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It's hard to say, and I imagine it varies a lot depending on the specific game. My instinct though is that a lot of the whales are the "casual" but heavily invested players. If you can play eighteen hours a day you probably don't need the various P2W stuff in your average lovely kMMO-style game for example, and things like cosmetic items probably sell to all player types equally so you probably get more from casual players simply due to them being a larger percentage of the population. It's something that's kind of hard to judge though. I mean there's not really an objective "casual" and "hardcore" definition... hours played? Degree of progress in the game? And then you run into catch-22's like how spending dozens or hundreds of dollars usually pulls people from the "casual" side of MMOs by definition, even though you see similar spending habits in assorted freemium mobile games and nobody sane is calling those hardcore, and.. eh. 
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Mar 13, 2016 06:08
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Has anyone itt ever played a warplot?
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Mar 13, 2016 08:23
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Pesterchum posted:Honestly if all the people they've been laying off are the PvP/Raid/Have You Seen Warplot designers then it wouldn't be the worst decision they've made. The Raid guys actually made some neat raids that 95% of the playerbase never got to see. Like if you were say a heroic or above raider in WoW's last expansion, you absolutely would have adored Wildstar's raids. But heroic or above raiders aren't anything like a majority of the population. The majority of the population spends their day gathering daffodils, doing dailies, running old content, queue for a BG or two, and then maybe they'll do LFR. One thing they did do correct in the relaunch was massively retool housing, and they dumped a lot of raw building materials for housing onto the markets. People did some pretty impressive poo poo (Full scale model of Serenity from Firefly, an At-AT you could walk around in, treetop villages, etc). But building a mega rad house isn't something everyone is going to get into.
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Mar 13, 2016 09:07
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Rhymenoserous posted:The Raid guys actually made some neat raids that 95% of the playerbase never got to see. Like if you were say a heroic or above raider in WoW's last expansion, you absolutely would have adored Wildstar's raids. But heroic or above raiders aren't anything like a majority of the population. The majority of the population spends their day gathering daffodils, doing dailies, running old content, queue for a BG or two, and then maybe they'll do LFR. I was pretty big on housing stuff in the game but the stuff for that was too sporadic to keep me around. Waiting months for new items and having them locked behind PvP stuff? Nah. And it doesn't matter how good the raiding in the game was, when you launch with this:  I don't think there's any way to recover from the perceptions that it ingrained on people as far as raiding goes.
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Mar 13, 2016 09:31
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Asimo posted:It's hard to say, and I imagine it varies a lot depending on the specific game. My instinct though is that a lot of the whales are the "casual" but heavily invested players. I'm a whale with poor impulse control and a love for dumb cosmetics and I'm in no way hardcore. I probably spent most of my time leveling alts to 14 to have more houses to build than playing level 50 grinds before quitting. ~Anecdotal~ Rhymenoserous posted:One thing they did do correct in the relaunch was massively retool housing, and they dumped a lot of raw building materials for housing onto the markets. People did some pretty impressive poo poo (Full scale model of Serenity from Firefly, an At-AT you could walk around in, treetop villages, etc). I miss my houses a lot. One of my characters just lives in a bar cabinet scaled to max so I could turn all the shelves into rooms 
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Mar 13, 2016 11:32
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Baron Porkface posted:Has anyone itt ever played a warplot? Saw a video once. It looked like a MOBA inspired clusterfuck.
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Mar 13, 2016 12:07
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Baron Porkface posted:Has anyone itt ever played a warplot? I don't even loving know how to get into one. Supposedly you can queue for a Warplot solo, but the ability to do so is never available, the button is always grayed out.
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Mar 13, 2016 14:32
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The game knows you're not hardcore enough so it won't let you queue Cupcake
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Mar 13, 2016 14:37
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There was some dude who got into one in the old thread. It was apparently unplayably laggy because the game's netcode was not meant to handle 80 distinct entities all sending and receiving packets simultaneously. It was, quite literally, an afterthought.
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Mar 13, 2016 16:28
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Pesterchum posted:I was pretty big on housing stuff in the game but the stuff for that was too sporadic to keep me around. Waiting months for new items and having them locked behind PvP stuff? Nah. And it doesn't matter how good the raiding in the game was, when you launch with this: Don't forget that this attunement would sometimes reset on your character and wildstar's response was "DO IT AGAIN CUPCAKE"
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Mar 13, 2016 20:24
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Vermain posted:There was some dude who got into one in the old thread. It was apparently unplayably laggy because the game's netcode was not meant to handle 80 distinct entities all sending and receiving packets simultaneously. It was, quite literally, an afterthought. That is insane but not surprising. I mean Carbine advertised Warplots as a major feature of Widlstar. It was touted as something that made their game unique from everyone else, yet it seriously got zero support after it was implemented?
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Mar 13, 2016 20:32
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I said come in! posted:That is insane but not surprising. I mean Carbine advertised Warplots as a major feature of Widlstar. It was touted as something that made their game unique from everyone else, yet it seriously got zero support after it was implemented? It sounded like Alterac Valley or Wintergrasp, to be absolutely frank. I mean yeah you were supposed to have your guild custom build their war plot and the enemy team would attack it, but it boiled down to the same PvP objective poo poo those two WoW ones had.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:45
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I said come in! posted:That is insane but not surprising. I mean Carbine advertised Warplots as a major feature of Widlstar. It was touted as something that made their game unique from everyone else, yet it seriously got zero support after it was implemented? It gets even crazier than that (unless it's a lie, who knows). From what I heard the people that went on to be developing Warplots heard about it the same time we did: When one of the higher ups announced it randomly at a convention somewhere. Spur of the moment, no planning or preparation whatsoever. There wasn't a warplot team or anything, someone just decided it sounded like a good idea so let's run with it.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:45
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Pesterchum posted:It gets even crazier than that (unless it's a lie, who knows). From what I heard the people that went on to be developing Warplots heard about it the same time we did: When one of the higher ups announced it randomly at a convention somewhere. Spur of the moment, no planning or preparation whatsoever. There wasn't a warplot team or anything, someone just decided it sounded like a good idea so let's run with it. i dont have any experience but imo thats a bad way to design a game
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Mar 13, 2016 21:07
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Pesterchum posted:It gets even crazier than that (unless it's a lie, who knows). From what I heard the people that went on to be developing Warplots heard about it the same time we did: When one of the higher ups announced it randomly at a convention somewhere. Spur of the moment, no planning or preparation whatsoever. There wasn't a warplot team or anything, someone just decided it sounded like a good idea so let's run with it. I have a hazy memory of someone announcing it and the other people on camera looking like he just announced he was going to implement a feature that brings your dead real life pets back to life.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:08
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Alteisen posted:Don't forget that this attunement would sometimes reset on your character and wildstar's response was "DO IT AGAIN CUPCAKE" 
Asimo fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 22:04
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I said come in! posted:That is insane but not surprising. I mean Carbine advertised Warplots as a major feature of Widlstar. It was touted as something that made their game unique from everyone else, yet it seriously got zero support after it was implemented? IIRC Warplots did get seen by an elite few who coordinated it just so they could say they did. You were supposed to be able to queue solo so you could hop into one of the dozens warplot fights going at any given moment as a "mercenary" but since virtually no one ever did them it's not surprising the options is greyed out. I like how the warplot nodes you used to customize your warplot were max level architecture crafts that were tied to these time limited resources so each architect could make something like 1 or 2 of them per week max. And then if you lost they'd get destroyed.
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Mar 13, 2016 22:53
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Rhymenoserous posted:The Raid guys actually made some neat raids that 95% of the playerbase never got to see. Like if you were say a heroic or above raider in WoW's last expansion, you absolutely would have adored Wildstar's raids. This is a first I hear of Wildstar's raids being anything but bad. You saw a lot of flack in these threads regarding the bad design choices in those such as the loot, enrage timers, health/shield sponges, boss mechanics, and the color green.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:10
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I managed to get into a Warplot around launch by tagging along with a guild that was looking for a few people to fill out their warplots team. The match was an unplayable mess of particles and telegraphs that drove FPS into single digits -- if you've done the 10v10 PVP, 40v40 is exponentially worse. My team got routed in about 5 minutes; the guild lost a significant amount of money on destroyed warplots equipment and disbanded.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:26
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The Chairman posted:I managed to get into a Warplot around launch by tagging along with a guild that was looking for a few people to fill out their warplots team. The match was an unplayable mess of particles and telegraphs that drove FPS into single digits -- if you've done the 10v10 PVP, 40v40 is exponentially worse. My team got routed in about 5 minutes; the guild lost a significant amount of money on destroyed warplots equipment and disbanded. Baking cupcakes 40 at a time.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:34
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The Chairman posted:I managed to get into a Warplot around launch by tagging along with a guild that was looking for a few people to fill out their warplots team. The match was an unplayable mess of particles and telegraphs that drove FPS into single digits -- if you've done the 10v10 PVP, 40v40 is exponentially worse. My team got routed in about 5 minutes; the guild lost a significant amount of money on destroyed warplots equipment and disbanded. I love that you could permanently lose poo poo.
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Mar 14, 2016 11:22
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Mayor McCheese posted:This is a first I hear of Wildstar's raids being anything but bad. You saw a lot of flack in these threads regarding the bad design choices in those such as the loot, enrage timers, health/shield sponges, boss mechanics, and the color green. Maybe he meant neat as in visually appealing zones or enemies. Wasn't that an argument back in the day when LFR first came out, that their visual designers put in all this work and 90% of the playerbase would only see it on youtube? Still, Wildstar raids did seem to have an awful lot of green.
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Mar 14, 2016 11:56
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Psykmoe posted:Maybe he meant neat as in visually appealing zones or enemies. Wasn't that an argument back in the day when LFR first came out, that their visual designers put in all this work and 90% of the playerbase would only see it on youtube? It's great if your dream is to fight your way out of an 80s era monochrome computer for hours at a time.
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Mar 14, 2016 12:58
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Wildstar's Reddit is still a goldmine of hilarity with people getting mad at the layoffs saying " nothing is going anywhere" I thought by now it would if ran out of post like that but it keeps on giving.
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Mar 14, 2016 18:44
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Pesterchum posted:It gets even crazier than that (unless it's a lie, who knows). From what I heard the people that went on to be developing Warplots heard about it the same time we did: When one of the higher ups announced it randomly at a convention somewhere. Spur of the moment, no planning or preparation whatsoever. There wasn't a warplot team or anything, someone just decided it sounded like a good idea so let's run with it. True story.
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Mar 14, 2016 20:15
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Mayor McCheese posted:This is a first I hear of Wildstar's raids being anything but bad. You saw a lot of flack in these threads regarding the bad design choices in those such as the loot, enrage timers, health/shield sponges, boss mechanics, and the color green. I only saw them post F2P, by that point they had largely fixed itemization so you no longer saw people wandering into raids with their arms tied behind their backs. And post F2P also saw a much larger loot spew, all the minibosses giving loot etc etc. Basically most of the raid whines (Aside from difficulty) had been dealt with in F2P. EDIT: And I meant the mechanics really. About half my guilds raid team was dead weight and we were still able to get pretty deep into GA before our main tank/gm's wife went off her meds and we got a serious case of "Guild leaders wife breaking everyone's will to live." And that leads into the ultimate reason I quit: None of our other tanky classes were worth a poo poo in the role, our offtank was woefully unequipped to take her spot. I could have stepped in on my engy but I was absolutely unwilling to go through the ability/amp grind again. This game is so loving alt unfriendly that I quit. I guess what it boils down to is that while I really enjoy the core game, the initial design document is so hostile to players that I doubt any dev teams ability to unfuck it. This is a shame because in some areas you can tell a LOT of love was put into the game, housing, character design, just the general feel of the world created. But you can't stop idiots. A lot of people are holding onto the steam release to save the day, but that's dumb as gently caress. Ultimately the same issues "Alt unfriendly", "Runes are obnoxious" et al will be sitting there for the next crop of people to wash out of within a few months time. Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Mar 14, 2016 |
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Mar 14, 2016 21:09
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I still can't believe anyone at Carbine believed the amps/ability points unlocks to be a good idea. j/k who am I kidding, of course they all do
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Mar 14, 2016 21:19
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You think it'd be really hard to gently caress up a skill/talent tree system, something that's basically been iterated upon since Diablo 2. But Wildstar.
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Mar 14, 2016 21:24
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To be fair warplots probably would have been pretty neat if they were like 10v10, ran well, and didn't get destroyed if you lost.
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Mar 14, 2016 23:48
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But don't you know? Having massive penalties for failure is the best way to encourage people to take risks!
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Mar 14, 2016 23:59
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They are if you aren't a fuckin CUPCAKE. 
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Mar 15, 2016 00:25
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The Moon Monster posted:To be fair warplots probably would have been pretty neat if they were like 10v10, ran well, and didn't get destroyed if you lost. I think even 10v10 would be asking too much of Wildstar.
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Mar 15, 2016 01:03
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Before I quit there were a few dominion/exile guilds that were running scheduled warplots that anyone could join, and you could queue for someone elses warplot the same way you could every other PVP. But yeah outside of the "Scheduled Warplots" no one ran them. For that matter even when the F2P population was still pretty healthy (2-3 months ago) it was remarkably difficult to even get a regular bg going. The only time BG's would populate is when they did a double pvp xp (Whatever it was called) weekend. Then people would queue up because you could get ability/amp points quickly. Like 5 a day, and you only need about 15 of each to fully maximize your pote...  For those of you wondering about pop: It was actually pretty good till about 2 months ago, but since then there's been a very noticeable and steady decline. When I quit it was still fairly normal to have about ~200 people just hanging out in the contracts section of Thayde and another 150ish in the crafting/bank sections, and there were usually 2-3 full public raids on each side running world bosses at the same time. Max level dungeon queues were popping fast even as DPS. As it stands now, I logged in the other day just to see how the pop was. About 80 total people in the capital, and people bitching about trying to do worldbosses with only a half raid. One of my guildmembers was desperately trying to recruit enough people to raid. EDIT: A lot of people are hanging onto the Steam release to add a bunch of players, and it probably will get a similar critical mass that the initial F2P release did. The problem is that ultimately six months after that the pop is going to dive right back down again when people realize that: 1. The dungeons are more difficult than what they are used to. About 50% of all bosses, raid or dungeon have a "If you get hit by this you just killed yourself" mechanic. 2. That PVP isn't really that fun in this game. 3. If for some reason you need to level an alt to fill a slot you have to find a way to compact several months of runing/amping/pointing into a few weeks if you want to be at the same basic competency level you were before. 4. That raids require a much higher "Highly competent clutch player" to "dead weight" ratio than raids in most other games (We ran about 10 and 10. 10 people who I could give tasks too, and 10 people that could be trusted to DPS for about 5 minutes before they died spectacularly). This is where WoW does it right as a "Raiding game" and gives everyone access to an appropriate skill level of raiding that they can do and have fun. Everyone should have fun, if everyone is not having fun you have fundamentally failed as a game designer. But anyways this game was really designed so only what I'd call "WoW heroic or better" raiders would have fun. This put a ton of stress on me as a raid leader because some fights literally required a certain volume of players be alive for certain mechanics, and that they do those mechanics properly. Kurulak was my personal favorite because we were stuck on her for 2 weeks. Bear in mind that I had done all of the fights in the first raid with another guilds alt group as a method to "Teach myself" before I subjected our retards to it. For Kurulak P1 I needed six smart people who could dodge lasers and dot damage to decloak the boss whenever she cloaked. I sicced my A team players on this (Including myself). Everyone else I kept in the middle. Their only job was to move clockwise while DPS'ing the boss to avoid lasers. I have never died in the center when doing it with other guilds, or during the periods where I wasn't doing the "Special Task" and could move back to the center. I could see no reason to die in the center. Nevertheless by the time the outside team made it's way back into the center again roughly 2-3 people would be dead. People that only needed to move left and dps. Meanwhile all of my guys that had to active dodge lasers and dots chasing us and awful things managed to survive every time. Phase 2 starts and it's the egg phase. Boss spawns 1 egg, 2 eggs 4 eggs, 8 eggs then you wipe. Each egg is actually a player mind you. First player gets randomly egged, someone breaks him out. These two people will be egged next time and two people need to break them out and so on. At 8 eggs if 16 of your players are not alive: You wiped. If you go to 16 egg phase, you wiped. When doing it with the alt guild full of smart people, I thought this fight was a hilarious blast, I thought it was fun dodging lasers while doing DPS. When doing it with our guild composed of half smarty mans, and half "Dads playing video games" it was super stressful. And the sad thing is I'm sure that if I took this same guild into the latest WoW raid they'd do much better. Because WoW raiding usually requires a successive chain of fuckups to fail compared to the "Just one fuckup" of wildstar raiding. And by the way: I thought the raiding was fun, but I also realize that it was tuned for people at my level. Not at casuals. And there's a huge problem with that. Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 16, 2016 |
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Mar 16, 2016 22:07
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Is there a picture of The Little Engine that Could committing suicide?
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Mar 16, 2016 22:40
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I just looked up a kill video of that fight and it looked really boring as most of the fight seemed to be attack the boss till it dies while sometimes advoiding an aoe. I mean I guess most raiding can be described at this but it seemed a lot more boring than I expected this HARDCORE (tm) raids I'd heard so much about.
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Mar 16, 2016 22:53
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Belzac posted:I just looked up a kill video of that fight and it looked really boring as most of the fight seemed to be attack the boss till it dies while sometimes advoiding an aoe. I mean I guess most raiding can be described at this but it seemed a lot more boring than I expected this HARDCORE (tm) raids I'd heard so much about. tbh videos of really good players doing it makes it look easy. watching fuckups getting mown down by lasers is probably far more entertaining. When doing that fight there's a lot of mechanics happening at once, and there's about 3-4 mechanics I didn't even describe in my post. The timing is such that generally you are dealing with a mechanic every few seconds at a near constant pace with very little slack. If they were just standing still and dpsing they were probably so overgeared that they could just eat a lot of the incidental damage that as a first time step in you absolutely must avoid. But the big killer in kurulak is that small AOE. The damage it does isn't really significant. But it applies a slow which makes it harder to keep up with the group/heals, and you are more likely to get hit by more small AOE's that you can't get out of due to slow, which further slow you down in a cascading effect. Also anyone who has the egg buff on them has a massive dot that will kill them in give or take 8 seconds if they aren't receiving an incoming healing, and it's compounded if you get hit by the small AOE's. The small AOE's speed debuff is important because you need to move back into position quickly if you are debuffed because the person that breaks you out of the next egg phase needs to know where you are during that phase or poo poo can go sideways quickly. Basically for most of that fight people need to be within a few characters length of specific places at specific times in order to pull it off. If you try to just shotgun it tank and spank style and don't move people back to their specific floor positions you are probably going to wipe. Unless you are overgeared. None of that poo poo really shows in a video though.
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Mar 16, 2016 23:09
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Oh I get that for sure. but at a high level the "mechanics" are dodge things, break eggs, and whatever the break off people did in the first phase as you described but wasn't well shown. There might have also been an interrupt. In all I believe there was only 2 phases with the last phase being an enrage based one. Thinking back it compares pretty similarly to a lot of the raids in WoW that usually only had 2 phases with a short enrage and only one big mechanic with a few small mechanics like swapping the tanks or massive healing. Invoking the XIV demons the highest level fights in that game are pretty much the bees knees in terms of raid design
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Mar 16, 2016 23:41
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Rhymenoserous posted:tbh videos of really good players doing it makes it look easy. watching fuckups getting mown down by lasers is probably far more entertaining. When doing that fight there's a lot of mechanics happening at once, and there's about 3-4 mechanics I didn't even describe in my post. Wildstar's raids are hyped up and people praise them, and I never saw why. Visually they're a complete clusterfuck (or just boring), barring a few noteworthy and relatively good looking 'huh, that's neat' scenarios. The other problem is that most of Wildstar's challenge in raids comes from dodging aoes. There's really not a lot more in terms of actual innovative or particularly challenging boss mechanics other than 'don't stand in stuff'. Plus occasionally 'stand/don't stand next to this'. While that may be a great endurance test and a great source of artificial difficulty, it really doesn't compare very favourably to how various other MMOs do their (arguably more well designed) raid combat. Minibosses were also a complete waste of time, despite being hyped up for some godforsaken reason. Rhymenoserous posted:And the sad thing is I'm sure that if I took this same guild into the latest WoW raid they'd do much better. Because WoW raiding usually requires a successive chain of fuckups to fail compared to the "Just one fuckup" of wildstar raiding. This isn't true at all unless you're doing early heroic HFC stuff. A single gently caress up on a crucial mechanic (like your egg example) will cost you the entire fight in most of the latter parts of BRF and HFC, except it's just not so obvious as 'WELP ONLY GOT 15 PEOPLE? YOU'RE DEAD'. Edit: Belzac posted:Invoking the XIV demons the highest level fights in that game are pretty much the bees knees in terms of raid design Yeah, XIV has some great boss/raid design. Too bad about the horrific netcode and the variety of other issues that stop them from taking full advantage of their designer's creativity.
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Mar 16, 2016 23:43
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quote:The first topic that we’d like us all to discuss is faction barrier. Holy poo poo yes. Wildstar, become the quote:The thought of you guys removing the faction barrier makes me feel physically ill. Not because of the people playing Exiles or whatever, not even because I think Exile characters look dumb and Aurin are ew anime-catgirl tree rats. Hail Wildstar. Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 17, 2016 08:52
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To be fair many WoW players are just as dumb, even though for the last 5 expansions the faction divide has not made any sense at all.
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Mar 17, 2016 10:15
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