New Player 16-39 Experience is Atrocious

[Razid1987]

I have been more or less gone from the game for about 6 years, so I am by no means an expert. I have the last few days been casually leveling in SCs on a Shaman (30/30 now), and I've experienced one of the following, either:

You win very hard.
Or
You lose very hard.

The SC I've encountered most often has been Gromril's Crossing, which I really love to play on: It's simple, fun, action packed, and not that long. But that being said, you either win very fast, or lose very fast. I don't know if I've been facing premades, though.
In my short experience, if I won one SC, I'd win all of them. If I lost one, I'd lose all of them. It was very one-sided, always. That thankfully also meant, if you got stomped, at least it was over fast, lol.
Usually a lack of either tanks or healers seems to be a problem, for the losing side. But then again, sometimes you win having 0 tanks, but a million DPS. It just depends, I guess /shrug

I don't recognize the huge difference in gaming experience that OP describes, though. Like, not at all. It's win hard/lose hard, all the way from level 3, as far as I've seen.

[Bozzax]

OP is right 16 - 40/60 (vanq) is **** if you are new to the game. Lets not pretend it is knowledge/skill

[Dabbart]

Previously this happened multiple times. When you left T1 for T2, you sucked. Left T2 for T3, you sucked. Leave T3? Well now you're R32 fighting people in SOV gear. Not to mention T2/T3 would often suffer ZERO SC pops or RvR action for days at a time, leaving newbies to effectively level solo in PvE.

New system is FAR preferable. So, remember that when you complain about it. You get a Bolster which is determined by your gear. If you actually look when pvp flagged, you'll notice you have awesome stats. Your main attack stat(int/bs/str) will be nearly softcapped(for your lvl) and your wounds/tough/resistances will be close to cap also. Stack wounds tali's, and you're actually tankier than you will be at higher levels. You hit like a wet noodle, but you're a lowbie. If the Bolster actively made lowbies threats to RR80 toons, then wtf would be the point in going to RR80? Bonus Points: Check out your PvP stats on a WH/WE lvl 1. Check out what your parry rate is, and THEN tell me the bolster isn't effective... Same goes for R16 upwards, it's just not as dramatic. W/o that bolster you'd get literally 2 shot by AAs.

I dislike the SC system of 16-39 all in one tier. But blame the playerbase for that. You have to fight RR80's at some point, it was decided at R40 was the best time. So what're you gonna do? Split up the Tiers and you get dead zones, no one wants to play in a deadzone tier, so lets all play together in a kinda fun tier instead.

You are lvling in a MMORPG game. Power spikes and power dips happen. If lvl 16s in green PvE gear had a chance or could threaten 39/60+s in Anni gear then you'd have people uninstalling because the game is just a huge waste of time. Why bother lvling or gearing up, when a 16 in bolster can rock you? Get more ranks and gear. Understand how stats are actually adjusted and what baselines you need to meet. IE, go learn the game a bit more. You'll be fine.

last point; Archetype matters. If you are a healer/tank then once you hit 20(earlier if Secrets is giving away a secret(har har)you're pretty much good to go, and it's positioning/tactics that you need to learn more than anything. DPS classes are different. DPS is very heavily gear/RR dependant. But, more than anything, it needs to be played "right". The worst DPS class(DPS Zealot imo) can be effective, as long as you assist off other DPS classes. I never see anyone do this in low tiers(and few in t4). My Sorc when I was lvling was almost always top DB in SCs, cause I set my assist to the "best" dps in the SC. Since no one else assisted, I got kills left and right. Just play the game with a group mentality, and learn when to push which button and you'll be fine.

TLDR; Lvl 16 is supposed to kinda suck. Same as lvl 1 does. We all wish we had the population for a full 4 tiers. We don't. We have a bolster. If you think it should be improved, plz offer specific advice as to how. And if you are actually new to the game, life is gonna be hard. This is a very complicated game, that isn't super well documented, and has a slightly toxic playerbase. New players will have to put in serious effort. That's how MMO's work...

Edit: as for fighting the same prem over and over... Try placing this in chat:

Code: Select all

/5 LFG mid tier SCs

[Razid1987]

I'm not too concerned personally about the 1-39 experience. I see it as a bunch of people running around and wacking each other on the head, until they are all level 40. The RvR sets are relatively fast to get, and they make a huge difference. You usually get the pieces before you can even equip them.

What concerns me, personally, is this: Newly dinged level 40, with annihilator/ruin/low level gear, running into people in full sovereign+. If you want to talk about game imbalance, I think that's a much more apparent place to start. But hey, that might just be me

[Bozzax]

For bolster to work you need to be stacked with best in slot and OP tallies / potions. Newcomers fail in all it is a design flaw by devs IMHO

16-37 bad
38 - 40/60 worse

[Phantasm]

Spoiler:

They should do a boost from 16 to 30, and give some lv30 welfare gear, or something, because honestly turning level 16 on this server was one of the worst new player experiences I've encountered in an MMO to date. A 23 level sync is just too much. I went from having some of the most fun I'd had in an MMO in a while to absolutely not enjoying myself in any way. Even though the game is free, I can't see most players roughing it through this horrible bracket. I guarantee this server would be way more popular if it did something, ANYTHING to alleviate the god awful 16-30s experience.

In one experience point you go from being a great build, banging through queue pop after queue pop, to being a completely useless goof wankstain of a failure, waiting in 30+min queues just to be slotted into an undermanned pug team to be trounced by the same sweaty premade over and over. In 1 experience, all your progress is gone; all the build work & gearing up, all the practical experience, all useless, and actually you are worse than a level 1 player by a large margin waiting in long queues just to be useless to your group. You may as well just queue up with the game in the background, join the queue when it pops, and autorun into a wall because HONESTLY that's how useless you are. There is basically no gameplay. Nobody is playing PvE, so you can't PvE. The game thinks the solution to low pop is to slot you in at level 16 with level 39s, so you can't PvP...

Like I said, it's virtually unplayable. Speed up the 16-39 experience. Put in some kind of boost with welfare gear or something. The game is unplayable. This is why you are losing population instead of gaining it, I guarantee it.

I spent a bunch of war crests to get good level 16-17 gear. I spent them because I figured if I don't do something to help alleviate the power gap between my player & actual high 30s players, I will just quit anyway so who cares about saving.... But guess what, I'm still completely useless even with high-end level16-20 gear. So, PQs are all empty so you can't gear up in PvE, and even if you do go out of your way to gear up you are still useless until probably 30~. In short, the 29 level sync is just a bad idea. Throw in a boost from level 16 to 29 and some welfare level 29 gear or something.

I've talked to other new players, they have said the same thing. There have been other threads like this one in the past. I'm not saying this out of hate, I'm saying this because I think it's a shame that the game is so close to being a fun experience and then this absolutely broken bracket has to exist. The changes made to create the T2 bracket are absolutely atrocious and absolutely compromise the gameplay to an extent that most will find unacceptable. If you can't make the bracket work, you need to do something to speed it up so that it doesn't constantly push new players away.

It's fine if you want it to be the same 200 people at end-game playing over on both sides while new players in 1-16 bracket quit upon hitting 16. That's what this system gets you. It feels like this server has intentionally been made inaccessible to new players, and I can't fathom as to why. The server will decline. If you want the server to be accessible to new players, the T2 experience absolutely needs to change. Honestly, there needs to be something to speed up the experience beyond level 16, and there needs to be an alternative to using war crests so you aren't wasting all your crests on trash gear just to stay up to date... The original game had more than 1 currency for this reason.

Most people just silently leave at level 16 because the game becomes unplayable. I want to say something, because WAR was always one of my favourite MMOS-- and RoR is SO freaking close to being playable & accessible to new players. If they found a solution to this problem, I guarantee you would see steady population gains.

In classic WAR, entering a new bracket was always a bit tough, but entering a 16-39 with no boon of any kind is ridiculous... You go from having a ton of fun around 13-15, to feeling like somebody has just kicked you square in the jibblies come lv16. Most sane people will just leave.

Whole new player (16-39) experience dramatically depends on playstyle. If you try solo Q scs, roam without group, cant join autoband 40+ WBs you are going to suffer and quit. On other hand, if you skip 16-39 RVR totally and focus on scs with /5 group its quite enjoyable and learning experience. Gear doesnt matter, bolster doesnt matter if you Q solo. Thats it. I hope devs with new inc low tier changes will enforce somehow grouping up and being solo be a choice, not an only option.
Question to devs or @Secrets:
Is it technically possible to extend Ranked-like queueing system for all scenarios especially MID bracket? There must be a choice to go solo Q or be 6man group.

[Morradin]

Unless you are an experienced RoR veteran, the low ranked player experience is a bit wanky.

I had a chance to finally make a new alt since the XP reduction scrolls got removed, and man did I miss them.
Everyone tells you the best way to advance is Scenarios. Sadly, scenarios will give 20x XP compared to RR. A regular scenario win will give you around 40 to 50k XP and around 2k RR. On a Weekend Warfront scenario "win" that translates to around 80k+ XP and about 3k to 3.5k RR. Losing is worse, you can get 20 to 30k for a win, and only 500 to 1k RR.

With numbers like that you rise in Class Levels a lot faster than RR levels can keep up. And of course if you lose hard a lot, the number of crests gained, is not enough to keep you going in gear at a comfortable sustained rate.
It also means you end up entering t4 in Anni/Ruin and 2piece conq. A far cry from last year when I made an alt and got into t4 as a 40/RR64 in Vanq.

If you want to enter t4 with anything more than RR55, you need to spend most of (if not all of) your time in the RvR lakes, where RR gain is still at a lot higher rate/percentage.

[Strakar]

Good case in this thread for eliminating rested xp, lowering the multiplier, or adding rested rr.

I've felt like whatever changes they made to rr gain on keep and zone locks about a year ago was a huge kick in the pants and has further exacerbated the rested xp gain, and the side effect has hurt lowbies. There needs to be a 25% rr gain buff across the board except box running, maybe 50% for kills. Also scaling rr rewards for locking a bo too the more fighting there is on the objective likethere used to be. Just need to balance out xp vs rr gain because that is hurting new players who don't know the optimal way to level.

[Dabbart]

Increasing RR doesn't help new players. It helps current players who want to gear up an Alt fast. New players don't know how game mechanics work, much less the meta way to min/max. Increasing RR gains does absolutely **** for any of the issues the OP expressed. The Op is talking about people who wont make it to 40 cause they say "**** this". Not those that are willing to experience dog **** gameplay for hours on end to min/max their RR gains. We, the experienced players, will figure this **** out on our own. They, the new players, have no idea wtf is happening at any given time.

Do you see the difference?

Now, Morradin nearly gave us their experience leveling a new toon. Then it kinda veered off into a RR rant. Again, uesless info for the OPs issues.

BTW: Xp gain in SCs is retarded. I entirely agree. You get like 40k xp for a 40pt surrender at high 30's during weekend event SC. I nearly went from 37-38 entirely on fast dessie surrenders, took like an hour. However, that's separate to the OPs entire point.

[Whyumadbro]

There will be a rumored patch coming that the team is working on to address this very issue by giving you your full ability kit earlier.

I'd hold judgement on the current pre-rank 40 experience until then.

the 5 new people with have a great experiance!