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Leveling blew in Wildstar. Whenever you'd go out to do a quest, you'd be bombfuckingBARDED with these things called "challenges" that sometimes could be fun but often times just showed up when you didn't want them or need them and made you feel like someone struggling with deep ADHD as every little thing you tried to do presented you with a million other options that pulled you away. The cool thing that they tried to say was super important, choosing wether to be a settler or a soldier or explorer or scientist, honestly didn't matter much at all. You got the good rewards quickly, and most of the time everything you did was super boring. People thought settlers would be setting up towns, I remember. Oh boy they were disappointed when it turned out they'd just put up tiny little stations that hardly anyone used or needed. Those first two dungeons were impressive though! They were the only dungeons until the cap! Ugh and the tone of that game. When it wasn't insufferably internet, they'd whiplash you back and forth from goofy to tragic and expect you to care, like that wasn't exhausting and indicative of the poor talent behind everything. it billed itself as a fun space adventure, and yet you're watching a plane full of refugees and a pregnant woman you spent a bunch of time saving get blown up and getting chewed out by a widow for sending her husband to war. gently caress YOU game
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Apr 17, 2015 02:26
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It would be fun to see how the people who bought shittons of credd with the exploit respond to the game turning F2P.
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Apr 17, 2015 02:37
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Unless they're even more retarded than I gave them credit for, credd will maintain some value after the switch. There will either be some sort of premium time subscription, or credd will be usable in the inevitable cash store. Completely devaluing the credd and blatantly loving over their current customers would have consequences that I think even they would balk at.
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Apr 17, 2015 02:52
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Valatar posted:Unless they're even more retarded than I gave them credit for, credd will maintain some value after the switch. There will either be some sort of premium time subscription, or credd will be usable in the inevitable cash store. Completely devaluing the credd and blatantly loving over their current customers would have consequences that I think even they would balk at. Reminder that Carbine's response to characters losing all raid attunements and progression was "Make a new character." Do not underestimate Carbine.
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Apr 17, 2015 03:02
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Schubalts posted:Reminder that Carbine's response to characters losing all raid attunements and progression was "Make a new character." Do not underestimate Carbine. It constantly blows my mind how every move Carbine makes is like the complete opposite of Anet and Guild Wars 2.
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Apr 17, 2015 03:55
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BexGu posted:It constantly blows my mind how every move Carbine makes is like the complete opposite of Anet and Guild Wars 2. People who love WS's design and game play direction tend to dislike GW2. This is not a hard rule by any means but let's face it. WS is a game where grinding numbers in a vertical progression system is supposed to be pure ambrosia. GW2 gives nearly no fucks about that at all and mostly cares about pretty princess dress up in a completely horizontal progression system. These games are opposites if games can be opposites (they can't but whatever).
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Apr 17, 2015 04:19
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Welp, that's why GW2 is rolling in the goodwill of the players and WildStar is an empty ghetto of despair. Being able to play magical pretty princess dressup online with a fairly leisurely time investment seems to resonate better with people than the 20 DKP MINUS grind. Not that people don't still manage to grind the hell out of GW2, but it's not mandatory for anyone who isn't going for legendary equipment.
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Apr 17, 2015 05:14
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Schubalts posted:Reminder that Carbine's response to characters losing all raid attunements and progression was "Make a new character." Do not underestimate Carbine. HAhaha I didn't hear about this, is there more to it?
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Apr 17, 2015 06:27
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They didn't say it to be assholes, they just literally did not have the technology to restore individual characters, so they would have had to rollback entire servers to restore them. I'm vaguely surprised they didn't just do that.
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Apr 17, 2015 06:30
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Capntastic posted:HAhaha I didn't hear about this, is there more to it? It is why I quit for sure. I got de-attuned or whatever and the only fix was "re-roll".
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Apr 17, 2015 07:01
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Thumbtacks posted:They didn't say it to be assholes, they just literally did not have the technology to restore individual characters, so they would have had to rollback entire servers to restore them. I'm vaguely surprised they didn't just do that. They're assholes because they said it and they said it because they're assholes. These things just go hand in hand.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:26
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Bauxite posted:They're assholes because they said it and they said it because they're assholes. These things just go hand in hand. My point is that they didn't do it out of spite, they just didn't put a system in place because they're morons.
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Apr 17, 2015 07:39
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Can't wait to talk about MMORPG balance and how much of a good game SWTOR/FFXIV is in this thread. Welcome back WIldstar thread. 
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Apr 17, 2015 08:25
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Givin posted:Can't wait to talk about MMORPG balance and how much of a good game SWTOR/FFXIV is in this thread. XIV may be awesome but I'm here to read about how Wildstar is being mismanaged.
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Apr 17, 2015 11:00
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randombattle posted:http://www.mmo-troll.com/carbine-and-ncsoft-take-a-hard-stand-on-wildstar-promise-never-to-go-free-to-play/ quote:Another Carbine source was a bit more… militant… when it comes to the subject of ‘Free-to-Play': Ho-lee loving poo poo.  EDIT: I don't even care if that's fake, because I can honestly believe a Carbine employee would say that.
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Apr 17, 2015 11:12
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Capntastic posted:HAhaha I didn't hear about this, is there more to it? Something else that didn't get mentioned: Just to rub the salt into the wound they gave people like a 10% XP bonus on the rerolled characters. Because when you're forcing someone to replay the leveling game while your guild is kept waiting so they can fill that spot in the raid, 10% XP will fix everything. They had might as well just have given them nothing for all that it mattered. It was the sort of bullshit consolation prize that had a few people cracking up and raging on here. Especially since Carbine's response was basically "GG Cupcake!" to the issue. Archonex fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Apr 17, 2015 |
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Apr 17, 2015 11:33
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Wildstar players seem to be getting very annoyed with the retail box being turned into a lockbox, solely because Carbine is exploiting the desire to gamble like literally every other big name f2p game out there. Wildstar is the best, ty carbine.
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Apr 17, 2015 11:46
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Shadowlyger posted:Ho-lee loving poo poo. Even if its fake Carbine were very vocal at release that the game would never go F2P, hell I'd probably return to the game if it went F2P. I did totally forget about Wildstar sad concidering just how much time I put into it
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Apr 17, 2015 12:02
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Xavier434 posted:I'll give that spergy poster that I quoted a little credit. They are right that unless Carbine nerfs their game a lot then the business model does not matter. People will try the game because it is "free" or B2P but they will quit soon after that because of the wall they will slam into which amounts to WS's end game. Even if they tone down the difficulty, the end game was buggy, grindy and unrewarding as gently caress which they probably haven't changed.
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Apr 17, 2015 12:35
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I remember a investors meeting was supposed to have happened in march but there wasnt sny word. I wonder id theae f2p/b2p discussions popping up again are a result of that? Also their quarterly reports come soon. The last one had "other" beating out Wildstar by a huge margin and it was found out it was lineage 2, lmao.
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Apr 17, 2015 13:45
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Capntastic posted:HAhaha I didn't hear about this, is there more to it? Aside from what everyone else has posted, it was the most mind-boggling bug I've ever seen in an MMO. It was clientside specific. GMs would log into that person's character on their own computers and see no problem, but if the original owner tried to log in on their computer, they would see all of their progression as being lost, and the server would register them as such.
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Apr 17, 2015 15:21
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Arzachel posted:Even if they tone down the difficulty, the end game was buggy, grindy and unrewarding as gently caress which they probably haven't changed. This is the big problem with Wildstar. The developers rhetoric was so anti-player, I seriously doubt they have done anything to make the game worth playing at this point. At least other games like ESO seem to have invested considerable resources into the player experience prior to going B2P. Carbine will probably do something idiotic like hobble non-subscription accounts with a severe xp penalty as a "gently caress you" to players.
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Apr 17, 2015 16:38
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Thumbtacks posted:My point is that they didn't do it out of spite, they just didn't put a system in place because they're morons. That's probably true. It's also true that they could have done a shitload of other things and not be assholes about it. The only reason to give the answer they did is because they're assholes. There isn't a dichotomy here, the choices weren't "give them impossible things" and "be an rear end in a top hat." There's a range of very diplomatic answers that you can use to disappoint customers that any loving waiter would know between the two, but they chose instead to give the "eh, reroll your characters?" answer.
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Apr 17, 2015 16:54
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I want to see a post mortem of everything that has happened on this game since its inception to its inevitable f2p demise. It will be great to hear all the horror stories from someone in the inside.
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Apr 17, 2015 18:18
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Cao Ni Ma posted:I want to see a post mortem of everything that has happened on this game since its inception to its inevitable f2p demise. It will be great to hear all the horror stories from someone in the inside. there has to be at least one employee who's been going to work everyday and forever going  in his mind. this person needs to write a blog so i can read it tia.
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Apr 17, 2015 18:27
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glassdoor is a good resource i feel like for the next MMO that comes out we should look at glassdoor if they have no reviews for their company, the game is going is to be janky and broken and the company will have no idea how to run an MMO if they do, read them, because they are the canary in the coalmine example: 
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Apr 17, 2015 18:42
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Apr 17, 2015 18:45
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people never go to glass door to write positive anything hth
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Apr 17, 2015 18:49
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you can always tell which complaints are valid and which aren't tho
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Apr 17, 2015 18:50
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Blazing Zero posted:people never go to glass door to write positive anything hth The course of development of Wildstar and the outright arrogance some of their staff has displayed (like the lead raid designer) makes me believe that the person is being completely truthful. Messes like Wildstar aren't accidents.
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Apr 17, 2015 18:57
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Reading through those...man it sounds bad. http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Carbine-Studios-Reviews-E587246.htm Blazing Zero posted:people never go to glass door to write positive anything hth Eh..not entirely true but the general rule of thumb applies of course. Most people never take the time to review anything unless they have something to complain about. That is a tradition much older than the life time of anyone on SA. In contrast, here is ArenaNet's glassdoor which shows a very distinct and positive difference compared to Carbine: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/ArenaNet-Reviews-E255820.htm
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Apr 17, 2015 18:58
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Vermain posted:Aside from what everyone else has posted, it was the most mind-boggling bug I've ever seen in an MMO. It was clientside specific. GMs would log into that person's character on their own computers and see no problem, but if the original owner tried to log in on their computer, they would see all of their progression as being lost, and the server would register them as such. When I would hit the reputation tab in Wildstar, it would make everything but my ui disappear, teleport my character to 0,0, spam combat noises, and spam my chat with housing errors. To be fair, this bug got fixed before any of the common ones like the costume pieces jumping between panes.
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Apr 17, 2015 19:02
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Xavier434 posted:Reading through those...man it sounds bad. Ahaha the first one is a five star review titled "Hardwork and a holistic view of development will lead the company to success." And from there it's just a markov chain of buzzwords that winds up being more damning than anything the most disgruntled, shotgun-wielding ex-employee could have written.
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Apr 17, 2015 19:53
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I tried the open beta for 10 minutes and it helped me figure out that my computer was having an overheating problem. Thanks I guess Wildstar.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:11
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quote:the guy trying to uplift us started discussing the negative perception we had on Glassdoor, and instead of talking about how the company wanted to fix the issues that people were discussing in the reviews here, he said that he had begun talks with Glassdoor to see what he could to alter the perception that was being shown. This is not an uncommon way for employers to look at sites like Glassdoor, the HR director at my place went to the website content team in Marketing and demanded they changed the reviews about us on glassdoor thinking they had put them up because it was on the internet and was about us. He then later came to me and demanded I use, and I poo poo you not with this quote, "Technowizard nerdery" to go change the reviews on Glassdoor so they were positive. When I explained it was a website run by a completely separate entity he had an aha moment and went down stairs to legal to ask them to start C&D proceedings against Glassdoor. I could hear the laughing from the other side of the building. This guy recently left without much fanfare when the upper management started asking why employee retention was so low across the company. Edit: looking over the reviews the benefits look like anything I would expect in any tech company ever. I get all those benefits and if I was interviewing at a place and they said they didn't at least have those I would not take the job if offered. Working at a games developer is always going to be a poo poo show anyway as they know they can get developers for peanuts, who want the kudos of working on games vs working in a less glamorous area as they all believe in a few years they will be at E3 and the like being interviewed about the game their are the designer of. Xavier434 posted:The parts that stood out the most to me are the relationships between management and the majority of the staff, the blame game crap that happens as opposed to working together to solve problems, the lack of reception to serious critical feedback from their own developers, the general feeling that you have to "take sides" if you work there, and the low morale. A lot of the reviews centered on that sort of stuff. Sadly this is all pretty common. Go ready any technical company and you will similar reviews I expect. The problem is that a small, newish company in a competitive market that is the graveyard of dreams needs everyone working together and to be focused on a goal and to be better at pretty much everything than their competitors. Having a bad culture means you will create a bad product and those in charge of your PR will think they can get away with being arseholes because hey that is just how this company rolls. However this thread is about tears of pubbies about a game that has belly flopped onto concrete rather than a post mortum of the development and how most companies still haven't gotten the memo about not treating people like poo poo. CoffeeBooze posted:The reviews that pointed out managements insistence on non-stop "crunch time" style work hours also stood out. This seems to be a signature of bad management. The kind of long term fatigue it leads to would also explain a lot about why so many bugs continued to not be resolved. Working long hours like that pretty quickly leads to mistakes becoming far more frequent. Exactly right. You cannot have people working constant 10+ hour days and weekends over the entire development lifecycle of a product unless you are providing them with benefits beyond snacks and a few free t-shirts. Google has a habit of doing this however they have beds, free meals and a spa in their offices which is fine for the young guys and gals who don't have family commitments but not for old warhorses like me. It is a sign of poor management making promises they cannot keep to investors. Since they were cutting staff it seems they were not going for the whole "9 women can deliver a baby in 1 month" resource management technique that is all too common as well. A good example of this is Blizzard merging their Titan team into the WoW dev team and despite having more people delivered less in the last expansion due to the time needed to normalise a new team. BigPaddy fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Apr 17, 2015 |
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Apr 17, 2015 20:27
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The parts that stood out the most to me are the relationships between management and the majority of the staff, the blame game crap that happens as opposed to working together to solve problems, the lack of reception to serious critical feedback from their own developers, the general feeling that you have to "take sides" if you work there, and the low morale. A lot of the reviews centered on that sort of stuff.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:43
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The reviews that pointed out managements insistence on non-stop "crunch time" style work hours also stood out. This seems to be a signature of bad management. The kind of long term fatigue it leads to would also explain a lot about why so many bugs continued to not be resolved. Working long hours like that pretty quickly leads to mistakes becoming far more frequent.
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Apr 17, 2015 20:49
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Thumbtacks posted:They didn't say it to be assholes, they just literally did not have the technology to restore individual characters, so they would have had to rollback entire servers to restore them. I'm vaguely surprised they didn't just do that. I question whether Carbine had the power to rollback servers, because of the infinite money glitch. Oh yeah, you could earn infinite money in Wildstar for a while. You had a personal little housing plot (that was actually legitimately cool and encouraged a lot of creativity and had people make some goddamn amazing little areas), in said housing area you could install things like a little mining deposit or a garden or a thing that handed out free stat food. I believe it was the last one that was the problem as it never ran out. You could just vendor the food infinitely, get unlimited money, buy shittons of CREDD, and play the game for free. Carbine never rolled this back or changed it. They removed the food dispenser from the game until they could fix it (Wildstar's code is hideous overwrought and fixing small things is nearly impossible by all accounts), suspended a few people for a couple of days, and then had the rest promise to be good. The end result is that the economy of Wildstar was basically a joke. Not like it wasn't before. Let's see, is it time to dump a litany of reasons why Wildstar failed? I've been here for the two previous threads, I remember them. Let's start with Amps. Amps are sort of like Talents in pre-MoP WoW, you got points from leveling up and you could spend them on certain buffs and abilities. The problem is that Wildstar was smitten with the early and bad MMO idea that just getting things by leveling up isn't hardcore enough, so many Amps (including the really good ones) were world drops including a number of incredibly powerful and vital ones. The one that I always remember is Trigger Fingers. Trigger Fingers was a ridiculously good Amp for Spellslingers that basically meant their Auto-attack lowered the cooldown on all their ability cooldowns. It was so useful that even Healing specced Spellslingers wanted it, so to balance it out better Carbine decided to halve its effectiveness for reducing healing cooldowns. The problem is they hosed up hideously. You see the cooldowns thing worked as intended, auto-attack reduced attack/utility cooldown by .5 seconds and healing by .25 seconds a use, but they messed up the UI so it appeared the other way around. For two weeks to a month Trigger Fingers made Attack skills go off cooldown BEFORE the UI said they did and healing skills AFTER the UI said they would, and if you used an attack CD before the UI thought it was ready it would go off but the UI would basically give up and say it was now permanently on cooldown and not tick down. Thanks to Carbine's wonderful programming for as much as a month the premiere attack AMP was rendered almost unusable. The best part? This was a bug that was known about on the PTRs. Oh and speaking of the PTRs? Carbine did them amazingly. People who copied their characters over to the PTRs would sometimes find that changes to their character on the Testing servers would actually transfer onto the live servers. Pity the poor people who decided to sell their inventories or go around test the new things. Also the PTRs were useless for actually doing Public Tests, 99.9% of the time if a bug was found, known about, and reported on the PTR absolutely nothing would be done about it and it might (emphasis on might) be fixed a month or so down the line after it was on the main servers. Let's see... Itemization was a joke. I don't know if it's still this way but for the 2 months I played straight attack power trumped absolutely everything else. The best crafted weapon you could make wasn't one of the level 50 Epics from the epic crafting progression track, it was a level 49 Blue with all the crafting modifiers put straight into attack. If you had a max attack level 49 the next time you'd get a weapon better than that would be in the tip-topmost raid. Oh god the raids. For starters the reason why "Clientside issue that wipes your raid attunement progress" was such an rear end in a top hat move was because getting attuned was an insanely tedious pile of bullcrap. No seriously Look at this poo poo mountain. As the graphic points out getting a silver medal meant you had to beat a dungeon or adventure in a tight time limit while doing everything. You basically couldn't wipe because you'd miss the time limit, and the bosses were stupidly over-complicated, and the dungeons as a whole were tedious slogs. The world boss bit was also fun because a number of people had their progress on world bosses randomly wiped (they responded by just giving everyone who was on that step credit while they finally decided to use achievements to mark process). Also Carbine did eventually reduce the Dungeon/Adventure requirements to only getting bronze thereby removing the time limit, but this was in the middle of Wildstar's deafening crash. Also if you got into the raids it was a whole 'nother level of bullshit. When Wildstar was being pushed they said that they thought Datascape, their premiere 40-man raid, was going to be so hard that no one would be able to beat it for 6 months. They were correct because they cheated. Datascape shipped with a majority of the content literally impossible. This was not a secret, Timetraveler, the lead raid designer was open with a number of top raiding guilds about what bosses were beatable and which he had made impossible. Worse yet Carbine frequently changed their minds and often overtuned bosses substantially on weekly resets, it was pathetically common that a raiding group would return to a boss they had breezed by in a previous week to find the mechanics totally different (and often literally impossible). More than a few raid groups just quit after the third or fourth time this happened. Carbine actually once nerfed a specific accessory because it let people meet the DPS threshold to kill a boss before they were allowed to. Besides that though the bosses were generally pretty lame as well, most just spammed AoEs and did a single mechanic every 30 or so seconds that you had to get right or wipe. The big final boss of Genetic Archives, their initial 20-person raid was almost literally just The Lurker Below from Serpentshrine Caverns. Oh and when they reduced Datascape from a 40-person to a 20-person raid they kept the bosses tuned for 40 people, so they were initially all impossible again. This was another thing known about on the PTR as well. Oh and when Carbine finally finally finally hit their 6 month deadline and let people beat Datascape? What did Timetraveler say? Timetraveler, the lead developer who had overseen this idiotic timetable and had admitted to being responsible for making his babies impossible to beat? Timetraveler, the man who deliberately had made the bosses impossible and was only now deigning to make the final raid boss possible posted a mocking image macro suggesting that the world's first raiders were scrubs because they had to wait for the bosses to be nerfed. Those folks at Carbine are a class act. There were also Warplots. No one has seen Warplots. And there were a whole litany of other problems besides. Things like gathering tools having various levels of quality but no differences in effects, or having the only solo content being 3 daily zones (two of which were just the starter zones again), or the broken UI with things like a /who menu that did not work ever, or the flagrantly teleporting bots, or how there was basically only one cool zone (RIP Farside, you were too good for Wildstar), or the tower defense daily where no one defended, the complete lack of a tutorial about the rune system, or the way you had to tap Shift until your fingers fell off to get anywhere fast, or any other design flaws. I wish Wildstar hadn't sucked, I liked hoverboards and double jumps and the flow of the combat. I liked the aesthetic and I enjoyed the goofy tone. I have fond memories of how someone wrote a plug-in that actually let you use the SA Smilies in the game's chat. I thought the adventures (except Malgrave Trail, gently caress that) were cool. The shiphand missions were all sorts of awesome. Wildstar had some cool things and some good stuff in it, but sadly those points of light don't countermand the tidal wave of poo poo that was the rest of the MMO. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Apr 17, 2015 |
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Apr 17, 2015 21:30
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When you stare into the abyss, something stares back.
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Apr 17, 2015 21:34
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Twelve hour healer queues. Twelve hour healer queues. It didn't even pop in the end.  [Edit] 
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