Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Xevy_sl said:

How many of you guys played the game with a guild and to max level?

Click to expand...

I made the mistake of rolling on the PVP server, and made it to about 40 until I got bored of the zones and dungeons/adventures, and tired of the broken class balance and getting owned by ranged classes. I didn't have a guild either.

I raid tested (both GA and DS) the game for 4 fucking months in DnT in closed beta, 4-5 nights a week. It was great, logged in, no farming, no dailis, no RNG slot, just purely enjoy raiding.

Game went live, guild finished GA in 3rd, I got totally burnt out from all those things I listed in my previous post. And I played an Esper, you only need 1 Esper as buff bitch in raid at launch (Esper was fine in beta, got nerf hard), doesn't matter how good you are. It was NOT worth my fucking time, so I quit before entering DS. Anyway the guild actually never made it into DS. The remaining DnT joined Voodoo just to raid in DS, and we all know what happened to Voodoo later.

There were both some positives and negatives from this game. I enjoyed the challenge and the combat was some of the best I've seen in a MMO. No idea why people are shitting on the combat. I would have stuck longer with this game if I were still single with no wife or kids and could devote several hours a night to playing. Perhaps this game can go thru a FF14-like redesign to make the game more suitable for casual gamers yet maintain its status as a challenging MMO. Regular dungeons should only take about an hour to complete. My groups were spending over 2-3 hours due to all the wipes. No idea if its possible but I do think there is a niche out there for something more difficult than WoW but not mind-numbingly painful like Wildstar. One obvious change they could make it return the raid bosses to only require 10, 15, 20 etc players. Requiring 40 hardcore raiders online at the same time is probably the worst decision Carbine made.

I cleared to DS as well. We found Esper and Spellslingers to be really good at healing, but Spellslingers especially took more skill to aim heals. We were all attuned before the giant World Boss drought, but yeah, that did fuck a lot of people over.

The raids were awesome. If you can't dodge telegraphs while DPSing, that's you. Not the game. Like I said this game was difficult in multiple senses. You had to be aware while dpsing rather than the button mashfest that is most MMO's, WoW included. Your skill rotations were often only 1-4 abilities but timing was crucial. Unless you were some bullshit class like Engineer and you could 1 button macro the whole thing. Having to know the scheduled telegraphs + DPSing to full potential + being aware how to deal with RNG telegraph shit was what made it fun. Most people never saw this.

Most people went into a dungeon with a tank that can't hold aggro, a healer who thought they could dps half the time, and DPS without interrupts. This game took more coordination than any MMO I've ever played. The combat and the effort going in to just PVE has ruined me from playing and shit like WoW or GW2 again. It's just a different level.

PVP was half assed. Classes rotated through OPness like any other MMO though. Spellslinger then Stalker then Warrior then Esper. Engineers never had their time at #1 but plenty of time at #2. The BG's were half assed and recycled ideas, but if people weren't using gimmicks like stalker tanks with flags it could be just as fun as WoW's pvp. The bomb one they added shortly before we all quit was actually pretty fun if you had a team that did more than just rush with bombs.

The quests were WoW quests. There WERE quests like the fake Indiana Jones quests later on, but of course no one here complaining got that far or paid attention. I personally thought questing was good because I had an addon tell me exactly where to go and what to pick up and I could scoot through that shit no problem. The space insanity shiphand mission I'm sure will be remembered by many for quite some time. I can't tell you many WoW quests besides Indiana Jones from Cata.

Classes were standard classes. They did have different resource systems, but I don't know what the fuck people want. A Rift style mess where everyone's going to be one of the two cookie cutter builds 90% of the time anyways? Okay, cool.

A lot of the people saying this game sucked literally didn't do a dungeon. Or at least complete one. Or get max level. I remember the 'hype train' (by the way, most of you retards in threads here CAUSE the hype train. Look at Draegan420Junkies and Crowfall. You're setting yourselves up for disappointment) and just because of that perceived hype people hated the game before it even launched. I was in beta for a year. A fucking YEAR. I saw it do a complete 180 several times. I laughed every time some retard came in here and said "Got a stalker to lvl 8. Basically bad WoW clone. Graphics were cartoons. Bad game." I mean there were lots of weak spots in this game, but most of the vocal people here never even got to them.

TL R Draegan and his ilk can shill and peddle their next dream machine, but that shit won't fly. Wildstar was cool if you had a team and didn't suck. Only at that point did the real problems start to show.

Draegan stopped hyping this game like a year before it launched. I distinctly remember him saying that classes were boring as shit and he was tired of the collect 100 bear-ass until level cap paradigm.

I agree with Rescorla; if I were single able to play hours a day this game might have felt more engaging to me -- I would have been able to invest ample time into building proper social connections and practicing tough content.

Xevy, honest question: how many hours a week did you play Wildstar on release?

Played it through 5/6 datascape with the rerolled guild. Combat was alright but other than raids there was really nothing to do.

I played somewhere between 40 and 80 hours a week.

And yes, Draegan was against this game immediately. That was my point. Some people were against the game before playing it just because they thought it was overhyped. Funnily, the same people just hype their next game which will never live up to it.

The dungeons nowadays take 15 minutes to 45 minutes for the longest one. Maybe an hour if you have some people that haven't done it before. It will still take you 2 hours though if you have never been there and refuse to share this information with your group, and proceed to never interrupt anything and not coordinate with the group.

They changed how the medal system works, and you can easily silver the dungeons by ignoring the optionals and killing bosses quickly. The attunement only requires bronze though, which can be done with a full group of newbies.

oops

Rogosh_sl said:

Played it through 5/6 datascape with the rerolled guild. Combat was alright but other than raids there was really nothing to do.

Click to expand...

you played it through GA, not datascape

Xevy,

Do you agree that Wildstar highly encouraged people to play with static groups and play for generally longer play sessions? I mean, think back to when you were working through medals for the dungeons. Being able to throw 6+ hours at a tough task helps a ton for learning. Compare this to a guy who has 60-90 minutes to play. Time being a function of success is common to practically all games, but its even more essential in an inherently social game: its just sheer easier to match play schedules with a core group of fellow tryhards if we're all playing all the fucking time.

I have no statistics handy but I'm guessing 40-80 hours a week puts you in a pretty high bracket for game-time, and I'm not surprised at all that really tough dungeon crawls that really asked people to spend 2+ hours minimum to get some decent practice in appealed to you and didn't appeal to the vast majority. I, along with most people, don't have the time that you do -- if I'm going to have a 3+ hour play session I need to schedule that.

I'm not saying its bad to play 80 hours a week, to each their own -- I'm just trying to illustrate why you're going to have a vastly different perception of game content.

I agree completely. 40-80 hours is insane for 95% of the population. But the thing is, unless you were playing at LEAST 20 hours a week, it's stupid to assume you're going to raid. But people did. People thought they'd play 1-2 hours a night and be able to have the gear and attunement for raids, most of which were very DPS dependent.

I did play with the same core people, as I have a group of 5-15 people I play every MMO with. That is certainly one of the reasons I was successful and DEFINITELY the reason I enjoyed the game more than some of the people here. Having a static group of people you know and can work with makes all the difference. Cooperation is key. You're not getting that with pugs. It works in dumb dumb WoW dungeons, but only when enough people have enough gear to carry bads. You can almost never carry more than 1 bad in WS. My group was literally the first group on our server to do silver attunement without exploiting a boss. We didn't wall jump Maiden, we didn't wall hump Mordechai. We did it all legit. And that's why it was fun. It was an actual challenge and we felt accomplished. After that began the carry mode. We could only carry 1 person at a time and certain fights like Mordechai were rough as fuck because with 1 bad who's going to die and then a 30% chance any one of you gets a bad pool spawn or something and you're done. Wasted 45 minutes. I said even when WS launched people needed to have friends or a guild to play with. Some people had that or found that and had more fun. Some didn't and then whine and bitched and quit before max level. Those people should have no voice in complaining about MMO's. It's about playing with people. You nerds need some single player, stick to Zelda.

I understand people who don't have much time to play, but some of the stuff they're arguing I just fundamentally cannot agree with. Like combat. Combat was great. It was incredibly fluid and the LAS really made your character play the way you wanted it. You didn't just rotate your cooldowns a la every other MMO besides GW2 that I can think of. People saw red telegraphs and went "oh that's baby mode!" Except those telegraphs were needed because so much shit was going on you needed to know which attack was happening with whatever extraneous other attack occurring at the same time. Think of the Council fight in GA. Know way in fuck could you time all the shit right if you couldn't see it. Waves + Hammer time + Jelly fish shit? Yeah, good luck being able to see just the graphic alone on each one of those.

Basically, people are largely arguing the game is bad because it was too hard for pugs. That's it. They didn't have the manpower to go in and do anything so they just played by themselves rather than join a community and increase their capability and by correlation, their enjoyment. There are plenty of arguments against WS. Crafting was shit. PVP was sorely lacking. A lot of itemization problems were present such as weapons only needing high AP. But to complain that the combat was bad or the PVE wasn't good is just... wrong. You can make plenty of arguments, but that's not one of them.

Shrug, I'm a carebear at heart and enjoy tough content. Maybe Wildstar was too hard for me, I dunno. It just wasn't fun. TBC-era heroics, Rift T2 experts... those games, they encouraged working through a dungeon, failing, re-attempting, achieving victory. etc etc. Wildstar's model pretty much said: "if you don't execute near-perfectly get the fuck out and try again". That may be why I didn't even bother to stick around; the game actively discouraged stranger's playing together long enough to succeed together and decide "hey maybe we should play another dungeon."

They had a pretty fun group game. What I saw of the raids (and I saw very little) did strike me as hard but it didn't strike me as particularly fun. That's fine -- not a flaw with the game. Different strokes for different folks. Some people enjoy that sort of thing. I used to be one of them. Things change.

But now their 5man game wasfun. I liked every last one of their dungeons, and I didn't hate their scenarios. They weren't as good, but they were still not bad. But there weren't anything near enough of them.

They spent like 90% of their dev time creating solo content which was just boring as shit and rote for all of their players. I never met anyone above level 30 that actually enjoyed the solo content. About halfway through you realized that you're just doing it because it's there and it has to be done. And that was a real problem. Honestly, that's a game breaking problem. Because their selling point was the co-op content and the fluff they'd worked in like housing.

Project managers can kill a game. They killed Wildstar. That's all it was. It wasn't anything more complex than that. Resource management and too many chiefs. That underlying problem was most obvious when it came to classes but it effected the entire game.

Xevy_sl said:

I agree completely. 40-80 hours is insane for 95% of the population. But the thing is, unless you were playing at LEAST 20 hours a week, it's stupid to assume you're going to raid. But people did. People thought they'd play 1-2 hours a night and be able to have the gear and attunement for raids, most of which were very DPS dependent.

I did play with the same core people, as I have a group of 5-15 people I play every MMO with. That is certainly one of the reasons I was successful and DEFINITELY the reason I enjoyed the game more than some of the people here. Having a static group of people you know and can work with makes all the difference. Cooperation is key. You're not getting that with pugs. It works in dumb dumb WoW dungeons, but only when enough people have enough gear to carry bads. You can almost never carry more than 1 bad in WS. My group was literally the first group on our server to do silver attunement without exploiting a boss. We didn't wall jump Maiden, we didn't wall hump Mordechai. We did it all legit. And that's why it was fun. It was an actual challenge and we felt accomplished. After that began the carry mode. We could only carry 1 person at a time and certain fights like Mordechai were rough as fuck because with 1 bad who's going to die and then a 30% chance any one of you gets a bad pool spawn or something and you're done. Wasted 45 minutes. I said even when WS launched people needed to have friends or a guild to play with. Some people had that or found that and had more fun. Some didn't and then whine and bitched and quit before max level. Those people should have no voice in complaining about MMO's. It's about playing with people. You nerds need some single player, stick to Zelda.

I understand people who don't have much time to play, but some of the stuff they're arguing I just fundamentally cannot agree with. Like combat. Combat was great. It was incredibly fluid and the LAS really made your character play the way you wanted it. You didn't just rotate your cooldowns a la every other MMO besides GW2 that I can think of. People saw red telegraphs and went "oh that's baby mode!" Except those telegraphs were needed because so much shit was going on you needed to know which attack was happening with whatever extraneous other attack occurring at the same time. Think of the Council fight in GA. Know way in fuck could you time all the shit right if you couldn't see it. Waves + Hammer time + Jelly fish shit? Yeah, good luck being able to see just the graphic alone on each one of those.

Basically, people are largely arguing the game is bad because it was too hard for pugs. That's it. They didn't have the manpower to go in and do anything so they just played by themselves rather than join a community and increase their capability and by correlation, their enjoyment. There are plenty of arguments against WS. Crafting was shit. PVP was sorely lacking. A lot of itemization problems were present such as weapons only needing high AP. But to complain that the combat was bad or the PVE wasn't good is just... wrong. You can make plenty of arguments, but that's not one of them.

Click to expand...

I don't think the game was bad at all. I just don't belong in the target demographic the game was designed for. There was just no point in me paying a monthly sub once I figured out that I would never be able to do any endgame raiding or hard mode dungeons. It appears there were a substantial number of players like me who fell into that same category. When the game goes F2P, if the endgame PVE design remains the same, then there won't be much of a reason for players like me to return.

Quitting WS for me was a combination of factors that overwhelmed me:

- A friend that came playing it with me decided to quit pretty early.
- Pugs were nightmares in dungeons (talking already about the first one when levelling, imagine that).
- I picked the wrong class at launch (wrong for me, that is), Esper, because my friend had picked Stalker that was my first pick. Restarting wasn't an option.
- Quests in Whitevale were fucking horrible, boring, stale, unsignificant and every negative adjective you can find. It didn't get much better after that.

In general I loved the combat, the setting, the humor, the class design and the scenarios and dungeons, but they were tuned badly for a MMO. To be palatable for most of the playerbase, they should have buffed the heals by 20% and reduced mob damage by 20% at least, in all levelling dungeons and possibly even in the tough version later on. I joined a large guild and I witnessed half of it nerd raging and quitting the game because of dungeons. I didn't even get to the raids, wasn't looking forward to the attunement.
In my opinion they should modify a bunch of things (I heard now raids are 20 players only, but that's not enough) and move to a b2p or a f2p model with a cosmetic cash shop, it could be very good for them.

I'm still convinced so many games keep having so many issues because people feel it applicable to ask 'how long should that dungeon take' and worse there is an answer.

How long did LGuk take to beat? How long did it take to beat SolB? Exactly. The questions don't apply and are dumb. They were just places with reasons to go spend time in, and those reasons definitely weren't to earn some contrived dungeon currency to then buy items with.

In short, fuck WoW, Wildstar and all the rest. And get off my lawn.

popsicledeath_sl said:

I'm still convinced so many games keep having so many issues because people feel it applicable to ask 'how long should that dungeon take' and worse there is an answer.

How long did LGuk take to beat? How long did it take to beat SolB? Exactly. The questions don't apply and are dumb. They were just places with reasons to go spend time in, and those reasons definitely weren't to earn some contrived dungeon currency to then buy items with.

In short, fuck WoW, Wildstar and all the rest. And get off my lawn.

Click to expand...

How long does it take to get into the FBSS group? A: At least 2 hours.