[Megathread] Wildstar - Now F2P

[SirRobin]

New Dev Speak.

Anyone else really just want to get videos on the endgame content at this point?

[unholytestament]

Anyone else really just want to get videos on the endgame content at this point?

What end game content?

[Araxie]

What end game content?

Not sure if this is meant to be sarcasm or whatnot, but he's talking about Heroic Dungeons, Adventures, RAIDS, Endgame PVP like Warplots, Arenas, and etc.

[Deleted]

What end game content?

raids, warplots, etc etc. had to reply due to weak sarcasm or really daft question

- - - Updated - - -

Not sure if this is meant to be sarcasm or whatnot, but he's talking about Heroic Dungeons, Adventures, RAIDS, Endgame PVP like Warplots, Arenas, and etc.

wasnt sure either.

[SirRobin]

What end game content?

Yeah, that basically. We've had a couple of years of videos, promos, demos, and even the whole, stream-to-fifteen thing. Enough with the appeteasers, bring on the main course. Show how you'll be convincing us to keep paying to keep playing.

[Yunru]

Anyone else really just want to get videos on the endgame content at this point?

They are saving this for a last.

[Collected]

I don't think you have to worry about that. In an interview Jeremy Gaffney said that they want to test the elder game thoroughly before release and I don't think they started with that in the beta yet. I'm basing my assumption on the fact that there haven't been any NDA breaches about the elder game, while there were tons of breaches about many other aspects of the game.

Yes from what I've read there is no need to worry about it. They'll have a good few months worth of end game testing under their belts before the game releases. Once they start testing end game that should also be the time they allow a lot more people into the beta to fill the void in the lower levels while the already established beta testers move onto cap. So it should be an exciting time for a lot of people.

[Lazuli]

Can pvp from lvl 1 or is there some cap you need to get to first to enter BGs

[Boramir]

Can pvp from lvl 1 or is there some cap you need to get to first to enter BGs

I believe they (the PvP lead designer, I forget her name) said in one of the livestreams that you can begin instanced PvP as soon as you get out of the initial "starter" zone (archship I think she called it). I also believe she said it would be around level 6. Please correct me someone if I am wrong.

[Yunru]

I believe they (the PvP lead designiner, I forget her name) said in one of the livestreams that you can begin instanced PvP as soon as you get out of the initial "starter" zone (archship I think she called it). I also believe she said it would be around level 6. Please correct me someone if I am wrong.

I think its lvl 4 as i have seen in some video. I remember seeing it in video after the *something big* died.

[Kelimbror]

They are saving this for a last.

AKA, it's not even remotely close to developed yet. If they had something solid, it would be in beta because they have needed the testing a great deal just to catch bugs, not to mention critical design flaws. Unless they are getting pressured by NCSoft, which seems unlikely given their recent releases, there's no way this game is launching that early. This is definitely a game that would be best served releasing 'when it's ready' and not 'when people will pay for it'.

And to be honest, they've taken quite a large bite in their development which is awesome. So many things they have tweaked to try and perfect already proven concepts. It's why I would like to see it succeed. Not only would it be pretty fun to play, but it will make future games and updates better. Do you think WoW would have garrisons without other MMOs having robust housing? I don't think it would. Having more games succeed in new areas forces all games to improve. It's a win for everyone.

[Deleted]

I have tried PvP in Wildstar and You can really see what class you are up against fairly easy. Does he have a big glowing sword? That's a warrior. Does she shoot electricity and flak from a big gun? It's an engineer. Is the person imitating a rave party? That's a medic. If you hear pewpewpew but have a hard time seeing the weapons? Spellslinger. Espers are harder to spot until they actually attack since the psyblade is on their back. And the stalkers are mostly invis so you won't see 'em that quick but their claws are rather big and visible once out.
And costumes are turned off in Pvp, yes, since you can have ANY armor as costume, regardless of armortype and class whch could really mess up pvp.

[Collected]

AKA, it's not even remotely close to developed yet.

I prefer "it's not ready to be tested yet". I believe they're not very far away from unlocking everything on the beta test including raiding.. so they're clearly already well into development of it. It would not surprise me if they've even invited some high end PVE people to play on pre-made 50s and test some of their raids privately. If I were at Carbine I would do that just to gain some feedback.

[Rakael]

AKA, it's not even remotely close to developed yet.

You are wrong. That's all I'll say.

[RoninaThorstone]

Has Deadlock and Deadlock extended been talked about on the streams yet?

[Kelimbror]

*snip*

Sure they've done 'something', but it seems like a very unconfident 'something' or else people would know about it. It's not like we haven't seen this from many developers to start to recognize the warning signs. They keep mentioning warplots, but absolutely refuse to say anything about them anymore. They've been name dropping it since first news about the game almost as if they hope internet speculation will build the feature for them.

It's the problem with trying to innovate and their apprehensive approach to bold decisions (imo). People freaked out, both negatively and positively, that warplots would have PvE elements to them. The last snippets of discussion I heard about it made it sound like they weren't sure exactly which way to go. That much indecisiveness translates to not talking for fear of people interpreting their iterative design as promises.

While I commend their efforts to not overpromise and underdeliver, at some point you really need to flesh out some general features. Something as simple as saying, the concept for warplots is a,b,c but we haven't determined how we're going to use x,y,z so stay tuned is much more believable, upfront, and trustworthy than continually namedropping it with the caveat of 'soon'.

Whatever form they take, as long as the feature makes it to launch it's going to be awesome. Who doesn't want to build a doom fortress to battle someone else's doom fortress. It's an area they have a chance to innovate in tremendously. I can understand the trepidation, but like I've said with their NDA...it's dragged on for far too long at this point. Unless the game is getting pushed back another year, they need to start getting some real information flowing.

I'm sure a handful of people that like to clash with me for their personal fun will take all of that as somehow bashing Wildstar, Carbine, and likely even blaming Obama, but it's just the way I see things. I don't have a lot of confidence in their specific brand of iterative development or how they market themselves. I think it will negatively impact the success of the game. That's just my opinion, which doesn't mean anything however.

[Kagger]

This was posted by gaffney on reddit.

Here's a quick version at least (yeah, we should do an official one, I agree, I'll send this to Scooter):
Just did a big update (37 pages o patch notes if I recall). This was from our work in December, so it's a 4 week update minus 2 weeks from most folks from holiday break.
Major foci:
Doing a polish pass on the 15-35 content
Polishing some of the 35-50 areas (which aren't enabled yet for the CBT testers)
Rebalancing class abilities across PVE and PVP (pretty good number of changes there, generally based on feedback or the data mining we've done)
Bunch of new itemization in various areas
A ton more. Did we release those patch notes? I forget.
The other thing we added in the last patch (NOT in the patch notes) was about 6 different crash bugs (due to the way we did QA testing over the holiday break, we added in about 50 new QA testers and for various technical reasons this basically disguised a bunch of crash logs which we normally fix during the staging period before a build goes live; it was a combination of adding new QA folks and the fact that some of our technical guys were on the holiday break. Sorta ironic that adding testers added crashers, but there ya go)
So I believe as of right now, the crashers are licked, folks are back testing/playing more stably. The crashes sucked for about a week or so though, so that was a pain for the guys fixing and the beta folks.
Current things we're currently looking at internally (based on implementation schedule, data, board feedback, or just playing and saying "we could do that better") - these aren't guaranteed to be in next update (or any if we find blockers) but are things we're either working on or discussing:
UI updates (we got some great new guys on our UI team) on many/most UIs, especially the obviously-placeholder ones
Extending the cap to 50 for next update
High level economies across the various elder content (level 50 playspaces, vet dungeons, raids, warplots, arenas, new content additions post launch)
Batting around ideas to help small-group play:
a lot of people like playing in/near small groups, and some quests are set up well for it/some aren't - we are fixing those
Fighting in the outside world as a small group is often too trivial (some few monsters and challenges are aimed towards it, and but 2 or 3 people fighting a mob tuned for 1 person is awful easy). That sounds tricky to fix, but we actually have some ideas. Some of those might also make for some interesting variation in killing quests (something we aim for is to reduce kill grindiness whenever we can) But we'll see, that's all in discussion. Not guaranteed to go in, but Donatelli is examining.
So in net: Personally I'm relatively happy with where we're at. Lot of pro and con feedback on the boards about some of the above issues (and others) but it feels IMO like a pretty healthy set of discussions and I love the team's pace of new additions and polishing existing content right now.

[unholytestament]

This was posted by gaffney on reddit.

That just makes it sound like "soon" the high level stuff will be in the still NDA closed beta. Doesn't really do much for letting us hear and talk about it (here, at least).

[ShimmerSwirl]

*snip*

Na thats not true, they know what they're doing.

[Kelimbror]

That just makes it sound like "soon" the high level stuff will be in the still NDA closed beta. Doesn't really do much for letting us hear and talk about it (here, at least).

Maybe there will be another equally confusing and hand tailored press NDA lift. We can only dream.