What improvements would you like to see to the new user experience?

Just imagine how off-putting it must be for a new player joining the game, once they have completed the initially interesting story/side quests from zone to zone, gaining enough XP to reach ~50 (if anything over levelling them through the initial zones.)

After this point, in order to grind the remaining levels to cap, the only realistic options available to them are to log in each day and repeat exactly the same set of boring and meaningless daily quests, in empty maps, in content which means absolutely nothing to them. We can reminisce all we want, but putting locks back in Kraken, or putting new eggs in old maps isn't going to mean anything at all to someone who is new to the game. All of those memories we have are about end game, with players the same level as us, when the relevant expansion was new and exciting.

Whether it takes new players 1 week or 1 month to grind to cap, they aren't going to gain any valuable game experience from doing that.

They aren't going to spend 2 hours with a party of determined souls trying to defeat Elite Bloodhammer in mediocre gear suffering one hit after one hit as they try to work out how tf to beat this thing. Or spend days, months on end farming fire squid on that random kraken map nobody quite knew what it was for.

They aren't going to learn with glee that you can stand basically AFK for hours with their friends in valheim tunnels, dropping locked from ubermans.

They won't enter shuyal expansion and join the frantic rush of the masses to farm elite gold puzzle boxes from undim fields in 1 minute, or spend months perfecting the pulls in the planar tombs and hitting the boss with Kelvin to avoid being 1 shot in Planar 3.

The won't stop levelling and enjoy Tindirin so they can take another year to farm the legendary set there before moving on to glintstone and stopping for another year farming fangs and orc tags.

They won't trawl forums for posts by vets on the best way to run the elites and farm the best gear of each era and learn how the skills and party dynamics have evolved through the ages.

And why would they? All of that is largely irrelevant now....

The new player experience will start when they reach the current expansion, and there is zero reason to make brand new players grind repetitive quests for days on end for no other reason that just to reach cap. In AL end game is the only game (Twink aside). And no matter how much time it takes them to get there (if they even bother at all) they are still going to find themselves largely excluded by the end game community- unable to access guilds where they could learn from skilled/experienced players, because their profile bears a sad/telltale lack of PVE kills and they have no gold to afford the best gear anyway.

Suggestions:
- Shorten the time and repetition involved in reaching 5 below cap level.
- Increase the number of XP giving quests available & the quality/quantity of story quests after Tindirin.
- Make it so that the story quests bring players quickly up to 5 levels below cap.
- When a new expansion comes, adjust the amount of XP given in quests from the previous expansion so that this still applies.
- Allow new players to access to auction
- Make respec free either (c'mon I have hundreds of respec scrolls in my inventory - the only people who can't respec "free" these days are new players and that's who need them the most)
- Consider the amount of gold you feel new players should be arriving at cap with and adjust the story quests accordingly (for inflation?)
- The new players experience shouldn't try to replicate the old players journey through the years. It should give them a taste of the game, bring them through the story, and drop them off at the door to end game where lets face it they will still have a long way to go!
- Barney is hardly the best advert for how awesome pets can be. I don't think he keeps em coming back for more.... add another "barney" type gift later in the game ( level 50?) which gives decent stats and a cool looking aa.
- Add "story quests" which point to each elite achievement, plus planar arena, and the elusives. Grant XP for these quests and better XP in elite maps.
- Add Story quests which point to the elite achievements granting free pets.
- Add more explicit explanations of each type of buff/elix and what it does.


Remove the blockers which segregate new players from old players:

- Reconsider the "Guild" lb so as to encourage guilds to be more inclusive of new players.
- Reconsider the speed set situation as "not having ss" makes it super hard for a newbie to get on board farming esg, or energy in events among other things.

What did you find the most difficult when you were first starting out?

Getting to grips with the skills / spec. I started before Kraken came out and with no respec option I remember creating my first rogue with a spec which mixed int/dex/strength and on realising I'd picked a terrible combination of skills, and that the options are pointless and I should just put all my points in dex, I remade my character to start again.

Having said that if I started now, the grind would cause me to quit before I ever capped. Early game for me, the grind was short and end game community was strong - the strength of the community is what carried me to continue levelling through every expansion since, even when the grind started getting stupidly long (Festerfang I'm looking at you.)

What would have made it easier to:

- Connect with other people in game?

-Easier method of joining a guild. Early guidance to do so.
-Guild system where by guilds are listed and new players can simply press "join". (ability to set at least a level requirement or limit number of click-to-join by gm.)
- Encourage established guilds to embrace newer players. Currently guild lb is set to encourage "old" accounts, with high numbers of PVE or PVP kills.

- Level up and collect good gear?

Get them to end game. Provide basic legendary armor/helm/weapon 5 levels below cap. Let them farm good gear in the current content along with the other 95% of the game population.

- Figure out the content (getting through the maps, events, etc.)?


The 5 min tutorial at the start works well - just extend this further through the content right through the levelling up process, as a continuous process involving the HUD as opposed to relying on new players stumbling across the right NPC.


What did you really like as a new player? What went well?

- Absolute #1 = Following story quests.
- Closely followed by finding a really good, supportive and chatty guild.
- Quickly got to cap.
- Klaas / Shaz
- Regular content updates - not very long between expansions/ new content.