Your comparing technical limitations vs Consumer Trend.
And yes Blizzard knew WoW would be huge. Warcraft 3, Starcraft and diablo 2 both had big sales.... They had huge amounts of buyers who would buy anything they put out. Sorta like making Grand Theft Auto online 2 (and charging for this one).
So yes they knew that it would be big, it just turned out bigger. The success of WoW is more complicated than just they had vision or they made there game like this... blah blah blah..
They had no idea. They even stopped shipping the game in the United States for several months after the holiday season. They still had an EU launch, but no games were shipped on this side of the pond. You can google it and find an article about just how unprepared they were. How would they know anyway? The most popular games only had a few hundred thousand subs.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
Good. Hopefully Wildstar can corral the majority of these magical people who have 2 jobs, a family, are working on their Ph.D, own a ranch/farm, enter bodybuilding competitions, and still have time to game for 8 hours a day. It should be a real treat for these folks.
I just hope hat the best, and coolest gear will not just be available in the 40 man raids only. I hope Carbine allows the casual/solo players a shot at the biggest and the best with our own sets of challenges. It is very possible to create challenging content for small groups and solo players that also give us a challenge, so we can be in the loop too. Developers who realize that just because many of us do not like to raid, it doesnt mean we dont want to have a shot at that great looking gear at the end of a 40 man raid. We want to earn it just like the raiding community. But we want our own challenges to acquire it. That is what I hated about vanilla wow and EQ 1. The only way to have that great looking gear was to raid for hours and hours. I dont mind doing content for hours or days, or weeks to get that great gear. I just want to play my way.
Originally posted by Torvaldr Originally posted by jacktors I just hope hat the best, and coolest gear will not just be available in the 40 man raids only. I hope Carbine allows the casual/solo players a shot at the biggest and the best with our own sets of challenges. It is very possible to create challenging content for small groups and solo players that also give us a challenge, so we can be in the loop too. Developers who realize that just because many of us do not like to raid, it doesnt mean we dont want to have a shot at that great looking gear at the end of a 40 man raid. We want to earn it just like the raiding community. But we want our own challenges to acquire it. That is what I hated about vanilla wow and EQ 1. The only way to have that great looking gear was to raid for hours and hours. I dont mind doing content for hours or days, or weeks to get that great gear. I just want to play my way.
Has that ever been the case in any game? The 10 and 20 person raids won't deliver the same rewards that 40 person raids will let alone the group, dungeon, overland, small group, and solo content.
What amazes me is that so many people will pay for and bankroll raiders while swallowing the trash that is second hand progression. I can see how it happened in earlier games. The world of mmos were new and we were maybe a bit more naive, but why do people still do this in newer games?
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I want to play and progress my own way. I want my efforts while grouping, soloing, or crafting to contribute to the same progression. The only way to send the signal is to not fund their game for them.
I dunno. If I'm not going to raid, then why do I need raid gear? When I do combat, I'm usually farming mobs that drop crafting materials and usually by the time I am max level, I am dropping those mobs in 1 or 2 hits in crafted gear anyway.
I understand wanting to progress and play your own way. I do the same thing. But I don't demand rewards for activities I don't participate in.
I love"d" raids, but it's just too tiresome, time-consuming and nerve-racking, especially when you have a busy life... I just hope they won put exclusive rewards on the raid bosses that you must get in order to keep up in other endgame content like PvP or 5 man dungeons.
Let The Amazing Raid-Men have their fun, and let us have ours.
I despise gear grinds in mmo's BUT if I do end up playing because family/friends want to, I will just pay someone to run me through the raid content for loot a few weeks and get it all so I'm done til the next gear grind patch. I like getting the best gear possible, but I'm not about to do a 40 man raid again.
I despised the 40 man raiding we had in WoW, so I'll either not play an mmo that makes me gear grind, or I'll just pay someone else to get me through it so I can get it quickly and be done with it.
Originally posted by Torvaldr If raid rewards worked for raids and were no more valuable or provided better progression I wouldn't care either. But raid gear is more powerful than any other gear and the rewards more valuable. Why does raid gear need to overpower every other form of content? Why doesn't it just work that way in raids and function like other gear in other forms of content (dungeons, overland, contested bosses, pvp, etc)? Why do the raid rewards need to be magnitudes inherently more valuable than other content such that raiders get tons richer and can overpower the trade economy. Why do raids need exclusive rewards that non-raiders must purchase exclusively from raiders like crafting recipes and materials or fluff rewards? Take Rift as an example, some of the most unique mounts in the game are locked behind raids.There is no reason for any of that. I've raided in Rift and EQ2. That content isn't more challenging than say Rift's Master Mode dungeons.
Believe me, I am with you on this. In the context of Rift, yeah thats a main reason I gave up on that game. As a crafter, I simply could not give away my best made stuff because raiders got the best recipes and crafting materials.
In the context of Wildstar, it is really hard to assume they will do the same thing as Rift. Considering the game is launching with four core gameplay aspects, it would seem counter productive to frontload all relevant rewards into only one of them.
Although I don't raid, I feel that large raiding is an important aspect of a well balanced mmo. Raid culture is just as important as role play culture and so is the crafting community.
Where was I going with this? lol
Oh yea! I think we should wait and see how Wildstar works on all of its systems before writing off raiding based on bad management in other games.
In the context of Wildstar, it is really hard to assume they will do the same thing as Rift. Considering the game is launching with four core gameplay aspects, it would seem counter productive to frontload all relevant rewards into only one of them.
I know a ton of games which had all sorts of complex crafting systems, dungeon systems, and even eco systems in some cases, but in the end, the best gear came from raiding in all of them (which ended up trivializing EVERYTHING else).
If Wildstar makes it so that equal gear comes from being a builder, soldier, explorer, and scientist (the four paths in the game that they keep advertising about) instead of from raiding like every other MMO in existence, I'll be pleasantly surprised.
......."Surprised" definitely being the word. I'm not expecting it to happen, what with like, you know, every other MMO in existence eventually making the best gear come from raids only. Maybe not when the MMO initially comes out, but eventually, it always becomes the case as devs realize or just lose the drive and will power to make the best gear come from other sources.
Getting to that other topic, people say "Oh, they're making other content besides raid content!", but in the end, designing a raid that's meant to be beaten and not zerged by 40 players takes a ridiculous amount of dev time and budget for content that's only going to be enjoyed by a small amount of players and, if they make the best gear only come from it, leave a bunch of other players extremely aggravated. And that's assuming they have the player base big enough to sustain 40 man raids in the first place, which they won't, regardless of your silly irrelevant opinion on "oh, there should be no absolutes!" is. Wild Star will NOT have as large a player base as WoW. The market is too saturated today for another WoW clone to have it, and all your "no such thing as absolutes!" nonsense won't change that. I never said it absolutely will not have enough for 40 man raids, however, but no one can say it absolutely will, either, and in that case, why risk spending so much dev time and money on something you're not even sure will be sustainable? Those resources could have gone to other aspects of the game.
Hopefully they have some magic remedy and have learned from Rift as it pertains to raiding, which was also touted for the top 5% mentality.
When the Hammerknell raid hit, which was fantastic difficulty wise, about half of the raiding guilds broke because you really couldn't carry anyone. This continued happening to the point of only being able to recruit raiders from dying guilds. I'm not sure if things improved after as that was the time i gave up having to deal with this issue.
This isn't and obviously wasn't healthy for long term growth.
Now the key is to have many forms of progression other than top end raiding so I'm curious how Wildstar intends to handle this.
Sadly the more details that are provided about this game the less likely I am to play it.
My old Wow buddies keeping trying to interest me, as according to them, Wildstar will be the next big thing. But shock, horror, due to RL I have become a casual gamer so 40, 20 even 10 man raids have become a thing of the past.
Originally posted by TiamatRoar I know a ton of games which had all sorts of complex crafting systems, dungeon systems, and even eco systems in some cases, but in the end, the best gear came from raiding in all of them (which ended up trivializing EVERYTHING else).
I'd really like to see some examples of mmos that have complex crafting systems being completely nullified by raid gear. Because honestly, I cant think of any. Part of what makes a crafting system complex, is that it offers more than just the ability to make gear.
If raid rewards worked for raids and were no more valuable or provided better progression I wouldn't care either. But raid gear is more powerful than any other gear and the rewards more valuable. Why does raid gear need to overpower every other form of content? Why doesn't it just work that way in raids and function like other gear in other forms of content (dungeons, overland, contested bosses, pvp, etc)? Why do the raid rewards need to be magnitudes inherently more valuable than other content such that raiders get tons richer and can overpower the trade economy. Why do raids need exclusive rewards that non-raiders must purchase exclusively from raiders like crafting recipes and materials or fluff rewards? Take Rift as an example, some of the most unique mounts in the game are locked behind raids.
There is no reason for any of that. I've raided in Rift and EQ2. That content isn't more challenging than say Rift's Master Mode dungeons.
Your statement doesn't make sense when you add PvP into the mix then talk about Rift. Raid gear in Rift was pointless for PvP, since PvP had its on dedicated set of gear with PvP stats on it.
Now, not all raid gear was the best in Rift as well and you needed to Mix & Match with gear coming from Rifts. You also had to actually do some PvP (Conquest) later on for couple items that were BiS. Not to mention seasonal events who brought at times couple BiS items as well (so even raiders had to do these).
Now, when you take a look at the difficulty of dungeons / world bosses in Rift and Raid difficulty, it's somehow normal that the Raid gear is better since it's simply harder to get. World Bosses are a joke and just a spam fest anyway in Rift. As for dungeons, same thing, joke. T2 were somehow challenging at first when no one had a clue about the strategy and still awful gear, but they quickly became trivial. Master Mode were still far from being as hard as any of HK/ID bosses.
I only agree with you regarding the mount part, and that's mostly because I am the kind of gamer who couldn't care less about cosmetics. I always used my basic epic mount in Rift since it was just as fast as any other fancy mount.
---
What I never understood are non-raiders crying about Raid gear being too powerful, but even if you gave them the raid gear, what would they do with it since... they don't raid. What's the point? Clearing dungeons even faster than you already do? Making World Bosses fights even more trivial? Turning Elites into trash since you are overgeared for them?
Owning Raid Gear is only a way to smoother the progression in a Raid, that's it. At first when your roster is not geared, any small mistake result in a wipe. Gear just give you more room for failure (or lack of skill).
Vanila wow had 40 man raids to and the best memory's still are from those days.
Glad to see WS holding on to this epic adventure
Lets hope these 40 man raids arn't as easy as the ones in Vanilla WoW, where the most complicated fight mechanic was dispelling a debuff.
The only "hard" part of vanilla WoW raiding was getting 40 ppl to gather , get attuned, and not go AFK. The actual raid fights themselves were some of the easiest/simplest encounters the game (or any MMO for that matter) has ever had.
Since the topic also covered gear, and since I've read up a lot on the subject, I can add some "facts", aka things we know to be planned into this discussion.
The plan for gearing is to move away from raid gear being the end all, be all of gear, because lets face it, if you raid once and get some loot, you automatically invalidate everything the open world will ever give you. And that is, frankly, dumb, because it locks you into raiding always giving you the biggest carrot, and dungeons, open world and other content that COULD be challenging or fun giving you nothing of worth.
So what's the plan? Basically gear for a certain content type gives you gear that is ideal for that content type, but not the best at other types of content. Those 3 types we know of are solo/small group end game, raiding, and pvp. So a raider will no longer roflstomp mobs in the open world and eclipse any solo/sg gear efforts. But he will be roughly on par with the top-end solo/sg stuff. And PvP will be great for PvP, but like solo/small group gear, it won't be really good for raiding. They intend to have the top-end solo stuff be about equal with the entry level raid gear, and they intend for this kind of gear to take a lot of effort to get in the first place.
Personally, I applaud this, because now you can refine your gear, aka your character, without HAVING to go raid. You can do the type of content you actually like, while raiders get to raid because they like raiding, not simply because a) its the best gear which everyone wants and b) its the one viable pve endgame option in pretty much every themepark game out there.
Now on the subject of raid sizes. 20 and 40 man will have separate instances, so it might also have separate gear. Or a shared gear pool, we don't know that yet. Raiding also won't be the main driver for the game's lore at end game any more either, instead it will be told via the solo story, and via the things that scientists can unlock as part of their path quests etc.
Is it going to be hard to get 40 people together and working as a group etc, in possibly very difficult content? Yes, but carbine pretty much said "that's the point". Obviously a lot of people were indeed asking for the return of 40-man stuff, so the bigger sizes are a pretty welcome thing. I might give it a shot if I end up being good enough, but I intend for the most part to enjoy the solo/group aspects of the game, since dungeons look insanely fun already.
Lastly, keep in mind right now about half their development resources go into at or near-cap experiences, and they abundantly made it clear that they will launch with a fully fleshed out late/end-game, as opposed to many other launches who have a couple weeks worth of content, and a patch cycle of 3 months. Meanwhile wildstar is scheduled to have a one-month cycle, much like gw2. Hopefully with a bit more meat, but seeing as they have many systems and many more in development, it should be fairly simple to add to the game
40 man raids and they say there will be no "duty finder" that helps you form them? lol. Good luck with that. The devs seem determined to make their game fail. I really can't come to any other conclusion.
Good try on the marketing,but having played FFXI,i know full well you won't get any tougher bosses anywhere in gaming.Reason i say this is because it takes pretty much a one dimensional structure to take some bosses and that is IF you figure out that one way to beat them.
Personally i don't agree with that type of combat,i prefer a mediocre versatile challenge that is just FUN.
WS already doomed itself with the hand holding red carpet telegraphs,FFXI for example uses no hand holding at all while achieving similar type combat structure.
I already stated many times in the past that Raiding is just some elitist term,it is still gaming with the goal of defeating a boss,nothing else is different or changes other than the term instance usually accompanies it ,which again is a bad omen for MMORPG gaming.
I might also add that the SIZE of the raid offers absolutely NOTHING to the SKILL factor,they would know that if they have gamed at all over the last 15 years of online gaming.I could construct a more skillful scenario with a 6 man group than any dev could with their Raids,not tooting my horn,it is VERY simple to do anyone could do it.So for Carbine to make bold claims about elitist raiding is just nonsense,just cheesy marketing 101.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Originally posted by The1ceQueen I did 40 man raiding before, and I just couldn't see myself ever doing it again. It wasn't fun, even when it was challenging. It was still a gear grind, and I despise gear grinding mmorpg's.
I did these once also and never again. They are not fun and the fact that this game is going to add stuff like this puts me off from this game. Enough mmo's already do this stuff. Always got to please the hardcore crowd i guess. I can see the lagfest already.
Originally posted by The1ceQueen I did 40 man raiding before, and I just couldn't see myself ever doing it again. It wasn't fun, even when it was challenging. It was still a gear grind, and I despise gear grinding mmorpg's.
I did these once also and never again. They are not fun and the fact that this game is going to add stuff like this puts me off from this game. Enough mmo's already do this stuff. Always got to please the hardcore crowd i guess. I can see the lagfest already.
I really don't see why it puts people off. There is a ton of other stuff to do in the game. WoW had 40 mans, only 2% of the players ever did them and they still managed to get 6 million subs in the first year. Because the game shipped with a ton of content that kept people busy and having fun. As long as Wildstar can manage to do the same, it should be win win. Exclusive content is good for the game as long as their is plenty of other content to back it up.
A lot of correlation vs. causation going on here. I don't think raid size was the main factor behind WoW's sub number growth, especially when we know the vast majority of the population never did a 40 man raid.
A lot of people became interested in the game despite the existence of 40 man raids, not because of them.
WS is gambling on the ability to attract the hardcore raider crowd since these days with streaming and social media they are practically e-celebs and bring a lot of attention to a game. This would hopefully have a trickle-down effect that would attract casual players who will still have lots of stuff to do.
The hardcore crowd matters in MMOs because they get to the endgame content first. If they get there and it sucks, they will create a lot of noise and then quit which can start a chain reaction and cause a lot of the casual players to leave since they will see no point in getting to a lame endgame.
Also these days 10-16 man raids get downed and farmed extremely quickly. Adding a 40 man raid may perhaps increase the longevity of endgame content precisely because it is very difficult to manage that number of people.
Originally posted by shalissar Good. Hopefully Wildstar can corral the majority of these magical people who have 2 jobs, a family, are working on their Ph.D, own a ranch/farm, enter bodybuilding competitions, and still have time to game for 8 hours a day. It should be a real treat for these folks.
You seem to have an anger issue.
Just because people can manage their time more efficiently than you do, doesn't make them wrong.
Just because I'm a gamer doesn't mean I drive a Honda.
Comments
Yeah looking forfard to this game! Hope it won't be another WoW clone..
Merazet
They had no idea. They even stopped shipping the game in the United States for several months after the holiday season. They still had an EU launch, but no games were shipped on this side of the pond. You can google it and find an article about just how unprepared they were. How would they know anyway? The most popular games only had a few hundred thousand subs.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
That is what I hated about vanilla wow and EQ 1. The only way to have that great looking gear was to raid for hours and hours. I dont mind doing content for hours or days, or weeks to get that great gear. I just want to play my way.
What amazes me is that so many people will pay for and bankroll raiders while swallowing the trash that is second hand progression. I can see how it happened in earlier games. The world of mmos were new and we were maybe a bit more naive, but why do people still do this in newer games?
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I want to play and progress my own way. I want my efforts while grouping, soloing, or crafting to contribute to the same progression. The only way to send the signal is to not fund their game for them.
I dunno. If I'm not going to raid, then why do I need raid gear? When I do combat, I'm usually farming mobs that drop crafting materials and usually by the time I am max level, I am dropping those mobs in 1 or 2 hits in crafted gear anyway.
I understand wanting to progress and play your own way. I do the same thing. But I don't demand rewards for activities I don't participate in.
I love"d" raids, but it's just too tiresome, time-consuming and nerve-racking, especially when you have a busy life... I just hope they won put exclusive rewards on the raid bosses that you must get in order to keep up in other endgame content like PvP or 5 man dungeons.
Let The Amazing Raid-Men have their fun, and let us have ours.
I despise gear grinds in mmo's BUT if I do end up playing because family/friends want to, I will just pay someone to run me through the raid content for loot a few weeks and get it all so I'm done til the next gear grind patch. I like getting the best gear possible, but I'm not about to do a 40 man raid again.
I despised the 40 man raiding we had in WoW, so I'll either not play an mmo that makes me gear grind, or I'll just pay someone else to get me through it so I can get it quickly and be done with it.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
Believe me, I am with you on this. In the context of Rift, yeah thats a main reason I gave up on that game. As a crafter, I simply could not give away my best made stuff because raiders got the best recipes and crafting materials.
In the context of Wildstar, it is really hard to assume they will do the same thing as Rift. Considering the game is launching with four core gameplay aspects, it would seem counter productive to frontload all relevant rewards into only one of them.
Although I don't raid, I feel that large raiding is an important aspect of a well balanced mmo. Raid culture is just as important as role play culture and so is the crafting community.
Where was I going with this? lol
Oh yea! I think we should wait and see how Wildstar works on all of its systems before writing off raiding based on bad management in other games.
I know a ton of games which had all sorts of complex crafting systems, dungeon systems, and even eco systems in some cases, but in the end, the best gear came from raiding in all of them (which ended up trivializing EVERYTHING else).
If Wildstar makes it so that equal gear comes from being a builder, soldier, explorer, and scientist (the four paths in the game that they keep advertising about) instead of from raiding like every other MMO in existence, I'll be pleasantly surprised.
......."Surprised" definitely being the word. I'm not expecting it to happen, what with like, you know, every other MMO in existence eventually making the best gear come from raids only. Maybe not when the MMO initially comes out, but eventually, it always becomes the case as devs realize or just lose the drive and will power to make the best gear come from other sources.
Getting to that other topic, people say "Oh, they're making other content besides raid content!", but in the end, designing a raid that's meant to be beaten and not zerged by 40 players takes a ridiculous amount of dev time and budget for content that's only going to be enjoyed by a small amount of players and, if they make the best gear only come from it, leave a bunch of other players extremely aggravated. And that's assuming they have the player base big enough to sustain 40 man raids in the first place, which they won't, regardless of your silly irrelevant opinion on "oh, there should be no absolutes!" is. Wild Star will NOT have as large a player base as WoW. The market is too saturated today for another WoW clone to have it, and all your "no such thing as absolutes!" nonsense won't change that. I never said it absolutely will not have enough for 40 man raids, however, but no one can say it absolutely will, either, and in that case, why risk spending so much dev time and money on something you're not even sure will be sustainable? Those resources could have gone to other aspects of the game.
Hopefully they have some magic remedy and have learned from Rift as it pertains to raiding, which was also touted for the top 5% mentality.
When the Hammerknell raid hit, which was fantastic difficulty wise, about half of the raiding guilds broke because you really couldn't carry anyone. This continued happening to the point of only being able to recruit raiders from dying guilds. I'm not sure if things improved after as that was the time i gave up having to deal with this issue.
This isn't and obviously wasn't healthy for long term growth.
Now the key is to have many forms of progression other than top end raiding so I'm curious how Wildstar intends to handle this.
My old Wow buddies keeping trying to interest me, as according to them, Wildstar will be the next big thing. But shock, horror, due to RL I have become a casual gamer so 40, 20 even 10 man raids have become a thing of the past.
I'd really like to see some examples of mmos that have complex crafting systems being completely nullified by raid gear. Because honestly, I cant think of any. Part of what makes a crafting system complex, is that it offers more than just the ability to make gear.
Your statement doesn't make sense when you add PvP into the mix then talk about Rift. Raid gear in Rift was pointless for PvP, since PvP had its on dedicated set of gear with PvP stats on it.
Now, not all raid gear was the best in Rift as well and you needed to Mix & Match with gear coming from Rifts. You also had to actually do some PvP (Conquest) later on for couple items that were BiS. Not to mention seasonal events who brought at times couple BiS items as well (so even raiders had to do these).
Now, when you take a look at the difficulty of dungeons / world bosses in Rift and Raid difficulty, it's somehow normal that the Raid gear is better since it's simply harder to get. World Bosses are a joke and just a spam fest anyway in Rift. As for dungeons, same thing, joke. T2 were somehow challenging at first when no one had a clue about the strategy and still awful gear, but they quickly became trivial. Master Mode were still far from being as hard as any of HK/ID bosses.
I only agree with you regarding the mount part, and that's mostly because I am the kind of gamer who couldn't care less about cosmetics. I always used my basic epic mount in Rift since it was just as fast as any other fancy mount.
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What I never understood are non-raiders crying about Raid gear being too powerful, but even if you gave them the raid gear, what would they do with it since... they don't raid. What's the point? Clearing dungeons even faster than you already do? Making World Bosses fights even more trivial? Turning Elites into trash since you are overgeared for them?
Owning Raid Gear is only a way to smoother the progression in a Raid, that's it. At first when your roster is not geared, any small mistake result in a wipe. Gear just give you more room for failure (or lack of skill).
Lets hope these 40 man raids arn't as easy as the ones in Vanilla WoW, where the most complicated fight mechanic was dispelling a debuff.
The only "hard" part of vanilla WoW raiding was getting 40 ppl to gather , get attuned, and not go AFK. The actual raid fights themselves were some of the easiest/simplest encounters the game (or any MMO for that matter) has ever had.
Since the topic also covered gear, and since I've read up a lot on the subject, I can add some "facts", aka things we know to be planned into this discussion.
The plan for gearing is to move away from raid gear being the end all, be all of gear, because lets face it, if you raid once and get some loot, you automatically invalidate everything the open world will ever give you. And that is, frankly, dumb, because it locks you into raiding always giving you the biggest carrot, and dungeons, open world and other content that COULD be challenging or fun giving you nothing of worth.
So what's the plan? Basically gear for a certain content type gives you gear that is ideal for that content type, but not the best at other types of content. Those 3 types we know of are solo/small group end game, raiding, and pvp. So a raider will no longer roflstomp mobs in the open world and eclipse any solo/sg gear efforts. But he will be roughly on par with the top-end solo/sg stuff. And PvP will be great for PvP, but like solo/small group gear, it won't be really good for raiding. They intend to have the top-end solo stuff be about equal with the entry level raid gear, and they intend for this kind of gear to take a lot of effort to get in the first place.
Personally, I applaud this, because now you can refine your gear, aka your character, without HAVING to go raid. You can do the type of content you actually like, while raiders get to raid because they like raiding, not simply because a) its the best gear which everyone wants and b) its the one viable pve endgame option in pretty much every themepark game out there.
Now on the subject of raid sizes. 20 and 40 man will have separate instances, so it might also have separate gear. Or a shared gear pool, we don't know that yet. Raiding also won't be the main driver for the game's lore at end game any more either, instead it will be told via the solo story, and via the things that scientists can unlock as part of their path quests etc.
Is it going to be hard to get 40 people together and working as a group etc, in possibly very difficult content? Yes, but carbine pretty much said "that's the point". Obviously a lot of people were indeed asking for the return of 40-man stuff, so the bigger sizes are a pretty welcome thing. I might give it a shot if I end up being good enough, but I intend for the most part to enjoy the solo/group aspects of the game, since dungeons look insanely fun already.
Lastly, keep in mind right now about half their development resources go into at or near-cap experiences, and they abundantly made it clear that they will launch with a fully fleshed out late/end-game, as opposed to many other launches who have a couple weeks worth of content, and a patch cycle of 3 months. Meanwhile wildstar is scheduled to have a one-month cycle, much like gw2. Hopefully with a bit more meat, but seeing as they have many systems and many more in development, it should be fairly simple to add to the game
I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
--Voltaire
Good try on the marketing,but having played FFXI,i know full well you won't get any tougher bosses anywhere in gaming.Reason i say this is because it takes pretty much a one dimensional structure to take some bosses and that is IF you figure out that one way to beat them.
Personally i don't agree with that type of combat,i prefer a mediocre versatile challenge that is just FUN.
WS already doomed itself with the hand holding red carpet telegraphs,FFXI for example uses no hand holding at all while achieving similar type combat structure.
I already stated many times in the past that Raiding is just some elitist term,it is still gaming with the goal of defeating a boss,nothing else is different or changes other than the term instance usually accompanies it ,which again is a bad omen for MMORPG gaming.
I might also add that the SIZE of the raid offers absolutely NOTHING to the SKILL factor,they would know that if they have gamed at all over the last 15 years of online gaming.I could construct a more skillful scenario with a 6 man group than any dev could with their Raids,not tooting my horn,it is VERY simple to do anyone could do it.So for Carbine to make bold claims about elitist raiding is just nonsense,just cheesy marketing 101.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I did these once also and never again. They are not fun and the fact that this game is going to add stuff like this puts me off from this game. Enough mmo's already do this stuff. Always got to please the hardcore crowd i guess. I can see the lagfest already.
I really don't see why it puts people off. There is a ton of other stuff to do in the game. WoW had 40 mans, only 2% of the players ever did them and they still managed to get 6 million subs in the first year. Because the game shipped with a ton of content that kept people busy and having fun. As long as Wildstar can manage to do the same, it should be win win. Exclusive content is good for the game as long as their is plenty of other content to back it up.
A lot of correlation vs. causation going on here. I don't think raid size was the main factor behind WoW's sub number growth, especially when we know the vast majority of the population never did a 40 man raid.
A lot of people became interested in the game despite the existence of 40 man raids, not because of them.
WS is gambling on the ability to attract the hardcore raider crowd since these days with streaming and social media they are practically e-celebs and bring a lot of attention to a game. This would hopefully have a trickle-down effect that would attract casual players who will still have lots of stuff to do.
The hardcore crowd matters in MMOs because they get to the endgame content first. If they get there and it sucks, they will create a lot of noise and then quit which can start a chain reaction and cause a lot of the casual players to leave since they will see no point in getting to a lame endgame.
Also these days 10-16 man raids get downed and farmed extremely quickly. Adding a 40 man raid may perhaps increase the longevity of endgame content precisely because it is very difficult to manage that number of people.
You seem to have an anger issue.
Just because people can manage their time more efficiently than you do, doesn't make them wrong.
Lets see your Battle Stations /r/battlestations
Battle Station
all it takes is a guild
EQ had 72 man raids 10 years ago -- raiding Planes of Power
w no "duty finder"
I no longer have interest in raiding but I do want to try Wildstar
EQ2 fan sites