Guild Wars 2

The old? (Or rather, how do we solve these problems?)

1. The old system for primary skill unlocking was fine, it got people used to their skills before they unlocked new ones and they did it for each individual weapon so they helped guide players into all their skills gradually, but not too slow either. As for utility unlocks, I would suggests unlocking the first at level 3, letting new players dabble with choices and their first 3 skill points and then unlocking at the same rate as before patch. 35 levels to unlock all utility slots is just extending the time without any reason to. Like I said, most players should be comfortable around level 15 with general skill flow and even if you wanted to be safe it shouldn’t take longer than level 20 to be familiar with choosing and playing around with all 3 utilities. Level 30 was a good place for elite skills too as by then people would have gotten familiar with their builds and playstyles by then.

2. I think 30 is a little late to be introducing traits. I feel like 15 or 20 would have been better to teach players how to modify their skill bars even more with traits. I would suggest introducing trait points (their first one and minor traits) at level 15 and then major traits at level 20 would be beneficial to bringing them through progression. More importantly, I feel like there should be introductory traits, as in, upon unlocking major traits, there should be a selection of traits (maybe the 5 number 1 traits) for new players to experience it while the idea of traits is still fresh in their minds. Maybe to mimic the current trait unlock system an auto-spawning quest or instance could appear with objectives for them to unlock a selection of traits.

3. While a reduction in the learning levels as proposed above would solve the first part of this problem, I would like to say some things about how to fix trait unlocking. I was waiting and hoping that they would change the way traits unlocked in this feature patch but they haven’t and so I feel it is time to bring my suggestions.

I like the idea of the current trait unlocks but they are tedious for players with many alts. I thin that they should be account unlocks as opposed to character unlocks. This would help prevent players with 30 alts from having to run around collecting traits over and over again, or resorting to buying them with skill points that particular character doesn’t have.

If account binding traits is something that isn’t on the table (it should be), then perhaps making it possible for any profession character to buy trait books for other professions would help make this easier. I have loads of skill points locked away behind different professions that I can’t use to help my alts and I feel like being able to would soften the tediousness of the process. At least for me, this part is over because after my engineer I’ll have 1 of each profession for farming skill points to help bring my other alts into their trait builds.

When I called this section The Old, I really wasn’t referring to the old system though. I just felt that this part wouldn’t fit very well in my presentation for my suggestions earlier. So The Old was actually referring to the original guild wars. As someone who very recently experienced the new player experience in Guild wars, there are some things that I feel could transfer over to GW2 very easily and to great benefit.

In GW1, new characters entered the game with the ability to choose whether to go through a tutorial mode or to skip it while in a mission instance. I think this could be reworked for GW2’s benefit. After all, we have a starting instance, but it doesn’t actually teach you anything. It could be used to teach the basics of battle and death and downing and skills just like it did in GW1. Maybe even introducing merchant types could work within the instance. Rather than the current new system of teaching new players how to play, I felt I learnt so much about GW1’s system in so short a time because of how it was presented. explanations with actions. Literal hand-holding as opposed to artificially extended unlocks that don’t really serve to put learning into practice.

As an anology, currently what GW2 is doing is that everyday, someone gives a boy one part of a fishing rod and tells him a little about that part and what it does, giving him new reels, new lines, new baits, one by one a day at a time. Maybe the boy figures it out and learns how to fish on his own with all these parts. But GW1 takes no chances. On the first day, the teacher gives the boy the rod and the reel, tells him to put the bait on the hook and throw and rigs a fish to bite. The boy learns how to fish and slowly, as the boy fishes, the teacher comes and introduces him to new things, like better reels, different baits and etc. To me, the second way seems like a better way to teach.

Also, SKIPPABLE tutorials!

Thank you for your time.

So what’s Bad?

1. Yes, some people are bad at the game, but nobody is bad enough to need hand-holding through primary skill unlocks. More than that, I think gating the the first utility skill bar unlock too late is a disservice to teaching new players and gamers about customisability and choice.

2. Just as bad, and carried over from the April feature patch is that traits aren’t in the vocabulary of new players. Level 30 is a little too late as by then, most players would have been comfortable with the base skill system for a while already. I got comfortable at around 15 or 20 when I started at the beginning of the GW2 life cycle. Worse is that with the current trait system in place, by then new players might not even have had any traits unlocked yet. I can’t be bothered with the trait system (having already done map completion twice before) and usually just stick to buying them with skill scrolls that I have saved up.

3. For altaholic veterans, while we can skip most of these with our level 20 scrolls, but it’s still tiring (has always been with elite slots unlocking at 30 in the past, more so now) to not have access to my utility slots when I know what they are and don’t need my hand held. Traits are even worse because technically I’ve done most if not all of those events in the past, I just didn’t do it late enough to have them unlock traits. Worse, is that I have to do it for every new character I create and I ain’t having that. Unfortunately, after my engineer, I will officially have run out of skill scrolls despite still having another 8 characters to level up.

Where am I writing this from?

I’m an altaholic. I level alts in EOTM and outfit them in Exotic gear and dress them up and generally do more PVE content. I took a year break, after ‘completing’ 3 characters, then came back and have ‘completed’ 5 more (3 of which were grandfathered into the then new trait system, 1 who was a repeat profession and who I used my old character to sponsor trait books and 1 who was a completely new class and had the fresh trait unlock experience). While waiting for the patch to come and settle down, instead of levelling my Engineer, I bought GW1 from the recent steam sale and have been working through it for my HOM (got 5 points!).

At the same time, a couple of weeks ago I introduced a friend to Guild Wars 2. He’s not a gamer, not even anywhere close, and found it difficult to find quests and level up and needed help to even find the trading post, and despite warnings not to, used his free hero armour skin on his level 1 gear.

So what’s good?

When I heard of the new levelling up tutorials, I told my friend he should just start a new character. For someone who doesn’t know much more than auto-attacking, I see these tutorials as a godsend to really new gamers. I’m not talking about people coming into THIS MMO for the first time, I’m talking about people coming into A MMO for the first time (and let’s face it, GW2, flaws and all, is a great and easy MMO to be inducted into the gaming culture, I know, it was MY first MMO).

As an avid player of the personal story (More because my characters don’t feel complete unless they at least kill Zhaitan), I prefer it in one shot, so I think that the new grouping at 10 level intervals for chapters is a good thing.

I am neutral about taking out the Greatest Fear arcs. They never really stood out to me, especially because there wasn’t enough time to really get invested in them, maybe aside from Syska’s story. I couldn’t care less about Apatia or Tonn.

With the recent gemstore update it seems Anet has silently increased the pre-sale price listing of the 10 and 25 stack transmutation charges from 270 gems to 300 gems and from 600 to 750 gems respectively. This means that the 30% off sale is only for the stack of 5 transmutation charges.

Unfortunately, while all other stack gem store items enjoy the anniversary sale discounts on top of their original bulk discounts, transmutation charges have no such luck.

I just wish they were upfront about this instead of the reply they gave me in a support ticket I sent which was that the original price is 750 gems (it has always been listed at 600 gems) and that it is a display bug on the gemstore.

There are tons of people that are unhappy with the direction the newly announced ‘Ascended’ items are going. Mostly because they have higher stats and they (eventually) require a completely new set of gear. The promise of more content that uses the Agony and Infusion mechanic also seems to suggest that for future end-game pve, ascended gear might become a requirement. Obviously this is creating a lot of unhappiness.

My suggestion is to implement a dungeon token like system for ascended gear that instead of giving a new set of armor (and all the problems that come with retransmuting and/or storage – hopefully they didn’t even think about the effects on Gem shop items because that would be sad), a certain number of tokens would allow for a piece of gear to be ascended, and instead of higher stats and the removal of an upgrade slot, add an infusion slot to the gear. Then people get to keep their exotics, Anet gets to keep their Ascended tier and infusion mechanic, and the people that want it get some semblence of progression within this dungeon.

Of course, this only works if the infusions really only affect the specific dungeon performance and not give stats in general (which imo would be much much worse than what I’m assuming).

It doesn’t even have to be aas easy as the current dungeon token system. It could be that every boss you reach at every even numbered run drops maybe 5 or 10 tokens and you need maybe 200 tokens to get 1 piece of gear infused. This of course should be matched with the difficulty increase such that by the time an individual gets to this point he or she will probably be at the point where they need 1 piece of gear infused. Then there is constant progress, and being an infinte dungeon there’s no issue of it being too grindy because that’s already what it’s supposed to be, which itself is mitigated by the increasing difficulty.