Pretend you're a new player

Community General Discussion
1

Imagine you are trying to get into WoW. The entire storyline is a hot mess. You have no idea what a raid is or how it works and nothing in the game really explains this to you. The game doesn’t teach you to use all your abilities or how dungeons work. The leveling process really fails as a tutorial.

Honestly, they should have opened the experience as a new player with you being the hero of azeroth and you’re on a gunship/zeppelin and you are shot down and lose your memory temporarily. Allies guide you back to your senses and teach you the ways you have forgotten. This would serve as an excellent tutorial of abilities and game mechanics. I liked the idea behind that new isle, but it should have been done in a lot more detail this way. Also, giving people abilities each level is dumb. It is better to give a new player access to all of their core abilities right away so they can learn.

When you go to choose what campaign to level in, you should be able to talk to someone and see a long, detailed 10-15 min summary of cinematics explaining what happened in each expansion. It should be a nice narrative that tells the heroes what they did so they can catch up and understand the story.

You should also never design an expansion with this many currencies and “systems”. New players will be completely turned off by this. It is all artificial complexity that really adds nothing to the game.

Honestly, WoW has a natural attrition rate and if you do not include new players and keep designing the game to be more exclusive, it will inevitably die.

TLDR: The game needs to be coherent for a new player. It needs to make sense on day 1 for a brand new player, and it needs to have a compelling route to hook the player and get them excited to play.

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3

I’m pretty sure my reaction if I’m a new player is “who is this diamond dwarf and why does he keep calling me champyun?”.

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4

How about you stop assuming every new player is an idiot?

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I never once said any new players were idiots. Nothing about the game is compelling for new people. Nothing about the game even teaches you how to play properly. This is a huge problem for WoW, and it will eventually kill it if it isn’t rectified. The devs seem to live in a bubble. Normal humans do not know or care what a soulbind is.

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Pretty sure this is what the new starter zone for new players is for.

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7

They did this, its called Exiles reach.

Go make a level one character and try it out.

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I did. It sucks. And as I said, they don’t teach you how to use all of your abilities or how raids work or anything really. It’s a terrible system.

One of the best things about vanilla was that it slowly taught you to use most of your abilities. You learned to use different abilities for different situations.

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Well there’s just no pleasing you then

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They teach you the basics of using your abilities, which is vastly more in depth then the game has ever had in that regard across its lifetime.

It does indeed teach you about grouping aswell.

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Or you can admit it could be better.

It’s not enough. having only 3 or 4 abilities isn’t enough.

They need to really teach people how to play.

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12

All of this sounds like a horrible idea, to be honest. No thanks.

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I mean sure, my life could be better too, but you dont see me on the forums crying about it.

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So this was me about 2.5 years ago when I got into WoW, made worse by the fact that this is my first MMORPG. Literally walked into Deadmines thinking that it was just another area to explore. No idea about dungeons or raids. Learned the hard way pretty quickly. That being said I did enjoy the leveling process through patch 7.3.5 (ie just after level scaling began).

For new players, they make you go through the new tutorial process which actually does a lot to teach you about the basic game systems and mechanics. Then it forces you to level through BfA.

Getting the rest of the story is a bit tricky but the game does allow you to go back with subsequent toons to experience the rest of the game.

Its not a perfect system but with a 16 year old game you are going to end up with a lot of legacy material that you can’t do much about. Overall the new changes in the leveling process make it a lot easier for a new player to get into the game.

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15

I got my son’s girlfriend into playing with me. Never, ever invite someone new to the game. I spent the whole day explaining things to her and had a wife/son glaring at me. Not my fault she details freak who like to know everything. Plus we get along and that seems to make everyone mad. No clue why that is.

No matter what it been a pain trying to explain all the things in the game.

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Yeah let’s have a crash course on optimal max level dps rotations at level 1 to like 15 for new players.

How about no, that’s absolutely idiotic.

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Imagine them thinking BFA being the main experience for a new player is appropriate. Jesus.

Why is that idiotic?

Why is helping new players play the damn game better idiotic?

And why is improving the new player experience idiotic?

Listen to yourselves. Why would you oppose this?

18

great post! the tutorial really leaves new players to have to intuit every important detail of the game. i think they should make interrupts and some CC available from level 1

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It’s actually not bad at all, the quests are neatly laid out and efficient, and generally have been since Cata.

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Exactly. They need to teach new players many of the abilties and interactions, both from a PVE and PVP perspective.

It is bad. I have played through it. It’s not enough. And as I said, not having your full arsenal available early on means new players won’t know what to do.

It seems like the devs live in some bubble and seem to have forgotten why people play videogames.

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21

Unfortunately, subs have been on a steady decline, and I doubt there are many new players.

1 Like