Guild Wars 2

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

Hi everyone,

I’m going to paraphrase Colin on this topic. The decision to implement the New Player Experiment system came from tens of thousands of usability testers and interviews with players who tried Gw2 and left leading up to China launch both in NA/EU and in China. It came as a surprise to us but it was an important for us to acknowledge that a number of systems, downed included, were difficult to understand for many players.

For the downed, system we tried a downed tutorial, building downed into the level 1 tutorial and other ideas. After usability testing with numerous different groups, we found that the best rate of people learning and understanding it came from having it be layered complexity and the solution we went with above. Intuitively that wouldn’t have been my guess either initially, but we found people understood it better this way than all other options we tried.

This same level of testing led to the other changes as well. At the end of the day the biggest take away is that all of us (including a lot of people on the forums) probably know games (and Guild Wars 2) really really well. We have millions of users, and a tiny percentage of them frequent game forums. Just because all of us learned those systems well and thought it was all really easy doesn’t mean we are the norm.

I hope this helps everyone here understand that this was a decision to improve the game for many people. Thanks for your understanding

Were these tens of thousands of test users infants? Or monkeys?

I’ve been playing this game on and off since I pre-ordered this game. I’ve got 3 lvl 80s and I love levling alts. But this time I came back to the game and I absolutely hate it. The trait changes were horrendous and now these new changes of gating skills behind levels are worse. The game, not only feels clunky and dumb, it feels boring now.

I’m actually done with this game, and I know no one should care about that. But the same feeling is spread across all my friends who play this game.

Anyway, good job Anet on ruining a perfectly good game.

sonicsix.5713:

All my toons were 80 when this went into effect. The only class I did not have was a mesmer, so I made one a week or so ago. Now he is level 36 and the trait system is horrible. It is enough to make me stop playing the alt and go back to my other toons.

I already had a lvl 80 Thief and Ranger and wanted to play Guardian. I had a lvl 30 Guardian but I wanted to play from scratch because I had forgotten most of the personal story. Anyway, I had no idea about the new trait system as I had been away from the game for over a year. I got to lvl 36 and notice my traits are locked. I look at the unlock criteria for a few I want. I go to the maps to kill the required champions, and of course they’re not there. So, I just gave up and just bought the skills even though I’m not particularly rich. I got my Guardian to lvl 59 and notice that I’ve only unlocked 4 traits. 2 of them were part of map completion that I happened to do while I was leveling my character. The other 2 I bought. Of the 4 I have unlocked only 1 is being used for me as my character is basically 5/5/0/0/10.

Then I realize how much work it would be unlock all the stupid traits so I log out and delete my character. and start playing my old lvl 30 Guardian because at least he’s got all of the traits (except for the Grandmasters) unlocked.

This will be my last alt, if I continue to even play, because the game lost its appeal so fast. If I wasn’t someone who pre-ordered this game and had a few low level alts just made but not leveled, I wouldn’t be playing this game. As it stands right now, I wouldn’t even recommend this game to my friends.

This game is a nightmare for new players and I’d be surprised if new players even stay around after lvl 40 or so.

Feonix.4790:

How was opening your character panel, looking at the 5 options, choosing one and clicking a + button complicated for new players before? It’s literally opening a panel and clicking a button. RPG players are used to assigning points when they level up. It’s ingrained in the entire RPG philosophy. Sure, sometimes you make a choice that you later realized was wrong for your character build, but that’s what respec is there for.

What’s not simple for new players to understand is when they open their traits panel and can’t assign a trait because they have to unlock it first, and when they look at how to unlock it, it’s either vague or far too time-consuming. Most new players aren’t going to know what these world events and big event chains are.

I have a friend who just started playing GW2 not too long ago. I was talking to a co-worker about my character’s traits and we asked my friend what traits he’s unlocked so far, and he replied: “What are traits?” Because the trait system was pushed back all the way to level 30, he didn’t even realize he’d started unlocking trait points. He’d already figured out the “pattern” of how leveling up in GW2 plays out. When we started unlocking traits much earlier, we figured it out very easily, because it was shown to us up front at an early level. You knew it was a big part of the game.

I agree that building complexity slowly over time is the correct way to ease new players into a complicated system, but I really don’t think traits are a complicated enough system to warrant easing players into them this slowly, and I think it’s actually hurting their ability to understand what traits are about. Also, while there’s definitely the risk of new players becoming overwhelmed, there’s an equally large risk of new players becoming bored and seeing their character progression as stale and unrewarding.

Most players, even the extreme casual ones, have at one point or another have put points into talent trees or skill trees, have made wrong choices and then have gone and respec. I’ve been playing games for over a decade and never have I seen a developer so adamant about assuming that their player base is stupid and needs to be treated as such. And adding unlock criteria that need to be done through completing complex jumping puzzles or world bosses isn’t going to get you new long lasting customers.

Like I said earlier, I’m already thinking of quitting the game. I don’t have the time and patience to go through Obsidian Sanctum on all my alts. I did it once for the achievement, I don’t want to have to do it again. I like making alts, as that was the best thing about this game: the leveling process. And by adding these stupid roadblocks you’re ruining that for the game.

As someone who used to play this game a year ago and decided to return, this new unlocking of traits is such a stupid and dumb idea.

I made a new Guardian and I wanted to unlock Master of Consecrations. The unlock criteria is to kill some guy called “Lord Ignius the Eternal” in Lornar’s Pass. I had not even been in that map zone on my Human Guardian but I decided to make a run for it, thinking it would be a veteran I could kill and get the trait. After going to Lion’s Arch, north to Gendarran Fields, running west into Lornar’s Pass and then running south to the location of this “Lord Ignius the Eternal”, he’s not there. I run around in circles trying to find what I thought would be a veteran. After a few minutes and not finding him, I google his name and find out he’s a Champion mob and part of a Group Event, that I have no idea about how to trigger. And I’ve just spent more than half an hour just running to this stupid place.

I like the various ideas of having more generic unlock criterias, which aren’t tied to champions or specific tasks.

And they have a trait unlock based on Obsidian Sanctum? Why not also add “Not So Secret” Jumping puzzle too. That sounds reasonable. Making new players do frustrating jumping puzzles and champions, seems like a good way of getting rid of them.

After going through all the different unlock criteria for the traits, I don’t know how I feel about staying with this game any longer. It just seems such a chore to unlock them on my alts. And I don’t have the gold, let alone the 200+ skill points needed to unlock most of the useful traits.