissioned it – possibly due to complaints about having to go through it before playing pvp? So it just became a useless island for a while.

That being said, it wasn’t a great tutorial, in part because it was just a checklist that piggybacked on the renown hearts system. Capture point, objective complete. The explanation for what was going on was very weak.

What anet really needs is a tutorial with competent AIs akin to For Honor(and surely other games). Enemies just strong enough to require some understanding of skills (that you’re forced to use; a condi clear, a stun break, etc), with predetermined directives such as “charge mid” or “occupy uncapped point”, and a scripted points ticker so that players understand what purpose capturing points has. A rudimentary demonstration of map gimmicks would be nice, but if it’s literally just Foefire and it ends with a scripted lord kill at 350 points, that’s better than what we got.