devtrackers.gg
As the title says, I spent the last week helping new players.
I usually sat in one of the slower "global" chats and helped people who said they were struggling with content. This means the people I helped were already a step ahead of 90% of new playerbase since they actually engaged the community instead of never asking for help. There are many ways new people mess up their builds but some of those are GGGs fault because the game does not communicate core mechanics. I'll list the most commonly overlooked mechanics below:
- Getting Ascendancies in the lab!
This has been by far the biggest sin. Lab is very easy to skip, nothing in the game tells you it's character defining and if you are new it's easy to forget about it. Nothing links the puzzles you get in zones with the green door in Act 3. I have talked to a few people who got to maps without completing a single lab, quite a few others did the first one and didn't know it had 4 stages.
SOLUTION: Having a "tutorial" style pop-up every time you complete a given trial for the first time. It should show you where to find the lab and your current progress. Having a pop-up would indicate the lab is VERY important. The first 6 trials for lab should also always be "discovered" on the trial Plaque and tell you which zones they are found in. The map trials on the other hand should always list the name and say "Found randomly in maps". The tutorial popup should have a "Never show me Labyrinth tutorials again" tickbox not to annoy the more experienced players.
- Resistance Penalties
The fact you lose resistances is communicated by a single, quickly disappearing sentence that nearly everyone misses because it appear RIGHT AFTER a major boss fight with a lot of other things still happening on screen and Sin doing Sin things.
SOLUTION: This also calls for a pop-up. It should appear after the Kitava fight and you are already safe in Docks/Oriath. It should explain you lost resistances, urge you to open your character defences tab, should show your current resistances and explain the game is balanced around having them at 75%. This should also help with an issue many players have where they concentrate on Uniques more than on well rolled rares.
- Ignoring the Pantheon Upgrades
Most players, even many experienced ones, forget about the Pantheon. The lack of Pantheon is not as gamebreaking as not having Lab but it's a good defensive layer and new players need all help they can get.
SOLUTION: Allow us to invite Sin to our Hideout and have him explain what the Vessels actually do once we get to maps.
- Customising Loot Filters
Many new players don't realise different/custom loot filters are even possible.
SOLUTION: The game should give us more, stricter loot filters (unlockable as you level up) and should show a tip that you can customise them on the loading screen.
- Private Player profiles
One of the largest hurdles I had to go through was the fact all new player profiles are Private. The settings to make your profile public is pretty well hidden on the main site and is not intuitive.
SOLUTION: "Make my profile public" should be an ingame option. It'd be pretty good if the profiles were public by default, and you could simply "Make profile private" if you don't want anyone to spy on you.
To end on a positive note, I found the new players don't struggle with finding a build (streamers and youtubers do a great job promoting their guides) , they don't struggle with their skill tree and they don't struggle with finding uniques on the trade site (rares are another matter altogether).
If you made it this far, thank you for your attention! Hopefully this brings the issues to light!
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