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They took a gamble that the hardcore mmo market was as big as the internet likes to pretend it is.
They were wrong.
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On May 29 2015 05:13 Gorsameth wrote:They took a gamble that the hardcore mmo market was as big as the internet likes to pretend it is. They were wrong.
Yeaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh, thats got nothing to do with it.
To put it bluntly, most of their shit at release was broken and / or not working. a handful of people who played the game ever got to even SEE 40 vs 40 PvP, Guild were stuck for weeks / MONTHS on outright BUGGED bosses. The PvP system / gear itself was pretty fucked up in that you'd just get smashed over and over and over by extremely over-geared opponents, Gear optimization was pathetically horrible.
The list goes on, people quit because carbines game was fucking broken and they took far far far too long to fix it (as in shit that could be hotfixed in a night or two by other MMO's would take 1-2-3 months for them to address in a large content patch called a "drop")
They had an amazing idea, an amazing world and an amazing game when you look at its base, the combat is fun as fuck! Its just end-game, alot of the content and all the things in the "background" (i.e. gear, currency, professions) were flawed beyond belief.
If carbine had put a massive effort into fixing these glaring issues - alot of them pointed out during alpha / beta - before or directly after release, Wildstar would have been alot more successful.
I myself quit before max level because speaking to firebolt / cyro and reading about how flawed the game was - and just how many people were leaving the game already - completely killed my interest in the game i was so enjoying.
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Will i pick it up when it goes F2P? Fuck yeah! I'll even resub for that bonus they're offering!
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8748 Posts
On May 29 2015 05:13 Gorsameth wrote:They took a gamble that the hardcore mmo market was as big as the internet likes to pretend it is. They were wrong.
Pretty bad summary imo. The game wasn't ready at release. Class design wasn't done. Loot wasn't done. PvP wasn't done. Raiding wasn't done. Not fair to say that the reason it wasn't more successful is because the market didn't exist for their vision when the game was so flawed at release.
Also it's not a game just for hardcore players. It has housing and dyes and costumes and pets and mount skins and lore etc. If it really was a straight bet on making challenging content for hardcore mmo players then the game would have had less of these features.
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the whole idea of 40 man raids was a good but ultimately flawed idea. they would never have the active raiding population to fill it and they never really tested the 40 man raid until people started going into it.
The period where people were figureing out vet dungeons and then just getting into the raid was better then any other mmo could deliver on. That period ended and the game got exposed for a lot of the problems mentioned.
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On May 29 2015 05:27 NonY wrote:
Pretty bad summary imo. The game wasn't ready at release.
Agreed. Pretty much everything was redone in a beta, 2 or 3 months before release and it completely messed up the game. Every Class was reworked, some fore better and others for worse.
Raiding was horrible at the start. We had to wait for patches to have a boss become kill-able.
PvP sucked.
The game going free to play is almost at a state where I can say, this is how the game should have been released. People who paid for the game the past year, was basically like paying to Beta test the game.
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United Kingdom20278 Posts
On May 29 2015 05:13 Gorsameth wrote:They took a gamble that the hardcore mmo market was as big as the internet likes to pretend it is. They were wrong.
People say that a lot, but they didn't really provide a game that the hardcore crowd is interested in. GA and DS is great, but they messed up a lot of important stuff and IF they're even releasing another raid tier, it won't come for a year and a half after launch. WoW is putting out a datascape sized raid 7 months after expansion launch and they're getting destroyed by criticism of lacking content because they're not bringing other stuff out earlier.
Also the engine is just bad. WoW generally runs about three times faster but you don't have to worry about addons destroying performance with basic functions like nameplates, or having to reload UI every 3-5 boss pulls due to performance degradation, stuff like that.
There are visible performance drops on the best performing systems available even for WoW in 20 man raids in some situations. You can't just make an engine that runs nowhere near as well and expect it to hold up with 20-40 players.
They're also still plagued - a year after launch - with routing issues from their servers, which forces a significant portion of the raiding population to pay for VPN services just to be able to consistently play without DCing or spiking to 5k ping, 30% packet loss for a 5 minute time period halfway through a system daemons pull.
The game going free to play is almost at a state where I can say, this is how the game should have been released. People who paid for the game the past year, was basically like paying to Beta test the game.
I use WoW a lot for comparison because i don't play much else recently in the MMO scene. You just HAVE to get the basics right though - If your engine runs terribly on both low and high end systems in an MMO and people with otherwise perfect internet get mysterious chronic issues with packet loss and ping spikes right before reaching your servers, you won't be able to compete well no matter how good your game is.
For the loyal subscribers who have maintained a subscription from WildStar’s official launch on June 3rd, 2014 until the Free-to-Play launch
well that's a slap in the face, i was "only" subbed from launch week to january
25% more exp and money is i guess the reality of a free to play MMO. It's not something that i'm happy with (from a different reference frame, that's like saying any friends that you get to play will only earn ~80% of "normal" exp and money) and also the crafting changes sound awkward, like it would be better to trade your mats to somebody and have them craft instead.
Bonus proc chance for gathering? Sounds nice, but when you look at it for more than a second you'll just see that it will deflate the value of mats so that veterans are getting the same money they always did and new players are getting less.
Only being able to list three items for sale on auction house at a time sounds really annoying.
They're also making crafting and such BETTER for those who have the loyalty bonus for subbing to the game before f2p - and you CAN'T pay anything or subscribe to get the same bonus, they'll just always be better than you.
Maybe i read them wrong, but i'm concerned for them putting some those changes up instead of choosing to support the game more with stuff like cosmetics
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8748 Posts
Yeah I just took a stroll down memory lane looking at the private testing forums... crazy some of the shit we were scrambling to get changed. Like warrior tanking, which I heard is actually getting better or is pretty viable now?
Anyway hopefully free to play gets a lot of new people to try it and get a better experience than people who played at release, and maybe some players from release will try again too. I was thinking about reinstalling but I just don't really have the time to play a game regularly.
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United Kingdom20278 Posts
Yeah I just took a stroll down memory lane looking at the private testing forums... crazy some of the shit we were scrambling to get changed. Like warrior tanking, which I heard is actually getting better or is pretty viable now?
It was still bad when i stopped playing in december. I think it's good now, but took them ~6-9 months or so. There was a phase of "warrior tanks are actually alright, just not quite as good as other classes and nobody uses them in high level guilds yet" and also the trouble of the stalker/engineer tanks having a huge gear lead unless guilds had been farming content for ages
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Personally, I played the game, and enjoyed the dungeons a lot. I never got around to finishing the grind for raid attunement though. What killed the game for me was that the pvp at launch was decent, but had some issues. Carbine came out with a "Pvp patch" to supposedly fix those issues, and ended up just completely screwing over pvp scaling/gearing. ( I think some of it was bugs, some of it was just bad design).
If your going to patch something, please test it well enough to make sure your actually making it better.... That patch just killed the pvp scene for Wildstar, and a dead scene just gets more dead.
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United Kingdom20278 Posts
I remember the jokes about the satotage patch sabotaging pvp ;p
and the weeks before, everybody talking about how it would fix things
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Warrior tanks are very viable now.
I've been playing since June. Never thought about quitting. Might change when Avatus goes down and we have to wait months on a new raid, we'll see.
The game's had many bugs and imbalances, but nothing that frustrated me enough to turn me away from the amazing raid content.
I've also been lucky to find an amazing guild and stick with them all the way through, that helps a lot.
So here's hoping f2p makes the game better rather than ruin it completely 
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i quit because it didnt even run at 60 FPS while questing with a new high end PC at that time, piece of shit engine.
I doubt i was the only one.
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United Kingdom20278 Posts
Doing the system daemons second pillar phase and falling through 30fps with a 4770k @4.6ghz (and nvidia gpu) with FPS optimized settings and UI wasn't fun (entirely cpu bound). I can generally keep FPS in the triple digits in 20 man WoW raids, with some exceptions because blizzard is rather silly about having abilities like Stampede which summons about 5 extra pets for 40 seconds. When you have 5 hunters casting that and creating 25 (combat) pets, it actually creates a huge FPS drop.
It wouldn't have been so bad if it was easy content - but they put mechanics in that will literally kill you if you don't interrupt within 0.8 - 1.3 seconds and then you get low FPS, dropped frames, minor stuttering etc - just not acceptable.
Performance has not improved much in the last year. If they had the manpower to rework the engine for performance from the ground up, they don't seem to be interested in it. They fixed/improved some stuff, but it runs nowhere near as well as it could
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On May 29 2015 08:51 Cyro wrote:
I use WoW a lot for comparison because i don't play much else recently in the MMO scene. You just HAVE to get the basics right though - If your engine runs terribly on both low and high end systems in an MMO and people with otherwise perfect internet get mysterious chronic issues with packet loss and ping spikes right before reaching your servers, you won't be able to compete well no matter how good your game is.
On May 30 2015 04:08 LaNague wrote:
i quit because it didnt even run at 60 FPS while questing with a new high end PC at that time, piece of shit engine.
I doubt i was the only one.
it looks to me like they decided to release the game because they ran out of money.
this new "Buy A Physical Box and Get A Super Special Item" is hilarious stuff.
http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/news/2015-04-15-announcing-the-wildstar-box-mystery-box-promo/
i guess the distributor will charge them huge cash for each returned Box once the game goes F2P.
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While I agree that much more could have been done for optimization, Wildstar has improved very significantly in many other aspects since release. I think carbine have done reasonably well with the resources available to them, it's a pity that time was not on their side.
If you enjoy raiding to any extent, do give Wildstar a try when f2p comes around. If the combat style does not put you off immediately, I am confident that you will thoroughly enjoy the good amount of PvE content that it has to offer.
Also, Laurens what guild are you in? Catharsis?
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On June 01 2015 21:16 nehcnhoj wrote:
While I agree that much more could have been done for optimization, Wildstar has improved very significantly in many other aspects since release. I think carbine have done reasonably well with the resources available to them, it's a pity that time was not on their side.
for the purposes of the point i am about to make let's assume u r 100% correct.
this shows us the Blizzard philosophy on releasing games is the best approach. only release it when its done. from a strictly PR perspective, the bad first impression is very, very difficult to recover from when u release a game early.
early in Blizzard's life as a company this meant not taking on a project whose scope was larger than their limited bankroll could handle.
maybe WildStar should've been a game of Borderlands2 sized proportions rather than a full MMO. u need someone at the top with testicles as big as mike morhaime to make those calls... and that's rare.
the tone of my posts has been negative, but i should say that i've spent $45 on the game and i feel i've gotten my money's worth. Had WildStar been better NCSoft/Carbine could've taken $100s of dollars from me though.
when combat was at its toughest and most intense i felt like i was playing WWF No Mercy inside an MMO...sigh.
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On June 01 2015 21:16 nehcnhoj wrote:
While I agree that much more could have been done for optimization, Wildstar has improved very significantly in many other aspects since release. I think carbine have done reasonably well with the resources available to them, it's a pity that time was not on their side.
If you enjoy raiding to any extent, do give Wildstar a try when f2p comes around. If the combat style does not put you off immediately, I am confident that you will thoroughly enjoy the good amount of PvE content that it has to offer.
Also, Laurens what guild are you in? Catharsis?
Indeed.
After 3 more hours of Avatus pulls we have a solid hand strategy and are starting to see the end of yellow/green room.
Here's hoping water/logic and air/life don't spawn in the near future :D
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On June 01 2015 21:28 JimmyJRaynor wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On June 01 2015 21:16 nehcnhoj wrote:
While I agree that much more could have been done for optimization, Wildstar has improved very significantly in many other aspects since release. I think carbine have done reasonably well with the resources available to them, it's a pity that time was not on their side. for the purposes of the point i am about to make let's assume u r 100% correct. this shows us the Blizzard philosophy on releasing games is the best approach. only release it when its done. from a strictly PR perspective, the bad first impression is very, very difficult to recover from when u release a game early. early in Blizzard's life as a company this meant not taking on a project whose scope was larger than their limited bankroll could handle. maybe WildStar should've been a game of Borderlands2 sized proportions rather than a full MMO. u need someone at the top with testicles as big as mike morhaime to make those calls... and that's rare. the tone of my posts has been negative, but i should say that i've spent $45 on the game and i feel i've gotten my money's worth. Had WildStar been better NCSoft/Carbine could've taken $100s of dollars from me though. when combat was at its toughest and most intense i felt like i was playing WWF No Mercy inside an MMO...sigh.
I don't disagree with anything you said.
However, and everything I say here is my own speculation, I do believe Wildstar is one of the victims of big publishers scaling down their expectations from the "golden" MMORPG age. That is, NCSoft saw the saturation of the MMO market with League and other such massively popular games and felt that MMORPGs were not as profitable as they had perceived from when WoW saw their dominating growth.
The result is the sort of crippled release that we have with Wildstar.
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In an interview with PCGamer, Carbine announces some specific changes to WildStar as it moves from subscription based monthly to F2P.
http://www.pcgamer.com/wildstar-is-going-free-to-play-this-autumn/
"In addition, Carbine says they'll be rebalancing the game in time for the free-to-play switch. New features will include:
Streamlining player and item stats to be much more intuitive while adding high-level options to give players more flexibility.
Making the Amp system easier to use by unlocking all Amp slots.
Reviewing dungeons and open world content so that the experience is challenging, but not brutal.
Changing the tutorial and early game experience to provide a better and quicker introduction."
I think its important to take note that Carbine repeatedly says FALL/AUTUMN. This could mean its not F2P until as late as December 20.
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United Kingdom20278 Posts
Reviewing dungeons
Oh they're gonna review the fuck out of them. It's not ok that players do like 1.5x more damage than they used to because of the itemization and class changes, stuff needs to be easier still
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EPT
