Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Abefroman_sl said:

I'm interested to see who got him. He mentions that he got an offer he couldn't refuse. Is that a big company or just anything is better then here move.

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Reminder: NCSoft doesn't change its failing MMOs to F2P, it just shuts them down.

Itzena_sl said:

Reminder: NCSoft doesn't change its failing MMOs to F2P, it just shuts them down.

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Aion

City of Heroes, AutoAssault, Dungeon Runners, Tabula Rasa, Lineage.

Sigh, one of the best MMO's to come out in years and bad players can't handle it.

Sorry, I need to check my pro-priviledge.

Sorry Wildstar has pretty awful class design and combat mechanics. I'll disagree with the general consensus about the raid shit. Some people like Hardcore Raids, I'm ok with the game being balls hard. There is a smaller market for it. The only issue in that regard is that Wildstar did nothing else except balls hard Raids for level cap.

Combat mechanics were great for the most part. No one ever bitched about CC in this game like every.other.game.ever. It was done fairly well. Class Design was fine a month after they fixed all the bugs that plagued classes like engineer who then went from bot-train-pulling-garbage-dumpsters to god-mode-one-macro-dps-lords. The only class who had a truly cookie cutter resource system was warriors who just had warrior rage per every game since 2004 and Espers with their combo points.

PVP in this game was great when you actually got to 1v1 people in BG's or open world. Most engaging combat I've seen. Not hitting my 40 buttons as I need them was refreshing and having to have foresight for what you'll NEED to have slotted is something all unto itself.

It's an opinion, and my opinion is that you're wrong. Like, really wrong. But that's why you're still playing.

I'm looking forward to some studies in the future demonstrating exactly why catering to the "hardcore" isn't nor has it ever been a profitable business strategy. Eve is the most hardcore successful MMO and they've survived by very distinctly catering to their carebear majority. The "play 12 hours a day like it's my entire life because it is" crowd just isn't a large enough demographic to rely on them to keep the lights on. And once all the casuals quit, the HC quit too because they don't have enough of an audience. No one is left to admire their throbbing e-penis.

My hardcore friends just play emulated servers with rulesets they enjoy. And blame Blizzard for ruining games.

Eidal_sl said:

I'm looking forward to some studies in the future demonstrating exactly why catering to the "hardcore" isn't nor has it ever been a profitable business strategy. Eve is the most hardcore successful MMO and they've survived by very distinctly catering to their carebear majority. The "play 12 hours a day like it's my entire life because it is" crowd just isn't a large enough demographic to rely on them to keep the lights on. And once all the casuals quit, the HC quit too because they don't have enough of an audience. No one is left to admire their throbbing e-penis.

My hardcore friends just play emulated servers with rulesets they enjoy. And blame Blizzard for ruining games.

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I think that person will find that the hardcores were forged in a time when there were few choices - EQ or WoW. Sure, there were other games around in those times, but not many and those were the clearly superior choices. They were more than games too, there was a huge social aspect as well, especially in the time before Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc.

Now those hardcores from that era, by and large, have jobs and families now and aren't dedicating the time they used to, even if they still play; the new generation of hardcores has a plethora of quality games to choose from, and the drawing power of the social aspect has been watered down by the explosion of social media.

That social aspect had a relatively unappreciated power in the success of EQ and WoW, I think - I mean, come on, you didn't log in to raid the same shit for week after week for yourself unless you were a crazy bastard; you did it for your friends, your guild, the people you played with for years. These days, those bonds, by and large, aren't forming because there is so much online interaction that there isn't any need to get your social fix in a game, so there is nothing keeping them playing other than the game itself, and in all honesty there are very few games with the staying power to be entertaining more than a month or two (shit like Madden, Call of Duty, Civilization are a few I can think of off the top of my head that have stood the test of time, and even those have a social element to them that keeps them fresh, except for Civ, which I think is the greatest game of all time).

I agree. The only reason my R99 friends continue to play is for the social aspect. Those that feel socially fulfilled in other areas of their life are exponentially less inclined to be "hardcore" in a video game.

Since this is one of my favorite types of conversations:

Hardcore was required to reasonably see a good chunk of content "back in the day" as now that same level of hardcore is required to see "slightly higher stats on the same looking items" in most cases. The reason? The playerbase for mmorpgs is substantially larger today than it has ever been, and the amount of mmorpgs on the market is commiserate. Whereas EQ could get away with gating 1/4th of their content behind "hardcore" checks such as 30 hour camps, keys, flags, etc... it was pretty much the only kid on the block. And the playerbase for mmorpgs in that time was relatively small, so people were concentrated heavily in 2-3 titles with almost nothing else out there. In other words, if you wanted to play an MMO back then, you had to play by the rules of the 2-3 titles available or you didn't play. Hence all of us "hardcore" players from that timeframe.

Today? If I want to play an mmorpg it is difficult to open up utorrent without seeing links to 1-2, and every gaming company in the world has a handful under their umbrella. Back in the day, you were either in EQ or DAoC or FFXI (western audience, obviously) and if you didn't like PVP, it meant you were in EQ or FFXI. Both games had some fairly heavy gating to get into a non-trivial amount of content, so in order to really enjoy those games you had to put in the absurd time requirements or you sat on the sidelines. There weren't realistically any other options. Had what we call casual games been around during that time frame, the populations of EQ/FFXI/DAoC would have been quite a large chunk smaller compared to what they enjoyed in 99/early 2000s. Hell, had a solo-friendly game like WoW been released at the same time as EQ, EQ wouldn't have gotten 1/5th the subs on that fact alone.

People who started during the pre-WoW days were hardcore by necessity, not by choice. When the choice appeared, most people got the hell out of dodge, and not a single "hardcore" game outside of Eve(totally different audience) has gotten even close to the % of the market that EQ enjoyed. And honestly, it won't. The numbers that were associated with EQ in its heyday weren't representative of the amount of hardcore players in the market. It was everyone because there wasn't any other options. A hardcore game won't attract that same number and certainly not for nearly as long as EQ did on that fact alone, as the people that were lumped into EQ's numbers wouldn't have played EQ had casual options been available.

Anyway, history/logic lesson ended. I enjoyed Wildstar for what it was, but with dungeons being tuned super tightly and a gaming populace that simply isn't the same ratio of alert/active players : half-afk players as it should be to have that type of tuning, I decided that I simply didn't want to put up with the pain of dealing with that every step of the way. Wiping on the same boss in a newb dungeon more than once or twice (and consistently being the last person alive, tanking -or- dps) and constantly having to replace players that bounce on their first wipe was enough for me to call it a day.

My friend who is in one of the end game guilds summed it up nicely:

"Great game to play with if you are in a guild like you are in WoW, fucking awful otherwise". I am in a guild in WoW that cleared All heroic raids 25 man top 20 during MoP, so not bleeding edge, but not far behind. Essentially they got the raiding right, but all the other little things like pvp, solo content, 5 mans, exploration, farming, whatever he said it was worse then WoW in every way. Unfortunately for them thats how you keep your game up and running by catering to people who are NOT hardcore raiders but has amazing end hard content (WoW also does this)

edit. Reading that reddit it sounds just like his complaints. Guess its fairly universal.

I haven't played WoW since Cataclysm but I remember running heroics or PVPing. Nothing else. Maybe daily quests for some faction if I needed some dumbshit thing from them. I think the fact that any dum-dum can run heroics in WoW and can't in WS is why it succeeds. All that stuff listed above, exploration, solo content, and farming? Like what? That shit didn't happen in WoW either. WoW is fast food. Everyone can afford it and everyone will eat it. Wildstar was like Ethiopian or something. Some people love it, but other people can't handle it or won't even try it.

Also I believe Draegan argued months ago with me that "most experienced MMO players can determine if an MMO is good or not in the first 8 levels". Yeah you can keep YOUR opinions.

I stopped playing this after we cleared GA a month or two ago, and to be honest despite having a fun guild I'm surprised I didn't get out sooner. I ended up becoming a raid leader pretty much out of necessity, which had me stick around for longer than I probably would've. Here's some brief thoughts:

• I totally lost my faith in Carbine as a solid dev team. Issues with class balancing (I was a warrior tank, going into the game back in June knowing full well that Warrior tanks were the weakest in almost every respect, but expecting such a glaring imbalance to be resolved within the first couple of months of launch at latest), massive indecision over raid gating and a general over-interest in new content being focused on daily zones and more tedious questing zones that nobody I knew had any interest in.
• Outside of raids there was nothing to do. Nothing. Except the most tedious of activities imaginable that you were forced to do if you wanted to keep your EP capped. Even the idea of playing an alt was completely inappealing due to the fact that all you would be doing is the same tedious shit to EP cap it as well.
• Hardcore vs casual. Hardcore vs casual. Hardcore vs casual. Hardcore vs casual. Hardcore vs casual. They had to chose one to focus on, really. I was always completely flabbergasted that people got as in to the Housing elements as they did, considering they were of absolutely no consequence, were completely non-interactive and were 100% instanced and detached from any idea of residing in a persistant world. The thought that there would always be a big base of housing fans paying monthly for the game to help balance out the demographics... absurd. The thought that casual players would enjoy dailies & adventures as a sustained endgame leading nowhere except to hardcore gameplay... absurd. At the same time, outside of raids and to some extent dungeons, the game was not hardcore. And maybe this is more of a problem I have with post-WoW raid/dungeon design, but it was all overtuned. I would much, much, much prefer - in a hardcore game - for the actual fight difficulty to be lowered, but the consequence of dying to go up. And I don't think that's just the EQ player in me talking. I have multiple level80+ and a level 90 in the Path of Exile hardcore league and that game has been the most enjoyable online RPG experience for me in a long time, because of the emphasis on risk vs reward really drawing you into the world in a way not much has since EQ, UO, Eve. I think I realized I just wasn't a fan of what raiding is now: Wiping for hours on end, making incremental improvements on mechanical details with each attempt, until eventually, inevitably, you beat it. This raiding style is kind of dead to me, even though I'd barely tried it outside of vanilla WoW. I want risk vs reward raiding again, where a guild going into a raid is a guild placing a bet on its own skill. Where punishment for failure is costly, but the rewards great. That's where real raid gameplay exists, not in this cold iterative bullshit where fast progress comes more from a dull organizational facet than from conquering raw gameplay. But yeah, I guess that's not really an attack on Wildstar specifically.

Aaand I'll stop there as I realized I've gone full ramble.

Yeah the game itself has some very good core mechanics but the people managing it are terrible at their jobs. Not much more to say.

Xevy_sl said:

I haven't played WoW since Cataclysm but I remember running heroics or PVPing. Nothing else. Maybe daily quests for some faction if I needed some dumbshit thing from them. I think the fact that any dum-dum can run heroics in WoW and can't in WS is why it succeeds. All that stuff listed above, exploration, solo content, and farming? Like what? That shit didn't happen in WoW either. WoW is fast food. Everyone can afford it and everyone will eat it. Wildstar was like Ethiopian or something. Some people love it, but other people can't handle it or won't even try it.

Also I believe Draegan argued months ago with me that "most experienced MMO players can determine if an MMO is good or not in the first 8 levels". Yeah you can keep YOUR opinions.

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You seem angry that other MMO players think your game is shitty. You shouldn't be angry, you should have fun playing a game you like. There are enough MMOs out there that everyone can have their slice of pie and enjoy it. The fact that you used the "fast food" reference to way means you already lost any present or future argument due to being retarded.

Draegan, Xevy comes of as mad for the same two reasons my "hardcore" friends come across as mad.

A) The MMO-scape has changed, and there aren't 100 casuals standing around EC tunnel / Gfay slobbing the throbbing e-peen of a "hardcore raider". The hardcore players miss this shit; the more have-nots that flee the scene the more its pretty obvious that the "hardcore players " are just a bunch of doods pouring 40+ hours a week into a video game. Some of them are okay with this, others don't like meeting the man behind the curtain. I mean, if someone you knew said he spends 40+ hours a week at the local arcade with twenty other people playing the shit out of [insert any arcade game here].

B) The gravitation of the player-base to the casual side is an indirect value judgement, and the hardcores do not like the implication. No "hardcore MMO raider" wants to seriously think to himself: ("Jesus christ, have Ireallyinvested years of my life in something just to impress strangers on the internet? Why don't people care anymore? Did they ever care?") If no one truly gives a shit that you killed raid mobs in Wildstar, then you must have done it because it was fun... and for a lot of people, it never was. "Hardcore" raiding as a whole was never fun, you were just doing it to puff that e-peen up.

I can have a conversation with most people about how fucking dumb it was all the shit we put up with in classic EQ because it was new/fresh/novel, and how generally it's much easier and more fun to be an online PC gamer in 2014 than it was in 1999. But the handful of my "hardcore" friends freak the fuck out if I imply anything was ever wrong with original Everquest -- "in fact", they say, "something must be wrong with you. Blizzard ruined MMOs and turned people like you into fucking casuals!"

Maybe the simple answer is no matter how hard or easy a game is, the one thing a game like this needs to be is fun. For most people, WS wasn't fun.

To be fair to my hardcore friends, Wildstar had zero of the things they want in an MMO. Their three primary demands are:

1) Meaningful loot that isn't replaced quickly; e.g., FBSS. They dislike the moving target game of modern MMO itemization.

2) Meaningful death penalty. They want to bring risk back into the RvR equation -- modern MMO dynamic's function off of "Tedium vs Reward". Wipe a bunch and we'll make you go farm dailies for more repair gold.

3) Impossible-to-solo level grind -- the raid game should begin at end game but the route to raid game should have some base-line checks on social aptitude. They do not want a "tunnel vision solo the gold question marks until you can raid".

However -- they like to over-complicate shit by making it sound like they want a hard game, and that's not what they want either. They want an easy game that takes a fuckton of time -- because its easy to compete when your pathway to success is 90 percent dependent on logging in. Secret to being the best Dumar of them all? Log in and when someone asks if you want to camp ghoul king, type "yes". If you do this 8 hours a day you're automatically in the 95th percentile.

Take a random guy from a top WoW guild and swap places with a D1/Challenger LoL player -- which one is going to be able to play the other one's game faster? And WoW is metric fucktons harder than old-school EQ raiding was. What was the average Velious raider's level of responsibility? Hardcore MMO players mad about games not catering to them don't understand that the world simply stopped being impressed with their "skills". If they want their slobbing e-peen fanbase back, they would actually have to get GOOD at games that people care about... but getting good at LoL is much more daunting than rabbling about how "WoW is McDonalds" on online forums.