Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

They also forgot that a game requres, you know, more than a couple instances to be entertaining.

Itzena_sl said:

They based Wildstar's design on the theory that there's they great untapped pool of bitter, hardcore ex-WoW/EQ players who were just crying out for a "difficult" (read: grindy) game who'd leap at the chance to subscribe and keep playing for months and months while doing TBC/PoP-style attunements that would let them lord it over the casual players.

The problem with this is their theory isbollocks.

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Your theory is bollocks. Problem is their design sucked. This game is nothing like Vanilla WoW or Velious era EQ. There are plenty of untapped players that are consistently not being catered to. Every game makes the same mistakes over and over then blames their player base. The problem is the game sucked. It was bland, uninspiring, meaningless and void of any semblance of immersion or community due to faulty design. Too many pinhead autistics that have no idea of what contributed to the emotions felt while playing a game like EQ. They focus too much on simple game mechanics without an initial presuppositional existential design philosophy based on human psychology.

Malakriss_sl said:

They also forgot that a game requres, you know, more than a couple instances to be entertaining.

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Posts like this underline the entire problem with game devs thought processes. Wrong. This game does not require more than a couple of instances. What this game really needed is ZERO instances. I know its a concept that just blows people's minds when they first hear it, but yes, it's possible. What the true next gen MMO needs is to completely eliminate precisely what people think it needs. Eliminate instances, auction houses, hard factions, teleporting, group finders, raid finders, cut scenes, voice overs, quest hubs, min maps, world maps, invisible walls, mob leashing, level designated zones, etc. Everything they've added has done nothing but contribute to the death of this genre.

Underjoyed's mmo will also make you 18 years old again in real life so you can re-live your glory days.

Underjoyed_sl said:

Eliminate instances, auction houses, teleporting, group finders, raid finders, cut scenes, voice overs, quest hubs, min maps, world maps, invisible walls, mob leashing, level designated zones, etc. Everything they've added has done nothing but contribute to the death of this genre.

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Artifa_sl said:

Underjoyed's mmo will also make you 18 years old again in real life so you can re-live your glory days.

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All the way back to here apparently...




I think Underjoyed is from 300 years into the future. He's warning us of impending disaster unless someone quick makes a fully text-based MMO.

The biggest issue with this game is that Jeremy Gaffney did not listen.
Balance | Page 7 | WildStar Central

"Several factors apply:

1) The 1% are pretty vocal. If they report back to the 99% that the elder game sucks, guess what? Lots of people leave - why bother levelling up if no love was put into the very top content? (Well there actually answers to that, but I'll leave it for brevity).

2) Over time, your "1%" content becomes easier - better loot drops, people get more skilled, level caps raise. So that percentage our of time spent actually over time does get utilized well.

3) We devs often ARE the 1%. If you make a game you don't love, it's pretty damn hard to make it good. We want a game we want to play too. There are a disproportionate amount of hardcore raiders/PVPers in the industry (and probably also in those passionate enough to post here or on other MMO sites for that matter).

4) There's some magic involved. Picture a game with no nigh-inaccessible content. You can go anywhere the first month, there's nothing left unseen. From one perspective, maybe that's great - there's no earning your way into Counterstrike maps, and that game's pretty damn fun. But from another...I dunno, it's pretty tough to have a mysterious, huge-feeling world when you can trivially do it all, and even in games I don't want to or don't have time to raid in I'd like to know there's more out there. That's arguable though.

So we focus a lot on elder games. We're trying to have innovative answer for each major playstyles:

Soloers PVE'ers (IMO under-served in most MMOs oddly as they are 65+% of the playerbase in most western MMOs) get more than rep grinds and dailies by having solo story dungeons released regularly, dynamic PQ content (most to be revealed down the road), big frequent updates, housing stuff, good tradeskilling, and more.

PVPers: Warplots (40v40 player built city v city combat) and arenas (to oversummarize)

Group PVE'ers: Dynamic raid content, weekly competitions for legendary gear, and more (some to be revealed later)

Some of that stuff (especially the group stuff) needs to be damn hard. We want the best guilds capturing raid bosses in challenging ways, and pinning them down on their warplots to go beat the <REDACTED> out of the other fortresses. Many noobie players may never experience that - but hopefully they hear about it and aspire to it."

I'm personally really really over faction-based gameplay. You IMMEDIATELY slice the perceived player-base in half. And frankly it seems to add sweet fuck-all to the world.

Reward scientific approaches to the game....by this I mean players asking the question "I wonder what happens if I do X?"....the more the world responds to this question, the better the game.

Underjoyed_sl said:

Your theory is bollocks. Problem is their design sucked. This game is nothing like Vanilla WoW or Velious era EQ. There are plenty of untapped players that are consistently not being catered to. Every game makes the same mistakes over and over then blames their player base. The problem is the game sucked. It was bland, uninspiring, meaningless and void of any semblance of immersion or community due to faulty design. Too many pinhead autistics that have no idea of what contributed to the emotions felt while playing a game like EQ. They focus too much on simple game mechanics without an initial presuppositional existential design philosophy based on human psychology.


Posts like this underline the entire problem with game devs thought processes. Wrong. This game does not require more than a couple of instances. What this game really needed is ZERO instances. I know its a concept that just blows people's minds when they first hear it, but yes, it's possible. What the true next gen MMO needs is to completely eliminate precisely what people think it needs. Eliminate instances, auction houses, teleporting, group finders, raid finders, cut scenes, voice overs, quest hubs, min maps, world maps, invisible walls, mob leashing, level designated zones, etc. Everything they've added has done nothing but contribute to the death of this genre.

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I agree with most of this, with a few exceptions...

Instancing: There should be some instancing. The level of encounter design possibilities within an instance dwarf the alternative. A good percentage (at least 60%) of raid and significant dungeon encounters should be instanced. Leave some contested desirable content with more bland encounter mechanics. It's worth it to encourage the PVE meta.

Worldmap: Why not? My character is a smart chap. He wouldn't leave his house without a map of the known world if he intended to travel it. You're hurting my immersion. He'd also have a compass, and a writing utensil to fill in his own points-of-interest and notes.

Teleporting: You can give travel significance without being ridiculous about it. Youneeda means of getting your friends to you when you log on. Fostering friendships is key to an MMORPG's success. People can't be friends if they can't play together. I suggest including a summoning mechanic that requires any 2 players to do anywhere, including dungeons, or can be accomplished in a major HUB/city by a solo player + a 'summoning statue'. The summoning of course requires a reagent (LORE item).

Group Finder: If you launch an MMORPG in 2014 without a group finder, you might as well just close the doors to your studio now and get it over with. The players expect it. Deal with it. There are other ways to encourage players to converse with each other besides sending /LFGtells. Better ways.

Sev_sl said:

I'm personally really really over faction-based gameplay. You IMMEDIATELY slice the perceived player-base in half. And frankly it seems to add sweet fuck-all to the world.

Reward scientific approaches to the game....by this I mean players asking the question "I wonder what happens if I do X?"....the more the world responds to this question, the better the game.

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Original EQ's faction system - which may or may not have been kind of an accident - remains the best implementation of faction to date in my opinion. That shit was awesome and really made the world seem more alive. The artificial walls between factions these days, not so much.

I wonder how long until some world-threatening event brings the walls down between the Exiles and Dominion like what happened in Rift.

I love when dumbfucks like Underjoyed talk about NEXTGEN then fucking describe EQ as the game they want.

There is always someone who says there are plenty of 'untapped players' who want this type of game and yet time and again reality continues to prove them wrong. Everyone was singing the game's praises during the first month (which wasn't that long ago) and then like every other game, the honeymoon ended and a vast majority of players decided they have better things to do than bang their head against the wall.

Faltigoth_sl said:

I wonder how long until some world-threatening event brings the walls down between the Exiles and Dominion like what happened in Rift.

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Depends when NCSoft spends millions on Defiance, End of Nations, Warface and Trove equivalents that almost bankrupt their company so that they have to think outside of the box.

Vandyn_sl said:

There is always someone who says there are plenty of 'untapped players' who want this type of game and yet time and again reality continues to prove them wrong. Everyone was singing the game's praises during the first month (which wasn't that long ago) and then like every other game, the honeymoon ended and a vast majority of players decided they have better things to do than bang their head against the wall.

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I clamored for them to not split the population, but the carbine response was because "lore". They should go the Rift route for transfers and for pvp via mercenaries( temporary fight for the other side) and no faction splits on pve servers.

Abefroman_sl said:

I love when dumbfucks like Underjoyed talk about NEXTGEN then fucking describe EQ as the game they want.

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That's essentially true. I agree with him but I'm comfortable enough in my barnacle encrusted skin to admit to wanting an EQ throwback.

Warmuth_sl said:

That's essentially true. I agree with him but I'm comfortable enough in my barnacle encrusted skin to admit to wanting an EQ throwback.

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Thank you. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that, just be honest about it.

Vandyn_sl said:

There is always someone who says there are plenty of 'untapped players' who want this type of game and yet time and again reality continues to prove them wrong. Everyone was singing the game's praises during the first month (which wasn't that long ago) and then like every other game, the honeymoon ended and a vast majority of players decided they have better things to do than bang their head against the wall.

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Well, to be fair the game Underjoyed is describing hasn't been released since EQ (possibly vanilla WoW). Perhaps Vanguard fit the bill somewhat, but another important factor in releasing a game is that it actually plays on most machines, and Vanguard didn't.

So it is possible that Underjoyed's game would be successful because it hasn't been tried in over a decade.

Personally, I don't think the list matters as much as the fun factor. If the game is fun then people will play it.

Grim1_sl said:

Well, to be fair the game Underjoyed is describing hasn't been released since EQ (possibly vanilla WoW). Perhaps Vanguard fit the bill somewhat, but another important factor in releasing a game is that it actually plays on most machines, and Vanguard didn't.

So it is possible that Underjoyed's game would be successful because it hasn't been tried in over a decade.

Personally, I don't think the list matters as much as the fun factor. If the game is fun then people will play it.

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Sure but for some reason people thought Wildstar was the next coming of vanilla WoW simply because '40 man raids' and playing 5 minutes of this game told you that wasn't the case.

It's actually incredibly close to BC WoW. People just won't admit to the fact they like a lot of the MMO innovations that have occurred since then. Nostalgia glasses too strong.

Xevy_sl said:

It's actually incredibly close to BC WoW. People just won't admit to the fact they like a lot of the MMO innovations that have occurred since then. Nostalgia glasses too strong.

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Not accurate for me at least. Only MMORPGs I've played for 12 months+ are EQ (Vanilla-PoP), Vanguard, and woW (Vanilla-TBC)

How many subs did this end up with, anyway? I can't find anything so i assume it didn't get to 1,000,000.

Most (sane) estimates put it somewhere between 100K - 300K and not yet stabilised. Box sales haven't reached the million mark yet either, iirc.