Gwynhara.7261

To me, as someone who was here when the game launched and has bounced back and forth every now and then with it since then, the main issue for truly new players (like people I have tried to bring along in some of those "bouncebacks", but also including sometimes me ....) is that the whole thing is terribly confusing. It's clear as a practical matter that you want to (really have to) do certain things as a priority (like mounts) in order to play the more advanced game properly with others, but there isn't anything in the game that really indicates this or points at this, and there isn't anything "official" in the way the game explains itself to new players (or prospective buyers) that the path to follow is X to Y to Z and so on, and this and that is what you will have to purchase in order to access the story and so on. It's all like a big mystery and puzzle to new players, and that's off-putting to many I think. I mean you can find the information if you look around, that's true, but that isn't accessible. And it's really interesting how a game that started as a very accessible casual MMO became kind of a confusing labyrinth for new players along the way.

I think what throws new players for a loop here is that GW2's overall design differs from other MMOs in that (1) there is very little true vertical progression, in terms of gear, after level cap, which makes your character statistically better (and therefore noticeably more performance effective relative to the content) in large leaps and (2) the "open world" content at level cap is tuned to be quite difficult, rather than keeping the difficult content sequestered away in group instances (the latter of course exist, but they are not the only place tuned to a higher difficulty setting). Players from other games (WoW for certain but certainly not only WoW) are simply not used to reaching level cap and having the level cap open world content lay them out again and again and again and, further, not having a way to out-gear the issue in the relatively short term. GW2, not being a primarily gear-progression game, has decided to create "endgame difficulty" in other ways -- namely by creating open world content that is markedly more difficult than it is in pretty much any other MMO at level cap, and forcing players to overcome this by learning the detailed ins and outs of every aspect of their class -- all of the trait options, all of the skill options, all of the weapons options -- in detail to optimize performance and adapt to situations. It's an advancement scheme that isn't gear-related as much as it is player-related -- in that sense it is much less of an RPG in the sense where the advancement is all about your character and its stats (as in gearing games) and more of an adventure game where the advancement is all about the knowledge and skill of the player driving the character as an avatar of the player. It's simply a different approach to the one most MMOs take, and therefore it's going to be jarring for lots of new players when they reach 80 and discover that anet's approach to endgame difficulty is very different from other MMOs. The jarring effect is amplified by the fact that the design of the game from 1-80 does basically nothing much to force the player to learn said detailed ins and outs of their class in the detail that the follow-on content expects, as a baseline, in order to not get laid out repeatedly.