[Megathread] Wildstar - Now F2P

[Post]

If we look at the order of things changed and the complaints at the time, it wasn' the world bosses holding people back, but feel free to believe otherwise.

I didn't say the world bosses held people back because they're difficult or whatever you're trying to say. I said the attunement is full of pointless nonsense and that's not fun.

You know that proving the state of how forums looked months ago is something you cannot proof, well you can but i'm not going to do searches and compare the amount of posts and time stamp them as i'm not insane.

The quotes are all over the place and not in dedicated threads.

I understand some things would be ridiculously difficult to prove, all the same you don't make claims if you can't back them up.

[Deleted]

Optional content is not done ...

No? (That applies pretty much to the whole post.)
To help your reading comprehension, I asked why content should be hard-gated in the first place.
"The fastest path" to what exactly? To uninstalling the game?

"Factors not really in players' control": It doesn't have to be entirely outside of their control. Examples: Random mistakes (come on, these do happen), lag, avoidance/crit/proc RNG, mechanical RNG (e.g. which target a random-target ability is cast on), even extremely small differences in positioning (which can also be caused by server issues).

The point is not to eliminate everything but to reduce these factors or smooth them out. E.g. avoidance/crit can burn where the sun doesn't shine, fights should be short (no need to repeat the same stuff ad nauseam), the amount of players should be the amount needed to achieve enough coordination / complexity / <something else> (that is, way below 40).

The challenge would remain the same, without having to attempt something 814598075 times. Let's steal a post of Shambala, shall we:
Assuming the encounter's difficulty comes entirely down to a mechanic that periodically needs to be executed correctly by every raid member,
20-man, 5 minutes -> 150 tries, say
40-man, 15 minutes -> 150^(40/20*15/5)=11,390,625,000,000.

[Gray_Matter]

In July they predicted 4QFY14 revenue for the game at US $12 million; in August they reduced that to US $9 million; the November report further reduces that to US $8 million. So it looks like they believe the game is going to continue to slip in terms of financial performance although the rate of decline is slowing down.

Actually, the rate of decline is increasing and not slowing down. It was going from down from 16 (Q3) to 12 (Q4), then they adjusted it to 16 (Q3) to 9 (Q4) and now they have basically cut the Q4 figure down to half of the Q3 figure with 16 (Q3) to 8 (Q4).

For me, I have now officially given up on the game. It's not alright when only 2.5% of player have killed any raid boss. I can even ignore the white knights defending continuously the game despite all of the design flaws. The problem is that Carbine seems to have tunnel vision. They don't appear to be seeing the problems.

Acid, you keep saying that the problem with the attunement was silvers. Even if that's what Carbine said, that's not the problem. After the changes, we only have 2.5% of players having killed at least one raid boss. Its probably a lot lower as they started with about 450k players. That speaks volumes. There needs to be a much wider group of people doing raids. Sure, a lot of people could have got past the attunements and then not managed to kill a boss but then we would be looking at a figure of only 12% of raiders killing a single boss to make the attunement reasonable (assuming that 20% of the players got through attunement). If that were the case then the raids would have serious problems. Both ways it's a total stuff up.

[Acidbaron]

No? (That applies pretty much to the whole post.)
To help your reading comprehension, I asked why content should be hard-gated in the first place.
"The fastest path" to what exactly? To uninstalling the game?

"Factors not really in players' control": It doesn't have to be entirely outside of their control. Examples: Random mistakes (come on, these do happen), lag, avoidance/crit/proc RNG, mechanical RNG (e.g. which target a random-target ability is cast on), even extremely small differences in positioning (which can also be caused by server issues).

The point is not to eliminate everything but to reduce these factors or smooth them out. E.g. avoidance/crit can burn where the sun doesn't shine, fights should be short (no need to repeat the same stuff ad nauseam), the amount of players should be the amount needed to achieve enough coordination / complexity / <something else> (that is, way below 40).

The challenge would remain the same, without having to attempt something 814598075 times. Let's steal a post of Shambala, shall we:
Assuming the encounter's difficulty comes entirely down to a mechanic that periodically needs to be executed correctly by every raid member,
20-man, 5 minutes -> 150 tries, say
40-man, 15 minutes -> 150^(40/20*15/5)=11,390,625,000,000.

I answered your question, to make the content behind the gate interesting and harder as it puts everyone entering that content on a basic level of game mechanics understanding.

I read this as 'i want things to be easily controlled', what in my head translates as 'i want easy to do content'.
Some folks like things that aren't fully predictable and not under control. That crit on your tank won't kill him if your healers healed him up before and didn't fumble like a clown and so on, all RNG elements can be controlled in an controlled environment you create as an experienced raid group. That crit didn't wipe you, the poor actions of people in your raid lead to that crit wiping you. Being it a person dousing of or people taking avoidable damage too much.
Those hidden gems is what makes raiding also interesting for me, where others go and say "this cannot be done!" i try to look for a way how it can be done as there's always a way, the more obscure and hidden it is the more interesting it becomes.

Yes mistakes happen, they cost you a kill, you learn from that mistake and go again. What is this some sort of silly positive reinforcement stuff? You tried hard and often enough, here's your golden star? You're either able to complete the challenge or not, that simple.
Sure connection issues happen, if they happen constantly to the same person, i bid that person adieu as i'm not going to ruin the entire raid their evening because of one person and if the person is mature, that person will also not throw a tantrum about it, if it happens multiple evenings i generally don't even have to ask that person will stop till he or she fixed the problem. Their have been few and very rare special cases were i literally had to remove the person from the roster.
Fights should take as long as the mechanics need it to be, that freedom in creativity needs to be there, that freedom in balancing needs to be there. I can easily say the most interesting fights were those that took their time and also the most rewarding to do.

See that's why i generally don't take people like him seriously, silly concepts and ideas that try to over complicate things for the sake of making things easier for sake of it, instead of telling and teaching players how to play better let's excuse them from being bad and blame it on the game mechanics. What do you seek to gain by this other than making things more predictable (smoothed out) and therefor easier? Why would you want PvE content to become that? It's the absolute opposite of what people ask for if you read their feedback on designs.


Since you're going to argue till no end that this isn't the case and for some weird reason you find this doesn't relate to difficulty. I argued with people like you before next you're going to tell me solo content can be made as hard as group content, you'll make me facepalm a few times and this goes no were, so my interest in this subject has ended

I might be wrong here, for me when raiding the fight and the challenge of completing it is more rewarding then any epic item i might receive, that part generally comes in to motivate me to do it when on farm. You come across to me that for you the reward is the alpha and omega of your motivation to set foot into a raid.

ps: i think i can count the fights over multiple games that required 150+ pulls to learn on one hand and more often than not it was due to a few people not getting it or due to having to replace people to often. It's also so fights that take that many pulls exist out of multiple phase by pull 50 you're no longer learning phase 1, (well i hope at least)

pps: the best and most interesting raid fights were those that existed out of multiple phase and weren't limited in time to follow some idiotic formula.




@gray_matter if your interest is great enough i laid out a couple of times what's wrong with wildstar the raids isn't it(it's rather elaborate about what went wrong and what was wrong). And no i don't play broken records although they do seem all the rage in this thread and i'm too humble to start self quoting

[Shambala]

Actually, the rate of decline is increasing and not slowing down. It was going from down from 16 (Q3) to 12 (Q4), then they adjusted it to 16 (Q3) to 9 (Q4) and now they have basically cut the Q4 figure down to half of the Q3 figure with 16 (Q3) to 8 (Q4).

I wasn't clear about what I was referring to. I meant that Daewoo is no longer reducing its revenue estimates downward as sharply as it did. As in, adjusting from a projected 16 million to 9 million was a huge change, meaning that the variables Daewoo was examining had undergone some very large shift for the worse, causing them to severely re-evaluate their predictions between those two reports. In this case, the difference in predictions between this report and the next most recent report is quite small, a change of only 1 million. That indicates that Daewoo is feeling more confident that it has locked down the variables and is more or less holding to its last estimate, which makes sense as these things get easier to predict the closer you get to them, like the weather.

[Autumnal]

I don't think I saw this posted yet, but an interesting article on why MMO's should abandon raiding

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/11...raiding-part-1

[Gray_Matter]

I wasn't clear about what I was referring to. I meant that Daewoo is no longer reducing its revenue estimates downward as sharply as it did. As in, adjusting from a projected 16 million to 9 million was a huge change, meaning that the variables Daewoo was examining had undergone some very large shift for the worse, causing them to severely re-evaluate their predictions between those two reports. In this case, the difference in predictions between this report and the next most recent report is quite small, a change of only 1 million. That indicates that Daewoo is feeling more confident that it has locked down the variables and is more or less holding to its last estimate, which makes sense as these things get easier to predict the closer you get to them, like the weather.

They are not reducing them downwards as much but they are increasing the loss percentage and hence the rate of decline. The fact that they are adjusting their estimates downwards is concerning, especially this late. It means that the number of customers is dropping off even more significantly than they previously thought. The drop in customers for Q3 to Q4 has increased from 25% when they first estimated to 50% now. I understand what you are saying though, I am just saying that it's getting worse with each estimate. We are now talking about losing half of all players between the start of October and the end of December which is massive.

- - - Updated - - -

@gray_matter if your interest is great enough i laid out a couple of times what's wrong with wildstar the raids isn't it(it's rather elaborate about what went wrong and what was wrong). And no i don't play broken records although they do seem all the rage in this thread and i'm too humble to start self quoting

I have seen your posts. I just think you are missing the boat. If you take away raiding for the casual player (which is what the present state of it is) then what is there as the draw card for WS? Without the progression that raiding offers you need to build a whole lot of content, a lot more than a couple of dungeons. Raiding can stretch out game time much more than any other content type.

[Deleted]

I don't think I saw this posted yet, but an interesting article on why MMO's should abandon raiding

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/11...raiding-part-1

Think about that for a moment. Would you go to a restaurant where everyone paid the same amount of money, but 10% of the patrons got access to a better menu and better service? Would you pay for Netflix if 10% of subscribers had access to the movies that you spend a good chunk of time cursing about why they aren't already available via streaming? Heck, would you be happy if you could watch only half of a movie but 10% of the people subscribing could see the whole thing and tell you about it?

That part doesn't make any sense. It's not like you can't raid in games, its more likely that people don't want to.

[Shambala]

They are not reducing them downwards as much but they are increasing the loss percentage and hence the rate of decline. The fact that they are adjusting their estimates downwards is concerning, especially this late. It means that the number of customers is dropping off even more significantly than they previously thought. The drop in customers for Q3 to Q4 has increased from 25% when they first estimated to 50% now. I understand what you are saying though, I am just saying that it's getting worse with each estimate. We are now talking about losing half of all players between the start of October and the end of December which is massive.

I think we're in violent agreement here -- Wildstar is definitely not in a safe place in terms of revenue and I wasn't meaning to imply that it was, or that the population was finally stabilizing, or anything like that. My original comment was only to say that Daewoo's downward revisions weren't as steep between last report and this and nothing more meaningful than that.

[Calfredd]

That part doesn't make any sense. It's not like you can't raid in games, its more likely that people don't want to.

I think that's what makes it so interesting: It's full of oddities such as the bit you quoted.

[Deleted]

@Grey Matter : I've now come to the conclusion your the biggest troll in the thread!
One minute you know absolutely everything about the game!
The next, absolutely nothing, then everything, then nothing then? Well you get the picture!
Your posts have gone from having no idea how to input a serial code to trying to pick apart a post by Acid....Man get a life and stop being a sad sack!

Infracted.

[Gray_Matter]

@Grey Matter : I've now come to the conclusion your the biggest troll in the thread!
One minute you know absolutely everything about the game!
The next, absolutely nothing, then everything, then nothing then? Well you get the picture!
Your posts have gone from having no idea how to input a serial code to trying to pick apart a post by Acid....Man get a life and stop being a sad sack!

Welcome to my ignore list. Feel free to pick apart my posts instead of trying to attack me. Take a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem. If you think I am troll then you are welcome to report me.

[Acidbaron]

I don't think I saw this posted yet, but an interesting article on why MMO's should abandon raiding

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/11...raiding-part-1

That attention whoring piece as usual from massively already has it's own thread on this forum

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I have seen your posts. I just think you are missing the boat. If you take away raiding for the casual player (which is what the present state of it is) then what is there as the draw card for WS? Without the progression that raiding offers you need to build a whole lot of content, a lot more than a couple of dungeons. Raiding can stretch out game time much more than any other content type.

Raids aren't made for them therefor other content should be given. There was mention of there being content for that target group and that content wasn't there i don't see how that justifies butchering content that does work, all that will do is shrink those people still playing even further.
You don't agree with me because your model of mmo's that being GW2 is the absolute opposite of what i find an interesting game in the genre.

[Calfredd]

Raids aren't made for them therefor other content should be given. There was mention of there being content for that target group and that content wasn't there i don't see how that justifies butchering content that does work, all that will do is shrink those people still playing even further.

I won't say it does justify it but Carbine did promise good solo content and delivered rehashed zones as daily hubs and such so they needed to do something to keep those subs around. I'm biased against 40man content so I won't touch on the 40->20 conversion unless you meant something else when you meant "butchering".

[Deleted]

herp derp let's read things that aren't there, im right ur wrong lul casual ezmode herp

I tried to have a somewhat repectful discussion with you. However, as you continued this heap of bullshit, e.g. "you just want to make things easier" (No, I don't.), "it doesn't work" (There are examples of it working.), "excuse players from being bad" (Come on now, are you even trying anything other than twisting words in a desperate attempt to disagree?), "gates make things harder" (No, if something isn't gated and you don't beat it, try again or come back later. It being gated does only slow down / "funnel" players that are already at an appropriate level of play for whatever reason.), I became convinced that you aren't worth discussing with.

PS: Stick your indirect name-calling and immense arrogance where the sun doesn't shine.

PPS: Fun fact: On multiple occasions you didn't just call my opinion but me stupid (Google "Ad Hominem"), even if you had the exact same opinion. E.g. fight length. I'm not going to report you because, frankly, I couldn't care less about people like you.

Please post productively and respectfully. Infracted. -Edge

[Acidbaron]

I won't say it does justify it but Carbine did promise good solo content and delivered rehashed zones as daily hubs and such so they needed to do something to keep those subs around. I'm biased against 40man content so I won't touch on the 40->20 conversion unless you meant something else when you meant "butchering".

Butchering as in turning existing content into something like LFR for the sake of creating more content to other groups, i have no issue with the 40 to 20 conversion, i'm also no longer actively raiding in there so it doesn't really concern me.

I tried to have a somewhat repectful discussion with you. However, as you continued this heap of bullshit, e.g. "you just want to make things easier" (No, I don't.), "it doesn't work" (There are examples of it working.), "excuse players from being bad" (Come on now, are you even trying anything other than twisting words in a desperate attempt to disagree?), "gates make things harder" (No, if something isn't gated and you don't beat it, try again or come back later. It being gated does only slow down / "funnel" players that are already at an appropriate level of play for whatever reason.), I became convinced that you aren't worth discussing with.

PS: Stick your indirect name-calling and immense arrogance where the sun doesn't shine.

PPS: Fun fact: On multiple occasions you didn't just call my opinion but me stupid (Google "Ad Hominem"), even if you had the exact same opinion. E.g. fight length. I'm not going to report you because, frankly, I couldn't care less about people like you.

By responding in that manner i have to guess i hit a nerve, as i said pointless to continue due to lack of finding any mutual ground.
I also didn't insult anyone in my post although pot meet kettle on that and i read what i read and you advocated removal or smoothing things out that does add difficulty, there's no otherway to read that then "make it easier". I literally said i did disagree with you and why rather hilarious that me disagreeing with you must clearly be me being something somthing rather than simply disagreeing with you.


ps: think someone got out of bed with the wrong foot this morning, keep up the rage i'm sure you'll be able to better communicate your points across while ranting

pps: by saying you could report me but you didn't, doesn't give you the moral high ground after such a post, feel free to report me.

[Darksoldierr]

Mini banned? Damn, the thread is dead for a week.

Please post productively. Infracted. -Edge

[Falkenburg]

So, not to interrupt... whatever was going on here, but earlier today I started wondering what if any action is going on in Wildstar news. And the only thing I have found that seems to count as "news" is... the new story on the Wildstar Website?

Has communication from the developers really ground to a halt, or is this simply the holiday lull, and nothing to read into?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

So, not to interrupt... whatever was going on here, but earlier today I started wondering what if any action is going on in Wildstar news. And the only thing I have found that seems to count as "news" is... the new story on the Wildstar Website?

Has communication from the developers really ground to a halt, or is this simply the holiday lull, and nothing to read into?

Communication is grinding to a halt.

Ever since update 2, Carbine has mosty withdrawn to their cabin in the Californian mountains to contemplate how to resolve their current situation. ATM, salvaging the game so that they can avoid a financial crisis is of higher priority than actually producing anything new or overhauling systems like Runes. I don't think therw'll be anything interesting this month to announce, and probably not the next one either. Until they decide that interacting with the community so that they can retain their playerbase/rebuild, there is nothing to be said except for those short stories that one dev is forced to write up after work before he leaves the office.

[Edge-]

So, not to interrupt... whatever was going on here, but earlier today I started wondering what if any action is going on in Wildstar news. And the only thing I have found that seems to count as "news" is... the new story on the Wildstar Website?

Has communication from the developers really ground to a halt, or is this simply the holiday lull, and nothing to read into?

I wouldn't expect anything meaningful for the month, it's December, when most studios usually wind down in a major way. They're going to keep putting out more lore drops, but in terms of big news for the game, that's only occasional (last I remember was the announcement they're reducing 40 man to 20 man).