The majority of the community sucks (or does it?)

It would not work, this kind of information is already in the tutorial quests. I can't help it if people skip those, their responsibility.

Surgestions to make people better (and not covered in tutorial quests) have to do with two, maybe three things.
First of all, team building. Learn how to make a balanced team.
And more important, the individual build should benefit the team, not only the ego of the player.
Second, position on the field.
Get those two two right and you've gained a lot.

Third, don't use the user interface, use all information you get. Shut down the user interface and look around. What animations do certain hexes have when being cast, both on caster and target. Same with enchantments. Which sounds are associated with the casts (I really hate the sound of Diversion when I know I'm too late to cancel my skill).
What do conditions like daze and blind look like on a target.
Don't try to learn them, just look at the information presented to you.
The only thing I would keep open (and kinda huge on the screen) is the compass. It tells you the relative position of your team and foes.

Only after that you can start talking about the various skills and how they effect gameplay. The number of skills makes it very hard for a new player to learn each of them. Who cares about Empathy or IP or SS? As long as the healers can heal up, it's not a problem. Same with Backfire. I don't care ~125 damage when I can kill or disable a foe and am not in any danger.
My (human) monks could also know they don't have to react, since my position on the field would indicate no danger.
More important is to look for damage sources (do I get hit or do I hurt myself) and the amount of healing applied.


@Akaraxle on "For PvE, I blame the lack of a proper tutorial...."
Yesterday I created a new monk in both Factions and Nightfall and the tutorials are there. And they ain't that bad, but one should follow them all to actually learn as new player. And who wants to play and read those when the world is at risk?

You're not actually comparing Factions' and Nightfall's "noob islands" to Pre-Searing, are you? They're night and day.
Also, this is a game, the world is not actually at risk. As long as the "tutorial" is cunningly slipstreamed into the plot, and plays and feels just like the actual game (if you think about it, Prophecies' learning curve is spread out until the Crystal Desert), no one will skip it.

Adding to the list of "things that made PvErs worse", I could talk about the WoW-style tank/nuke/heal template that was made evident with Factions elite missions, and became dominant - to the amazingly dumb point where people were prohibited from doing anything but spam nukes on command - in the DoA.

The game mechanics should integrate the teaching and increase of player skill over time while demanding a progressive increase in skill level in order to proceed further into the game.

That's what good games do.

Any guide is really compensation for bad game design, besides which you have to make a player actually want to increase or improve their skill level first.

After that it takes care of itself as it's a requirement to progress and achieve.

GW is about finishing and then repeating content as efficiently and quickly as possible.No guide will change that core mechanic and as a result a guide would have negligible effect imo.

Efficiency > Skill when it should be Skill = Efficiency.

this is what fanboys actually believe.

I'm completely leaving this out of the equation here because:
1) it's advanced stuff when you start from (very) low;
2) it's already covered on a few guides in different PvP forums and Guru article;
3) I don't have the time for now, and I'd like to try to devise a first document anyway.

Well, I was alreayd thinking of showing skill acvitation on a screen (have to be fast at ss ), their effects, but: 1) I can't show sounds (or maybe I'll try on 2 or 3 obvious ones); 2) this guide will be an entry point, surely not a complete guide on the UI or GW's game mechanics. If people find this guide interesting, maybe they'll be more willing to read more stuff (e.g. wiki).

Of course at this point I've got no control over the "maybe" and, despite people saying here that it's not going to work, I'll try anyway.

Just had a Maths lecture this morning, if you were there you would probably have been bored to death (let's formulate this plain English problem in Maths...). My point being: it's going to be a much more grassroots level guide, what you're talking about is too advanced (and too much work). I'll start small and, possibly (time permits), get to bigger topics.

Good point . (I may use that in the introduction of the guide, something along the lines of "Would you like to play in such a way that you'll understand why Shiro is so strong and beat him more easily? Or why the Margonites are easily killing you while the Vabbian guards were easy to kill?" )

First, my apologies to fireflyry if this rant is in no way sticking to your view, but this comment struck me as a good jumping off point. Second, I'm sure this will be largely ignored just like most of my comments (after all, what could a 38 y.o. lifelong gamer who was playing PnP wargames long before there were computer games worth a damn know about GW and gaming if he had the "unfortunate" luck to start GW in the early fall of 2007 ), but I'd like to throw in a bit of perspective:

GW is not about repeating anything efficiently or well or much of anything else. There is a storyline, there is a finale, and that's pretty much it. There really is a finite game from the overall design POV. And, yes, it is true that you can finish this defined, finite game without a whole lot of (meta)skill; me and my friends finished Prophecies the first time mostly with the stock henchmen and barely a decent skillbar between us. The thing is, that was the game that was actually designed by Anet. EVERYTHING else in PVE, be it getting a fancy piece of gear, vanquishing, maxing some title, unlocking extra heroes, capping skills, etc., etc. are purely optional diversions. Nobody wins real life prizes, nobody gets any better at PVP, and with the exception of armor and minipets, nobody even gets bragging rights in the public areas of the game.

This entire thread is people who know next to nothing about gaming as far as I'm concerned arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin. You have deluded yourself into thinking a bunch of optional metagoals that we, the gamers set for ourselves and that have been repeatedly accentuated with the very generous outlay of time, money, and effort on the part of Anet are somehow The Game (TM) or, for the other viewpoint The Scourge of The Game (TM). They aren't either one, and that's why your kevetching will never be addressed by Anet to anything close to your satisfaction. They're quite simply just additional timesinks to add value to an already decent value in games.

I'm reasonably sure there are a lot of things Anet did wrong in regards to supporting PvP - the single domain where all this hand wringing about skill or lack of skill belongs - in GW, but consumables, PVE skills, titles, HOM, rare minipets, heroes, PUGs, lack of PUGs, missions that force teamwork, missions that don't force teamwork, <insert your favorite excuse for why this game sucks so much> are not it. They have nothing to do with it and as far as I'm concerned the GW community would be magnitudes better if there weren't people filled with so much angst over nothing at all. Fortunately for me, my friends, and other tens of thousands of gamers actually enjoying the game, the game is brilliant in its design because your so-called success or failure has nothing do with ours.

You have to volunteer to have someone else's gameplay affect your game experience. There's no griefing in explorable areas, there's max gear available for, almost literally, peanuts, and the most expensive runes in the game aren't even close to necessary for PVE. So, when you decide to set some 100% optional and 100% pointless metagoal for your playtime, don't come whining to me about how some other guy chose to meet the same 100% optional and pointless metagoal the "easy way", because it sounds to me just like the whining from my kids.

From a other 38+,

Channum, you hit the nail on his head.

Welldone

This should be obligatory reading for the people in Sardelac.

Anyway I think Fril has a point. I do not think there is not much knowledge passing between vets and newbies. Me for example. Now after 3 years I am getting sick of explaining some thing for the n-th time and most of my friends as well. That is why there are so many "high end guilds" out there which do not want to recruit fresh players. People just got tired of explaining, they prefer to spent time achieving their goals. Maybe after a longer break in gw I would get some enthusiasm to do it but for now I have none at all. It requires too much dedication. Not mentioning all kinds of reactions you get when you are trying to help.

Indeed improved manual would be handy. I remember so many so called obvious things which were absolutely not clear when I was running through pre searing. As it was stated here. Pre-searing is so much better than all other tutorials in other campaigns.

I am comparing the very first part of the noob islands to Pre.
In Factions I've played only the main quests, tried all secondary professions, played the first mission and have chosen my secondary.
That's about what you do in pre (except the mission). I think Factions is better at this.
Next step up are a few quests in the secondary line, the ones given by Instructor Ng. Advanced Defence, Condition Removal, Hex counter, Disenchantment, Disruption, Skill chains, snares.
Those are not found anywere in Prophecies. I've yet to start those but I know they are there from the past.
I'm about half as far in the game in NF and got a somewhat decent skillbar that provides basic needs (though some skills are unusable, same with factions).


Y, when playing with a first character. But learning another profession would require doing all those again. And another profession yet again. Many people start skipping at that time. And at that time the world is at risk, they know about Lich, Shiro and Abaddon.
And what many people tend to forget is that playing a different role in a team does make a difference. It took me a long time to get from back-/midline to decent frontline. And that's not because I'm a bad player.


@Fril Estelin

The problem is that many players say team balance and positioning are advanced while in fact they are not.
Sure, it's a lot of work to explain in depth, but it's not rocket science.
And it's what makes a lot of the difference between 'good' and 'bad' players.

Let me give an example.
Ages ago I liked monking for PUGs in THK. When the team was forming it already started to get clear if it had a chance of success or not.
Why? Because it became fast if there was balance in the team or not.
Next when into the mission (or upfront) strategies would be discussed.
A decent leader would point out where to walk, where to wait and even spot if someone was drawing unintentional aggro.
That's basic team positioning.

Sure, we can go to the PvP side where a slightly bad position could result death or disadvantage, but that's not what I'm talking about here.
It's more about making sure that the entire team stays around each other (except when intended to split), people don't draw aggro to the group when someone is tanking (when a tank is used) or by pop-ups and how the group positions itself on the battlefield (not in the line of patrols, take advantage of a certain position like behind a wall).

That's not so hard to understand, even for a new player.

But then, maybe I should place myself in the brains of the 14yr old son of one of my guildies. Don't think he'd want to do all this, he just wants to pwn I guess. And after countless fails he'd still not understand why, even when told.

The whole game is optional; there is no need to ever finish the story. Thinking that the game is just the storyline is just as bad a view as thinking the game is all about farming. There are some players that will play for just the storyline and others that will play for the phat loot; some will actually play for both. Developers specifically put "optional" goals in a game because they want to cater to that type of player; it's hard to think of any game nowadays that does not have content of that sort.

Yeah I get this feeling too on this thread, but not from the target audience . (I know some people may think I'm wasting my time but I think the exercise is interesting, even if it fails)

You may have experience in gaming, but I'm not sure you're a wise person. Your comment was rude, because directed at the "entire thread", and it even was off-topic. It's not about what being "good" means, but about making the n00b a little less n00b, giving the newbie the right tool to start learning, and presenting the casual player with information s/he may have missed.

Easily solved: if you have completed the campaign with at least 1 character, you can skip the tutorial, you get all the skills you should, and are leveled to ~7. Wasn't done, but could've been.

Just have to add some comment to this part.
I don't think many of the players here ain't enjoying the game.

But let's get this one in perspective.
I'm in a guild that has a focus on high-end PvE content of GW for a very long time, starting about December 2005 I'd say. We were not serious enough for PvP, couldn't get a core team together because of different playing times.
However, for me and the other guildies, the quality of new players does matter.
At a certain time players of my guild refused to play with alliance members except one or two guilds because of 'bad quality'. Meaning they would enter an area with them and were unable to finish it. Not once, not twice but many times. Now this influences their fun and their gameplay.

I've seen the same with several less experienced players who were recruited in our guild.
There would be some initial mistrust till they had proven themselfs.
Again because the fun of players is doing stuff and succeeding doing it.
No farming teams and fixed builds, so people always know there is a risk of failure, but it shouldn't be because of lack of basic game knowledge. And that happens once in a while.

Now let's step up one level in gameplay. Organised PvP.
Something the game was build for.
You either are willing to improve or you are a burden to your team.
And being a burden to your team means you are out.

Sure, if you like to live in your little sandbox there is no reason to improve. No-one to care about. Because it's only you vs some AI foes. Do whatever you like. For me you don't exist, I will never interact with you.
But this is not my kind of game. I play with a lot of people. Meet good and bad players. They are part of my fun and that's my choice.
And if I would team up with slightly better players every day it would make things more fun for me. Not because I could finish things faster, I've done everything on the PvE side I wanted and am not sure about a PvP swich yet.
But it's fun to see people achieving their goals and be happy about it. And with better players there is more chance of that.

From this perspective improving the skill of less experienced players matters a lot, even if it's PvE.

Your first answer is an over-generalization. There are people who view player-created limitations as "legitimate" difficulty increases. Ever tried beating DMC with Force Edge and E&I? There are many people who try these kinds of challenges and love them. At the same time, I know people who use cheat codes pretty much whenever they play any game. Now, I (and probably many of you) can't understand what's fun about playing a game when you can't die, can't run out of ammo, and have access to all technology from the beginning, but that's how these people have fun. Is their "cheating" fun any less than my "challenge" fun? Ultimately, the game is what you make it - and if you can't make it fun, you don't play it.

That ties us right into your second point, which is the same answer I came up with - many of the people that are after "challenge" are really after rewards and recognition for their efforts. As I said, that makes them impossible to reconcile with the people who want rewards even if they're not as good. The question then boils down to: which group results in more money if I cater to them?

Re: Dream,
This isn't philosophical. Your stance is that you can cater to everyone. Arguing this requires you to know what everyone actually wants. Therefore, I've argued a position dealing with what people actually want. Prior to this, people were just speaking in terms of "hardcore", "casual", "challenge", etc. These terms are smokescreens; remove the terms and you expose the flaw in the argument: challenge isn't what's lacking - it's rewards and recognition, stuff that makes the challenge "matter". Once you know that, it becomes clear that certain groups will always be fundamentally opposed: some people want challenge to "matter", and others don't.

Whether cheat codes are available at a game's release doesn't make a difference. After all, PvE skills and consumables weren't added until much later in the GW product cycle, but somehow GW is allegedly worse for it even though you aren't playing it for the first time. And again, consider the case of Starcraft. Does a game suddenly become bad once you know there are cheat codes?

You're on the right track. Keep going.

Re: Bryant,
While every level in Doom might not have a BFG with infinite ammo, you are allowed to use cheat codes on every level. By your reasoning, what's the point of learning how to play Doom without cheat codes when you can just use cheat codes? If you're going to argue that learning how to play GW without PvE skills and consumables is pointless just because you could use PvE skills and consumables, then there's never any point in learning any game without cheat codes, right? Someone brought up the fact that cheat codes in Starcraft can't be used in competitive play, but PvE skills and consumables can't be used in GW PvP either. That's not the salient difference.

Actually, mastering the shotgun is learning a new skill "to the best of your ability". That's what you were originally concerned with, right? Would you ever bother to master the shotgun if you could use a different weapon? Does learning the shotgun not teach you anything that is applicable to other weapons? Going back to DMC, why do people bother to beat the whole game with Force Edge or without guns? Where's the point? For one, it's incredibly fun to them, and for another, it makes them better players. After all, if you can beat the game with the worst weapon in the game, it ought to be a complete walk in the park when you can use better weapons right?

It's impossible for us to say if Epic did the right thing with Gears of War, because we simply don't have the relevant data. It's possible (likely, even) that they'd have gotten more players if they'd toned down the hardest difficulty level. Sure, you and I might think that makes the game "worse", but that's not what concerns a company.

I've been following this thread off and on and thinking about it while playing. These are some of my own observations regarding quality of players. Now before I start, I do realize there are many people playing through the game for the nth time and there are some places you just don't want to play anymore but... for anyone who still plays PVE, how many outposts/towns with people in them can you go to without seeing LFR to X, what I mean is a lot of ppl don't even play the game to have a chance to improve. They make a character, find out where the "good stuff" is and then get run all the way there, once there they are horrible because they haven't played anything leading up to it to have a chance to have an idea of what to do when they get to their destination. I started GW and played a war (frontline) and did so for a long time, then my friend convinced me to make a monk(back), now I had exp in the game, kinda knew what to expect content wise, but playing through I had to learn how to play the new character, so when I got to the end I had some exp playing that role, now I just made an ele(mid) and the same thing, no runs anywhere but I now have an idea of how to play a caster. I can totally understand why people chose to play mostly H/H, I got to Gate of Madness and thought, hey it may be fun to do this with some people, I had played most of the way through NF by myself and wanted to try and play with some people as I do enjoy it. However, after my 2nd group, a couple of wasted hours, some /facepalm, and a couple epic failures, I said to hell with it, put together a H/H team and went and did the mission with masters. Now I am by no means an expert and would most certainly get my butt whipped in PvP but for me I enjoy PVE and when I am going to do a mission or play an area, I'll have a peek at wiki or something and try and be somewhat prepared for what I'm going to face. So many people I have played with don't even have an idea of what the objective is of what they are trying to do and it is just frustrating after a while. Another place it shows that people just rush through/skip large portions of content (and thus an opportunity to learn/improve) is the amount of people who complain they are broke. I don't mean broke as in "I can't afford a mini Panda" I mean broke as in all the people spamming " can anyone spare 500g/10 bolts of cloth/20wood planks, etc", for Pete's sake, dip your toe in the friggin water, go outside town, kill 10-15 monsters and get the friggin stuff yourself! Not every foe has to drop an ecto/obsi shard, VS, etc. and heck, if they did that they may even learn something about the game. /end rant Sorry, this came out way longer than I meant but I think those are some major problems in people's lack of ability/knowladge of the game.

That's a good question, when I referenced to above:

Not really. Mastering the shotgun is pointless because there's never going to be a situation that requires it when the double barreled shotgun does three times the damage at only double the reload time, and your aiming skill is far better examined through using the chaingun. The only thing it tests is your patience, which is much better done with the pistol...and which is much better done by not using any weapons at all.

Just because you spent more time doing a task often doesn't make you a better player. If I beat a game using the pistol over any other weapon, that only means that the fight encounters were simply lengthened. I'd still do everything I normally do, it would just be as though all the monster's health was quadrupled by a shit done and your ammo was increased by the same amount. It just makes the fight longer.

The fists are the only "bad" weapon that may make you a better player since being able to dodge those projectiles at close range requires some pretty tight reflexes, but that's only because you have to be next to the baddies to use it. You'd be able to practice the same skills with any weapon as long as you run up to them pointblank.

If we don't have the relevant data how come it's safer to assume they'd have gotten more players toning down the hardest difficulty level? Is it on the simple basis that most players aren't that good? How do we know that most of those players even care?

In any MMO, the amount of 'good' players will most likely hover around 10%. Sad, but true; not everyone can be good at MMO's. The idea of any MMO having a population where 25% of the players are good at the game is unrealistic. Why? Because that's saying that 1 out of every 4 players you run into have proficient knowledge of the entire game and could competitively play at a high level. That means either the game is extremely shallow and not skill based, or the player base is robots.

For reference, my definition of 'good' is being able to do something successful or well

That is all nice and good Zeff, but the point is "why does other people skill matter to you?"

If you like meat and want to have meat for lunch you not going to a vegetarian place. Likewise, you can and should choose the people you wish to play.

Like Burst Cancel is saying most are after recognition, not the challenge. In my opinion, those persons should be playing PvP and get their recognition, not wishing to FORCE challenge on other people when they can create the challenge to themselves.

Guess they aren't good enough to play GvG so need to be slightly better than the mediocre...

The point of "why does other people's skill matter to you" is that this is a multiplayer game and because of that I like to play with other people. While sometimes I can chose who I play with, friends, guildies etc, that is not always possible. And while I wouldn't expect everyone to be "good" I would expect that in a certain number of attempts one should be able to find enough (only need 7 sheesh) other people to be able to accomplish what you are tring to do instead of coming to the end of your play time and feel like it was just wasted. At that point it was not time spent having fun, which is why I play, it just feels like an exercise in frustration. I don't expect to succeed 100% of the time, that isn't fun either as there is no challenge then, I would expect though that people have some idea of what it is they are doing or trying to do. I guess what I am trying to say is that while failure happens, if you at least have an understanding of your role you can make adjustments and hopefully succeed, if you have no clue because you skipped all the basics to prepare you for your current situation, that just makes it frustrating for those playing with you.

No. You want to play with people that see the game like you.