We spoke to a number of raiding guilds--including all of the ones at that time who had experience within Datascape. The feedback across the board listed the extreme pressure that the 'roster boss' put upon those guilds, and the (in our opinion) excessive amount of additional stress it required simply to maintain a stable 40-player raid roster.
Our analytics shows that the player buy-in (number of players attempting the raid) is too low and that the player turnover (players who entered, then left and did not return) is much too high.
EDIT: Not to go from one extreme to another with my posts, but really...they've been hearing the EXACT SAME THING about 40 man content for YEARS!
ironzerg on
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CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
May this be the final nail in the coffin of 40 mans. Nostalgic as I was once a long time ago for Molten Core and the mini armies that went there in 2005, I have zero desire to see any more stuff like that in the future. Open world events with lots of people is the only way to go if you really must have massive amounts of people doing a thing.
Wow. That's certainly something. I mean it's one thing to make 40 man raids knowing why they failed in the past and try to do something about those issues to make it work. But it seems that they decided to make 40 man raids without having ANY CLUE why they failed in other games and why the genre as a whole moved away from the concept.
That is just mind boggling.
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
Happy for this change, 20 mans are about the max that my computer can handle without reducing all the setting down to the min. Now I can experience the Datascape in its full glory if I actually was raiding Datascape.
They are not suddenly coming to any kind of revelation, come on guys you should be able to read past PR speak by now.
The people who insisted on 40 mans are gone. Its that simple, no one else is forcing them to continue that awful experiment.
Of course it's PR speak. But that is precisely the image they are projecting and it's a harmful one, which means it BAD PR speak. They are saying "Oh hey we just talked to some endgame raiders and they told us that they are experiencing the exact issues that have plagued the entire concept of a 40 man raid for years! Who knew?!"
The fact that they decided THAT was the line they were going to put out there, the line they couldn't foresee this issue until the endgame raiders in the game (the customers) detailed it for them, is incredibly bad. It showcases their company as incredibly naive, or even worse that they lacked the ability to do basic research on any of this stuff before they decided to put it into a game.
On top of that, the fact that the people pushing for 40 man raids are gone is irrelevant, they still made the game with those people, and they still decided to implement 40 man raids in pretty much an identical fashion to older games meaning that they would inevitably fail. Which means that they really WERE that naive, or they really DIDN'T do any research. Alternatively they just didn't care and thought they could force it anyways and rely on rose colored glasses/nostalgia to succeed (personally this would be the most egregious one of them all).
No matter how you slice it it's incredibly mind boggling.
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Could have been worse. I still remember 72 player raiding against bosses with random death touch mechanics. Oh well, I hope the good ideas from this game (combat and housing) are shamelessly copied and used elsewhere.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Wow. That's certainly something. I mean it's one thing to make 40 man raids knowing why they failed in the past and try to do something about those issues to make it work. But it seems that they decided to make 40 man raids without having ANY CLUE why they failed in other games and why the genre as a whole moved away from the concept.
That is just mind boggling.
I think part of it is to understand that many of the original dev team for WildStar were WoW dev team vets who left specifically because they felt WoW wasn't "hardcore" enough anymore, and one of the reasons was 40-man raids. There was a deep cultural vein that read "40-mans weren't broken, Blizzard did them wrong and caved to casuals". Combine this with an echo chamber of early testers who were all xtreme hardcore raiders (because that's who Carbine let in to their beta early), and you see what happens.
As Korror said, those people are now no longer at Carbine.
This was the best news. Genetic Archives is fantastic raiding. The fact that my guild no longer has to worry about ramping up the roster for a 40man zone works in everyone's favor. I can't wait to see the new zone.
I think part of it is to understand that many of the original dev team for WildStar were WoW dev team vets who left specifically because they felt WoW wasn't "hardcore" enough anymore, and one of the reasons was 40-man raids.
So, I've been tabletop gaming with the same group of guys for ~20 years now, and we've all ended up in interesting places. One of the group is now a developer with Obsidian, and has worked with various shops throughout the years.
One of the things he told me blew my mind. It goes completely against my assumptions and expectations, but I believe him, because this is what he does for a living.
~80% of the accounts in WoW never have a character that reaches max level for the current expansion.
I am not a hardcore raider anymore. The days of camping out in the Plane of Sky with 100 other people for 2 days straight with a constant, around the clock battle going on just to maintain a safe place to stand are long over, but even with my casual play I have 5 level 90's and can level very, very fast. To me, I am reasonably casual, but to the average person who plays, I and people like me are still considered a tiny, hardcore minority.
The market the makers of WildStar targeted, people who come across as "hardcore" to me is just so small that it's almost impossible to make a commercially viable AAA product for them.
Offer an option for self identifying hardcore players. Give them an extra shiny, or gear just that bit better, or special mounts or titles or what have you. that is good, it's always good to have something to aspire to. But gating your content behind a process that, right or wrong, a large portion of the player base is going to be unwilling or unable to go through is a recipe for failure.
I think part of it is to understand that many of the original dev team for WildStar were WoW dev team vets who left specifically because they felt WoW wasn't "hardcore" enough anymore, and one of the reasons was 40-man raids.
So, I've been tabletop gaming with the same group of guys for ~20 years now, and we've all ended up in interesting places. One of the group is now a developer with Obsidian, and has worked with various shops throughout the years.
One of the things he told me blew my mind. It goes completely against my assumptions and expectations, but I believe him, because this is what he does for a living.
~80% of the accounts in WoW never have a character that reaches max level for the current expansion.
I am not a hardcore raider anymore. The days of camping out in the Plane of Sky with 100 other people for 2 days straight with a constant, around the clock battle going on just to maintain a safe place to stand are long over, but even with my casual play I have 5 level 90's and can level very, very fast. To me, I am reasonably casual, but to the average person who plays, I and people like me are still considered a tiny, hardcore minority.
The market the makers of WildStar targeted, people who come across as "hardcore" to me is just so small that it's almost impossible to make a commercially viable AAA product for them.
Offer an option for self identifying hardcore players. Give them an extra shiny, or gear just that bit better, or special mounts or titles or what have you. that is good, it's always good to have something to aspire to. But gating your content behind a process that, right or wrong, a large portion of the player base is going to be unwilling or unable to go through is a recipe for failure.
The bolded is absolutely true, and it's largely why Wildstar is failing. You cannot build a game centered on the "hardcore" you have to build a game for the "casual" market because they are the majority and will be paying the bills. But you need to include incentives for the hardcore because they will be very vocal and be a great source of word of mouth. They are the ones who are on the frontier of your game, and will get the more casual market excited and interested and eventually hooked.
But if there isn't a game for the casual market to play, then the game will simply crumble.
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
The takeaway is that most people are stunningly far from what we think of as "Hardcore", and WildStar was marketed only to the hardcore audience. Even if they had captured 100% market share, the market isn't large enough to support a AAA subscription MMO.
Add in their endgame and performance issues and opinions and aesthetics (can't please everyone) and they didn't come close to that 100%.
80% of the population never hits level cap yet wildstar's problems were mainly with the end game. that doesn't make sense.
Wildstar's "hardcore" problem didn't just influence endgame though. I found the first adventure downright punishing and didn't bother doing it again, never even bothered attempting the first dungeon since everyone was emphatic that the adventures were "casual" content and dungeons were harder.
80% of the population never hits level cap yet wildstar's problems were mainly with the end game. that doesn't make sense.
It all rolls downhill however. When leveling, pretty much the only things you had to do where "Grind Quests, Do Dungeons and Adventures(except most people never did them since they were overtuned and took much time and gave little rewards), Do PvP, and Housing". Unsuprisingly, the endgame was "Grind (daily) Quests, Do Dungeons and Adventures(which people didn't like to do because they were to difficult for non-premades and had poor rewards), Do (busted) PvP, Housing, and Raids." Literally the leveling process was a subset of the endgame, and because the endgame design was bad, the leveling also felt bad.
If you look around and ask people, there's a large chunk of people who quit at various points in the leveling process. In general, the points being near the beginning or middle of Whitevale, The Farside biomes, or Wildrun as a whole. I'd say something like a full 1/3 of people never made it to level 50 before burning out.
Also, I'm just going to come right out and say this:
Dodging red geometric warnings on the ground frantically, constantly, isn't fun gameplay.
And that's a WS boss fight. You spend so much time staring at your feet it's not fun. I still think the combat compares quite unfavorably to Tera, where boss fights involved movement and timing and dodging but didn't feel like you were spending 99% of every boss fight running around like a decapitated chicken on crack.
And then when you add in the horrible latency issues which afflicted a very large number of players, which often rendered the twitchy ground geometry dodging game unplayable, and you get a shitty game.
I didn't think much of the game in general though I still ended up following this because it's like a 3 month long car wreck and I can't look away. it's an interesting study in failed game design
Dodging red geometric warnings on the ground frantically, constantly, isn't fun gameplay.
It didn't take too many levels for me to realize this. The combat just became wearying, it ultimately as you say just was not fun staring at the ground and having to constantly move all over the place for even the simplest mobs.
Dodging red geometric warnings on the ground frantically, constantly, isn't fun gameplay.
It didn't take too many levels for me to realize this. The combat just became wearying, it ultimately as you say just was not fun staring at the ground and having to constantly move all over the place for even the simplest mobs.
Normal mobs are probably even worse. I can only speak for myself, but when I'm playing the mmo grind I kind of want to be able to blow through normal mobs.
I certainly understand that that's not to everyones taste, there are surely people who prefer gameplay where every fight needs to be a deliberate, skill-based encounter, it's just really not my thing. I think the better mmos strike a good balance between challenging occasional fights and hapless mooks who the players can mow through.
That isn't to say that trash shouldn't be dangerous, even lethal, just that having to dodge trash attacks constantly gets old incredibly fast.
80% of the population never hits level cap yet wildstar's problems were mainly with the end game. that doesn't make sense.
Wildstar's "hardcore" problem didn't just influence endgame though. I found the first adventure downright punishing and didn't bother doing it again, never even bothered attempting the first dungeon since everyone was emphatic that the adventures were "casual" content and dungeons were harder.
Yeah this was pretty much my experience as well, except I gave the first few adventures and dungeons the old college try before throwing in the towel. Why spend hours wiping on something at level 20? At best you get a fraction of the money spent on repairs, a paltry amount of XP, and shit gear. In that same timespan I could have been out in the world questing and getting 2-3 full levels.
The risk/effort-to-reward ratio for group PVE content was completely out of whack. The whole design felt like an anachronism.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKERS
There is a balance between making monsters too frantic and making them too boring.
I've been playing WoW recently since the expansion came out and I miss Wildstar combat so much. In WoW, there's no way to interact with the monsters aside from interrupting a few casts or stunning/kiting them when they gain a buff. I might as well just be doing my rotation on a target dummy. That's boring and I've noticed how they've tried to add as many wildstar style telegraphs as the WoW engine allows.
Dodging red geometric warnings on the ground frantically, constantly, isn't fun gameplay.
And that's a WS boss fight. You spend so much time staring at your feet it's not fun.
One of my biggest gripes, too. I felt like I was spending so much time look at shapes on the ground, I couldn't get into the actual game play.
Have major moves telegraphed is cool. Moderate moves should come from tells by the boss. Minor moves should just be thrown out at random.
Same goes for the player's attacks. Having EVERY single god damn thing I do show up as a shape on the ground just wasn't immersive at all. You couldn't hit a single button in Wildstar without it explicitly reminding you that you're playing a video game.
Also, I'm just going to come right out and say this:
Dodging red geometric warnings on the ground frantically, constantly, isn't fun gameplay.
And that's a WS boss fight. You spend so much time staring at your feet it's not fun. I still think the combat compares quite unfavorably to Tera, where boss fights involved movement and timing and dodging but didn't feel like you were spending 99% of every boss fight running around like a decapitated chicken on crack.
And then when you add in the horrible latency issues which afflicted a very large number of players, which often rendered the twitchy ground geometry dodging game unplayable, and you get a shitty game.
Of course, Wildstar went that route because it started off as a basic tab-targeting style MMO that switched to the faux-action combat system of telegraphs. Because ultimately, while it's possible to make fun encounters using tab-targeting, it's hard to manage sources of damage; in classical tab-target system, the only sources of damage are white auto-hit style damage, or AOE "fire" on the ground that you need to dodge. MMOs have hit a hard design space issue with it, and Wildstar's attempt to innovate was to make everything an AOE. It kinda works, but true action combat works better if you're an action junkie, and if you prefer a slower pace odds are you'd rather have less "everything is red and on fire" that Wildstar sometimes goes into.
In that sense, I feel that Wildstar shows the limits of classical MMO design. After a certain point the only option for making more intense, difficult encounters(other than going pure action combat), is to increase the number of AOEs and mechanics being thrown at the players. Wildstar took the AOE part to the upper limit, and shows why it's a questionable decision.
There is a balance between making monsters too frantic and making them too boring.
I've been playing WoW recently since the expansion came out and I miss Wildstar combat so much. In WoW, there's no way to interact with the monsters aside from interrupting a few casts or stunning/kiting them when they gain a buff. I might as well just be doing my rotation on a target dummy. That's boring and I've noticed how they've tried to add as many wildstar style telegraphs as the WoW engine allows.
WOW is introducing some stuff. The final quest boss of the last area is designed to make sure people can not stand in the fire. It took me by suprise.
"Oh, silly open world content, laying down telegraphs. How quaint."
85K damage and dead.
"... Well, I guess I won't stand in the fire next time."
There is a balance between making monsters too frantic and making them too boring.
I've been playing WoW recently since the expansion came out and I miss Wildstar combat so much. In WoW, there's no way to interact with the monsters aside from interrupting a few casts or stunning/kiting them when they gain a buff. I might as well just be doing my rotation on a target dummy. That's boring and I've noticed how they've tried to add as many wildstar style telegraphs as the WoW engine allows.
WOW is introducing some stuff. The final quest boss of the last area is designed to make sure people can not stand in the fire. It took me by suprise.
"Oh, silly open world content, laying down telegraphs. How quaint."
85K damage and dead.
"... Well, I guess I won't stand in the fire next time."
WoW did this with the PvP rares in MoP, and the have very much the same kind of problems that Wildstar had. Was standing outside the telegraph(smoke or some circle of light), but was lagging? Get hit for for a good chunk of HP.
It wasn't quite as bad as Wildstar both in frequency and severity, but still.
Apparently, after promising that delaying Drop 3 for several months would allow them to release more polished, bug-free content, Drop 3 unleashed a major exploit(supposedly related to Garden Fabkits on housing plots) which allowed people to farm massive amounts of plat. Like ~100p an hour. The result is the game's economy is fucked and CREDD went up to 30p(from 8-9p).
I've been around PA for a long time, and I've seen some shit in these MMO threads...real shit. But that. Yes. That.
If that was the post that opened its sixth mouths and sang the song that ended all the MMO threads ever, I would lift my head as high as I could, while the flesh was reaped from my face and nod my approval.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
Personally, I am starting to think you might need to replace ws in that comic with the entire mmo genre
People just need to realize that MMO is a genre, not universal.
Just like RPG, FPS, RTS or whatever. Perhaps dropping the RPG part from MMORPG to try to make it sound more inclusive was a mistake.
If you don't like RPGs that much, and you don't enjoy playing with other people, you're not really going to like MMOs, not matter how "good" it is.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
No see I like both
but IMO they evolved in the wrong direction and too many things make that direction unsustainable unless you have achieved godmode like blizzard. And even blizz barely holds on and does it with smart decisions gaining temp bursts in subs.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I think WoW was basically the video that killed the radio star. It's been so good, so successful, for so long, that anyone trying to enter the same space was already at a total disadvantage. Even today it dominates the MMO market. It's very common for a lot of MMO players (me included) to get the "yeah, but I could be playing WoW" syndrome.
The only other really successful MMO we have right now is FF14. Which, I might add YoshiP deserves any praise heaped on him for turning that game around. He smartly did what we all talked about: Have sizzle for the hardcore players (hard and extreme mode content, lengthy relic weapon quests, etc) while the steak is there for everyone.
Posts
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/118364-changes-coming-to-datascape/?p=1231236
"...only mights and maybes."
Hardcore.
EDIT: Not to go from one extreme to another with my posts, but really...they've been hearing the EXACT SAME THING about 40 man content for YEARS!
So they are just now getting this information?
Wow. That's certainly something. I mean it's one thing to make 40 man raids knowing why they failed in the past and try to do something about those issues to make it work. But it seems that they decided to make 40 man raids without having ANY CLUE why they failed in other games and why the genre as a whole moved away from the concept.
That is just mind boggling.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
shaved down to 30 v 30, apparently they've been happening frequently since the merges.
"...only mights and maybes."
The people who insisted on 40 mans are gone. Its that simple, no one else is forcing them to continue that awful experiment.
Anyone know a dominion guild that raids late PST?
Of course it's PR speak. But that is precisely the image they are projecting and it's a harmful one, which means it BAD PR speak. They are saying "Oh hey we just talked to some endgame raiders and they told us that they are experiencing the exact issues that have plagued the entire concept of a 40 man raid for years! Who knew?!"
The fact that they decided THAT was the line they were going to put out there, the line they couldn't foresee this issue until the endgame raiders in the game (the customers) detailed it for them, is incredibly bad. It showcases their company as incredibly naive, or even worse that they lacked the ability to do basic research on any of this stuff before they decided to put it into a game.
On top of that, the fact that the people pushing for 40 man raids are gone is irrelevant, they still made the game with those people, and they still decided to implement 40 man raids in pretty much an identical fashion to older games meaning that they would inevitably fail. Which means that they really WERE that naive, or they really DIDN'T do any research. Alternatively they just didn't care and thought they could force it anyways and rely on rose colored glasses/nostalgia to succeed (personally this would be the most egregious one of them all).
No matter how you slice it it's incredibly mind boggling.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
I think part of it is to understand that many of the original dev team for WildStar were WoW dev team vets who left specifically because they felt WoW wasn't "hardcore" enough anymore, and one of the reasons was 40-man raids. There was a deep cultural vein that read "40-mans weren't broken, Blizzard did them wrong and caved to casuals". Combine this with an echo chamber of early testers who were all xtreme hardcore raiders (because that's who Carbine let in to their beta early), and you see what happens.
As Korror said, those people are now no longer at Carbine.
So, I've been tabletop gaming with the same group of guys for ~20 years now, and we've all ended up in interesting places. One of the group is now a developer with Obsidian, and has worked with various shops throughout the years.
One of the things he told me blew my mind. It goes completely against my assumptions and expectations, but I believe him, because this is what he does for a living.
~80% of the accounts in WoW never have a character that reaches max level for the current expansion.
I am not a hardcore raider anymore. The days of camping out in the Plane of Sky with 100 other people for 2 days straight with a constant, around the clock battle going on just to maintain a safe place to stand are long over, but even with my casual play I have 5 level 90's and can level very, very fast. To me, I am reasonably casual, but to the average person who plays, I and people like me are still considered a tiny, hardcore minority.
The market the makers of WildStar targeted, people who come across as "hardcore" to me is just so small that it's almost impossible to make a commercially viable AAA product for them.
Offer an option for self identifying hardcore players. Give them an extra shiny, or gear just that bit better, or special mounts or titles or what have you. that is good, it's always good to have something to aspire to. But gating your content behind a process that, right or wrong, a large portion of the player base is going to be unwilling or unable to go through is a recipe for failure.
The bolded is absolutely true, and it's largely why Wildstar is failing. You cannot build a game centered on the "hardcore" you have to build a game for the "casual" market because they are the majority and will be paying the bills. But you need to include incentives for the hardcore because they will be very vocal and be a great source of word of mouth. They are the ones who are on the frontier of your game, and will get the more casual market excited and interested and eventually hooked.
But if there isn't a game for the casual market to play, then the game will simply crumble.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Add in their endgame and performance issues and opinions and aesthetics (can't please everyone) and they didn't come close to that 100%.
Wildstar's "hardcore" problem didn't just influence endgame though. I found the first adventure downright punishing and didn't bother doing it again, never even bothered attempting the first dungeon since everyone was emphatic that the adventures were "casual" content and dungeons were harder.
It all rolls downhill however. When leveling, pretty much the only things you had to do where "Grind Quests, Do Dungeons and Adventures(except most people never did them since they were overtuned and took much time and gave little rewards), Do PvP, and Housing". Unsuprisingly, the endgame was "Grind (daily) Quests, Do Dungeons and Adventures(which people didn't like to do because they were to difficult for non-premades and had poor rewards), Do (busted) PvP, Housing, and Raids." Literally the leveling process was a subset of the endgame, and because the endgame design was bad, the leveling also felt bad.
If you look around and ask people, there's a large chunk of people who quit at various points in the leveling process. In general, the points being near the beginning or middle of Whitevale, The Farside biomes, or Wildrun as a whole. I'd say something like a full 1/3 of people never made it to level 50 before burning out.
Dodging red geometric warnings on the ground frantically, constantly, isn't fun gameplay.
And that's a WS boss fight. You spend so much time staring at your feet it's not fun. I still think the combat compares quite unfavorably to Tera, where boss fights involved movement and timing and dodging but didn't feel like you were spending 99% of every boss fight running around like a decapitated chicken on crack.
And then when you add in the horrible latency issues which afflicted a very large number of players, which often rendered the twitchy ground geometry dodging game unplayable, and you get a shitty game.
It didn't take too many levels for me to realize this. The combat just became wearying, it ultimately as you say just was not fun staring at the ground and having to constantly move all over the place for even the simplest mobs.
Normal mobs are probably even worse. I can only speak for myself, but when I'm playing the mmo grind I kind of want to be able to blow through normal mobs.
I certainly understand that that's not to everyones taste, there are surely people who prefer gameplay where every fight needs to be a deliberate, skill-based encounter, it's just really not my thing. I think the better mmos strike a good balance between challenging occasional fights and hapless mooks who the players can mow through.
That isn't to say that trash shouldn't be dangerous, even lethal, just that having to dodge trash attacks constantly gets old incredibly fast.
Yeah this was pretty much my experience as well, except I gave the first few adventures and dungeons the old college try before throwing in the towel. Why spend hours wiping on something at level 20? At best you get a fraction of the money spent on repairs, a paltry amount of XP, and shit gear. In that same timespan I could have been out in the world questing and getting 2-3 full levels.
The risk/effort-to-reward ratio for group PVE content was completely out of whack. The whole design felt like an anachronism.
I've been playing WoW recently since the expansion came out and I miss Wildstar combat so much. In WoW, there's no way to interact with the monsters aside from interrupting a few casts or stunning/kiting them when they gain a buff. I might as well just be doing my rotation on a target dummy. That's boring and I've noticed how they've tried to add as many wildstar style telegraphs as the WoW engine allows.
One of my biggest gripes, too. I felt like I was spending so much time look at shapes on the ground, I couldn't get into the actual game play.
Have major moves telegraphed is cool. Moderate moves should come from tells by the boss. Minor moves should just be thrown out at random.
Same goes for the player's attacks. Having EVERY single god damn thing I do show up as a shape on the ground just wasn't immersive at all. You couldn't hit a single button in Wildstar without it explicitly reminding you that you're playing a video game.
Of course, Wildstar went that route because it started off as a basic tab-targeting style MMO that switched to the faux-action combat system of telegraphs. Because ultimately, while it's possible to make fun encounters using tab-targeting, it's hard to manage sources of damage; in classical tab-target system, the only sources of damage are white auto-hit style damage, or AOE "fire" on the ground that you need to dodge. MMOs have hit a hard design space issue with it, and Wildstar's attempt to innovate was to make everything an AOE. It kinda works, but true action combat works better if you're an action junkie, and if you prefer a slower pace odds are you'd rather have less "everything is red and on fire" that Wildstar sometimes goes into.
In that sense, I feel that Wildstar shows the limits of classical MMO design. After a certain point the only option for making more intense, difficult encounters(other than going pure action combat), is to increase the number of AOEs and mechanics being thrown at the players. Wildstar took the AOE part to the upper limit, and shows why it's a questionable decision.
WOW is introducing some stuff. The final quest boss of the last area is designed to make sure people can not stand in the fire. It took me by suprise.
"Oh, silly open world content, laying down telegraphs. How quaint."
85K damage and dead.
"... Well, I guess I won't stand in the fire next time."
WoW did this with the PvP rares in MoP, and the have very much the same kind of problems that Wildstar had. Was standing outside the telegraph(smoke or some circle of light), but was lagging? Get hit for for a good chunk of HP.
It wasn't quite as bad as Wildstar both in frequency and severity, but still.
If that was the post that opened its sixth mouths and sang the song that ended all the MMO threads ever, I would lift my head as high as I could, while the flesh was reaped from my face and nod my approval.
Just like RPG, FPS, RTS or whatever. Perhaps dropping the RPG part from MMORPG to try to make it sound more inclusive was a mistake.
If you don't like RPGs that much, and you don't enjoy playing with other people, you're not really going to like MMOs, not matter how "good" it is.
but IMO they evolved in the wrong direction and too many things make that direction unsustainable unless you have achieved godmode like blizzard. And even blizz barely holds on and does it with smart decisions gaining temp bursts in subs.
The only other really successful MMO we have right now is FF14. Which, I might add YoshiP deserves any praise heaped on him for turning that game around. He smartly did what we all talked about: Have sizzle for the hardcore players (hard and extreme mode content, lengthy relic weapon quests, etc) while the steak is there for everyone.
And the worst part is to get that success they went backwards in mmo development instead of forward. Its such a simple game play wise.
But I guess that is what mmoers want.