Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Eidal_sl said:

Making things easier in any form will require a large design/direction change. I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I think the devs are very reluctant to go down this hole of "adjusting" content to make rewards easier for the casual crowd. There is no large time commitment to joining a guild of like-minded players and progressing through hard dungeons at a slow place. 100 percent of the complainers on reddit are people who, for whatever reason, feel entitled to medals in PUG runs. They don't want to make any friends, they don't want to join a guild... I see this as laziness, but think that they outnumber people like me 100:1.

I am doubtful that in the long run, they'll be able to maintain their "Our game is super hard" stance without yielding towards the rather large demographic of players that want to PUG shit with strangers and feel rewarded.

Click to expand...

The very definition of a PUG is just that, a pick up group with strangers. If the content is too difficult for a few strangers to group up and do the runs, then what's the point of having the functionality of a dungeon finder then? This also goes to the thought that the casual player is not motivated to group or even join a guild while they are leveling since most questing content is solo.

Daidraco_sl said:

I want you to read what you just wrote. "There is no large time commitment to joining a guild of like minded players and progressing through hard dungeons at a slow.. (what I would assume, pace)"?

I also dont agree with your stance on the issue. Even if you're a brilliant player, have twitch reflexes and a great rig that runs the game flawlessly; you are still at the mercy of the worst person in your group. Silver Medal in Dungeons is so over tuned that if one DPS does Subpar DPS over the entire run, then you'll be stressed at getting just Silver with no deaths (this is with skipping an entire hallway and a respawn point worth of Trash mobs). God forbid you're carrying someone that doesnt know the encounters and dies a couple times. This is based off Storm Talon's Lair, mind you. Which is suppose to be the easiest of all the dungeons. Im not expecting Gold from a PUG, but ruling out Silver if you have to PUG one or two people just seems like it makes doing the dungeonpointless.

Click to expand...

What I wrote meant: You can join a guild of casual players and spend an hour or two at your leisure learning how to do dungeons -- don't even fucking worry about medals. You can still upgrade your gear. I play a few hours a day but I play casually. I do my dailies, tinker around with crafting. Last night I joined a guild group for the first time in STL. This guild is made up of people who want to play well and raid eventually, but aren't in any hurry. We wiped a few times on each boss; I had to leave after the 5th wipe on Stormtalon but they eventually got him down. It was my first time in STL Vet, and I felt that I learned a lot. After I watch a few healing perspective videos I think I'll have substantially less issues with Stormtalon.

I wish the dev's would come right out and explain their perspective, and let players determine if they even want to play a game with that design target. Right now there seems to be this presumption by the masses that LFD should be the primary way you gear yourself, and if you can't get epics via LFD then something is broken and needs to be changed.

Daidraco, if you want to do HARD group content then why are you trying to do this LFD instead of with your guild? If you don't want to do hard group content, why not just play WoW?

Final point: In a game with 40 man raids, the logistics and preparation aspect (everything that goes into maintaining a roster) are going to be a substantial challenge. Why would you assume that dungeon fight execution "should be easier". Dungeons are prep and execution training that require 5 man logistics, not 20-40. They ARE easier specifically because of that.

Vandyn_sl said:

The very definition of a PUG is just that, a pick up group with strangers. If the content is too difficult for a few strangers to group up and do the runs, then what's the point of having the functionality of a dungeon finder then? This also goes to the thought that the casual player is not motivated to group or even join a guild while they are leveling since most questing content is solo.

Click to expand...

Frankly, I think it'd be better if they removed medals completely from LFD. The dev's clearly are targeting their difficulty at a point substantially higher than the average PUG will reach. If they removed medals, then people would use LFD to learn fights -- instead of ragequit when gold is thrown away.

Just want to point out that I did a "queue for quickest veteran adventure" this morning. I was half asleep, didn't read anything I was supposed to do, and we got gold first try(Crimelords of Whitefall). Given, I am only a DPS, so my group could've had their shit together and I'd never know... but it didn't seem like we did anything ridiculous.

The reason he took his authenticator off was he's on vacation in Europe and either he was having trouble with the authenticator there or he took it off so his brother could play his account during that time. Either way the small window it happened seems to imply that shit was being attempted while it was on and the second he became vulnerable the program was successful. The guild my friends and I are joining had one of their guys hacked the same day so this wasn't a targeting attack as much as a mass spam.

I nabbed the game so we will see how it goes... It looks like Avantus Dominion is the way to go? From the progress reports it shows the server is the most progrssed.

Szeth_sl said:

Just want to point out that I did a "queue for quickest veteran adventure" this morning. I was half asleep, didn't read anything I was supposed to do, and we got gold first try(Crimelords of Whitefall). Given, I am only a DPS, so my group could've had their shit together and I'd never know... but it didn't seem like we did anything ridiculous.

Click to expand...

No one is really questioning the difficulty of Adventures. Theyre quite boring and still Buggy, but you can reliably PUG them and get Gold most of the time. If for some reason you got stuck under an over world object, and froze to death - Your group would still have disbanded. The objectives are just plain unimaginative for Gold and Silver in dungeons or adventures, though.

Seananigans_sl said:

Does anyone know if it's intended that Weaponcrafting Research stuff have weird unintuitive pre-reqs? Currently, the tree (and consequently the vendor) is designed in an Earth/Fire/Water/Air manner, such that you have to go down the Air tree, whether or not it's the same weapon. For instance, I've created Adventus-2 Claws, but to continue to Adventus-3 Claws, I have to first craft two resonators and a greatsword, because for some reason the 3 and 4 claws are over in the water column instead of earth where the 1 and 2 were.

So basically I'm hoping to get some sort of confirmation that this is intended before I start blowing research fragments on shit I don't need just to unlock my 3 and 4 claws. Anyone know?

Click to expand...

Yeah it's all kinds of fucked up. And some recipes take data fragments to unlock and some just take Accelerons. Just make sure to check the data fragment requirement for the line you want to go down because most cost like 10 fragments.

Also no point currently in making anything but Epoch's for quick sales and new 50's, and Adventus 3 for boosted stats/rune slots.

Crimelords is the easiest adventure to get Gold on. This is provided that you have a majority of people who know what they are doing who can then easily carry a DPS. Second easiest would be War of the Wilds. Malgrave trail is probably easier if people have a basic grasp of the overall Oregon Trail motif, but since most people do not it tends to lend itself to disease, lost refugees and lots of starvation.

So I bought the game about 5 hours ago.. its downloaded and ready to go. I log in and it tells me that no matter if its EU and NA it cant log me in and just swaps back and forth. I was just wanting to know if anybody has insight on a fix for that.

Did you beta test Wildstar? If so, and you're using the same account, sometimes they are flagged for different regions and you may have to put a support ticket in.

i don't know anybody that quit a game they enjoyed due to difficulty. However, I know plenty of players that quit a game due to it being to easy and boring. It's a total fallacy to say you have to make games easy to attract the casual crowd and sell copies. Dark Souls anyone? People bitch and complain then secretly play these games for 20 hours/day because they love the challenge. People love being contradictory and complain how they hate the difficulty but they keep playing because it's something to strive for. Yet when they get what they want and something because easy, they quit due to boredom. The worse thing any dev or company making an MMO can do, is listen to the average public and ask them what they want. People don't know what they want. That's clearly been proven throughout history. There are many reasons why people might stop playing Wildstar, content difficulty will not be one of them, at least on any meaningful level.

Underjoyed_sl said:

i don't know anybody that quit a game they enjoyed due to difficulty. However, I know plenty of players that quit a game due to it being to easy and boring. It's a total fallacy to say you have to make games easy to attract the casual crowd and sell copies. Dark Souls anyone? People bitch and complain then secretly play these games for 20 hours/day because they love the challenge. People love being contradictory and complain how they hate the difficulty but they keep playing because it's something to strive for. Yet when they get what they want and something because easy, they quit due to boredom. The worse thing any dev or company making an MMO can do, is listen to the average public and ask them what they want. People don't know what they want. That's clearly been proven throughout history. There are many reasons why people might stop playing Wildstar, content difficulty will not be one of them, at least on any meaningful level.

Click to expand...

A game called WoW would like to have a word with you if we're talking about making content easier brings in more subs. Also with people would stop bringing up Dark Souls as a reason why everyone wants very difficult content in an MMORPG. Last time I checked Dark Souls doesn't charge $15 a month to continue to play it, you can just put it down when your done, plus your enjoyment of the game is also not reliant on the other people you are playing with.

Vandyn_sl said:

Dark Souls doesn't charge $15 a month to continue to play it, you can just put it down when your done, plus your enjoyment of the game is also not reliant on the other people you are playing with.

Click to expand...

That's the key point, I think. People are much more content to get owned in a single-player game with no witnesses. Challenging game + reliance on teamwork + random teammates = League of Legends-esque levels of frustration. While the solution is clear to me (join a fucking guild and learn together you fucking inbreds), the truth remains that a huuuge portion of WoW's subs come from people who pretty much just solo. They want to press LFD/LFR, fuck around and mash keys for a bit, and get a new piece of gear. My limited experience with vet content in WS indicates that MOST people are doing the same thing here. After seeing the difference between good DPS, acceptable DPS, and average pug DPS... sigh. It doesn't help the puggers plight that Carbine has put far more responsibility on DPS than they're accostomed to from WoW. Moving out of redANDusing utility skills to interrupt group-wiping mob abilities? Oh hell no.

Vandyn_sl said:

A game called WoW would like to have a word with you if we're talking about making content easier brings in more subs.

Click to expand...

It doesn't, it didn't and there are some things that should be understood before repeating that same mantra over and over. WoW was growing during TBC and would have grown nonetheless, period. Difficulty had nothing to do with it, maybe and just maybe accessibility (in terms of 10 ppl raids) helped retention, but I doubt it helped inflating subscription numbers, it would have just happened: more commercials, more widespread acceptance about playing these games and so on and so forth, several reasons we discussed at nauseam over the years.

I'd suggest to have a read at this interesting article, especially the graphs (no longer updated with data post-wotlk, as you will read):OT: Subscription and Correlation | In An Age

Wow had a long ascending curve and is now on the descending one, which is 100% fine, since it's 10 years old and has made more money than some small country.

Vandyn_sl said:

A game called WoW would like to have a word with you if we're talking about making content easier brings in more subs.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure exactly how to read this, but I'm pretty sure WoW subs peaked during WotLK.

'Incidentally', this is when they added LFD and really iterated on the retarded badge mechanics.

I don't recall the 'casuals' being any less happy during Vanilla / TBC just because they wouldn't see Naxx or had to roll their own groups. "Content for everyone" just means you send the bads into the same dungeon queue as the people looking to attune for raiding; to the disappointment of everyone.

People serious about attunement should be rolling premades anyway. They should almost just do away with the ability to attune in queued dungeons, to stop both the morons who drop at the first hiccup and the morons who are shocked that they're not going to get gold with a bunch of idiot pugs. Throw some vet-dungeon only armor sets to give the people who will never raid something to work towards and call it a day.

WoW had achievements and titles basically bemoaning how painful and tedious pugging was when LFD was first introduced, and seems like everyone forgets what kind of a cesspool (to be completely avoided) it is for everybody involved. Dungeon queuing should be your last resort, not your first choice.

Im okay with the attunement because I see it as highly educational. There is no way I belonged in a dungeon until I could faceroll the adventures and I can't even fathom a raid until me and mine are good with dodging all sorts of crap while using stuns, CC breaks etc in judicious manners while not overhealing or wasting effort.

What Carbine needs to work on is keeping plenty of non-attunement based content rolling out so that people who aren't heading down that path have things to do. The new zones that are in the ultra-drop seem to be an indication that this is very much in the works.

I'm excited about the changes to pvp stats that were posted yesterday as the stats now are pretty borked. Although I'm not excited about pvp stats increasing healing abilities as they are already super strong in pvp, at least it gives healers a reason to have pvp gear. There should probably be some kind of diminishing returns to healing in pvp. For instance, every unique healing source within 5 seconds adds a 3% stacking reduction in incoming healing. After 5 seconds without getting healed the stacks go away or something. PVP is pretty fun in an organized group when you can actually focus down healers but in PuG practice grounds there are just so many stalemates until the healers run out of focus. Also, I hate tether and players should be immune to it for a couple of seconds after being tethered. Fucking Tether. Anyone else share these thoughts?