[Megathread] Wildstar - Now F2P

[Deleted]

Don't know the full in and outs of drop 4 (next 2 weeks) but the new LFG tool lets your group join anything together with ease, it also comes with the option of not finding other players, meaning for shiphands and so on it will only be your group!

[Acidbaron]

The leveling changes aren't in effect and i'm not even sure if that is in drop 4, it was on their plans for this year so might as well be in drop 5.

[Deleted]

Carbine Studios Staff
LocationCarbine Studios
Posted Yesterday, 06:14 PM

Hey there Settlers,

I just wanted to let you know a little about what I’ve been working on for the Settler path.

I’m merging the run speed buffs into a single awesome buff and adding mount speed to it as well. After doing review, I’ve decided there was no longer a point in having an in-combat and out-of-combat speed buff. There will now be one buff that does it all!

I’m also going to be reducing the time it takes to pick up a Settler resource down from a two second cast time, and making sure they all have their proper animations and sound when you do so.

For bigger, longer term work, I will be adjusting all Settler Projects across the board to allow you to carry more resources at a time, and shorten how long it takes to build the project solo and extending how long it is up for after you build it. I will also be making an effort to better communicate how many resources you are carrying, and making sure all Projects can give extra resources by performing random events that can fire when picking up a resource. (You may have seen this in places such as Whitevale.)

And also, I will be extending how long Settler Expansions (aka, buff machines, vendors, etc.) are up for after you build them. This should help you to fire off the Settler Payoff and keep it up for longer.

Keep your eyes on the patch notes for these changes. They will not be coming in all at once, nor in this order, so please be patient.

If you have any other ideas on how to improve your Settler experience (that doesn’t involve massive system changes) please feel free to share them with me and I’ll take them into consideration.

~ Honey ~

[Kelimbror]

Leveling was already pretty damn fast, I dunno if that's exactly something that needed fixing. :O

It was only fast if you knew the super secret technique of skipping most quests and jumping to zones before you think you should. If you are a normal MMO player you just do all the quests and move on to the next zone. Additionally, I think the specific problem is leveling in groups? It's essentially the worst group experience of any MMO w/r/t leveling.

Almost no objectives share, finding your party members requires multiple addons, and even then you are likely to have no fun due to path system not being appealing enough or streamlined enough to be cooperative. I had to abandon my wife and my own path in order to keep leveling as efficiently as possible and it still was the most painful leveling I've ever done outside of initial Tera.

When there is basically no endgame though, I can see why they want to mire everyone down in the leveling process. It was my conclusion anyways after going as fast as possible to cap, doing dailies for a week, and then deciding I was probably not going to be playing after the month was up. I wasn't wrong.

[Gaidax]

No, there is definitely end-game, they just failed on making in actually accessible to the general populace.

It's good that they reduced their unreasonable requirements somewhat, but at this point it's too late really.

[Deleted]

Leveling was already pretty damn fast, I dunno if that's exactly something that needed fixing. :O

No, not even close. A normal Wildstar player took just under 100 hours /played minimum to get to the endgame, that's with skipping much of the Path (that does not lie directly in your questing). With Paths, it could take another 30+ hours. Even without Paths, this is between 1.5 to three times longer than most of the mainstream MMOs.

Also, whatever changes they make, they are likely less about reducing the time to level, but smoothing out other issues.

Finally, I think it is worth reminding people that levelling is where most casual players are lost. I know at least some 70% of a large gaming community (hundreds of players) that I was part of which started Wildstar, just gave up during the leveling. Note, this was all at launch when the leveling population was largest, all activities were widely available, including instanced PvP and dungeons.

[Deleted]

We are a strange bunch, first we make a char, then we fall in love with our pixel generated player! Then we spend the rest of the game wishing we had spent more time at the creation screen, never fear chop shop is here

[Kaganfindel]

The speed at which you gain levels isn't the problem; it's that the fastest way to do it is to skip most of the quests. If you sort quests by type and ignore everything under the "Tasks" heading, you gain levels fast. That's great because you avoid most of the "collect ten bear asses" quests and you play through the story. It also sucks because it's counterintuitive to the target market demographic, and because the Tasks reward you so inefficiently that it's strictly better to ignore them.

I get what they were trying to do. They wanted to avoid the WoW quest problem, where you outlevel the main story before you've played through it. Their solution sucks, though. They just need to find some other reward for doing the Tasks quests, one that doesn't suggest that they're something you do to level up.

[Kelimbror]

They just need to find some other reward for doing the Tasks quests, one that doesn't suggest that they're something you do to level up.

If they allowed optional scaling instead of forced through grouping with lower level players only then they could have just turned all their tasks into dailies and let you have at it. It would have multiplied their end game content by like a thousand, allowed them to reuse assets without being criticized as lazy like their copy pasta zones, and given solo players more things to do.

Granted the core problems (which are hopefully being fixed soon) are currencies and rewards which would have to be fixed regardless, but still...they had a lot of options and chose the worst one every time.

[zito]

They are still restricting downscaling?

My god

[Kelimbror]

They are still restricting downscaling?

My god

Afaik it's not even on their radar of things to do. Apparently letting people actually play their game isn't high on their priorities. :-/ Not sure why they even did the work to program scaling and then make it worthless.

[Nosdrone]

No one is streaming at all?!

Was hoping to see some raiding this morning. Guess not.

[SirBeef]

No, there is definitely end-game, they just failed on making in actually accessible to the general populace.

It's good that they reduced their unreasonable requirements somewhat, but at this point it's too late really.

They did not fail to make it accessible, that was the plan from day one. Wildstar was supposed to appeal to the tiny fraction of 'hardcore' MMO players in the world. They expected there to be a lot more of these 'hardcore' raider types. They ended up with a game that catered to a few 10s of thousands at best and when the rest of the players left, they had to make a 180 on their decision to be exclusive and appeal to broader range of players.

[Kaganfindel]

I think making the Tasks into dailies you do for your Elder Gems has been the best suggestion I've heard yet. You might initially see a Mechanar effect, where everybody flocks to the zone that has the fastest/easiest set of quests, but that would be a self-correcting problem as the competition for objectives made spreading out into other zones more lucrative. It would also work toward solving a chronic problem with theme park MMORPGs - that all the zones you played through leveling up are pointless at the level cap.

[Nosdrone]

Enigma downed 40m Avatus. The race is over.

[Arbs]

The leveling changes aren't in effect and i'm not even sure if that is in drop 4, it was on their plans for this year so might as well be in drop 5.

A Wildstar Dev said to me in a Twitch stream that the leveling changes will be in Drop 4.

[lazorexplosion]

Congratulations.

After eight months someone has finally got there. What a tale of insanity.

[Arbs]

Enigma downed 40m Avatus. The race is over.

There really wasn't a race at all, It was just which guild could beat the Roster Boss & stay afloat.

[lazorexplosion]

People keep saying things like 'The success of Dark Souls shows there's a niche for difficult hardcore content'. And Dark Souls is hard, but the top 0.1% can cruise through it so easily they have to do stuff like deliberately stick to level 1 to actually make it challenging. That's Dark Souls difficult.

Wildstar difficult is so difficult only the top 0.1 have a chance of doing it, and it takes them eight months.

That's how crazy far out there Wildstar is. It's insane.

[Deleted]

There really wasn't a race at all, It was just which guild could beat the Roster Boss & stay afloat.

But what a feeling.....being the best