I can only speak on behalf of the new players I’ve played with, know personally, and have talked to. Primarily this is about the 1-50 experience. Only one wanted to play Shadowlands afterward and soon lost interest.
All races/classes for new players should start on Exile Island. You shouldn’t be able to skip the tutorial the game has by picking the ‘wrong’ choice.
Something that needs to be done is removing the BFA pathfinder. They find it very disappointing being told they can fly only to find out that they actually can’t because you don’t have something you can’t get access to while leveling.
I think I know why you left in BFA pathfinder in, you don’t want to rip flying away from new players whenever they enter Shadowlands. It would reasonably be a bad feeling moment for newer players. However, I think you should remove it from Shadowlands too. At the very least when the last major content patch comes out it needs to be removed on a per expansion basis I feel. It provides nothing but a negative experience for the game and each new player I know personally complained about flying.
Also, remove the unlocks for allied races. This is going to be two expansions of old content come 10.0’s release or in the case of the Legion Allied Races, already two expansions old. It is not inviting to newer players, seeing a bunch of grayed-out races they might want to be, only to be told they have to do other stuff first. Character creation is the first thing they see and a very important part of getting new players to join your game.
Here are a few things new players find confusing.
The story. You are plunged into the Battle For Azeroth Experience after the tutorial Island zone and you are swamped by a lot of characters and things you simply just don’t know about. Things just tend to happen to you for no real reason. You start off BFA With being arrested as an Alliance player.
As someone who knows the story, I know why Jaina is arrested and by extension why I am arrested but a new player can’t be expected to know that. Not only that but you don’t even need to finish all the zones to hit 50, so you’re left with even more questions as you just get shuffled off into the Shadowlands content. The BFA experience may as well be pointless to the actual handling of your character and your knowledge of the world.
It’s clunky, it’s offputting. It doesn’t let the player get invested in the world in any way. And if they want to get into the story, the game really doesn’t handle that super well.
The talents and class system aren’t explained to you very well. You are pretty much just left to experiment with them and there is no real indication of what you are doing is the right way to play. You click buttons and things die or they don’t die and you aren’t sure why.
I know of a few early roadblocks, Quite a few players I run into in the new player chat have issues with the siren in the Flynn Fairwind questline. (Not sure if you fixed that yet or not). Group quests and named NPC quests should all be made easier when the content is no longer populated by the majority of players. Across the board, for all expansions, we need things fixed like this.
I definitely agree with adding some more robust tutorials to teach players how to play their class better on some level.
And yes, please let us be in the Newcomer chat on an account-wide basis with us being able to be in it on non higher level alts.