I remember when this game was about to launch. It was sort of going toe to toe against ESO at the time. All I ever heard about was how much ESO was a fail game, and how WS was going to be the second coming. Now it seems like people are saying the opposite. All I hear from people anymore is how WS is doing poorly - its either going to shut down or go F2P. So... what happened?
I played the Beta. Honestly, the game didn't really seem all that bad, although I didn't get too far into it. Still, it seemed like it was a lot of fun. It actually surprised me a bit. In fact, I almost bought it on pre-order. I would have too, had I not been preoccupied with other things.
So - what's the deal? This game seriously can't be that bad. I mean, I played it, and it was pretty good. It seemed like a really fun adventure I might want to try out some day. I know these forums, though. People love the doom and gloom story. But whatever.
Is this game really "that bad" or are people just blowing smoke because they don't like subscription models... like they do with every other Subsciption game?
Addition:
I had to remake this thread because apparently my prior attempt was too "trollish" somehow. Really, there wasn't anything wrong with it other than a particular few people with paranoia. So I changed a few words so they wouldn't lose their $hit. Whatever. There were some decent comments in the other thread, but I'm hoping to get more insight. Hopefully this one will be more productive.
I hope this game doesn't go F2P. It's a solid game and I'd hate to see it become mired down with microtransactions and the like. That being said, I couldn't make it past the first month. I left mainly due to technical reasons, with the game running poorly. I overall enjoyed the game play a great deal, but I had some reservations about the time commitment to get any where significant in the game. The housing and crafting were both exciting systems, but the PVE group content wasn't enjoyable for me. Questing was okay, but I felt it was buried underneath the overly busy UI. I'm willing to come back to the game at some point next year, but I need to be sure it's better optimized and has systems for casuals like myself.
I'm currently in ESO and WoW and both offer a wealth of content that's readily accessible. You mention the climate of Wildstar prelaunch - I was definitely one of the hopefuls. About 3 weeks in, I ran into issues that I couldn't get past. Time will tell if I return. I hope so, and I hope this game gets the love it needs. It's got a good soul to it.
Originally posted by eldarisI have a lv 50 character and played a little with housing but lost interest as soon it was clear that it was all about raiding and rated arenas. Went back to WoW and probably I will not return to Wildstar since they are planning to have dominion vs dominion bgs and I really dislike developers which sacrifice lore instead of fixing population imbalance (like Trion and Rift). If they don't kill lore then I'll wait for rated armour to go away before trying it again.
i would love to see your source for this because it is completely made up.
I remember when this game was about to launch. It was sort of going toe to toe against ESO at the time. All I ever heard about was how much ESO was a fail game, and how WS was going to be the second coming. Now it seems like people are saying the opposite. All I hear from people anymore is how WS is doing poorly - its either going to shut down or go F2P. So... what happened?
I played the Beta. Honestly, the game didn't really seem all that bad, although I didn't get too far into it. Still, it seemed like it was a lot of fun. It actually surprised me a bit. In fact, I almost bought it on pre-order. I would have too, had I not been preoccupied with other things.
So - what's the deal? This game seriously can't be that bad. I mean, I played it, and it was pretty good. It seemed like a really fun adventure I might want to try out some day. I know these forums, though. People love the doom and gloom story. But whatever.
Is this game really "that bad" or are people just blowing smoke because they don't like subscription models... like they do with every other Subsciption game?
Addition:
I had to remake this thread because apparently my prior attempt was too "trollish" somehow. Really, there wasn't anything wrong with it other than a particular few people with paranoia. So I changed a few words so they wouldn't lose their $hit. Whatever. There were some decent comments in the other thread, but I'm hoping to get more insight. Hopefully this one will be more productive.
Isn't the problem you need to focus on is why you thought is was going to be different than what it is really?
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Here's the thing about Wildstar, I'll first say that it's a great game. Mechanically speaking it's very well done. The combat is fun, the servers are stable and the game just generally polished all around. What happened is that it honestly is lacking content right now. Right out of the gate you can see that they have spend most of their time appeasing the raider's, and that's fine because I'm one of those people. But in order to retain a reasonably populated game you need to be more well-rounded. There really isn't much to do besides raid or get attuned to raid. Yes they have housing, but that only goes so far, Warplots never really took off (Which I don't really know why, seems like a great concept) and the crafting system isn't anything revolutionary. I feel after some time with some content under it's belt Wildstar will shine again. How long that will take remains to be seen, But the core game is there and it is built very well. They have made some changes to help with some of the complaints so they are taking steps in the right direction.
Having played Wildstar from launch until finishing GA 6/6 with my guild ... Here's my take on the game.
The combat and gameplay is wonderfully done. The leveling content does little to take advantage of those systems, so it can be a very boring process unfortunately. Housing was very robust and fun, very well done. Content was very little in terms of what happened post-release, and the quality of patches was very poor. The constant push-back of content "Drops" and promise of fixing everything really set the game back.
After reaching 50, there was little a "casual" player could do besides dailies (for which there was no real reward, unless you were also clearing raid content, which meant you didn't need the rewards anyways). This lead to the majority of casuals being bored as well at end game.
End game was the main focus, however it was poorly designed. A high time wall was originally required to being raiding, and it was something very few could complete without the help of people who knew the "tricks" to completing the time trials of getting Gold. This led to few people/guilds actually able to participate in 20-man content. "Casual" raiders in WS would have easily been considered semi-hardcore raiders in WoW for the time-investment and skill it took. Most people who came to WS expecting to raid left very rapidly.
I saw the fall of many (MANY) guilds, very rapidly once they reached the point where raiding was the goal. I myself went through about 6 guilds before finding one that was actually able to complete the content, had the man power to sustain, and wasn't a complete douche about it. The rest? Within a week or two they all crumbled. Disbanded, completely. Even once a few guilds reached the point of being able to enter 20-man raiding, the roster boss quickly caught up to them. Many merged, only to still disband after failing to have the numbers.
It also suffered from terrible itemization and RNG. Crafted gear was near BiS until you got an incredibly perfect roll on slots from very specific GA gear drops. Otherwise, it was a break-even at best. This lead to the feeling of lots of stick but no carrot at the end. Having cleared GA and gotten all the drops for my class (SS Healer), I probably got about 15 drops of loot. Only about 4 of which were actual, quantifiable upgrades from what I had crafted or gotten from dungeons. I can't say enough about how terrible itemization was - It reminded me of TBC in WoW. -Crit taken on healer gear? +Focus recovery on tank gear? None of it really made much sense.
GA was a terribly bug-ridden raid. Some bosses caused complete crashes for over 75% of the raid group, randomly, and without known cause. Some bosses would become invulnerable, causing you to have to reset the entire instance of trash and re-clear to that boss. Some of the bosses had total cheese mechanics, which, to my knowledge, still haven't been fixed. The encounters were somewhat well-created and required pretty precise execution - It WAS fun, when it worked properly. However, even "on farm", the encounter would still cause multiple raid wipes due to bugs. This made it tedious and really annoying to keep a roster filled with 25+ people.
DS was even worse - However, I'd given up on raiding just before my guild started in on DS. However, I see now that they're abandoning 40 man content, which is likely the best idea. It will give more for the guilds (few in number) who are able to do 20 man content but not 40 man content something to do. It will probably take far too long for this content to roll around, though. They're constant lack of updates coupled with bug-ridden releases will make sure of this.
I'm not even referring to simple bugs - I mean completely game-breaking bugs. Not being able to switch hot bars, all of your gear randomly disappearing, purchases from AH changing stats once you buy them, exploits (numerous), class skills being broken (though unchanged in notes), AMPs not working, etc. So many things that would make it incredibly annoying to play the game, across the board. They delayed Drop 3 so much because they wanted it to be bug free as possible, and even then it still lead to multiple game breaking bugs and exploits being opened.
Wildstar has the capability to be an amazing game - the combat alone made it hard for me to return to other games without feeling bored. However, their target audience was small, and they failed to deliver even to them. Given time to recover and with the advent of F2P, I'm sure it will see more success.
TL;DR - Too much stick, not enough carrot. All the way through. End game was tough to reach, raiding was hard to reach, and none of it was particularly rewarding. Great potential, poor execution.
I really liked the game upon launch, and would still be playing it. If not for the fact that the development team is so damn slow. There were bugs with my class (engineer) that weren't fixed until recently that have been there since launch. They had so many damn bugs in the game, that were gamebreaking to me that never got any attention until it was too late, I just feel like game would have been so great had they been able to churn out bug fixes and content a little bit faster. Now with a smaller development team they will take even longer. I just don't think it's worth it.
Wildstar was made in very hardcore in mind, sure there was few things for people to do that was not hardcore type, but for to keep people they got needed more open the door more for the casual then the hardcore. Pretty much if they make it harder then people old mmo they will just move back.
But any big bugs and other problem would of been gone away overtime, just people lose interest.
Don't know how wildstar doing now, if there starting get in new people then that's good news for them to stay alive, but if there having big problem bring in more new people they'll end up closing the game, as people want them to hold on the sub card for wildstar thinking that better model, can be better model for it but is not helping it, if they don't end up going free to play but right now the core of the game is still problem.
End game was the main focus, however it was poorly designed. A high time wall was originally required to being raiding, and it was something very few could complete without the help of people who knew the "tricks" to completing the time trials of getting Gold. This led to few people/guilds actually able to participate in 20-man content. "Casual" raiders in WS would have easily been considered semi-hardcore raiders in WoW for the time-investment and skill it took. Most people who came to WS expecting to raid left very rapidly.
This whole post was good but especially important was the above paragraph. I stuck with it through 3 months, and in the 3rd, no one with whom I'd leveled or even really played the game through my attunement was logging in anymore. I was helping to carry people through dungeons so we could replace people in our 20 which had quit. Many of those players were very good, but I didn't get to know them as well and after 1 week of actually seeing a raid, many would stop logging on. So in the final 2 weeks, I didn't know anybody, was spending time advancing strangers, and while I was ok with raid bugs mostly before, the whole thing just started to wear on me.
I beta alot of games. I'm used to things being broken sometimes, spending 3, 6 or even 14 hours doing something diligently and getting no return. I enjoy learning new ways to solve puzzles presented before me. Alot of people are not like that, and most will quit when it comes to that. It's human and understandable. It just left me "lonely at the top", and I wasn't even at the top, as I never saw a 40 man raid.
I wouldn't say I was a tremendous fan, but it looked like an interesting mix between GW2 and WoW.
I still play WoW and GW2 and haven't touched Wildstar past the first month. Again, another game with potential and it was completely botched by the dev team.
I was actually a fan of the game prior to release, but W* was just sort of a victim of timing, unfortunately. If they had beaten ESO to market, I would have played it. As it ended up playing out, my gaming year went something like, WoW, ESO, WoW, Destiny, WoW. With Christmas coming up, and considering I have 4 kids who also love games, and considering I bought them the games "they wanted" I basically have 5 or 6 games in addition to WoW that I want to put my hands on. Also, I really want to get back to Firefall, since I haven't played that since beta.
So why don't you tell me, where should Wildstar fall in my list of priorities?
Having played Wildstar from launch until finishing GA 6/6 with my guild ... Here's my take on the game.
(...)
TL;DR - Too much stick, not enough carrot. All the way through. End game was tough to reach, raiding was hard to reach, and none of it was particularly rewarding. Great potential, poor execution.
Quite an accurate description of the problems Wildstar suffered from in the first 4 to 6 months.
Luckily, the dev team has indeed spent time on improving things and fixing a lot bugs, e.g. GA runs smoothly now, one miniboss sometimes puts up a fuss, but no more "game breaking" bugs. Top guilds, the ones progressing in the end of DS, clear this now in a day without issues.
The loot has gone through the first step of being overhauled: crafted gear has been put in its place, and while drops still give your random types and number of rune slots, you can now 1) add slots up to the max for the tier of gear, and b) reroll rune slots to get a much better outcome. That latter part is partially due to the rune choices themselves having been reworked. The next big drop, due in a month or so, will rework the stats on items, with the intent to cull the useless stuff, like assault oriented stats on healer gear. Loot is good again!
The roster boss has gotten a few kicks to the nuts, firstly by lowering the attunement requirements. If you have a reasonably capable guild that wants to raid they can now attune folks with relative ease. A controversial change coming up is lowering the size of the raid for DS from 40 to 20. Skipping the large discussion about pros and cons going on about this it will undoubtedly allow more people into DS. GA will stay a 20 people affair and no "tuning" (i.e. LFR'ing it) will be done.
Skills and AMPs are getting another major overhaul in that next drop - the first iteration of which has landed on the PTR - as well, and while we keep some red-headed stepchildren around, more skills end up useful. Drop 3 already did a good job at this, e.g. making espers actually competitive in raids, and drop 4 keeps moving in that direction, too.
I was actually a fan of the game prior to release, but W* was just sort of a victim of timing, unfortunately. If they had beaten ESO to market, I would have played it. As it ended up playing out, my gaming year went something like, WoW, ESO, WoW, Destiny, WoW. With Christmas coming up, and considering I have 4 kids who also love games, and considering I bought them the games "they wanted" I basically have 5 or 6 games in addition to WoW that I want to put my hands on. Also, I really want to get back to Firefall, since I haven't played that since beta.
So why don't you tell me, where should Wildstar fall in my list of priorities?
Based on my experience in the first 6 months ...
It's definitely worth it if you're into a single-player experience now, seeing as how low the population is (based on what I last experienced and what I've heard). The combat and gameplay is fun, however, there was never a "carrot" so to speak once you reached end-game while I played. Especially for casual players.
The story and characters are very forgettable compared to ESO, especially since there's no real voice-over work. It's definitely more action-based and fun though!
I went to ESO. Now I'm playing WoD and GW2. I think what is good about gaming is you don't need to get locked in. Specifically though I will play WS later! I love the music and the combat.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Comments
Yep. This one right here and only having two maps (one which the majority hated).
I hope this game doesn't go F2P. It's a solid game and I'd hate to see it become mired down with microtransactions and the like. That being said, I couldn't make it past the first month. I left mainly due to technical reasons, with the game running poorly. I overall enjoyed the game play a great deal, but I had some reservations about the time commitment to get any where significant in the game. The housing and crafting were both exciting systems, but the PVE group content wasn't enjoyable for me. Questing was okay, but I felt it was buried underneath the overly busy UI. I'm willing to come back to the game at some point next year, but I need to be sure it's better optimized and has systems for casuals like myself.
I'm currently in ESO and WoW and both offer a wealth of content that's readily accessible. You mention the climate of Wildstar prelaunch - I was definitely one of the hopefuls. About 3 weeks in, I ran into issues that I couldn't get past. Time will tell if I return. I hope so, and I hope this game gets the love it needs. It's got a good soul to it.
This is how you beat them with facts. I doubt he will accuse you again for lying.
Isn't the problem you need to focus on is why you thought is was going to be different than what it is really?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Having played Wildstar from launch until finishing GA 6/6 with my guild ... Here's my take on the game.
The combat and gameplay is wonderfully done. The leveling content does little to take advantage of those systems, so it can be a very boring process unfortunately. Housing was very robust and fun, very well done. Content was very little in terms of what happened post-release, and the quality of patches was very poor. The constant push-back of content "Drops" and promise of fixing everything really set the game back.
After reaching 50, there was little a "casual" player could do besides dailies (for which there was no real reward, unless you were also clearing raid content, which meant you didn't need the rewards anyways). This lead to the majority of casuals being bored as well at end game.
End game was the main focus, however it was poorly designed. A high time wall was originally required to being raiding, and it was something very few could complete without the help of people who knew the "tricks" to completing the time trials of getting Gold. This led to few people/guilds actually able to participate in 20-man content. "Casual" raiders in WS would have easily been considered semi-hardcore raiders in WoW for the time-investment and skill it took. Most people who came to WS expecting to raid left very rapidly.
I saw the fall of many (MANY) guilds, very rapidly once they reached the point where raiding was the goal. I myself went through about 6 guilds before finding one that was actually able to complete the content, had the man power to sustain, and wasn't a complete douche about it. The rest? Within a week or two they all crumbled. Disbanded, completely. Even once a few guilds reached the point of being able to enter 20-man raiding, the roster boss quickly caught up to them. Many merged, only to still disband after failing to have the numbers.
It also suffered from terrible itemization and RNG. Crafted gear was near BiS until you got an incredibly perfect roll on slots from very specific GA gear drops. Otherwise, it was a break-even at best. This lead to the feeling of lots of stick but no carrot at the end. Having cleared GA and gotten all the drops for my class (SS Healer), I probably got about 15 drops of loot. Only about 4 of which were actual, quantifiable upgrades from what I had crafted or gotten from dungeons. I can't say enough about how terrible itemization was - It reminded me of TBC in WoW. -Crit taken on healer gear? +Focus recovery on tank gear? None of it really made much sense.
GA was a terribly bug-ridden raid. Some bosses caused complete crashes for over 75% of the raid group, randomly, and without known cause. Some bosses would become invulnerable, causing you to have to reset the entire instance of trash and re-clear to that boss. Some of the bosses had total cheese mechanics, which, to my knowledge, still haven't been fixed. The encounters were somewhat well-created and required pretty precise execution - It WAS fun, when it worked properly. However, even "on farm", the encounter would still cause multiple raid wipes due to bugs. This made it tedious and really annoying to keep a roster filled with 25+ people.
DS was even worse - However, I'd given up on raiding just before my guild started in on DS. However, I see now that they're abandoning 40 man content, which is likely the best idea. It will give more for the guilds (few in number) who are able to do 20 man content but not 40 man content something to do. It will probably take far too long for this content to roll around, though. They're constant lack of updates coupled with bug-ridden releases will make sure of this.
I'm not even referring to simple bugs - I mean completely game-breaking bugs. Not being able to switch hot bars, all of your gear randomly disappearing, purchases from AH changing stats once you buy them, exploits (numerous), class skills being broken (though unchanged in notes), AMPs not working, etc. So many things that would make it incredibly annoying to play the game, across the board. They delayed Drop 3 so much because they wanted it to be bug free as possible, and even then it still lead to multiple game breaking bugs and exploits being opened.
Wildstar has the capability to be an amazing game - the combat alone made it hard for me to return to other games without feeling bored. However, their target audience was small, and they failed to deliver even to them. Given time to recover and with the advent of F2P, I'm sure it will see more success.
TL;DR - Too much stick, not enough carrot. All the way through. End game was tough to reach, raiding was hard to reach, and none of it was particularly rewarding. Great potential, poor execution.
Wildstar was made in very hardcore in mind, sure there was few things for people to do that was not hardcore type, but for to keep people they got needed more open the door more for the casual then the hardcore. Pretty much if they make it harder then people old mmo they will just move back.
But any big bugs and other problem would of been gone away overtime, just people lose interest.
Don't know how wildstar doing now, if there starting get in new people then that's good news for them to stay alive, but if there having big problem bring in more new people they'll end up closing the game, as people want them to hold on the sub card for wildstar thinking that better model, can be better model for it but is not helping it, if they don't end up going free to play but right now the core of the game is still problem.
This whole post was good but especially important was the above paragraph. I stuck with it through 3 months, and in the 3rd, no one with whom I'd leveled or even really played the game through my attunement was logging in anymore. I was helping to carry people through dungeons so we could replace people in our 20 which had quit. Many of those players were very good, but I didn't get to know them as well and after 1 week of actually seeing a raid, many would stop logging on. So in the final 2 weeks, I didn't know anybody, was spending time advancing strangers, and while I was ok with raid bugs mostly before, the whole thing just started to wear on me.
I beta alot of games. I'm used to things being broken sometimes, spending 3, 6 or even 14 hours doing something diligently and getting no return. I enjoy learning new ways to solve puzzles presented before me. Alot of people are not like that, and most will quit when it comes to that. It's human and understandable. It just left me "lonely at the top", and I wasn't even at the top, as I never saw a 40 man raid.
I played for a good while, but I got beta-burnout.
I played 4 characters to max in the beta, and after I got my main to max during live release I was done.
it's too bad, I really enjoyed quite a lot of WildStar.
Now I am playing Marvel Heroes and Armageddon, and excitedly waiting on Darkest Dungeons.l
T
I wouldn't say I was a tremendous fan, but it looked like an interesting mix between GW2 and WoW.
I still play WoW and GW2 and haven't touched Wildstar past the first month. Again, another game with potential and it was completely botched by the dev team.
I was actually a fan of the game prior to release, but W* was just sort of a victim of timing, unfortunately. If they had beaten ESO to market, I would have played it. As it ended up playing out, my gaming year went something like, WoW, ESO, WoW, Destiny, WoW. With Christmas coming up, and considering I have 4 kids who also love games, and considering I bought them the games "they wanted" I basically have 5 or 6 games in addition to WoW that I want to put my hands on. Also, I really want to get back to Firefall, since I haven't played that since beta.
So why don't you tell me, where should Wildstar fall in my list of priorities?
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Quite an accurate description of the problems Wildstar suffered from in the first 4 to 6 months.
Luckily, the dev team has indeed spent time on improving things and fixing a lot bugs, e.g. GA runs smoothly now, one miniboss sometimes puts up a fuss, but no more "game breaking" bugs. Top guilds, the ones progressing in the end of DS, clear this now in a day without issues.
The loot has gone through the first step of being overhauled: crafted gear has been put in its place, and while drops still give your random types and number of rune slots, you can now 1) add slots up to the max for the tier of gear, and b) reroll rune slots to get a much better outcome. That latter part is partially due to the rune choices themselves having been reworked. The next big drop, due in a month or so, will rework the stats on items, with the intent to cull the useless stuff, like assault oriented stats on healer gear. Loot is good again!
The roster boss has gotten a few kicks to the nuts, firstly by lowering the attunement requirements. If you have a reasonably capable guild that wants to raid they can now attune folks with relative ease. A controversial change coming up is lowering the size of the raid for DS from 40 to 20. Skipping the large discussion about pros and cons going on about this it will undoubtedly allow more people into DS. GA will stay a 20 people affair and no "tuning" (i.e. LFR'ing it) will be done.
Skills and AMPs are getting another major overhaul in that next drop - the first iteration of which has landed on the PTR - as well, and while we keep some red-headed stepchildren around, more skills end up useful. Drop 3 already did a good job at this, e.g. making espers actually competitive in raids, and drop 4 keeps moving in that direction, too.
Are there still bugs? Yes.
Has it gotten a lot better? Oh, yes!!
Based on my experience in the first 6 months ...
It's definitely worth it if you're into a single-player experience now, seeing as how low the population is (based on what I last experienced and what I've heard). The combat and gameplay is fun, however, there was never a "carrot" so to speak once you reached end-game while I played. Especially for casual players.
The story and characters are very forgettable compared to ESO, especially since there's no real voice-over work. It's definitely more action-based and fun though!
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.