The best thing developers can learn from Wildstar is simple.
Stop.
Stop making MMOs. There I said it. There's no pleasing the patrons of this genre, and every single game to have come out has been punished because the developers cannot appease the insatiable demand of players. I've compiled a list, so that developers can clearly understand why they're failing. Games are scorned for the following:
1. Having a questing system.
2. Not having a non-questing leveling system with clear instructions. So, not having a questing system.
3. Having no endgame.
4. Not having endgame like WoW.
5. Having endgame like WoW.
6. Having classes.
7. Not having classes.
8. Not having a grouping features.
9. Discouraging social interaction by having group finders.
10. Not having a recognized IP to drive sales and attract consumers.
11. Butchering an existing IP.
12. Being Guild Wars 2 and releasing the equivalent of some high school girl's furry fan fiction where she tries to figure out if she's bi or not.
13. Being Destiny and having the CEO's 5 year old write the story after a week long bible camp.
14. Not having open world pvp.
15. Not having a toggle to turn off said pvp, or having sufficient ointment for the butthurt. Seriously, they're people too.
16. Not having crafting.
17. Not having craftable end game gear.
18. Having the best end game gear be craftable.
19. Not having enough classes. We need more classes than reasonable, just so we can say, "don't play that class."
20. Having too many classes.
21. Having an archaic skill system.
22. Having active combat.
23.Having a shitty UI.
24. Having a shitty name. Wakfu. Yes, you. Stop that.
25. Being Korean-made.
26. Not appealing to Koreans.
27. Not appealing to COD players.
28. Not appealign to COD players who are also Korean.
29. Not appealing to LoL players.
30. Not appealing to non-LoL players who like MOBAs, but also like a sensible UI.
31. Ripping off minecraft.
32. Ripping off World of Warcraft. Seriously, grab a box of WoW from Target, some screenshots, and take it to a kid's birthday party. Ask the drunk clown entertaining the kids if the game looks like WoW. If he says yes, DON'T MAKE IT.
33. Being a browser game. You should know better.
34. Releasing no expansions.
35. Releasing an expansion that's not really an expansion, but you just call it that so you can milk people $30 more. Destiny.
36. Saying expansion is a marketing term and replacing it with bags and 2 quests per month.
37. Having a gem store.
38. Having elves.
39. Being sci-fi.
40. Having a binary gender choice. Some people can't accept the fact they're an exception to a genetic rule and need that validation. Have some sensitivity.
I think I covered it.
Exactly... the devs are trying to do it all. You can't because Mecha-Elves don't make any sense. Focus... market that focus correctly.
Jeesh, I'd never think of playing a game that didn't have Mecha-Elves...
I kind of agree with the "trying to appeal to everyone comment" of the OP.
I *L*O*V*E*D Wildstar's graphics and action target combat, but when I played it I just queued up for pvp Battlegrounds because that was all that was really interesting for me.
The problem was that they had that silly gear grind in batttlegrounds that made no sense at all. Why should people who are supposedly more skilled than me (which is doubtful--many just paid or were carried to their gear, but I digress) get a handicap by getting better gear in pvp? Surely any sane person would say the handicap (cf. golf, and basically any other skilled game...hmmmm...maybe MMO combat is not actually skilled gameplay or the devs don't think it is...) goes to the LESSER skilled person.
Anyway, I loved the graphics and the targetting, but the gear focus of pvp was too much for me. Why bother, when I can just play SMITE and have no gear grind at all?
Well, the answer is of course that after a bit I didn't bother and just play SMITE now... I did like the character customization though.
It is really too bad that people can't understand that pvp should be about skill, and that a gear grind is the absolute antithesis of skill. Oh well...
Originally posted by Tykam123 I wont sit here and pretend the games awesome and everythings perfect, but they really are addressing everything. They are listening to the community. In terms of the gameplay, if you didnt like it, ya didnt like it. It just seems much more engaging then WoW, or swtor, or all those other 1-3 stand in one spot mmos. Idk if its lack of motivation to dodge stuff, or what. I just advise giving the game another go before you come on and trash it. The developers are working hard to fix the mistakes that were made. To see people come on and whine about a bumpy launch and dismiss the game from ever improving is really sad considering the team is making such an effort. I say give it another shot, if you dont like it, leave and then come complain again. But honestly. those butthurt from something about 6 months ago still, need to move on.
addressing everything but the piss-poor game performance for amd users we can just go get cupcaked.
The problem with new MMO's nowadays lie indeed in the playerbase. There can be 10 things they like about the game and one they don't and that completely destroys the rest of the game even if they wouldn't even have to do it to accomplish anything. Whats funny about this is they feel so entitled that they simply have to go to the forums and act as martyrs of some weird kind because they feel to have been wronged somehow. Gamers attitudes are getting worse every year and I'd say it could generally be considered toxic on average nowadays. Internet is a wonderful place where theres no consequences. More and more people are making it their crusade to bombard a fellow player or a whole game down for often reasons that are based on a heat of the moment.
Anyway back to wildstar.
Leveling offered nothing new and got lots of hate towards it being just a hub to hub, kill this get that type of thing. I've played several big MMO's and it's been the same thing in every last one of them. I have nothing good or bad to say about WS questing. It was pretty much what I expected it to be. I agree the main story gets really going a bit late, but it is an entertaining one and I do wait for more to be revealed against my usual habits. Some regional stories were also quite funny, but nothing mindblowing.
Art style has been a deal breaker or a deal maker for many. Then I guess there are ppl like me who don't actually care if the art style is cartoony or realistic as long as it works and is well made. Many complained about wildstar demanding too much from a computer for what it offered in graphics and compared it to games like Tera etc. It had its issues with optimization, but was always playable. I started playing it with 5 yr old AMD/ATI computer and had no problem with medium graphics, but I just was lucky I guess. Compared to Tera wildstars graphics have a way different style, but WS is clearly more advanced as it should be.
Combat. Another deal maker/breaker. One of the biggest selling points of this game was its combat system and this one for my experience divided players even more than the graphics. It was never designed for the lazy gamers and I don't mean casuals now..I mean the players that liked standing still most of the time pressing 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 and at same staring casting bar, damage meter, casting bar, damage meter. They call this tactical or stategic...I just don't get it anymore..HOW IS IT TACTICAL OR STRATEGIC!? I played WoW for a few years as hardcore raider and the last one of those years I only played it because I wanted to play with the guildies. It was the exact same shit from day one to the last day. Patches, expansions and reworks didnt change the gameplay at all, they only changed the numbers you saw in that god damn damage meter. Progression in wow is gear based, not skill based. Progression in wildstar is a mix of those two. This reason makes it my preferred game right now. I read in a few posts above complains about the combat being clunky and not feeling fluid and I seriously couldn't disagree more. If you can't play the game don't blame the game for it. You could have given it the time to learn, but instead you decided to blame something that isn't there. Wildstars combat responds immediately to the push of a button and animations are clear and the combat flows quite nicely. For comparison I played TESO for a while also and thats clunky and unresponsive right there.
Bugs. Every game has them and people aren't being realistic with their expectations. Wildstar has had its fair share of them too and while they have implemented hotfixes for the most game breaking ones in a very timely manner I do agree that there have been or still are some bugs that should have been fixed a long time ago. It has gotten clearly better after they stopped trying to push out monthly content updates. Don't know who was the genius that convinced everyone at Carbine to try to keep up with that, it's just never was realistic.
PvP. This thing failed in wildstar badly in my eyes. While it is amazingly fun due to the combat system at least for me they failed the progression system for dedicated pvp gamers. Changes have been made in that part of the game and more will probably come before it finds the right way. I'm mostly a raider/pve type of player, but I do enjoy pvp every now and then. For this kind of a gamer the pvp has been fun and very entertaining.
Many ppl have also complained about giving up with the game before getting to lvl 10 due to various reasons. If you like group content in MMOs I strongly recommend you level up to 20 and try the first dungeon and give it a fair shot. This is where the game convinced me of its true potential. Dungeons and raids in wildstar are the best the genre has ever had to offer for me.
What I've read about the upcoming drop 4 I've come to a conclusion Carbine is trying to make the game more appealing for casuals with almost free epics and much more solo content. Not sure if I'm liking this yet. It remains to be seen. 40man -> 20man change is really needed. This is coming from a player that has been jumping to a guild after another because they couldn't maintain an active roster of 40 raiders without the officers losing their sleep.
The potential is there. They just have to make right decisions from now on and people will be coming back. Wrong decisions could mean the death blow as the playerbase right now is healthy in pve servers, but really bad in pvp servers.
Let's just throw it out there. Video games are not women. you cant expect the same thing to keep giving you hot new moves that you havent seen before. once you play a game once you understand how it works and start comparing it to every single game youve played prior to. Theres just no end to peoples nostalgia, or troll-stalgia or even criticism.
Wildstar is a prime example of why devs need to focus on a niche nowadays instead of attempting to become the next WoW. WoW had years to improve and grab a small piece of every MMO niche. You can't launch a game like that from the start. Start with a niche and a focused audience so you have systems with DEPTH, then add in pieces of other things that won't alienate your main player-base yet brings in more people.
Just like people said above, if the lore is good... you can't start it halfway through the leveling a stale/soulless leveling progression.
There was just way too many little things to focus on. Find a big thing and stick to that big thing as long as possible then add in the sub-sets. This is the same issue beginner novellist have. They pour too many "niches" into one book, which makes the book depthless and unfocused.
But the main question: Is wildstar fun? I'd say it has great "game" aspects too it, but an MMORPG should feel more than just a game. Some would find the game aspects the best part and really fun. Others like me want something more philosophical about our MMOs.
They did focus on a niche. They focused on raiders. I really don't think MMO developers can win at this point. I see countless posts about the questing system. Beyond sandbox, what's the alternative? A game can't be a one trick pony. It has to be complete, it has to have a large feature list to keep up with current games. It has to be fun and accessible, yet flexible enough to warrant deeper exploration. Very few games are accomplishing this. Fortunately, I think the rate of MMO development is slowing and we'll see less games like this.
The sad thing is this game could have been stronger. The questing was fine, the leveling was fine. The problem was poor opimtization, high entrance cost to endgame, and not enough endgame variety. It had a decent combat system, better than WoW's in many ways, great housing, and great crafting.
I feel that no matter what approach developers take, they're not going to succeed. This genre needs a drought, it needs some time to figure out what it wants and what it'll do to get that.
The problem with new MMO's nowadays lie indeed in the playerbase. There can be 10 things they like about the game and one they don't and that completely destroys the rest of the game even if they wouldn't even have to do it to accomplish anything. Whats funny about this is they feel so entitled that they simply have to go to the forums and act as martyrs of some weird kind because they feel to have been wronged somehow. Gamers attitudes are getting worse every year and I'd say it could generally be considered toxic on average nowadays. Internet is a wonderful place where theres no consequences. More and more people are making it their crusade to bombard a fellow player or a whole game down for often reasons that are based on a heat of the moment.
Anyway back to wildstar.
Leveling offered nothing new and got lots of hate towards it being just a hub to hub, kill this get that type of thing. I've played several big MMO's and it's been the same thing in every last one of them. I have nothing good or bad to say about WS questing. It was pretty much what I expected it to be. I agree the main story gets really going a bit late, but it is an entertaining one and I do wait for more to be revealed against my usual habits. Some regional stories were also quite funny, but nothing mindblowing.
Art style has been a deal breaker or a deal maker for many. Then I guess there are ppl like me who don't actually care if the art style is cartoony or realistic as long as it works and is well made. Many complained about wildstar demanding too much from a computer for what it offered in graphics and compared it to games like Tera etc. It had its issues with optimization, but was always playable. I started playing it with 5 yr old AMD/ATI computer and had no problem with medium graphics, but I just was lucky I guess. Compared to Tera wildstars graphics have a way different style, but WS is clearly more advanced as it should be.
Combat. Another deal maker/breaker. One of the biggest selling points of this game was its combat system and this one for my experience divided players even more than the graphics. It was never designed for the lazy gamers and I don't mean casuals now..I mean the players that liked standing still most of the time pressing 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 and at same staring casting bar, damage meter, casting bar, damage meter. They call this tactical or stategic...I just don't get it anymore..HOW IS IT TACTICAL OR STRATEGIC!? I played WoW for a few years as hardcore raider and the last one of those years I only played it because I wanted to play with the guildies. It was the exact same shit from day one to the last day. Patches, expansions and reworks didnt change the gameplay at all, they only changed the numbers you saw in that god damn damage meter. Progression in wow is gear based, not skill based. Progression in wildstar is a mix of those two. This reason makes it my preferred game right now. I read in a few posts above complains about the combat being clunky and not feeling fluid and I seriously couldn't disagree more. If you can't play the game don't blame the game for it. You could have given it the time to learn, but instead you decided to blame something that isn't there. Wildstars combat responds immediately to the push of a button and animations are clear and the combat flows quite nicely. For comparison I played TESO for a while also and thats clunky and unresponsive right there.
Bugs. Every game has them and people aren't being realistic with their expectations. Wildstar has had its fair share of them too and while they have implemented hotfixes for the most game breaking ones in a very timely manner I do agree that there have been or still are some bugs that should have been fixed a long time ago. It has gotten clearly better after they stopped trying to push out monthly content updates. Don't know who was the genius that convinced everyone at Carbine to try to keep up with that, it's just never was realistic.
PvP. This thing failed in wildstar badly in my eyes. While it is amazingly fun due to the combat system at least for me they failed the progression system for dedicated pvp gamers. Changes have been made in that part of the game and more will probably come before it finds the right way. I'm mostly a raider/pve type of player, but I do enjoy pvp every now and then. For this kind of a gamer the pvp has been fun and very entertaining.
Many ppl have also complained about giving up with the game before getting to lvl 10 due to various reasons. If you like group content in MMOs I strongly recommend you level up to 20 and try the first dungeon and give it a fair shot. This is where the game convinced me of its true potential. Dungeons and raids in wildstar are the best the genre has ever had to offer for me.
What I've read about the upcoming drop 4 I've come to a conclusion Carbine is trying to make the game more appealing for casuals with almost free epics and much more solo content. Not sure if I'm liking this yet. It remains to be seen. 40man -> 20man change is really needed. This is coming from a player that has been jumping to a guild after another because they couldn't maintain an active roster of 40 raiders without the officers losing their sleep.
The potential is there. They just have to make right decisions from now on and people will be coming back. Wrong decisions could mean the death blow as the playerbase right now is healthy in pve servers, but really bad in pvp servers.
What is strategic combat to you? Positioning was a huge thing in this game, so was dodging and the proper skill rhythm.
Regards to questing and leveling, what do you propose instead? If you don't have quests and quest givers, what do you proprose to entirely replace that?
I kind of agree with the "trying to appeal to everyone comment" of the OP.
I *L*O*V*E*D Wildstar's graphics and action target combat, but when I played it I just queued up for pvp Battlegrounds because that was all that was really interesting for me.
The problem was that they had that silly gear grind in batttlegrounds that made no sense at all. Why should people who are supposedly more skilled than me (which is doubtful--many just paid or were carried to their gear, but I digress) get a handicap by getting better gear in pvp? Surely any sane person would say the handicap (cf. golf, and basically any other skilled game...hmmmm...maybe MMO combat is not actually skilled gameplay or the devs don't think it is...) goes to the LESSER skilled person.
Anyway, I loved the graphics and the targetting, but the gear focus of pvp was too much for me. Why bother, when I can just play SMITE and have no gear grind at all?
Well, the answer is of course that after a bit I didn't bother and just play SMITE now... I did like the character customization though.
It is really too bad that people can't understand that pvp should be about skill, and that a gear grind is the absolute antithesis of skill. Oh well...
What people should understand is that PvP in MMORPG should never be about skill alone. There's always these factors like level, gear, buffs, skill ranks, etc. so PVP in this genre is never on even grounds. There's a genre where things are different, and that's MOBAs.
I've never understood these people who come to play an MMORPG for PvP only, and then complain they are forced to participate in PvE content to do better in PvP. I agree you shouldn't be able to grind battlegrounds for better gear, you should do it in the open world that the game provides.
If we think about f.ex WoW.. it has an open world and an ongoing war between horde and alliance. Yet almost the only way to actually fight the war in this game is defend flags in a small, instanced valley. Wohoo, there's a war going on and its winner is resolved by playing kids games in some unknown location.
PvP belongs to MMORPGs for sure, but it has to be a purpose other than gain honor and collect points to upgrade your gear. You shouldn't fight to be able to fight better in the future. You should fight to achieve something for you faction, and upgrade your gear to ensure you are able to do it better next time.
It was the combat that turned me away. I thought it was fun at first then it became too much work and not enough fun. The challenges popping up when you least expected (or wanted) them was another big turn off. I only made it to the mid-30s before my guild dissolved and I left MMORPGs for the time being.
It's really a pity because I had so much fun in the beginning and I'm convinced the setting has so much potential. Unfortunately you can't fix my major problems without reworking combat completely and that's just too much to expect from a company.
I agree with this. Loved the beginning, by mid game, it started to lose me, combat was tedious as was questing and yeah the challenges popping up all the time messed the pace up. Those should be something that happen at endgame and give people a reason to go back into old zones, maybe have those give elder gem rewards or other endgame stuff.
I quit at 40 because I got quest/combat fatigue. Came back a few months later to tackle the last 10 levels, very rough and once I hit cap, attempted to start the attunement chain and just said, the heck with it. I don't really raid as it is(LFR for life! lol) I just want to see a raid's story just once so, what else is there for me to go after? Nothing.
I believe Carbine did choose a direction upon release -Raids.
was it the smartest choice?- perhaps not.
I believe now they are focusing on what other mmos have upon launch
itemization-drop 4, solo content drop3-, incentives!
the raiding now can take a back seat since they really have nothing todo with the main story-as stated. It may have been that carbine notice the trend how mmo players eat through content so fast and have no endgame that they decided to start it backwards?
who knows- but the game is starting to shape up really nice with drop 4- which has a lot of the quality items and mechanics all general mmos have upon launch.
my only beef with ncsoft/carbine was the departure of many key players in this mmo. hoping tha some comeback-something rarely seen in the dev community.
The problem with new MMO's nowadays lie indeed in the playerbase. There can be 10 things they like about the game and one they don't and that completely destroys the rest of the game even if they wouldn't even have to do it to accomplish anything. Whats funny about this is they feel so entitled that they simply have to go to the forums and act as martyrs of some weird kind because they feel to have been wronged somehow. Gamers attitudes are getting worse every year and I'd say it could generally be considered toxic on average nowadays. Internet is a wonderful place where theres no consequences. More and more people are making it their crusade to bombard a fellow player or a whole game down for often reasons that are based on a heat of the moment.
Anyway back to wildstar.
Leveling offered nothing new and got lots of hate towards it being just a hub to hub, kill this get that type of thing. I've played several big MMO's and it's been the same thing in every last one of them. I have nothing good or bad to say about WS questing. It was pretty much what I expected it to be. I agree the main story gets really going a bit late, but it is an entertaining one and I do wait for more to be revealed against my usual habits. Some regional stories were also quite funny, but nothing mindblowing.
Art style has been a deal breaker or a deal maker for many. Then I guess there are ppl like me who don't actually care if the art style is cartoony or realistic as long as it works and is well made. Many complained about wildstar demanding too much from a computer for what it offered in graphics and compared it to games like Tera etc. It had its issues with optimization, but was always playable. I started playing it with 5 yr old AMD/ATI computer and had no problem with medium graphics, but I just was lucky I guess. Compared to Tera wildstars graphics have a way different style, but WS is clearly more advanced as it should be.
Combat. Another deal maker/breaker. One of the biggest selling points of this game was its combat system and this one for my experience divided players even more than the graphics. It was never designed for the lazy gamers and I don't mean casuals now..I mean the players that liked standing still most of the time pressing 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 and at same staring casting bar, damage meter, casting bar, damage meter. They call this tactical or stategic...I just don't get it anymore..HOW IS IT TACTICAL OR STRATEGIC!? I played WoW for a few years as hardcore raider and the last one of those years I only played it because I wanted to play with the guildies. It was the exact same shit from day one to the last day. Patches, expansions and reworks didnt change the gameplay at all, they only changed the numbers you saw in that god damn damage meter. Progression in wow is gear based, not skill based. Progression in wildstar is a mix of those two. This reason makes it my preferred game right now. I read in a few posts above complains about the combat being clunky and not feeling fluid and I seriously couldn't disagree more. If you can't play the game don't blame the game for it. You could have given it the time to learn, but instead you decided to blame something that isn't there. Wildstars combat responds immediately to the push of a button and animations are clear and the combat flows quite nicely. For comparison I played TESO for a while also and thats clunky and unresponsive right there.
Bugs. Every game has them and people aren't being realistic with their expectations. Wildstar has had its fair share of them too and while they have implemented hotfixes for the most game breaking ones in a very timely manner I do agree that there have been or still are some bugs that should have been fixed a long time ago. It has gotten clearly better after they stopped trying to push out monthly content updates. Don't know who was the genius that convinced everyone at Carbine to try to keep up with that, it's just never was realistic.
PvP. This thing failed in wildstar badly in my eyes. While it is amazingly fun due to the combat system at least for me they failed the progression system for dedicated pvp gamers. Changes have been made in that part of the game and more will probably come before it finds the right way. I'm mostly a raider/pve type of player, but I do enjoy pvp every now and then. For this kind of a gamer the pvp has been fun and very entertaining.
Many ppl have also complained about giving up with the game before getting to lvl 10 due to various reasons. If you like group content in MMOs I strongly recommend you level up to 20 and try the first dungeon and give it a fair shot. This is where the game convinced me of its true potential. Dungeons and raids in wildstar are the best the genre has ever had to offer for me.
What I've read about the upcoming drop 4 I've come to a conclusion Carbine is trying to make the game more appealing for casuals with almost free epics and much more solo content. Not sure if I'm liking this yet. It remains to be seen. 40man -> 20man change is really needed. This is coming from a player that has been jumping to a guild after another because they couldn't maintain an active roster of 40 raiders without the officers losing their sleep.
The potential is there. They just have to make right decisions from now on and people will be coming back. Wrong decisions could mean the death blow as the playerbase right now is healthy in pve servers, but really bad in pvp servers.
What is strategic combat to you? Positioning was a huge thing in this game, so was dodging and the proper skill rhythm.
Regards to questing and leveling, what do you propose instead? If you don't have quests and quest givers, what do you proprose to entirely replace that?
To answer the quest question, look at how WoW did questing in WoD. Questing does not have to be boring. Devs need to be more creative with their questing systems if they want to hold the players attention. We've been doing "kill x amount of mobs" for long enough. Hire writers that know what they're doing. Make people invested in your game's world by creating sweeping, exciting quests that engage the player. "Kill 10 rats" type of quests aren't going to keep a lot of players attentions because we've all been doing these types of quests in so many past MMORPGs.
The quest formula needs to change and needs to be made into a quality experience (voiced, scripted events, in-game cutscenes/cinematic cutscenes, and etc.) if a company wants $15 a month for their MMORPG. It's really that simple.
The quest formula needs to change and needs to be made into a quality experience (voiced, scripted events, in-game cutscenes/cinematic cutscenes, and etc.) if a company wants $15 a month for their MMORPG. It's really that simple.
The problem with new MMO's nowadays lie indeed in the playerbase. There can be 10 things they like about the game and one they don't and that completely destroys the rest of the game even if they wouldn't even have to do it to accomplish anything. Whats funny about this is they feel so entitled that they simply have to go to the forums and act as martyrs of some weird kind because they feel to have been wronged somehow. Gamers attitudes are getting worse every year and I'd say it could generally be considered toxic on average nowadays. Internet is a wonderful place where theres no consequences. More and more people are making it their crusade to bombard a fellow player or a whole game down for often reasons that are based on a heat of the moment.
Anyway back to wildstar.
Leveling offered nothing new and got lots of hate towards it being just a hub to hub, kill this get that type of thing. I've played several big MMO's and it's been the same thing in every last one of them. I have nothing good or bad to say about WS questing. It was pretty much what I expected it to be. I agree the main story gets really going a bit late, but it is an entertaining one and I do wait for more to be revealed against my usual habits. Some regional stories were also quite funny, but nothing mindblowing.
Art style has been a deal breaker or a deal maker for many. Then I guess there are ppl like me who don't actually care if the art style is cartoony or realistic as long as it works and is well made. Many complained about wildstar demanding too much from a computer for what it offered in graphics and compared it to games like Tera etc. It had its issues with optimization, but was always playable. I started playing it with 5 yr old AMD/ATI computer and had no problem with medium graphics, but I just was lucky I guess. Compared to Tera wildstars graphics have a way different style, but WS is clearly more advanced as it should be.
Combat. Another deal maker/breaker. One of the biggest selling points of this game was its combat system and this one for my experience divided players even more than the graphics. It was never designed for the lazy gamers and I don't mean casuals now..I mean the players that liked standing still most of the time pressing 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 and at same staring casting bar, damage meter, casting bar, damage meter. They call this tactical or stategic...I just don't get it anymore..HOW IS IT TACTICAL OR STRATEGIC!? I played WoW for a few years as hardcore raider and the last one of those years I only played it because I wanted to play with the guildies. It was the exact same shit from day one to the last day. Patches, expansions and reworks didnt change the gameplay at all, they only changed the numbers you saw in that god damn damage meter. Progression in wow is gear based, not skill based. Progression in wildstar is a mix of those two. This reason makes it my preferred game right now. I read in a few posts above complains about the combat being clunky and not feeling fluid and I seriously couldn't disagree more. If you can't play the game don't blame the game for it. You could have given it the time to learn, but instead you decided to blame something that isn't there. Wildstars combat responds immediately to the push of a button and animations are clear and the combat flows quite nicely. For comparison I played TESO for a while also and thats clunky and unresponsive right there.
Bugs. Every game has them and people aren't being realistic with their expectations. Wildstar has had its fair share of them too and while they have implemented hotfixes for the most game breaking ones in a very timely manner I do agree that there have been or still are some bugs that should have been fixed a long time ago. It has gotten clearly better after they stopped trying to push out monthly content updates. Don't know who was the genius that convinced everyone at Carbine to try to keep up with that, it's just never was realistic.
PvP. This thing failed in wildstar badly in my eyes. While it is amazingly fun due to the combat system at least for me they failed the progression system for dedicated pvp gamers. Changes have been made in that part of the game and more will probably come before it finds the right way. I'm mostly a raider/pve type of player, but I do enjoy pvp every now and then. For this kind of a gamer the pvp has been fun and very entertaining.
Many ppl have also complained about giving up with the game before getting to lvl 10 due to various reasons. If you like group content in MMOs I strongly recommend you level up to 20 and try the first dungeon and give it a fair shot. This is where the game convinced me of its true potential. Dungeons and raids in wildstar are the best the genre has ever had to offer for me.
What I've read about the upcoming drop 4 I've come to a conclusion Carbine is trying to make the game more appealing for casuals with almost free epics and much more solo content. Not sure if I'm liking this yet. It remains to be seen. 40man -> 20man change is really needed. This is coming from a player that has been jumping to a guild after another because they couldn't maintain an active roster of 40 raiders without the officers losing their sleep.
The potential is there. They just have to make right decisions from now on and people will be coming back. Wrong decisions could mean the death blow as the playerbase right now is healthy in pve servers, but really bad in pvp servers.
What is strategic combat to you? Positioning was a huge thing in this game, so was dodging and the proper skill rhythm.
Regards to questing and leveling, what do you propose instead? If you don't have quests and quest givers, what do you proprose to entirely replace that?
To answer the quest question, look at how WoW did questing in WoD. Questing does not have to be boring. Devs need to be more creative with their questing systems if they want to hold the players attention. We've been doing "kill x amount of mobs" for long enough. Hire writers that know what they're doing. Make people invested in your game's world by creating sweeping, exciting quests that engage the player. "Kill 10 rats" type of quests aren't going to keep a lot of players attentions because we've all been doing these types of quests in so many past MMORPGs.
The quest formula needs to change and needs to be made into a quality experience (voiced, scripted events, in-game cutscenes/cinematic cutscenes, and etc.) if a company wants $15 a month for their MMORPG. It's really that simple.
I totally agree, but that's another veneer over the same system. I don't have a problem with the system, nor do I have any pretense an MMO would be absent of that feature. I just find post after post complaining about questing and lamenting the themepark structure. However, WoW once again shows the way and demonstrates how successful the model can actually be. Will others listen? In a way. We'll see another 5 games to crop with a similar, but shallower experience. This is why I stand by my earlier comment, MMOs need to largely stop being developed. There's too much crap on the market and too many fickle gamers.
Didn't bother me one bit that the game was geared toward hardcores. Let them have their cartoon playground. Maybe this way, the genre will finally get over this whole "stylized graphics" trend and move on to something more palatable, adult and less woody wood pecker. Even better, with the majority of hardcores occupied with their new shiny, we could finally get a casual, adult MMO that didn't try to cater to casuals in the beginning only to crap on them for end game.
Only played late beta, but I never realy cared for my char. I just never got hooked. Often I hear people tell the story starts getting interesting at about level 30, but that's just way too late. You have to get people hooked almost from the start.
The start of the game was more looking at the screen being told a backgroundstory than me playing the game and experiencing the story.
The game itself was ok. The setting was ok. I didn't mind the style of combat. The enemies weren't bad. The quests were pretty standard quests. There just wasn't something interesting enough to make me want to log on and play Wildstar. It wasn't a bad game. But for a subscription game I want more than ok. I can get ok from SWTOR or Rift or some other f2p MMO.
Well, I only played the beta a bit and then bought the game just to play it the first month.
In my opinion, this game and Guild Wars 2 have simillar problems, and Carbine clearly didn't learned their lesson with ArenaNet's mistakes.
The first of them is, just like you say in your post, trying to have all kinds of gamers instead of focusing on one or two types of gamers. That's the worst mistake ever when releasing a new product in most situations and it seems that, at least to me, many mmorpg develloppers don't know how to make the best out of their "unique products".
When you create a product, you have to make sure THAT PRODUCT satisfies a certain necessity in consumers. Unfortunatelly today the consumer is much more self-oriented and it evolves much faster then companies capacity to adapt, thanks to the digital era we are now. This means that, if you try to focus in too many types of consumer, your product will be obsolete in a flash because not even one of those types will be entirely satisfied with it and they will go the the next big thing in a heart beat.
Todays' mmorpgs' devellopers don't show signs of getting this, which is wierd since the gaming industry is one of the first industries to be ready for this change in consumer behaviours.
GW2 had this same issue and it's still trying to fix all their mistakes for the past 2 years, BUT is still adapting too slow and that might get them sooner or later if they aren't carefull enough. Maybe that's the reason why they focused on getting a lot of new players instead of getting the old players back, starting with a new "wave" of consumers with a "new beguinning". But I guess the time wasn't the right one for that either.
Carbine is having the same problem. If they don't adapt fast enough, they might end up in a worse situation then GW2 and a lot faster too.
The other big problem I see in both games is the lack of orientation. What is the BIG MISSION? What is their Vision? What is their philosophy as a company? These would describe what kind of consumer they want. The sad thing about this is, consumers think they don't know what they want... and so the real question is: Do they know what are and what they want? Or are they just here to create a game a hope it will work because "it seems logic"? Since we consumers don't know what they are looking for, we go after all the hype they put in their products, but after a while we see there's something lacking in a game for me, and for my friend (who is different than me), and for almost everyone because they promised things and never really delivered those things. If the consumer feels he is beeing fooled around, that's the company fault for not beeing specific enough because, today, the consumer has a lot more products to chose from and the company is the one that gets burned.
As someone who played casually, I was excited that there was going to be content for everyone. I was excited that they sounded like they understood the value proposition, and that if they wanted to keep subs they had to put out content. I would have stuck with them if they would have kept on producing content. However 3 month updates that aren't any bigger than the 1 months update, and didn't appear to be any higher quality... Canceling holiday events... Sorry bub, If you aren't willing to put forth the effort, I'm not willing to put down my money.
In the end, the needed to get a lot of content out in the first year to keep people busy and happy. They need a better quality assurance team that should have been working out bugs long before the patches got released. In other words they needed a content pipeline that wasn't broken.
Personally what I would like to tell any up and coming MMORPG developers is, if you don't have enough staff and monetary reserves to put out frequent updates for at least the first year while you establish your player base, don't even bother.
I never bought the game, but from what little I did play in the beta, I can safely say I didn't like the combat. There were so many things that I didn't like about the combat that it'd be simpler to say I only liked how disarm was handled in the game, and that was about all I liked about the combat.
Few people fail to understand why certain aspects of older games were the way they were, and misinterpret the success of the game, by attributing certain aspects as positive influences rather than the compromises that they actually were.
Then again it is entirely possible that people love floaty combat and hitbox vomit.
Exactly the right interpretation of what Wildstar is. It's a shame that so many people (like the redaction and readers of massivelly) do not understand that it is, and should be a game for certain kind of people. It is a game for raiders, yet so many idiots want it to be everything and have things for everyone, for it to be like every other game. It is a game for people that like riding and consider it the main thing to do in an mmo, while still having a bunch of other activities to pass the time, just not as the main focus. I hope people will stop bahing Carbine for that it is still somewhat stubborn in their vision of the game and saying that it shoul listen to the whole playerbase and change their game. Wildstar is what it is, if you don't like it ,don't play it. stop trying to rin the game for people that like that different approach
Originally posted by Ponku Exactly the right interpretation of what Wildstar is. It's a shame that so many people (like the redaction and readers of massivelly) do not understand that it is, and should be a game for certain kind of people. It is a game for raiders, yet so many idiots want it to be everything and have things for everyone, for it to be like every other game. It is a game for people that like riding and consider it the main thing to do in an mmo, while still having a bunch of other activities to pass the time, just not as the main focus. I hope people will stop bahing Carbine for that it is still somewhat stubborn in their vision of the game and saying that it shoul listen to the whole playerbase and change their game. Wildstar is what it is, if you don't like it ,don't play it. stop trying to rin the game for people that like that different approach
unfortunately the raiders didnt support this game and many guilds left fighting the 'Roster boss' this although has been changing with alot of the updates carbine has done to the game.
If Wildstar was Buy to Play with DLC I would have tried it. I don't know how long I would have remained and kept playing it, but it certainly helps getting people in to not have a subscription. Some people want to play a game for years casually and sub fees block us. Yes, there are people would love subscriptions because they keep out casuals and promote a more hardcore play style, but for people who play multiple mmos 5-10 a month, sub fees block us when we can't afford to be paying $100's a month on sub fees, for games that we don't have enough time to play as it is.
Time = money, but what do you do when there isn't enough time or money? So, Wildstar is losing customers to games that are more fun and free, like Rift and Tera. Or, even to WoW because you can't ever out "WoW" World of Warcraft. If you're going to pay a subscription it makes more sense to just buy Warlords of Draenor and play WoW right now.
Wildstar really should have DLC patches and operate like The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. No companies follow the buy to play model, despite the fact that it works for console games just fine. How many bought Call of Duty for a 4 hr solo campaign? Sure, that was fun, but it ended quick, they spend thousands of hours on multiplayer, how many would buy CoD if multiplayer required a seperate monthly fee of $15 a month in order to use it? Not very many..
It just makes more sense to pay the money up front and get permanent access to the content that you paid for, additional expansions and DLC would always cost, but once bought you'd have permanent access and could casually play as much or as little as you prefer.
Also World of Warcraft didn't have content when it launched, it is unfair to expect more out of Wildstar.
WoW was kept alive by the PVP players who created their own content in a limited number of Battlegrounds and world pvp. They only add 2 or 3 battlegrounds per an expansion, which is every 2 years. So, if it wasn't for PVP players being willing to "grind" the same old content over and over and keep paying subscription fees, they wouldn't have remained as popular during the years that it took them to release The Burning Crusade expansion.
There were and will always be content shortages and game login queues / bugs and glitches on every single MMO. Some are better than others, but usually you take your content vs polish approach, you can 't ever have enough content unless it is bugged/glitchy. With Sony and Everquest you usually got the content but had more bugs and glitches, with Blizzard and WoW you got a lot less content but got polish and almost virtually no bugs and glitches.
My guess is Wildstar is trying to do the polish approach like Blizzard, thus they found it really hard to get content out there while reducing bugs and glitches.
I know one thing that Wildstar could do that most games don't do since it has a fantasy sci-fi theme.
They have to be unique and they could be by focusing on air combat. Almost no games let you fight on a flying mount or with jet packs... Do they do this at all or enough? Have special areas that you have to fly to get to and just exploration and secrets in the sky? There are super hero games, but some of us don't like them, and Star Trek Online has starships (along with Eve Online for PVP),, Star Wars ToR has on rails space combat, and Aion was the first with flying combat.
However, it would be really cool and fun if more games let you fight airborne. Let you mine/harvest items without having to dismount (does Wildstar do this?), because that constantly dismounting/remounting every single time you see a node is annoying...
There are so many things they could do to make themselves unique, get their own mini games like the WoW peggle addon and Everquest 1's gem game that you played while LFG and waiting on boats, and make your own games to make people log in like Rift's Minions and WoW's pokecraft battle pets.
Fun and fluffy things matter.... dailies and reputation grinds are a chore, do they have awesome house decor and houses on Wildstar? Cosmetics, companion pets, mounts, illusion/"fun" emote skills?
Random world events like Lord of the Rings Online with its "Buried Treasure" and "Hobnanigans"? Or, like Rift's "Unicornalia" , it seems like Rift has a event going on almost every single week.
I think Tera had like 3 different events going on during October for Halloween. However, the main problem for Wildstar, is this is an incredibly oversaturated fantasy mmo market, and you have to be more sci-fi to promote the game vs Star Trek Online and Star Wars : ToR, because t here are countless fantasy MMO's out there already.
Comments
Jeesh, I'd never think of playing a game that didn't have Mecha-Elves...
I kind of agree with the "trying to appeal to everyone comment" of the OP.
I *L*O*V*E*D Wildstar's graphics and action target combat, but when I played it I just queued up for pvp Battlegrounds because that was all that was really interesting for me.
The problem was that they had that silly gear grind in batttlegrounds that made no sense at all. Why should people who are supposedly more skilled than me (which is doubtful--many just paid or were carried to their gear, but I digress) get a handicap by getting better gear in pvp? Surely any sane person would say the handicap (cf. golf, and basically any other skilled game...hmmmm...maybe MMO combat is not actually skilled gameplay or the devs don't think it is...) goes to the LESSER skilled person.
Anyway, I loved the graphics and the targetting, but the gear focus of pvp was too much for me. Why bother, when I can just play SMITE and have no gear grind at all?
Well, the answer is of course that after a bit I didn't bother and just play SMITE now... I did like the character customization though.
It is really too bad that people can't understand that pvp should be about skill, and that a gear grind is the absolute antithesis of skill. Oh well...
addressing everything but the piss-poor game performance for amd users we can just go get cupcaked.
The problem with new MMO's nowadays lie indeed in the playerbase. There can be 10 things they like about the game and one they don't and that completely destroys the rest of the game even if they wouldn't even have to do it to accomplish anything. Whats funny about this is they feel so entitled that they simply have to go to the forums and act as martyrs of some weird kind because they feel to have been wronged somehow. Gamers attitudes are getting worse every year and I'd say it could generally be considered toxic on average nowadays. Internet is a wonderful place where theres no consequences. More and more people are making it their crusade to bombard a fellow player or a whole game down for often reasons that are based on a heat of the moment.
Anyway back to wildstar.
Leveling offered nothing new and got lots of hate towards it being just a hub to hub, kill this get that type of thing. I've played several big MMO's and it's been the same thing in every last one of them. I have nothing good or bad to say about WS questing. It was pretty much what I expected it to be. I agree the main story gets really going a bit late, but it is an entertaining one and I do wait for more to be revealed against my usual habits. Some regional stories were also quite funny, but nothing mindblowing.
Art style has been a deal breaker or a deal maker for many. Then I guess there are ppl like me who don't actually care if the art style is cartoony or realistic as long as it works and is well made. Many complained about wildstar demanding too much from a computer for what it offered in graphics and compared it to games like Tera etc. It had its issues with optimization, but was always playable. I started playing it with 5 yr old AMD/ATI computer and had no problem with medium graphics, but I just was lucky I guess. Compared to Tera wildstars graphics have a way different style, but WS is clearly more advanced as it should be.
Combat. Another deal maker/breaker. One of the biggest selling points of this game was its combat system and this one for my experience divided players even more than the graphics. It was never designed for the lazy gamers and I don't mean casuals now..I mean the players that liked standing still most of the time pressing 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 and at same staring casting bar, damage meter, casting bar, damage meter. They call this tactical or stategic...I just don't get it anymore..HOW IS IT TACTICAL OR STRATEGIC!? I played WoW for a few years as hardcore raider and the last one of those years I only played it because I wanted to play with the guildies. It was the exact same shit from day one to the last day. Patches, expansions and reworks didnt change the gameplay at all, they only changed the numbers you saw in that god damn damage meter. Progression in wow is gear based, not skill based. Progression in wildstar is a mix of those two. This reason makes it my preferred game right now. I read in a few posts above complains about the combat being clunky and not feeling fluid and I seriously couldn't disagree more. If you can't play the game don't blame the game for it. You could have given it the time to learn, but instead you decided to blame something that isn't there. Wildstars combat responds immediately to the push of a button and animations are clear and the combat flows quite nicely. For comparison I played TESO for a while also and thats clunky and unresponsive right there.
Bugs. Every game has them and people aren't being realistic with their expectations. Wildstar has had its fair share of them too and while they have implemented hotfixes for the most game breaking ones in a very timely manner I do agree that there have been or still are some bugs that should have been fixed a long time ago. It has gotten clearly better after they stopped trying to push out monthly content updates. Don't know who was the genius that convinced everyone at Carbine to try to keep up with that, it's just never was realistic.
PvP. This thing failed in wildstar badly in my eyes. While it is amazingly fun due to the combat system at least for me they failed the progression system for dedicated pvp gamers. Changes have been made in that part of the game and more will probably come before it finds the right way. I'm mostly a raider/pve type of player, but I do enjoy pvp every now and then. For this kind of a gamer the pvp has been fun and very entertaining.
Many ppl have also complained about giving up with the game before getting to lvl 10 due to various reasons. If you like group content in MMOs I strongly recommend you level up to 20 and try the first dungeon and give it a fair shot. This is where the game convinced me of its true potential. Dungeons and raids in wildstar are the best the genre has ever had to offer for me.
What I've read about the upcoming drop 4 I've come to a conclusion Carbine is trying to make the game more appealing for casuals with almost free epics and much more solo content. Not sure if I'm liking this yet. It remains to be seen. 40man -> 20man change is really needed. This is coming from a player that has been jumping to a guild after another because they couldn't maintain an active roster of 40 raiders without the officers losing their sleep.
The potential is there. They just have to make right decisions from now on and people will be coming back. Wrong decisions could mean the death blow as the playerbase right now is healthy in pve servers, but really bad in pvp servers.
Finally started raiding and its the most fun ive had since Lich king- and TSW nightmare dungeons!
i was patient - and glad ive done so- havent had so much fun in a long time!- well worth the wait.
and now with all the changes in drop 4- iam glad i call nexus my home.
They did focus on a niche. They focused on raiders. I really don't think MMO developers can win at this point. I see countless posts about the questing system. Beyond sandbox, what's the alternative? A game can't be a one trick pony. It has to be complete, it has to have a large feature list to keep up with current games. It has to be fun and accessible, yet flexible enough to warrant deeper exploration. Very few games are accomplishing this. Fortunately, I think the rate of MMO development is slowing and we'll see less games like this.
The sad thing is this game could have been stronger. The questing was fine, the leveling was fine. The problem was poor opimtization, high entrance cost to endgame, and not enough endgame variety. It had a decent combat system, better than WoW's in many ways, great housing, and great crafting.
I feel that no matter what approach developers take, they're not going to succeed. This genre needs a drought, it needs some time to figure out what it wants and what it'll do to get that.
What is strategic combat to you? Positioning was a huge thing in this game, so was dodging and the proper skill rhythm.
Regards to questing and leveling, what do you propose instead? If you don't have quests and quest givers, what do you proprose to entirely replace that?
What people should understand is that PvP in MMORPG should never be about skill alone. There's always these factors like level, gear, buffs, skill ranks, etc. so PVP in this genre is never on even grounds. There's a genre where things are different, and that's MOBAs.
I've never understood these people who come to play an MMORPG for PvP only, and then complain they are forced to participate in PvE content to do better in PvP. I agree you shouldn't be able to grind battlegrounds for better gear, you should do it in the open world that the game provides.
If we think about f.ex WoW.. it has an open world and an ongoing war between horde and alliance. Yet almost the only way to actually fight the war in this game is defend flags in a small, instanced valley. Wohoo, there's a war going on and its winner is resolved by playing kids games in some unknown location.
PvP belongs to MMORPGs for sure, but it has to be a purpose other than gain honor and collect points to upgrade your gear. You shouldn't fight to be able to fight better in the future. You should fight to achieve something for you faction, and upgrade your gear to ensure you are able to do it better next time.
I agree with this. Loved the beginning, by mid game, it started to lose me, combat was tedious as was questing and yeah the challenges popping up all the time messed the pace up. Those should be something that happen at endgame and give people a reason to go back into old zones, maybe have those give elder gem rewards or other endgame stuff.
I quit at 40 because I got quest/combat fatigue. Came back a few months later to tackle the last 10 levels, very rough and once I hit cap, attempted to start the attunement chain and just said, the heck with it. I don't really raid as it is(LFR for life! lol) I just want to see a raid's story just once so, what else is there for me to go after? Nothing.
I believe Carbine did choose a direction upon release -Raids.
was it the smartest choice?- perhaps not.
I believe now they are focusing on what other mmos have upon launch
itemization-drop 4, solo content drop3-, incentives!
the raiding now can take a back seat since they really have nothing todo with the main story-as stated. It may have been that carbine notice the trend how mmo players eat through content so fast and have no endgame that they decided to start it backwards?
who knows- but the game is starting to shape up really nice with drop 4- which has a lot of the quality items and mechanics all general mmos have upon launch.
my only beef with ncsoft/carbine was the departure of many key players in this mmo. hoping tha some comeback-something rarely seen in the dev community.
To answer the quest question, look at how WoW did questing in WoD. Questing does not have to be boring. Devs need to be more creative with their questing systems if they want to hold the players attention. We've been doing "kill x amount of mobs" for long enough. Hire writers that know what they're doing. Make people invested in your game's world by creating sweeping, exciting quests that engage the player. "Kill 10 rats" type of quests aren't going to keep a lot of players attentions because we've all been doing these types of quests in so many past MMORPGs.
The quest formula needs to change and needs to be made into a quality experience (voiced, scripted events, in-game cutscenes/cinematic cutscenes, and etc.) if a company wants $15 a month for their MMORPG. It's really that simple.
Smile
Not sure if serious..
I totally agree, but that's another veneer over the same system. I don't have a problem with the system, nor do I have any pretense an MMO would be absent of that feature. I just find post after post complaining about questing and lamenting the themepark structure. However, WoW once again shows the way and demonstrates how successful the model can actually be. Will others listen? In a way. We'll see another 5 games to crop with a similar, but shallower experience. This is why I stand by my earlier comment, MMOs need to largely stop being developed. There's too much crap on the market and too many fickle gamers.
Only played late beta, but I never realy cared for my char. I just never got hooked. Often I hear people tell the story starts getting interesting at about level 30, but that's just way too late. You have to get people hooked almost from the start.
The start of the game was more looking at the screen being told a backgroundstory than me playing the game and experiencing the story.
The game itself was ok. The setting was ok. I didn't mind the style of combat. The enemies weren't bad. The quests were pretty standard quests. There just wasn't something interesting enough to make me want to log on and play Wildstar. It wasn't a bad game. But for a subscription game I want more than ok. I can get ok from SWTOR or Rift or some other f2p MMO.
The only GOOD things to "learn" are the raids, and dynamic encounters in an Action Combat MMO.
There are many BAD things to learn:
- how NOT to design a world with only 5-6 areas
- how NOT to release content: yey another DAILY zone
- how NOT to fix bugs: game-breaking (abilities not usable, exploitable elements) left in the game for months
- how NOT to balance classes: disparity in DPS/tanking/healing of at least 40% between top and bottom classes. Only GW2 is more broken in this regard.
- how NOT to spend money: sooooo much marketing going around Wildstar, not even 10% of that effort is put into development
and the list goes on and on....
Well, I only played the beta a bit and then bought the game just to play it the first month.
In my opinion, this game and Guild Wars 2 have simillar problems, and Carbine clearly didn't learned their lesson with ArenaNet's mistakes.
The first of them is, just like you say in your post, trying to have all kinds of gamers instead of focusing on one or two types of gamers. That's the worst mistake ever when releasing a new product in most situations and it seems that, at least to me, many mmorpg develloppers don't know how to make the best out of their "unique products".
When you create a product, you have to make sure THAT PRODUCT satisfies a certain necessity in consumers. Unfortunatelly today the consumer is much more self-oriented and it evolves much faster then companies capacity to adapt, thanks to the digital era we are now. This means that, if you try to focus in too many types of consumer, your product will be obsolete in a flash because not even one of those types will be entirely satisfied with it and they will go the the next big thing in a heart beat.
Todays' mmorpgs' devellopers don't show signs of getting this, which is wierd since the gaming industry is one of the first industries to be ready for this change in consumer behaviours.
GW2 had this same issue and it's still trying to fix all their mistakes for the past 2 years, BUT is still adapting too slow and that might get them sooner or later if they aren't carefull enough. Maybe that's the reason why they focused on getting a lot of new players instead of getting the old players back, starting with a new "wave" of consumers with a "new beguinning". But I guess the time wasn't the right one for that either.
Carbine is having the same problem. If they don't adapt fast enough, they might end up in a worse situation then GW2 and a lot faster too.
The other big problem I see in both games is the lack of orientation. What is the BIG MISSION? What is their Vision? What is their philosophy as a company? These would describe what kind of consumer they want. The sad thing about this is, consumers think they don't know what they want... and so the real question is: Do they know what are and what they want? Or are they just here to create a game a hope it will work because "it seems logic"? Since we consumers don't know what they are looking for, we go after all the hype they put in their products, but after a while we see there's something lacking in a game for me, and for my friend (who is different than me), and for almost everyone because they promised things and never really delivered those things. If the consumer feels he is beeing fooled around, that's the company fault for not beeing specific enough because, today, the consumer has a lot more products to chose from and the company is the one that gets burned.
As someone who played casually, I was excited that there was going to be content for everyone. I was excited that they sounded like they understood the value proposition, and that if they wanted to keep subs they had to put out content. I would have stuck with them if they would have kept on producing content. However 3 month updates that aren't any bigger than the 1 months update, and didn't appear to be any higher quality... Canceling holiday events... Sorry bub, If you aren't willing to put forth the effort, I'm not willing to put down my money.
In the end, the needed to get a lot of content out in the first year to keep people busy and happy. They need a better quality assurance team that should have been working out bugs long before the patches got released. In other words they needed a content pipeline that wasn't broken.
Personally what I would like to tell any up and coming MMORPG developers is, if you don't have enough staff and monetary reserves to put out frequent updates for at least the first year while you establish your player base, don't even bother.
I never bought the game, but from what little I did play in the beta, I can safely say I didn't like the combat. There were so many things that I didn't like about the combat that it'd be simpler to say I only liked how disarm was handled in the game, and that was about all I liked about the combat.
Few people fail to understand why certain aspects of older games were the way they were, and misinterpret the success of the game, by attributing certain aspects as positive influences rather than the compromises that they actually were.
Then again it is entirely possible that people love floaty combat and hitbox vomit.
If Wildstar was Buy to Play with DLC I would have tried it. I don't know how long I would have remained and kept playing it, but it certainly helps getting people in to not have a subscription. Some people want to play a game for years casually and sub fees block us. Yes, there are people would love subscriptions because they keep out casuals and promote a more hardcore play style, but for people who play multiple mmos 5-10 a month, sub fees block us when we can't afford to be paying $100's a month on sub fees, for games that we don't have enough time to play as it is.
Time = money, but what do you do when there isn't enough time or money? So, Wildstar is losing customers to games that are more fun and free, like Rift and Tera. Or, even to WoW because you can't ever out "WoW" World of Warcraft. If you're going to pay a subscription it makes more sense to just buy Warlords of Draenor and play WoW right now.
Wildstar really should have DLC patches and operate like The Secret World and Guild Wars 2. No companies follow the buy to play model, despite the fact that it works for console games just fine. How many bought Call of Duty for a 4 hr solo campaign? Sure, that was fun, but it ended quick, they spend thousands of hours on multiplayer, how many would buy CoD if multiplayer required a seperate monthly fee of $15 a month in order to use it? Not very many..
It just makes more sense to pay the money up front and get permanent access to the content that you paid for, additional expansions and DLC would always cost, but once bought you'd have permanent access and could casually play as much or as little as you prefer.
Also World of Warcraft didn't have content when it launched, it is unfair to expect more out of Wildstar.
WoW was kept alive by the PVP players who created their own content in a limited number of Battlegrounds and world pvp. They only add 2 or 3 battlegrounds per an expansion, which is every 2 years. So, if it wasn't for PVP players being willing to "grind" the same old content over and over and keep paying subscription fees, they wouldn't have remained as popular during the years that it took them to release The Burning Crusade expansion.
There were and will always be content shortages and game login queues / bugs and glitches on every single MMO. Some are better than others, but usually you take your content vs polish approach, you can 't ever have enough content unless it is bugged/glitchy. With Sony and Everquest you usually got the content but had more bugs and glitches, with Blizzard and WoW you got a lot less content but got polish and almost virtually no bugs and glitches.
My guess is Wildstar is trying to do the polish approach like Blizzard, thus they found it really hard to get content out there while reducing bugs and glitches.
I know one thing that Wildstar could do that most games don't do since it has a fantasy sci-fi theme.
They have to be unique and they could be by focusing on air combat. Almost no games let you fight on a flying mount or with jet packs... Do they do this at all or enough? Have special areas that you have to fly to get to and just exploration and secrets in the sky? There are super hero games, but some of us don't like them, and Star Trek Online has starships (along with Eve Online for PVP),, Star Wars ToR has on rails space combat, and Aion was the first with flying combat.
However, it would be really cool and fun if more games let you fight airborne. Let you mine/harvest items without having to dismount (does Wildstar do this?), because that constantly dismounting/remounting every single time you see a node is annoying...
There are so many things they could do to make themselves unique, get their own mini games like the WoW peggle addon and Everquest 1's gem game that you played while LFG and waiting on boats, and make your own games to make people log in like Rift's Minions and WoW's pokecraft battle pets.
Fun and fluffy things matter.... dailies and reputation grinds are a chore, do they have awesome house decor and houses on Wildstar? Cosmetics, companion pets, mounts, illusion/"fun" emote skills?
Random world events like Lord of the Rings Online with its "Buried Treasure" and "Hobnanigans"? Or, like Rift's "Unicornalia" , it seems like Rift has a event going on almost every single week.
I think Tera had like 3 different events going on during October for Halloween. However, the main problem for Wildstar, is this is an incredibly oversaturated fantasy mmo market, and you have to be more sci-fi to promote the game vs Star Trek Online and Star Wars : ToR, because t here are countless fantasy MMO's out there already.