Newe Olde Ascalone Feedbacke

By now, i'm sure that most people know this has become something of a monthly tradition with me - I like to gather up feedback from players during and after the BWEs so it can be passed on to those that need to see it. In this case, the big addition to this weekend is Old Ascalon, and it could use a lot of feedback.

What did you think of the area in general?
How well do you think it functions as a tutorial?
Did you look around for optional side quests, or just do what was necessary to move on?
Anything else you'd like to add?

First, I looked really really nice. I think its a really cool tutorial, it gets away from the normal follow this path, kill this guy, now you can start, method that most games use. I think I did most of the side quests, but for some reason, on one of the quests some person was supposed to follow me, but she never would, so I gave up. I was a Monk promary and we where supposed to capture some guy.(sorry about lake of details, it was between 3-5a.m.). A little clearer warning about the no turning back after joining the acadamy would be nice, I know a lot of people didn't even know they where supposed to get a secondary.

I love the detail they put into the tutorial level, but I agree with Fezz how their should be more warnings before the transition. While you're supposed to have spent some time in the academy training as the world changes, it doesn't really convey that in the cutscene.

Maybe they could add one or two mini-missions inside the academy (I thought I was warped to the wrong place when it dumped me into a pvp game), that are tied towards the eventual invasion, this at least would make the transition to ruined ascalon seem less abrupt.

I had the same problem Fezz did with the girl following me around. It was whats-her-name right beside Warmaster Whossname to whom we were not supposed to mention disloyalty to the King. The first two people as you entered Green Hills County. She was a Warrior, and just past them was a Monk- I can't remember these people's names!

I submitted a bug report anyway.

I spent a lot of time exploring and really liked the area as a whole. There were moments of special achievment, etc... I liked getting up into the mountains.

Eventually, of course, I felt the urge to move on, to better monsters and such. I was expecting a bad time with the opening PvP portion of the Academy, but that was... surprisingly easy.

I love the openness of it -- the way all the areas link up in multiple ways, as opposed to linearly in order. The quests, although more traditional MMO fare than the missions in the later game world, are fairly entertaining and do a good job of making me forget that the areas are instanced. The art design of course is brilliant. Easily one of the best-looking areas in the game that I've seen.

Oh, and are you gonna add anything to the northern area? I undertand it's supposed to be the charr army... (I even saw a bunch of them around the altar they use to ruin ascalon) There are players good enough to sneak around the charr there, but the lack of anything worthwhile in the area makes it feel a bit pointless :/

Oh, and the last cutscene. The charr cast a spell, and everyone fell down and went boom? It wasn't very clear what exactly happened. Here's hoping there's a cool FMV that makes more sense in the retail version

Yeah, I love the new area, too. It took me a while to figure out what direction was up, but once I got settled it was a blast. I'm actually looking forward to starting a new level 1 character to try to do more of the quests then I did. I agree that there should be a much clearer warning before going to the academy. I didn't have an issue with it, but people have. The Charr dance of death at the end of the Acadmey mission was pretty anti-climactic. I thought, "Hmm...If that's all it took, how did Ascalon last so long...LoL". It needs a more dramatic and exciting transition, IMO.

The best looking area in the game by far. Decent introduction, but for a game as complex as Guild Wars for idiots to pick up on, it needs more description on what is going on. Also, way too boring after a while. Once you have explored it all, it makes it hard to want to go back. The reason for this being is the lack of social interaction.

My favorite thing about this area though? It is possible to leave with only one profession. Sure a lot of newbies do it, but this is something I have wanted out of Guild Wars since I started, the ability to be just one profession and specialize. Thanks for this.

It would be nice to add some missions to this area that are group oriented. Also, it sucks leaving this area and fighting the same low level beings for the next five hours until you reach mission three or four (this is also while exploring Old Ascalon and other things once you leave the newbie region). Perhaps a level cap of three?

I liked it. But the only problem i could find is that the quests were hard to find, and that the no-turning back portion of the academy was hard to understand. I had made a level 7 Ranger, no second job, as it had no idea i was supposed to, and had barely gotten through the first defend the wall mission.

I will manage to wipe out those Charr at the Flame Temple at least once. I don't know how yet, but it will be done.

Peace,
-CxE

Ensign, if we can group up to do it... I'll come with you

it is so ironic to me that they made this exquisitely beautiful area... but after a little while you leave and can never go back. i also hated the running i had to do. the greatest thing about GW to me was that i could just do mission > autoteleport > next mission > etc.

I posted in the main suggestions, but I'll sum it up:

-I felt like it was made under the assumtion new people who play also happen to be idiots.

-It was slow paced, little to no action, lots of aimless running.

-It looked really nice, I mean really really nice.


If there was less running, started out with 5 skills, 10 stat points to alloc, and in the middle of a battle area, it would be much nicer. Hell you can even have it, if new players die in the new area within the first 5 minutes, they auto-res on spot 3 seconds later to kill kill kill some more.

In my suggestions I asked that they make some things even more 'simple stupid'. You are a veteran gamer Kunt0r, and I brought two people who had never played a video game in their life in to test the tutorial and in a few places it actually needs to treat you like you are even more of an idiot.

I don't think they were personally trying to offend you, but to help brand new gamers. In some places, it needs even more simplistic explanations for those exact users.

I think I covered some of this in the suggestion thread, but just incase it gets lost in the rest of my ramblings there:

I really really like the area.
I think it does rather poorly as a tutorial (though that's not the area in itself so much as the communication to the user).
I looked around for as long as I could, before sadly realising the time had come to move on. (as there was nothing else there to do)
Why make such a nice, large, fun, pretty area when most people wont stay there long enough to see everything, and will never get to go back? It's a crying shame.

I would prefer a tutorial like back in the WPE (say for instance you start outside the town, some NPC is there, some relative or such "well, you're really sure you want to go to the city and join the army? I know life on the farm is tough, but.. fine fine, I can see it in your eyes. Well it can't be helped, but before you do go I'd like you to help me with a few things, and maybe I can teach you something in the process." He then gets you to do things like run over and get a weapon, clear out some bug that's harassing his field which drops some salvage item. He gives you a salvage kit and shows you how to work it. Does other basic things (like you did in the WPE). Then says something like "Well, I guess I've run out of things to keep you here with so I guess it's time for goodbye. I might not ever see you again (leading in to the whole 'searing' aspect)... Make sure to remember everything I said! If you ever run in to trouble I'm sure there will be people around to help you, good luck!" THEN you go to Old Ascalon. With the basics under control so you can get into the more open ended area without feeling lost. This might allow you to make this new fun area less babyish too, which makes it more fun for others.

Make the requirements for entering the academy also include getting a second class or at least highly recomend it.

Add a mission in the catacombs (and explain in more detail what it is and why it is there.. I mean, a whole city of undead right in sunny ascalon.. and yet peoples greatest fears are of the critters in their fields? Everyone is way too happy in ascalon considering the landscape is covered in raiders, bears, etc... I find some Royalist elementalist past all these raiders, yet no one ever bothers to care raiders are rampaging over the lands?)

More reference to the Charr (oh, the monk in the abbey had a vision eh? "oh well" says the good Lord when you tell him "lets hope it wasn't true". With a commander like that no wonder they got pwnt!. :P )

The Searing and the Academy:
Explain the fact that you survived the searing where the others did not because you were off on a mission away from the town. Add a sense of time in to it. You feel like you go straight out of the academy in to this dicky little punishment task. Make you feel like you earnt you spot in the academy and this is your mission. Perhaps have a cut scene before the mission bit, after the pvp battle (well done, you have entered into the rank of yadda yadda.. then you get the bully sergent "so you think you're a warrior now eh? well we'll see, I think you're soft, etc.. this is your first mission. you'll be up away from the main town on this one, no chance to run back home to your mum when things get rough so pay attention and listen up!)
Perhaps add some continuity by getting this bully sergent to come up to you when you finish the mission and see the searing, explaining it to you. "oh shit, something has happened.. the warnings were true! the Charr have unleashed some magic attack... damnit Tydus(I really should check that spelling) why didn't you listen!! look how the fields burn befure us.. no time to mourn, we must organise resistance. Fall in!")
Then have another cut scene with action of the battles in the aftermarth, leading up to you falling back to ascalon city where you start the real game.

Anyway...

I think they did a good job, especialy given that it was probably quite rushed in order to give us a look at it this BWE.

Oh, you can pair up for it, just like every other newbie area.

The problem?



For those who haven't been there, here's the synopsis - four bosses - Elementalist, Mesmer, Monk, and Necromancer. Three packs of three Charr - two Axe Fiends and a Martyr - as well as several other packs of 5-7 assorted Charr that patrol in and out of the area. These aren't your favorite level 3-4, Fort Ranik Charr - no, these are level 7 beasties.

You can't pull one Charr at a time - you have to take the whole pack. They'll follow you to the ends of the level, they never retreat back to guard a set point. To a pair of low level characters with starter gear and skills, they're a bloody nightmare. Of course, you can't snipe any of them, either.

With a pair of level 9s I was able to pick off the packs of 3 without too much trouble. The packs of 5 are lethal, though - they stack Conjure / Siphon, and you just can't race it with healing. I can knock out a couple of 'em, but eventually you're worn down, someone breaks, and then everyone dies.

It's clearly a 3-4 person area, but you're stuck with a limit 2 - hence, wiping out the flame temple is the 'lowbie challenge'.

Of course, when you want to do something a little less trying, there's always appledance:



I swear, I had more fun with the magical anti-gravity apples than anything else this weekend.

Peace,
-CxE

lol, i did that apple thing too... i just tell ppl i glued it on for stage show purpose.

I been to the charr area as well... really got our butt whooped... We cant really take them on or anything... I think we have the best chance if we are able to drag a few other species of mob to the charr... then succefully let them fight each other, while picking on the charr one by one... of course... tough >_< it would really take practice..

As a tutorial map, its too big. Don't get me wrong. I like the expansiveness of pre-seared Ascalon but to function as a tutorial, there has to be more control. For those of us that have been playing since the WPE and the BWEs, everything is pretty obvious and we just have to know where to find what we need. For new players, its quite overwhelming to be dumped into one huge town with so many things happening at once. Information overload I would say.

Other than that, the place is awesome. Too bad we can't go back to it later. I've only encountered one quest which has follow up quests. It would be nice to have more of those.

The quests were pretty reasonable, in general. Some required you to run around a bit much, but most of 'em were the fast paced, run and go style that I love about the game. The 'collector' quests were awful. Go pharm this stuff? Whatever. At least let people craft the stuff they get from the pharming quests, instead of playing the 'oh, where's the dork that will give me new boots for skeletal arms or whatever?' game.

I'd like more control over the starter skills I get. Being able to not take the Res Signet is a huge bonus in my book - once you're high level it's just annoying having to scroll past that pile every time I want to change skills. Expand on that - let people accept or decline individual starter skills. Give people a dozen to choose from at the different trainers.

The secondary profession needs to be a bit more prominent - or, more importantly, the 'no turning back' nature of entering the academy needs to be made mind-numbingly clear. Being able to play around with the secondaries was a nice touch, but that needs to be expanded upon - a one shot test of Conjure Phantasm and Imagined Burden, without attributes, doesn't really tell me much about the Mesmer except that it's a bad Necromancer. More skills to test, more to choose from.

Everything in old Ascalon needs to be doable in the post-searing world. You don't want people crippling themselves if they don't get their second profession, or their belt pouch, or whatever. It doesn't have to be pretty, but it should be there.

The Catacombs are gorgeous. That they aren't accessable outside the first couple hours of the game is a tragedy.

Let people charm the Fern Lizards. And Bears. And Moss Spiders. Is that really going to break anything?

The arrows on the minimap for quests need to be made more prominent for new players. For those of you who missed it, when you clicked on a subquest in your quest log, you got a little green arrow on your minimap that pointed you towards the objective. That feature was, in a word, amazing. Every new player should be made aware of the arrow, it's a huge time saver.

I enjoyed the lowbie area a whole lot more than I expected I would - I went there whenever I just wanted to zone out, which was pretty much the entire weekend. Great job guys. Just do some debugging / touchup work, and you're good to go.

Peace,
-CxE

When I first played GW in E3, I had no issues picking up the gameplay and going with it, and neither did my friends. And back then, there wasn't any info on it, it was all self-taught, straight forward. Now when I introduce new friends to it, people I've PvP'd with for years and years, they quit the game within an hour or two due to it being horrendously confusing and boring. Half the time I was in the new area, I was at a complete loss as to what to do, and I've played the game for many many hours. It sucks because the few people who quit due to the ultra-bunk intro stuff, haven't and probably wont ever try the game again, and these are long-time clanmates. I don't know what Anet is thinking, I don't know who came up with the idea, but they should seriously take a step back, play some online games, and then go back to the drawing board. It seems as if the people who designed this new area haven't ever played an online game in their life. My mind can't even comprehend how someone can like this new area. Even my hardcore PvE buddy's don't like it. One of em quit the new area after 30 minutes saying, and I quote "wow this game has gone to s---". And I agree.

E3 = More fun then I've ever had, coolest intro to a game
Oct/Nov/Dec = Uhhhhh??? I hope this is just experimentation
Feb = Is this a joke? This idea is 1000x worse then bags.


I'm looking forward to March, can't wait to see how much worse Anet can make it. And thank god (for now) we can skip it all together. For retail.....gonna pay someone to play it for me.

I could write for ever and ever how dumb of an idea it is, and provide hundreds of solutions to it, but there's no point. It will continue on a path of bunkness never getting fixed, who knows how many more people will turn away from the game just due to a simple introduction Anet somehow managed to break. If I didn't play in E3, but started playing today, there's no way I would consider this game being even mediocre. 30 mins in trashland and I'd hit "exit" then uninstall the game for ever, making sure everyone I knew didn't bother wasting time with it.

I really really liked the starting area. This is my first BWE, and I totally am in love with the game. One complaint I have is that the whole "YOU CAN'T EVER GO BACK" should be much more blatantly obvious before joining the academy. I did it and realized little Thom will never get his cape =(.

But besides that I was in AWE at how expansive the starting area is. I explored for over an hour and I don't think I got near uncovering all of it. Theres tons of little quests and fun things to do, one thing I would suggest though is that they make the collectors a quest. A couple times I'd end up with 5 seeds or rocks or whatever and I had completely forgotten who was asking for them to begin with. A couple of the quests also didn't update, and I /bug'd them. But hey, it's still beta and from what I understand this is the first time anyone has gotten to play with this area, so it's going to be buggy.

I'm a huge fan of PvE and PvP combat, as soon as I entered the post apocalyptic world I jumped into the arena (even though I was only level 5 or something haha) and my team did great, we went for something like 10 rounds before eventually losing.

Anyway what I'm trying to say is that saying this opening area sucks dumbfounded me enough to write out this post. That has to be the most complete, comprehensive starting zone ever seen by the MMORPG world. The fact that you can spend HOURS of time there and not do everything, or you can walk over and immediately skip all of the opening content by just hoping into the academy. It's mind boggling they would devote that much time to an area that tons of people are just going to skip over.

It gets two big thumbs up from me, I hope they do keep it in the final release of the game.

Hey Kuntor, if you seriously want to see the area changed to something you approve of ,you can't just pass it off as "oh its bad and it always will be." Hell, a simple "skip tutorial" feature would solve all of your problems but you don't bother to mention even something that simple. There are a lot of ways they could play around with it, allowing "training mission" pvp fights before you enter the acadamy, giving more direction for new players, and allowing vets to leave very quickly without doing any quests if they don't want to.

Personally I really enjoyed the area, and I think it needs more action, an overarching theme/conflict to be more apparent, and maybe low-level pvp that you can play (without leaving forever!).

Skip Tut was already mentioned somewhere, since there's 3-4 topics across a few forums about the new area, I don't write everything everywhere. But if it was skipped, would you auto get your 2nd class and 8 skills or so? Without having to grind for them.

At the risk of agreeing with kunt0r, I have to agree that the "Fast, Furious, Fun" feeling has vanished from the tutorial.

It would be nice if you could directly enter the Acadamy and there would be Skill/Profession vendors. This would also give one last chance to get the second profession.

The outside Explorable Area with its quest system would be for people that wanted to test and sample. For people that knew what they wanted and wanted to "Rush" to 20, it would not be required to explore.

Yes, I liked the new area but, the game isn't just for me.
It was also more confusing than I would have expected. I introduced a friend to the game and they also felt the tutorial was rather drawn out.

OK I went and played through the quests in the pre destruction of Ascalon, and I must say it was impressive. I was level 10 before I entered the academy (cause I knew that was the change over to post destruction).

I was able to acomplish each quest with much greater ease becasue of the compass aides (which I did not find later in the game). These visual cues from the compass seemed to be activated by which ever quest you had last looked at in your quest log. Very nice feature to have. However after the fall this did not seem to work any longer...

There did seem to be one pre fall quest I could not accomplish (loyalty to the king, or true king) the one where you have to talk to 3 residents of barradin estate area... I could only find 2. but that may have been just me...

What I am asking about in this post is after the fall, you can not finish that quest so it should have been wiped out for the rest of the game, but it was not. It remained on the quest log the rest of the time I played with that character.

So two suggestions for this issue:

1: After the Fall of Ascalon City clear the quest log of incomplete quests, since they can not be finished from that point forward.

2: After the fall, I would like to see the compass still help you on the quests by continuing to point you towards your selected quest (from the quest log) step goal. Very helpful for multi part quests...

Ingram of Haz Ranger/Warrior
[SIZE=2]=HT=Ingram www.hazteam.net[/SIZE]

This is probably a good solution to those who want action action action.

I sincerely think from the 2 brand new gamers-of-any-kind I brought to test it that it is just right in pace - but there needs to be more tutorial and popup.

But for those who want action and dynamite from the get go, need that option.


Also, one of them spent an hour farming baked husks to buy me a pair of boots, and then found they couldnt because they were not the right class to purchase them.

It might be nice to allow any class to buy any item for those farm quests, just give them a popup that they cannot use them are they sure they want to buy them? And then they can give them as a gift.

Agreed.

Hah! I wish I had one of those magic compasses in real life, pointing me at the next life goal . But no, I disagree. It takes away all the fun of exploration and RPGs are 1/2 exploration. I am sure you'd find it useful, but I do not like my games "dumbed down" (I do not mean to offend you). It was the case with Freelancer which was transformed into something unplayable and bland. You can always team-up with someone who alreay knows the are and he'll show you arround: Guild Wars is about teamwork .

Old Ascalon aka Newbie land, is simply breath taking, vast in size and will appeal to the majority of the players new to GW. One can spend endless hours in this area exploring and questing.

There is work to be done with the quests as was remarked in the suggestions thread, replace some of the exp rewards with gear for example. More skill choices would be a plus and uping the levels on some mobs would be great also.

The party limit was too low which deters the sense of community. Joining the Academy was a totally confusing experiance, this needs to be reworked so that it is clear what the consecquences of this action entails.

Overall newbieland was great just needs some tweaking and polish, please read the suggestions thread carefully because the posters have covered all the points that need to be addressed.

As for the point of view that Kunt0r is voiceing, I can understand where he's coming from. This game promotes the fact that they have done away with the leveling grind. So give the option to folks who dont want to level grind to get to the meat of the game which is PvP this game is called Guild Wars not EQ2. By making it optional GW can satisfy both these mind sets.

Once a person has been through an area a few times it becomes a grind. Most gamers who have been around the block with other games are not really interested in repetitive game play. It gets old very fast .. been there .. done that.

IF GW wants folks to go out and grind makes it so that if a player does this he is rewarded with an uber item or skill vs opting for the quick levels.

Pax

There is a map bug on the pre destruction area on the wall gate.

Where the lever is to the gate below along the wall to the northern territories.

The eastern area at the top has no railing and a sloped hill going down. but you can not get through there. You have to go up and down the stairs to the west to get to the lever that opens the large gate doors. I assume that there is suppose to be a railing graphic there and it was missed... But the engine knows you don't get through that way.

Also I was getting a lot of stuck points in the Catacombs. near walls especially... No visual obstacle but you can not go any further... Sometimes looping back and then around an invisible blockade or something like that.

And lastly... somehow my game got stuck in visual block mode using f12 key(I just quit and came back in to fix it). I use that key to talk on teamspeak, so it was a shock to see the graphics change on me. Anyhow it did wire frame and blockmode, then back to normal like a toggle. I changed my talk key to prevent that happening again, but I thought I should mention it. I think it was ctrl f12 that did it...

That would be nice but I think of the second profession as a bonus to playing the beginning part of the game. as is the belt and class clothes. If you skip those then you dont get them. Plus the new part is HUGE. I was thinking it needed some more bosses or something besides just the side quests, cause its a game in and of itself really... I could have easily spent my entire time just in those areas. And if I would have been here for previous beta events I probably would have. But as it was I wanted to see the rest of the game as well.

I look at it like this... If you purchase the game brand new at release, it will be good for them to go through all of that pre destruction missions and quests. They dont know whats going to happen so its not too big a deal to them. For us that are playing it from the beta we are privy to a lot more then the average joe playing it for the first time, so we may be inclinde to skip forward faster... But I would think that is a rare thing. Now making new characters on the same account... I can see the problem. But having to go through the full beginning for new accounts would be expected at least once.

I agree... Now that I am seeing this as a tutorial. But what a tutioial!!!! It's a game in and of itself. It makes sence that its in the first part and not the second now that I am reading this in that context.

Thank you...

The Good
- The art is outstanding. Really awesome.
- The academy cinematics explains the searing (although more details could be useful)
- The green dots/arrows on the mini map is incredibly useful.
- The secondary profession experimation is original.
- The slow learning curve is probably good for beginners and newcomers to online gaming.

The Bad
- The selection of starting skills is a little disappointing (at least for my monk): way too much smitting and few skills in other lines.
- Quite a lot of running and some upsetting FedEx quest.
- The academy quest should be cleared stated as a no return point. I was disappointed to leave the area sooner than I wanted to.
- Small party only, no lobby with groups of four.
- I really liked the old quick start of new characters (even when I played GW for the first times), I wish the current slow start can become optional. I'd like a quick start option (with classical starting skills) to quickly move to side quests.

the Ugly
- The ephemeral aspect of this area (no going back after academy) is really bad. I'd like to come back! We're already able to warp through space with the map feature, please add a time warp feature to travel to pre/post searing.
- The tutorial side has to be redone entirely. The old solo intro was better.
- The secondary profession selection is very confusing for newbies (at least in its current state).
- I couldn't find any tutorial on how to use runes, dyes or weapon components. And I saw a lot of questions in the channels post searing.
- The bags! Where's my storage capacity? I like to store stuff for later or for guild mates (even if it's not valuable). Paying 100g (or more) for a bag is not fun, where's the accomplishment in having a new bag? It's really an ugly feature cloned from WoW-like grinders.

My $0.02.

This past weekend was my first experience playing Guild Wars. My thoughts on the game as soon as I started were "Wow! This looks visualy fantastic!".
After my initial "Look at all the pretty colors" feeling wore off I actually started to play the game.

At first I was a bit frustrated with figuring out the controlls and such but that soon passed and I was uprooting Aloe Seeds like there was no tommorow.

I got lost....lots. Especially when trying to find the second (or would she be the third?) Necromancer trainer in the Greenhills near the Warmaster and Monk. Was told to follow the road to the northwest...well..That "road" looked an aweful lot like a "Path" to me.

So ok, I *do* eventually find her and do my thing...I am Level 4 now and enter the academy, like many who have already stated this, there really does need to be more clarification on not being able to get another profession after you begin Academy Training.

But oh well, it was only perhaps 2 1/2 hours of time spent on a Character that I soon deleated and rerolled anew.

I feel those 2 1/2 hours was still time well spent as I became more familure with the controlls, the npc's, map, and gameplay in general.

Overall my experience was a great one for a few reasons:

The Graphics - Just amazing.

Henchmen - After dying LOTS and LOTS because of others mistakes, I choose to hire on a few henchmen till I reached level 9 or so. Made things alot better......(but the AI seems to make a few poor choices in stategy as well sometimes lol)

The Storyline/Plot It kept me wanting to see what was going to happen next!

It's Still Beta It is still beta. I was able to experiment with all sorts of builds (albiet all but two were below 10th lvl) and see what each had to offer.
Another thing is with this being a Beta, I had low expectations going into the game and was greatly surprised at what I found. And lastly, knowing it was a Beta I wasnt too critical of errors and bugs, just sent a /bug to let people know what I had found.
And I didnt get attached to my characters because I knew there was to be a wipe soon.

So, in closing, I think this is a fantastic game that has many great aspects to it and it just needs a bit of tweaking.

I did the same thing....then I left the area she and Warmaster were in and she was there waiting for me.

The big problem with old ascalon is that it's too spread out and open ended for a newbie area. The beauty of starting people out in an early mission like Ascalon One is that the goals are all laid out for you - there's no exploring, no questions about where what is or what you should be doing. You can just focus on the game mechanics and getting familiar with the interface. In the current tutorial, after getting your first two skills it's incredibly open ended, and to someone who isn't familiar with the game navigating across multiple maps to find your secondary skill trainer is a lot more than you want to give someone that has maybe 5 minutes of experience with the game. Do you really expect a new player to wind his way all the way down to the Elementalist trainer to get that secondary without any prior experience with the game?

I think the best way to address this is to use the academy, having separate introductory and graduate courses. Instead of giving someone the first quest to get skills outside of town, put up an option to take the introductory course, where you put people on rails - here are some temp skills, here's how you target, here's an instance wall, etc. Go over all of the basics. This is of course completely skippable for everyone else. After that, drop people into the wilderness and let them mess around a bit before going on to the graduate course, what is currently 'entering the academy'. That makes learning the game a bit more straightforward, while still letting people get in and out of the area quickly if they so desire.

Peace,
-CxE

I think the best way to do it really would be to missionize the old ascalon area. Make the catacombs a big mission allow groups of 1, 2, 3 and 4.

In the first mission, you solo with two skills, and at the end of that mission you are granted a couple more skills, levels, whatever.

The second mission would be the first group experience with a whomever. ou would be duoing. At the end of the mission you would be "split up" and be placed in a room somewhere in which they detail the importance of a secondary profession (I like that they are not required anymore), and allow you to pick one or not. If you do, they give you a few secondary skills, if not, more primaries. Perhaps the catacombs can be used for this mission.

The third mission would be a trio, maybe a treck through the snowy mountains to slay the beast that has been terrorizing local wizards and the people in the instance nearby (turn the instance into the outpost maybe).

The fourth would be leaving ascalon, and it would be sure to tell you that, blatantly, you will never return to ascalon the same. You will be without friends and family, before entering the mission, be sure to tie up all loose ends and do what you want to do. Then they will start the PvP and how it has already been done.

Just an idea on how to make things easier and more structured as a tutorial/learning area should be. Still allow for exploration and questing of course, but things need to be made more apparent to the person just starting out.

heya I just wanted to say that it looks like some people might want to be a "pure" ranger or warrior or...etc. So why not let them choose that as a 2nd profession and give them extra skills that aa non-pure character cant get? Also I think that you shouldn't get into the academy unless you have 2 professions..either combos or "pure"

Unfortunately I moved on rather quickly, sigh, because I wanted to finish off all the missions and get to level 20 and get elite armor(at least I got the missions done) to become the best I could in tombs and arena. I loved the tutorial, I especially loved how it brung you into skills, into a second profession, etc. I loved doing all the little missions I had time to do, and I believe Early Ascalon was one of the best and most beautiful areas of the beta so far. All in all, it was basically perfect

I totally agree with you. It was awesome, I just wished I could have explored it more , but I acidently entered the academy and there was no way back.

My comments:

1. The compass clues kept me going and I missed them immediately in the post-searing. Despite my years of gaming, I STILL get lost and can't figure out where I am. And, with the number of quests you can have going at one time, the compass cues help you remember which is what.

2. The small inventory space was a complete pain. The cost of an extra bag outrageous. I spent two days in pre-searing Ascalon and NEVER found a worn belt, nevermind five. I spent one day in the post-searing world and found one. Also, Lion's Arch is way too long to wait to be able to buy that designer-priced bag.

3. I liked the idea of collecting things and getting improved equipment or gold. However, the drops for the collectible things were very uneven. I don't know how many Ice Elementals I killed looking for the icy lodestones to buy Monk's Sandals. Not one dropped. Many other people where having the same experience. On the other hand, I collected about 30 Dull Carapaces.

4. Skale Fins need a purpose in life.

5. I ditto the comments about the clarity surrounding the Academy, coming back to the pre-searing world, and clearing quests that can't be completed.

6. I so enjoyed the pre-searing Ascalon, it would be all right with me if it were expanded a lot. However, I can understand that some players want to head off on the Grand Quest immediately, so I think letting people move on through the Academy at level 3 is a great idea. But letting those of us who want to enjoy the lush, green world stay there longer would also be very cool.


Galatea Orea
First there was Woman.
Then came man.
The rest is history.

Clearly you missed the collector right outside the Ascalon City gate who traded a belt pouch for 5 Skale Fins.

But those should be a salvage item eventually, anyway. Just selling those items for 1 gold each after the collector quests is a huge waste.

Peace,
-CxE

IMHO "Action from the get go" is funny. I hear that and think "Oh, that's a hardcore PvP player, and that's about it."

Want to skip the tutorial? Make a PvP only character. PvM and mixed players (like myself) don't mind a few quick levels to get out of the newbie area, if we want to get out quick at all.

It needs some work with the interface training, and a few things need clarified, but that's about it.