I do not think I will ever witness such a complete gaming failure as this. Ever.
I think their term "spectacular failure" fits the bill here.
APB was already dead by this point.
There's always Auto Assault. I'm glad I at least got to play it in beta for a day!
I loved that game. It was the Car Wars MMO I always wanted.
Nothing says "fun" like lining up a run on someone you had to kill, and barreling into them at like 200 MPH to splat them.
In a car decorated with Hello Kitty.
I see this car every morning on the way to work. Tail on the back, bowtie on the top, and face on the front. One day, I'll stop staring at it everytime I see it.
I was worried back when I realized they had managed to make cooking un-fun in an MMO.
I've never seen that before, even in mmos where tradeskills were pretty hardcore and required too much time to yield rewards in general, like FF13, they at least made cooking fun.
Nope. Wildstar cooking: drained of all joy until what was left was pure sadness
I was worried back when I realized they had managed to make cooking un-fun in an MMO.
I've never seen that before, even in mmos where tradeskills were pretty hardcore and required too much time to yield rewards in general, like FF13, they at least made cooking fun.
Nope. Wildstar cooking: drained of all joy until what was left was pure sadness
Honestly the system wouldn't be so bad if the RNG wasn't so ridiculous. But Wildstar's devs had a hardon for RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. So cooking was blindly aiming for some hidden spot on the grid, and hoping your randomly thrown RNG dots would eventually hit the target. Then once you did it once by blind luck, you knew where to aim, but hitting the target didn't get any easier. So depending on what you where trying to make, you had where from 9/10 chance to 1/10, and it was completely arbitrary. Some endgame stuff was stupid easy to make, and some beginner stuff was impossible. And there was basically nothing a player could do to try to make it easier, outside some rare, expensive "catalysts"(Since I swear the crafting talents were completely useless IME).
Cooking and Architect got hit with that stupid system. Architect wasn't too bad since you could normally see what you were making, but still had stupid shit like Survivalist housing plots being a pain in the ass to make with something like 25% of it working, while Mining for the same tier was stupid easy, which just highlighted how dumb it really was.
In retrospect, the crafting systems feel like a microism of the game as a whole: So many things that come off as them a vague recollection of a good idea, followed a shoddy implementation that misses the mark by so far, with just a sprinkle of RNG to make it just feel unfun and often unrewarding.
cooking wouldn't have been so bad if mats didn't have a 1% drop rate. One day I was like "I'm gonna buckle down and advance my cooking!" and that stopped after 30 minutes of grinding lowbie mobs yielding one piece of meat.
Leather was the same way. Spending a hour grinding only to get enough leather for maybe 2-3 pieces of gear was down right depressing. And that was as a Survivalist.
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
cooking became pointless the moment you got a max Tier festival. The hybrid meals were actually worse from a budget standpoint
While the setup is mildly amusing: "We've got a bad reputation on a site, how do we fix it? I know! Pay someone to put up a resondingly positive comment! Brilliant!"
The fact that that's the tactic Carbine management takes is more depressing to me than anything else.
I'm sad to see this game go, it had such potential. Though it did it's damnedest to suck the fun out of everything.
I've stopped playing. There's just no fun in the game.
Seems like some people are enjoying watching Wildstar crash and burn more than playing the actual game.
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
I don't enjoy it at all. I'd like them to actually fix their game to something that can be enjoyed by "hardcores and casuals" alike because I feel they had a solid core that they let poor management ruin slowly over the course of their dev cycle. FFXIV did this correctly. Wildstar did not. The behavior from both dev teams reinforces this.
PSN: Waybackkidd
"...only mights and maybes."
+7
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
Not much I can do about that. These threads don't exist to cheerlead a game, and if the general consensus is negative then the thread will be similar in tone.
You don't have to justify your enjoyment of the game to us, but I just think the game was a massive waste of potential thanks to out-of-touch upper management.
Leather was the same way. Spending a hour grinding only to get enough leather for maybe 2-3 pieces of gear was down right depressing. And that was as a Survivalist.
I got more leather from my survivalist thicket on my plot than I did from killing stuff.
Seems like some people are enjoying watching Wildstar crash and burn more than playing the actual game.
Eh, watching SWTOR go to F2P was more interesting. I'm watching this as an excersise on what happens when you don't bother to research or even listen to feedback in software's design decisions.
I still think a lot of the complaints about bad systems and bad endgame would have been significantly more limited had the game launched without a sub fee.
Everything goes under a microscope when you're paying a monthly fee.
I still think a lot of the complaints about bad systems and bad endgame would have been significantly more limited had the game launched without a sub fee.
Everything goes under a microscope when you're paying a monthly fee.
I think the complaints would still be there, but the general consensus would be more the lines of "Game isn't ready for prime time, comeback in a few months." versus "Game is dying/dead".
Problems don't just disappear if a game is F2P, it's just people are more will to put up with them or come back later once changes are made. But people aren't content to wait when waiting is costing the money.
Free games do get a substantively larger player base. More players could mean more people get through the bullshit attunement and you get more raiders and a healthier hardcore scene. I don't think that really matters in the end though. The hardcore raiding scene seems to have its beefs with the content that it has but the bigger issue was anyone who didn't make it through attunement before their interest waned or was never going to raid. There was nothing for those people.
Free games do get a substantively larger player base. More players could mean more people get through the bullshit attunement and you get more raiders and a healthier hardcore scene. I don't think that really matters in the end though. The hardcore raiding scene seems to have its beefs with the content that it has but the bigger issue was anyone who didn't make it through attunement before their interest waned or was never going to raid. There was nothing for those people.
Really, I think that's a problem of MMO's(or at least classical style themepark MMO's in the vein of WoW) have been having and haven't quite come to terms with. Wildstar(and WoW for that matter), have been ignoring small group content in favor of raiding(large group content), and I think there's two problems with that:
1) There's always been a large percentage of MMO players that never really bothered with raiding.
and
2) It's just not novel anymore.
1) means ignoring small group content causes the non-raiders to slowly leave as they don't feel like the game has anything for them to do, and 2) mean raid-focused MMOs just aren't drawing new people in. And it's really easy to see this happening in Wildstar. Especially since basically every raid group admits that most recruits they get come other raid groups. And each time someone quits Wildstar(or Wildstar's raiding), there's no-one to replace them. Because there's literally no(or very little) new blood at all.
Attunements have never been content. Attunements were used in everquest because expansions would come out shitty and unfinished and attunements gave them time to finish it.
Free games do get a substantively larger player base. More players could mean more people get through the bullshit attunement and you get more raiders and a healthier hardcore scene. I don't think that really matters in the end though. The hardcore raiding scene seems to have its beefs with the content that it has but the bigger issue was anyone who didn't make it through attunement before their interest waned or was never going to raid. There was nothing for those people.
I disagree with the first part only because I really, really agree with the second part. Wildstar is failing (failed?) because 99% of players don't want to deal with the large amount of hardcore bullshit it threw at people. Free to play doesn't change that. All it does is make people happy they didn't actually have to pay for anything once the reach that enormous wall of bullshit.
The subscription has very little to do with it, other than the fact that if people weren't paying $15/mo, they might have stuck around longer to see if Wildstar figured this out, and cut out the bullshit. But even then, probably not likely. There's just too many options in the environment right now for players to put up with bullshit in their games. Ten years ago? Maybe people stick these things out longer. Here? No way.
This isn't exactly a business model problem. It's a "we built the game no one wanted to play" problem. As fun as the basic mechanics are, as beautiful as the world is and as compelling as the story is, it doesn't mean anything if the rest of the game is an exercise in stacking bullshit.
If I wascharge at NCSoft, I'd do what they're doing now. Fire the entire management team (or let them make up some bullshit story about why they have to leave). Fire everyone who's replaceable. Keep only those who actually know the code, how it works, how it breaks and how to fix it. Keep your essential people responsible for crafting the world and the story. Everyone else goes.
Then take the game back to an open beta. Pause everyone's subscriptions, to be reactivated whenever Wildstar goes live again. Open it back up to everyone who actually purchased the game for free.
Re-work everything you have to, according to the player feedback, from the endgame to the very start. When you start to get consistent feedback from players that Wildstar is back on a "Yeah, I'll pay for this" track, work on your relaunch plan.
But without a major overhaul to the bullshit contained in this game, especially at max level, it's better to just pull the plug.
Emerging from years of lurking to comment on this.
Iron Zerg has a valid idea, but it might not be possible with this particular IP.
For those not familiar with the MMO market, this has been attempted several times: the chief two attempts have been FF XIV: A Realm Reborn, which was a smashing success by all accounts, and Auto Assault's efforts to salvage itself, which were a total flop and didn't get off the ground once the servers shut down in 2007.
Realm Reborn's smashing success was due largely to three things: 1. a rabid fanbase and powerful brand, 2. a forthright confrontation of the facts by Squeenix management, and 3. a charismatic director in Naoki Yoshida. Let me briefly emphasize #2 here: Square Enix put its money where its mouth was in this case and didn't bill anyone until the first big change went down in 2012.
WildStar is really missing the first advantage here. As an IP, it doesn't have literally decades of investment in its system by fans all over the world. The only thing we have to judge WildStar on is its existing game, which is good until one arrives at max level, and then becomes an unbreachable grind by today's standards.
If Carbine wants to save its property, it has to do what it's doing now, but also manage the PR battle more effectively. Come out and say that the game is bad and needs a lot of help. It does mean conceding on the central vision of endgame WildStar, which is a shame, but also an economic reality. Then, widespread refunds and a willingness to allow players to play for free until the game's execution is in an acceptable state.
I don't believe NCSoft will do either of those things.
Seems like some people are enjoying watching Wildstar crash and burn more than playing the actual game.
Turns out hubris is a fucker.
That and I feel like the beta and first-month scene was so overwhelmingly positive at places like the wildstar subreddit that no criticism was well-received. As things gradually deteriorated, or rather as people reached max level and started running into more of the bugs and 'end-game content', both sides became more and more adamant in their defense/criticism.
So, to me, it feels like people are getting perverse enjoyment from the train wreck because it was, in some ways anyway, foretold and shouted down.
I am not enjoying Wildstar's death, mostly because I played the game a bit and what I did get to see prior to Level 20 was pretty fun, but I do recognize it was inevitable and had been so since I'd seen how hard they were pushing the "hardcore" aspects of it.
wildstar is dying for a multitude of reasons, but "too good" is not one of them
+10
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
Things that are too beautiful for the universe do not exist in it. They aren't there to begin with. And arguably only exist in the realm of Platonic forms.
Wildstar is far and away from a Platonic form, unless that form is covered in beer stains and regret.
Posts
I bet he lives on Dreary Lane now.
"...only mights and maybes."
But he somehow found a way to take the most important thing away.
People.
I loved that game. It was the Car Wars MMO I always wanted.
Nothing says "fun" like lining up a run on someone you had to kill, and barreling into them at like 200 MPH to splat them.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
In a car decorated with Hello Kitty.
I see this car every morning on the way to work. Tail on the back, bowtie on the top, and face on the front. One day, I'll stop staring at it everytime I see it.
I've never seen that before, even in mmos where tradeskills were pretty hardcore and required too much time to yield rewards in general, like FF13, they at least made cooking fun.
Nope. Wildstar cooking: drained of all joy until what was left was pure sadness
Honestly the system wouldn't be so bad if the RNG wasn't so ridiculous. But Wildstar's devs had a hardon for RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. So cooking was blindly aiming for some hidden spot on the grid, and hoping your randomly thrown RNG dots would eventually hit the target. Then once you did it once by blind luck, you knew where to aim, but hitting the target didn't get any easier. So depending on what you where trying to make, you had where from 9/10 chance to 1/10, and it was completely arbitrary. Some endgame stuff was stupid easy to make, and some beginner stuff was impossible. And there was basically nothing a player could do to try to make it easier, outside some rare, expensive "catalysts"(Since I swear the crafting talents were completely useless IME).
Cooking and Architect got hit with that stupid system. Architect wasn't too bad since you could normally see what you were making, but still had stupid shit like Survivalist housing plots being a pain in the ass to make with something like 25% of it working, while Mining for the same tier was stupid easy, which just highlighted how dumb it really was.
In retrospect, the crafting systems feel like a microism of the game as a whole: So many things that come off as them a vague recollection of a good idea, followed a shoddy implementation that misses the mark by so far, with just a sprinkle of RNG to make it just feel unfun and often unrewarding.
"...only mights and maybes."
hahahahahahaha
While the setup is mildly amusing: "We've got a bad reputation on a site, how do we fix it? I know! Pay someone to put up a resondingly positive comment! Brilliant!"
The fact that that's the tactic Carbine management takes is more depressing to me than anything else.
I'm sad to see this game go, it had such potential. Though it did it's damnedest to suck the fun out of everything.
I've stopped playing. There's just no fun in the game.
"...only mights and maybes."
and thus my pessimism continues.
"...only mights and maybes."
Ouch....
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Wow. “A place where morale goes to die... ”
Kind of sounds like WildStar's raid scene.
sorta
You don't have to justify your enjoyment of the game to us, but I just think the game was a massive waste of potential thanks to out-of-touch upper management.
I got more leather from my survivalist thicket on my plot than I did from killing stuff.
Eh, watching SWTOR go to F2P was more interesting. I'm watching this as an excersise on what happens when you don't bother to research or even listen to feedback in software's design decisions.
Everything goes under a microscope when you're paying a monthly fee.
Don't remember it having that much customization.
Had more of a support A-Team van that had all sorts of weird tech for boosting allies nearby.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I think the complaints would still be there, but the general consensus would be more the lines of "Game isn't ready for prime time, comeback in a few months." versus "Game is dying/dead".
Problems don't just disappear if a game is F2P, it's just people are more will to put up with them or come back later once changes are made. But people aren't content to wait when waiting is costing the money.
Really, I think that's a problem of MMO's(or at least classical style themepark MMO's in the vein of WoW) have been having and haven't quite come to terms with. Wildstar(and WoW for that matter), have been ignoring small group content in favor of raiding(large group content), and I think there's two problems with that:
1) There's always been a large percentage of MMO players that never really bothered with raiding.
and
2) It's just not novel anymore.
1) means ignoring small group content causes the non-raiders to slowly leave as they don't feel like the game has anything for them to do, and 2) mean raid-focused MMOs just aren't drawing new people in. And it's really easy to see this happening in Wildstar. Especially since basically every raid group admits that most recruits they get come other raid groups. And each time someone quits Wildstar(or Wildstar's raiding), there's no-one to replace them. Because there's literally no(or very little) new blood at all.
I disagree with the first part only because I really, really agree with the second part. Wildstar is failing (failed?) because 99% of players don't want to deal with the large amount of hardcore bullshit it threw at people. Free to play doesn't change that. All it does is make people happy they didn't actually have to pay for anything once the reach that enormous wall of bullshit.
The subscription has very little to do with it, other than the fact that if people weren't paying $15/mo, they might have stuck around longer to see if Wildstar figured this out, and cut out the bullshit. But even then, probably not likely. There's just too many options in the environment right now for players to put up with bullshit in their games. Ten years ago? Maybe people stick these things out longer. Here? No way.
This isn't exactly a business model problem. It's a "we built the game no one wanted to play" problem. As fun as the basic mechanics are, as beautiful as the world is and as compelling as the story is, it doesn't mean anything if the rest of the game is an exercise in stacking bullshit.
If I wascharge at NCSoft, I'd do what they're doing now. Fire the entire management team (or let them make up some bullshit story about why they have to leave). Fire everyone who's replaceable. Keep only those who actually know the code, how it works, how it breaks and how to fix it. Keep your essential people responsible for crafting the world and the story. Everyone else goes.
Then take the game back to an open beta. Pause everyone's subscriptions, to be reactivated whenever Wildstar goes live again. Open it back up to everyone who actually purchased the game for free.
Re-work everything you have to, according to the player feedback, from the endgame to the very start. When you start to get consistent feedback from players that Wildstar is back on a "Yeah, I'll pay for this" track, work on your relaunch plan.
But without a major overhaul to the bullshit contained in this game, especially at max level, it's better to just pull the plug.
Iron Zerg has a valid idea, but it might not be possible with this particular IP.
For those not familiar with the MMO market, this has been attempted several times: the chief two attempts have been FF XIV: A Realm Reborn, which was a smashing success by all accounts, and Auto Assault's efforts to salvage itself, which were a total flop and didn't get off the ground once the servers shut down in 2007.
Realm Reborn's smashing success was due largely to three things: 1. a rabid fanbase and powerful brand, 2. a forthright confrontation of the facts by Squeenix management, and 3. a charismatic director in Naoki Yoshida. Let me briefly emphasize #2 here: Square Enix put its money where its mouth was in this case and didn't bill anyone until the first big change went down in 2012.
WildStar is really missing the first advantage here. As an IP, it doesn't have literally decades of investment in its system by fans all over the world. The only thing we have to judge WildStar on is its existing game, which is good until one arrives at max level, and then becomes an unbreachable grind by today's standards.
If Carbine wants to save its property, it has to do what it's doing now, but also manage the PR battle more effectively. Come out and say that the game is bad and needs a lot of help. It does mean conceding on the central vision of endgame WildStar, which is a shame, but also an economic reality. Then, widespread refunds and a willingness to allow players to play for free until the game's execution is in an acceptable state.
I don't believe NCSoft will do either of those things.
e: 1 spel gud
If by what Ironzerg said you mean not really what he said.
Except it's going to involve funding a different team to make a different game, because this one didn't work.
NCSoft's approach is to have every base covered in the MMO market. If a game fails, just keep funding the one that didn't and then make a new attempt.
That and I feel like the beta and first-month scene was so overwhelmingly positive at places like the wildstar subreddit that no criticism was well-received. As things gradually deteriorated, or rather as people reached max level and started running into more of the bugs and 'end-game content', both sides became more and more adamant in their defense/criticism.
So, to me, it feels like people are getting perverse enjoyment from the train wreck because it was, in some ways anyway, foretold and shouted down.
Wildstar is far and away from a Platonic form, unless that form is covered in beer stains and regret.