6241

I’ve posted about this before but I literally do not understand what the fuck ArenaNet are doing to GW2.
I thought the whole point of content/feature updates were to improve your game not dumb it down and fuck it all up.
Who is making these decisions and why haven’t they been fired yet?
Pure craziness, get yer shit together ArenaNet - You are ruining your own game!

6242

They broke my necro’s pets. :(

I noticed that, when using the Flesh of the Master trait, my minions die when my level changes due to scaling. I don’t understand why that happens if minion despawning is only affected by adding or removing that trait. But I have been able to consistently repeat this bug running between level scaling zones.

Hard to play in under-80 zones when you lose all your minions every time you move a significant distance. I may be able to work around it by removing the trait in question, but that sucks…I like that trait. No official word yet whether this is being considered a bug or working as intended…I really hope it’s a bug.

6243

How is it possible to be that fucking bad at one’s job, yet still be employed? The changes to the leveling experience seem to border on intentional sabotage.

6244

Seriously, what in the fuck is going on over there? How can the people responsible for making such an excellent game in GW2 be behind the utter crap that has come since?

6245

I’m not hardcore considering my highest character is like 30, but the feature pack looks a bit like shit.

The main point is that I really don’t understand what they are up to. One one side the first feature pack was rather bad, and I had explained this at the time. Lots of people complained. It made the game actively worse, adding basically nothing positive. And it amounted to rejuggling of some skills and removing them for early levels.

So people complain, they do nothing.

Now this feature pack hits. And they remove A LOT MORE. Like everything. So not only they didn’t listen at all, but aggressively once again made the game worse, adding absolutely nothing this time. They just REMOVED things to make them locked behind levels. You can’t even die because being dead is unlocked at level 5. It’s basically a MMORPG joke.

But what’s even more baffling is: WHAT THE HELL IS THE TEAM DOING?

Because moving skills and stuff around doesn’t take a whole lot of time, and instead now they can’t even make those flimsy live story stuff.

Once again we see an amount of content in a year that a team of about 5 people could do in their spare time. What the hell are the remaining 200+ guys doing?

And it makes zero sense because all the changes they do are about new player experience, so as if thinking this game is going to “last”, whereas development shows it’s like completely abandoned, instead. The team doing absolutely nothing is the sign that this team is working on a different game, OBVIOUSLY. Yet they waste the very few resources allocated to this game by removing skills to the newbie experience?

It makes no sense. This is looking more like MMO suicide.

6246

I bet they are taking the approach Blizzard took with WoW to make it easier for new players. They probably have metrics that show new players abandon the game quickly more often than not.

6247

Anecdotes from the forums support that: people talk about introducing 25 friends to the game, and seeing two of them stay to beyond level 20. I don’t think they simplified the game in quite the right way, but I don’t think it was the worst idea, either.

6248

Agreed. And it’s not the end of the world like the Galaxies’ move was. It’s just that they are doing these things so half-assed that it feels like all their resource allocation has produced is an inferior experience.

6249

I’m not sure what the freakout is about. I just logged onto my alt, level 15, and everything is unlocked except for the elite skill and the third utility skill. Yeah, that utility skill unlock needs to be adjusted downward probably, otherwise everything appears the same.

There’s an arrow that points to where I should go next, but it’s not forcing me to do so…maybe that’s what’s freaking people?

6250

I like the idea of the arrow. I want the option of a more guided experience. Apparently you can turn it off or change the settings so it helps you get achievements, etc. I may try the game again to see if the arrow adds to my enjoyment.

6251

An arrow?

6252

The arrow that suggests where to go. Or pointer. Or whatever you want to call it. Like I said, I want to try the guided experience.

6253

How can you make GW2 simpler and easier to get into? I already felt like it was tooooo streamlined

6254

Leveling often didn’t catch up to your personal story. There were frequent periods where you had to grind monsters to do your next personal story mission. Most people went to other races’ starting areas and did them too. The leveling curve wasn’t right.

6255

There are lots of systems in GW2 that were never clearly explained. I spent way too long wandering around trying to figure out where to go and what to do. It took me way longer than it should have to figure out the heart questing system, the “down” stuff, how to properly dodge, how going underwater worked…nevermind the horror show that is WvW and dungeons.

Now I’m a longtime degenerate gamer, so I figured that stuff out eventually on my own but I pity newer gamers. I imagine a lot of them wandered off, mystified. If they’re taking steps to address easing new players in, that’s a net positive IMO.

6256

Hey guys, I usually keep quiet with respect to GW2 on QT3 because this is sort of my forum home away from home and I try to keep work and home separate. I thought I’d just comment a little on why these changes exist and what is actually happening. So, as some of you astutely surmised the new player experience stuff is meant to introduce many of the concepts in the game to new players at a much gentler rate. This system was developed and introduced for our launch in China and based on our testing and data we’ve collected with both new western players as well as new Chinese players it works to make the intro experience a whole lot more friendly.

There are a lot of unfortunate bugs that were introduced when we moved the system over from our China branch. Some of these bugs include things being locked for alts that are only supposed to be locked for brand new players, issues with sidekicking, etc… Obviously we should have caught these bugs and are working hard to get them fixed.

The last thing making this difficult is that there’s an awful lot of misinformation going on and then people reacting with out verifying what’s been said. For example, the comment that “death” has been disabled until level 5 is flat out incorrect. The downed state is disabled until level 5, if you reach zero health before level 5 then you’ll go straight to downed and need to revive at a waypoint. I also saw a player screaming about how they couldn’t use the trading post on alts until a certain level in game which is also just incorrect.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

6257

Fixing that bug alone before launch would have made a huge difference in perception, I think. Still worth fixing, obviously, but I’m afraid the perception may already be set in stone for a lot of players.

In the tutorial, you’re invincible. (Intentional? Dunno.) After that, you do go straight to dead.

6258

GW2 was my first MMO since TBC (and my last MMO since), I genuinely found it overly accessible and rollercoastery. What killed it for me was the bland personal story (which was meant to be the narrative glue and the impetus going forward), generic areas and how by the time I started playing it every zone was empty and all the group stuff which seemed like it should have been a nice evolution of Warhammer Online was instead permanently closed off.

6259

You don’t have to “grind monsters”. You have to play the game. And yes, sometimes that meant heading to other areas. Grinding monsters was never a solid strategy for leveling. I assumed that was intentional and enjoyed it. The leveling curve isn’t right if you see the personal story as the axis of the game – which I hope it will never be.

6260

You were constantly being pointed to personal story chapters too high level to actually complete. So yeah, it was a problem.