Personally, I’m conflicted about a lot of the elements of the New Player Experience. I don’t like what’s happened to the Profession Skills, I don’t mind the weapon skill unlocking, but I prefer the old system (which I feel inspired a stronger sense of progress). I’m willing to reserve judgment on the whole and out of respect for the insights Colin and ArenaNet have brought forward, but I will say I started a new Thief and was tired of it at level six, then recreated the character as an Elementalist, which I put more time into to get a better idea of how that experience would play out at low levels.
The one thing that just absolutely irks me to no end is the popups for level up rewards, renown quest rewards, and—to a lesser degree—reward chests for world bosses, map completion, achievement rewards, etc.. It gets me on a couple of different fronts. First off, the popup is gigantic— far bigger than it needs to be. Seriously, is there an interface scaling setting I just haven’t noticed in the last two years?
The other side of it is that they’re annoying. All I can think of when I see those things shaking and flashing in the corner of my screen is Crash Different, in particular the line about psychological warfare and terriers (the line starts at about 1:41 and I grant the whole of the video is likely outdated, but for this, it’s relevant). Do I really have to click on it when I’m still in the middle of combat? No, but I want to because I want it off my screen as quickly as possible.
I do have a suggestion for a solution. If I’d brought this up when I really grew to dislike it after the popup was implemented for Renown Quests, I probably wouldn’t have thought of this first, but take a card from Microsoft. Do something like the balloon popup in the Notification Tray on the Windows Taskbar. Have the chests and the reward buttons appear by the minimap as they do now, but when you click on them, have an informative balloon pop up next to them. Fill it with icons for what was awarded, make them clickable to call up the hint system for things like dodging or stat increases, but please, please make it automatically fade away and dismiss it if the user doesn’t keep their mouse on it or dismiss it manually. And if the user needs to pick an item, then make it stay, but bring the selection process in line with buying slot skills—make it two clicks on the icon, once to select and a second click on a confirm button.
I believe this would be a much more elegant system than what is currently in place. It would provide the same information to new players without being obtrusive. For more experienced players, it helps get the interface out of the way of the game while still providing the same functionality, should the player care to explore it regardless their experience level. It also makes some of the redundancy more palatable. After all, I don’t need a popup window in the middle of my screen to tell me how much karma and coin I received for that latest Renown Quest when all that information will pop up again on the list at right as soon as I click Accept.