Wildstar: Overwhelmingly Negative

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Wildstar: Overwhelmingly Negative

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Babe Magnet posted:

Basically the game is queuing your character because the server is full. So you sit through a queue to get in, and then you sit through a queue to make your character. If you wait long enough at the end of character creation, your character will make is through the queue and you'll be able to play them next time you log in.

Didn't they have this problem during it's real launch?

I'd say I was surprised that Carbine didn't learn from that mistake, but we all know I'd be lying.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2015 05:52

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 19:03

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Most people didn't give a poo poo about whitevale because Wildrun got to be such a loving slog that it overshadowed everything else.

Hell, before they nerfed it in late beta, my levelling strategy was just to sit at one of the zones that's full of the stone tribesman guys, and farm them for the levels I needed, since they dropped rune pieces really frequently. Sitting and grinding the same mobs like it was 2006 was a more pleasurable idea than doing Wildrun as intended.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2015 09:08

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Rhymenoserous posted:

I'll re-iterate that raiding in this game is a pretty top notch experience, and they give me the same vibe that the current dungeons do "Difficult but doable". There are a dozen(ish) minibosses that all spit out loot, plus the bosses as well, I did get a bit annoyed that most of the pieces I rolled on and actually won were fairly minor upgrades, but that's nothing unique to this game.

I said the same thing a year ago nobody believed me.

Shame they hid it behind the most hideous attunement in recent MMO history.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2015 05:09

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Did they ever add in a new raid past the launch ones?

# ¿ Jan 14, 2016 16:28

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

noELrunes posted:

this is my favorite one in the link where they actually post the estimates

It isn't wrong. There were a lot of places where you could tell the devs actually gave a poo poo, and a lot of problems that basically arose due to NCsoft being cheap.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 06:40

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

It's kind of weird but I'll disagree with the Grognard focus being what ended up killing Wildstar. It didn't help but most of the poo poo hidden behind horrible grinds wasn't even stuff casual players would want to do.

I think horrible bugs and somewhat schizophrenic design choices are what killed it. Also I know a fuckload of high population guilds lost their poo poo when Engima got no punishment for exploiting their way to BIS pre-raid level gear and unlocking their raid grind a week early.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2016 07:24

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Cao Ni Ma posted:

NCsoft has continuously tried to prop Carbine. Like they were ok with them completely changing the gameplay midway trough production which added like another year of delays and then they gave them another 6 months after that to try and polish the game, missing the crucial holiday release they were aiming for. After that they decided to keep supporting the game way beyond after its obvious that the whole thing is fubar and there is no way to fix it other than completely remaking the whole thing, which is frankly impossible since you might as well make a new game in the first place. Wildstars IP is worth less than 0 right now.

Carbine's leadership deserves a lot of the blame sure, but NCSoft was also stingy as gently caress iirc leading to issues with attracting talent or even making sure the entire team was competent because of the discrepancy between pay and cost of living. they couldn't really afford to fire lovely devs because no good ones were willing to take their place.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 19:04

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

That's the worst part. There were good parts of the game. I really liked the adventures, and I think it's almost universally agreed that the housing system was great too. It's just that it couldn't carry the bad decisions that drug the game down.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2016 01:08

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

DeathSandwich posted:

Yeah, CoX was profitable and paying for itself, it just wasn't doing gangbusters like ANet expected from Lineage/Guild Wars/ Ect. I came into CoX real late in it's life, but I actually really liked it for what it was. My main at the time was a Demon Summoning / Darkness mastermind which, judging by what I could pick up at the time probably wasn't an ideal skill configuration. Still kind of fun though, I tried my best to make him look like the Smoking Guy from The X Files.

You're looking at it the wrong way.

CoH was in the green, yes, but Paragon studios was hemorrhaging money because they kept spending money on prototype MMOs that never panned out. NCsoft lost a lot of money on Paragon towards the end of CoX's lifecycle, and while they could have burned Paragon down to a skeleton maintenance crew and kept the lights on, who knows how profitable it would remain going forward. Paragon pissing off NCsoft with a bunch of burnt development money had far more to do with CoX closing than Wildstar ever did. The timing was just coincidental.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2016 17:26

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Hey, if Darkfall could get three loving re-releases maybe there's hope for COH.

There's no hope. It's clientbase was small and not extremely whalelike, and that was before people got multiple years to get over it going away.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2016 07:30

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

AbrahamLincolnLog posted:

Haha. Yeah. How'd that work out?

And wow, they have one of the most atrocious looking websites I've seen in a long time.

Last time I checked 90% of updates were about the character creation stuff and there wasn't anything discussing backend support (which is the real challenge in these kinds of things). Is that still the case?

# ¿ Oct 25, 2016 05:02

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

AbrahamLincolnLog posted:

That actually did happen with APB. Difference being that company went bankrupt and had no choice but to sell it, and sell it cheap enough that another developer picked it up.

According to their horrendous website, on the fourth of July they posted this lovely video that showcases nothing but placeholder models and textures, two lore updates, then August 31st they just got the first character model working. Since then, the only updates have been two lore additions and the creation of a single mask item.

So lol. Nope. They haven't even started developing the game itself it seems. They are still struggling with the 3d modeling.

Haha welp. The loving backend and client should be the first thing you do. What do you do when your fancy player customized models run like rear end with 20 people because nothing is optimized?

I feel bad, but I'm entirely sure I brought up that point before their kickstarter, back when the COH thread was still a thing, and there's really nothing more I could have done.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2016 07:42

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

30.5 Days posted:

I don't think it'd pop up uncompletable objectives, it's just that those objectives were consistently completable in the time limit so you wanted them to be in the pool of missions to up your chances of success. By the way, this adventure dropped the best in slot weapon for tank stalkers but only if you gold medalled it. And then they "fixed" medals to reduce LFG friction.

When it launched, you'd get some garbage for completing the mission, blues if you silver medalled, and purples (frequently BiS pre-raid, especially since dungeon boss drops were consistently garbage) if you gold-medalled. Actually, let me go back. So before you raided, you needed to do two things. Get gold medal loot from adventures and get attuned by silvering dungeons. There were a smattering of drops in dungeons but despite dungeons being balls-hard, the drops there were not consistently better than gold-medalling adventures (which wasn't hard but required people you knew, generally). You could get gear that good by gold-medalling dungeons, but the consensus was that doing so required insane coordination, because you had to do secondary objectives (bronze), complete it in a time limit (silver), and nobody was allowed to die (gold). You could buy purple gear with elder gems, but all currency gear was gated behind achievements, most of which were for things like killing raid bosses and gold medalling dungeons or whatever. There was one piece of gear per achievement, total, so your spec probably had like 2 or 3 pieces on the vendor and 2 of them were almost certainly garbage. I think I'm remembering this right.

So anyway, the result is that you only need to run each adventure once to attune, the bronze gear is trash, but the gold gear is stuff everybody needs. So like half the adventure LFG queue at any one time had no reason to be there other than to gold medal. Everyone else was either totally ungeared & just trying to get blues, just rolling through it to clear the attunement step, or RPers who are just trying to unwind. These groups quickly grew to hate each other. The ungeared folks probably didn't even know what all was required for golding (most of these adventures had a series of extremely specific steps in order to consistently gold that the game didn't surface AT ALL- sometimes they'd put what happens next to a vote, and if the vote didn't select the exact right option, gold medalling was off the table and two party members would bail). This was even better in the one motorcycle gang adventure & malgrave trail because there were some pieces of gear that dropped from bosses who you would only encounter if the party voted for a particular series of options that were ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from the correct ones if you wanted a gold medal.

So you throw 5 people with extremely different, mutually-exclusive agendas into a queue together and what happens? So carbine's plan for dealing with this was the following:
A) End-of-adventure rewards can now drop anything, including gold medal rewards and a % chance for a random boss drop from earlier in the dungeon. I think they hosed up & this couldn't include boss drops from bosses you didn't encounter lol
B) You get MORE end-of-adventure rewards the higher you rate.

The idea being that if things don't go your way you'll say "eh gently caress it" and finish it anyway with a minimum of drama so you can pull the slot bar. That mostly worked. The problem was that singular BiS gold medal drops became as rare and precious as a baby covered in diamonds because your chance of getting the one thing you wanted dropped loving substantially. And it wasn't great before because each adventure had like 10 gold medal rewards that could drop, and someone could always end up with it instead of you. Queue our stalker tank probably running 50 or 60 of that goddamn moba adventure, seeing the weapon twice, and always having the tanking weapon go to some rando stalker dps. Why did we have randos? Somewhere around 20 or 30 runs he couldn't find hardly anyone in our guild to run it with because gently caress that place.

It was irritating as gently caress to have the dota dungeon go from something where you could clear in 10 minutes, to a run where you basically sat for 15+ minutes on your hands.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2016 06:28

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

MisterZimbu posted:

You're not allowed to gross more off Wildstar than Nexon does.

I'd be rather shocked if Nexon grossed anything from Wildstar...

# ¿ Dec 12, 2016 07:51

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

I'm surprised that no MMO since EQ2 has tried anything like /pizza

# ¿ Jan 8, 2017 08:36

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Schubalts posted:

Lol if you actually think Wildstar had anything to with CoH.

CoH was slowly coasting towards losing money at the same time Paragon studios was proving it couldn't handle making new IP. CoH surely would have had like 5 new expansions by now if not for Wildstar.

# ¿ May 23, 2017 18:16

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Rhymenoserous posted:

Enigma was loving insane. They opened their class forums to the public and they were basically the elitist jerks of wildstar.

They wouldn't have even been the most poopsocky raid guild, but they gambled on Carbine not banning their asses for multiple major exploits and won.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 21:03

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

The Moon Monster posted:

Yeah, I think there were a few times some guilds coordinated and actually got one to pop. Apparently the lag was so bad it was almost unplayable.

Thank god the fuckin NCSoft Suits decided warplots were more important than fixing latency/bugs or adding content for like 4 months of beta. I remember getting my beta invite and thinking that the game was on track to be good, then having them do nothing in the mean time beyond adding random elite mobs everywhere and adding the godawful attunement process.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2017 00:17

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

boho posted:

CoH was a lovely game that was somehow retconned into being good only after it was taken out back and shot. See also: Asheron's Call

~~MMO gamers~~ goons gotta have a cross to die on

For all the poo poo wildstar gets horribly wrong it's central gameplay loop beats City of Heroes. At the time I was playing, it was a bitch to find a group to do anything that wasn't sitting in a small VR room grinding mobs or the incarnate trials, which were ok but got old real fast and had no real strategy to them (pubbies would afk through them and everything still got done easily for the most part).

I wouldn't mind a MMO with a COH style character creation though, so long as it doesn't run like poo poo like Champions online.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2017 01:21

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Firstborn posted:

I was also one of those design nerds that would participate in the costume contests and poo poo, and let me tell you, there was a lot of people doing cool interesting and funny characters.

This is true, though I never saw/participated in any of the contests where the interesting characters won.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 07:19

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Ad by Khad posted:

If you tried the free weekend and posted "This is just Wow" in the wildstar thread on this very forum after the free weekend, you would've been dogpiled and run right outta that thread. I remember posting "I don't find medic fun, sorry Cyster" and the wildstar goons gave me a whole shitload of heat over it.

Goons were pretty loving stupid right up until and even after launch.

The debate on both sides was pretty loving dumb tbf.

I remember some goon arguing that you can't have hard content because hypothetically they might be playing with an extremely mentally and physically handicapped player and if they can't do content then neither should anyone else.

And poo poo, Wildstar's 5 man content wasn't even that hard if you weren't trying to do the silver/gold timers (Which is now a thing in WoW that people mostly like, who knew?)

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 05:53

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Givin posted:

Space Jam was cool and chill and is still a cool and chill place to play WoW nowadays.

Was that the one Doublestep headed? Is he even still playing with goons after the Archeage pedo purge?

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 04:17

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

CrashCat posted:

It's mostly housing stuff so more cash grabbing, probably not worth even noting

Housing was the best part of wildstar though.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 07:18

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

CoffeeBooze posted:

NCSoft is having Carbine develop yet another game, so to shut down Wildstar would be some bad optics.

God I hope Carbine kept whoever did the Adventures/Shiphands and shitcanned whoever decided to throw in warplots in the last second and also whoever decided to "hardcore things up" in beta.

The adventures were all really good content except for the Oregon trail one.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 05:33

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 19:03

Deki: May 12, 2008; It's Hammer Time!

Rhymenoserous posted:

(The raids were more easily puggable than the loving dungeons that you had to complete to successfully raid)

I didn't get deep into the first raid in beta but this was absolutely loving true even before they scrapped 40 man raiding. Carbine hosed up hard by adding such a dick wrenching attunement at the last second.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 09:14

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