This IS insulting.

#1 - Sept. 9, 2014, 8:39 a.m.
Blizzard Post

I don’t speak German, but just look at the skillbar and the numbers.

This is what anet thinks of its playerbase’s intelligence? That we can’t handle having 5 skills at once before level 10? That 3 utilities by level 20 is just too complicated so they have to push it back to level 35? That an elite skill is just “too much to figure out” at 30 so they push it back to level 40?

I have never (AND THE ROCK MEANS NEVER!) met a person who has quit playing an MMO because of getting too many skills at once. I have on the other hand, played with a lot of people, who have quit MMO’s because they walled off too many core features to higher level gates. “Just keep playing, it gets better later I promise!” hardly ever works. You gate CONTENT behind levels and gear, you don’t gate core features and their skillbar behind high levels and gear.

I can’t believe I was thinking about leveling up a new character under this system as of yesterday since my keyfarming slot won’t be viable anymore. Forget that, I’m glad all my current characters are at least level 30.. as it is I’m just hoping current level 30 characters are grandfathered in to having 3 utility slots and an elite slot available.

it really is insulting to your fans intelligence Arenanet.

This is already a fairly simplified skillbar, I can understand putting weapon swapping behind a few levels (7 originally, now it’s higher) since that’s a relatively new mechanic for MMO’s, but keep those level gates rather low. These are core functions of the game. I know that if I’d started playing this game and was forced to have nothing but autoattacks and 1 other skill for several levels, I don’t think I’d continue playing, I’d be contacting support about a refund.

#230 - Sept. 9, 2014, 1:54 p.m.
Blizzard Post

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

#282 - Sept. 9, 2014, 3:13 p.m.
Blizzard Post

Due to the poor behavior in this thread, with name-calling and insults being used liberally on fellow members of the community, we are forced to lock it.

Please feel free to discuss the issue in a constructive, civil manner, without resorting to personal attacks.