Novice / Beginner / Training Hall -- General Discussion Topic

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Coming from someone who knew nothing of MMOs when I first started, I'm a firm believer in doing your homework.

As far as content goes, this community's generally very proactive about sharing tips and information. It's all out there. Skill rotations, best in slot gear lists, food buffs, etc. It's all there. But just like a book won't read itself to you, this information won't look itself up.

The answer is really that easy. Pick a job, learn the skills (READ the tooltips), then find a striking dummy and practice. Create familiarity, build muscle memory, TRY. Grab a buddy who also does the job and seems to be good at it. Pick their brain, watch them, TRY it yourself. When it comes to the content, gather up some friends and give it a go. No friends? Create a PF recruitment and clearly state that you're doing it to practice and would appreciate guidance (you'll be amazed how willing people would actually be for someone who's honestly trying hard.)

I said all that to say that, while I have high hopes for this Hall of the Novice, I don't at all expect it to be the fix for everyone. No one learns a sport, puts in a day's practice or two, then jumps straight into the championships. Same goes for music. It takes practice and repetition to "git gud". Give it your all, keep trying til you burn out. Then take a break. Then try again. At one point, it'll all just click.

[Waliel]

I think WoW's Proving Grounds was very well implemented. It had challenges for every role. The dps one required interrupts and dodging, the tank one required positioning and taunts, and the healer on required dispells and mana (mp) management which is a foreign concept to a lot of healers. There were increasingly difficult levels and defeating the most difficult one with 30 waves of enemies rewarded the player with a title <Proven Healer/Tank/Assailant>. That title alone was enough to make me do it on my main. Do you think it would work as an incentive for this game's community?

In the most recent expansion, defeating the "normal" difficulty (on a scale of easy-normal-hard-extreme) was required to use WoW's Duty Finder to queue for max level dungeons. Not sure how I feel about that, because some people in those dungeons were still pretty bad.

Silver was required to enter Heroics (Hard mode) which was faceroll difficulty. Even gold was way too easy to get for DPS. The only hard parts about it were the burn waves, and the game generously dropped +50% damage buffs on the ground that stacked and never vanished, if you didn't pick them up. You just saved them all for the hard part and got through with something resembling a rotation.

That's what it was during Draenor launch at least.

[Reisui]

Like some people said, the attitude of people needs to change.
I just had a dungeon run with a fresh player, playing as a Black Mage. She was using Freeze like 80% of the time.
I explained her, that ice should only be used to refill MP and that she should use fire as much as possible.

Her answer: I like Ice, it's pretty, so I will use that. I play how I want.

I told her that she's holding us back, that she didn't input any damage.

Her second answer: Shut Up! Don't complain about my play style.


So it's really the attitude that needs to change, because then at-least they would be open to suggestions and criticism.

[Brian_]

Like some people said, the attitude of people needs to change.
I just had a dungeon run with a fresh player, playing as a Black Mage. She was using Freeze like 80% of the time.
I explained her, that ice should only be used to refill MP and that she should use fire as much as possible.

Her answer: I like Ice, it's pretty, so I will use that. I play how I want.

I told her that she's holding us back, that she didn't input any damage.

Her second answer: Shut Up! Don't complain about my play style.


So it's really the attitude that needs to change, because then at-least they would be open to suggestions and criticism.

The attitude is obviously an issue but before we blame players for their behavior, you have to first acknowledge that this game does absolutely nothing to teach players how to play their classes correctly. For some people, a fellow player will never get through to them no matter how courteous you are. So, you put in the proper system to let them learn for themselves rather than burden them with the necessity to look outside of the game and to other players for help -- things they clearly won't do. If they still refuse to learn, then that is when you gate them out of any content where their selfishness negatively influences the user-experience of 3 other people.

[Klamor]

The key point is the incentive. There needs to be a proper incentive to completing the lessons. SE needs to take a real look at what rewards are most coveted and gate such rewards behind this mode.

Because the drive to not suck at everything one does isn't a good enough reason for a lot of people to improve on their own.

Just look at the relic. Tons of people pissed and moaned about it. And, at the end of the day, a lot are still doing it (even if reluctantly). Why? Because of the carrot on the stick.

And because the only other way to get an i210 weapon is locked behind A4S, which is locked behind A3S. Therefore, the only way for a lot of people to get an i210 weapon is the relic.

[Zojha]

I said all that to say that, while I have high hopes for this Hall of the Novice, I don't at all expect it to be the fix for everyone.

I don't expect it to have any noteworthy impact at all.

People who want to get better will get better regardless of whether it exists or not (By theorycrafting, looking for external help or via parsing, then practicing), meanwhile people who don't want to get better won't and people who can't won't either. At best it will make things more convenient for the first group, at worst it'll be wasted development time.

I'm really not overly optimistic. But then again, that means I can only be positively surprised if anything good comes out of it.

[OranKells]

so I'm of two minds on this

On one hand I have been begging for gated content. Here's hoping a training ground would put and end to things like this WoW does this to moderate success, you can't even do the harder raids until you at least rank at silver in these. Even in XI endgame didn't exist till you fought maat. Because the story and all the old content is nerfed to oblivion, there is nothing that requires 'bad' players to try to get better.


The other hand though is this gating .... what exactly? 3.2 isn't going to be adding much. More Alexander? another primal? three two expert really easy dungeons. This game is lacking in content right now and maybe I will find something to do but right now I don't know what the point of a gate will be if there is nothing on the other side. Also I fear that like everything else this is going to be tuned horribly and its either going to be stupid easy and not teach players anything or it will be set to savage extreme ridiculous hard and will be as seemingly futile as Alexander is right now to us midcore people