[Megathread] Wildstar - Now F2P

[Kelimbror]

Garrisons aren't housing -- they're bases of operation ala Warcraft III. They're more like Hytbold in LotRO than housing in other MMOs.

But yeah, housing is one of the things WS got right. It's fun.

But people just can't resist bringing up 'that game' to bash it while trying to praise Wildstar. It doesn't matter if the features are completely different in design and scope, let's trash it in comparison anyways! Wildstar's housing is phenomenal. It has even better functionality than Rift, a little bit more purpose, and that's great. They are the pinnacle of free form housing design in MMOs right now. SWTOR's new hook housing is the best of that system I've ever seen. Other than systems which have grown outdated due to age, I don't really see bad features in MMOs in general....mostly just players who don't understand the design intention of said feature.

[Pejo]

Want to get back into this game.

Bought it in June, tried to play it for a week, apparently my AMD graphics card cannot play it.
They then released a patch for the game a little bit after to improve AMD FPS, I tried it and still didnt work.

Can anyone say if framerates have gotten better?

It has, but make sure you're using the AMD beta drivers: http://support.amd.com/en-us/downloa...Windows+7+-+64

If you're finding that your experience hasn't improved, run the game in Windowed (not Borderless or whatever it is called) and it should improve it by quite a bit. If you're still having issues after that, you're SoL.

[Khorm]

ESO also has no stockholders to please. The game will stay P2P for as long as Bethesda feels they're pulling enough profit to justify the sub model.

ZeniMax owns Bethesda so they would make the call, though you are right that they are a private company. CCP Games which produces Eve Online is also a private company. NCSoft is a public company so operates to an entirely different set of rules when it comes to the profitability of games. Don't look to Eve Online or even ESO for a precedent that applies to Wildstar. City of Heroes is the precedent you want as it was owned by a public company, NCSoft as well, and while still turning a profit it was closed down so the millions that went into running it could be invested elsewhere, possibly into Wildstar.

I'm wondering if Wildstar could turn f2p even if it wanted to. Massive amount of content would have to be added, difficulty would have to be tuned again, they stand the chance of losing all of their raiding base who don't like playing f2p games. I think we'll have our answer early next year.

[Edge-]

City of Heroes is the precedent you want as it was owned by a public company, NCSoft as well, and while still turning a profit it was closed down so the millions that went into running it could be invested elsewhere, possibly into Wildstar.

Bad precedent to look to. CoH was a roughly 8 year old game in a niche genre that was not aging as gracefully as it could have been. It was still strongly supported up until it was closed. It was closed because in the years leading up to the closure, the game was registering between 1-5% of revenue for NCsoft, closer to 1% in the last few quarters.

And honestly, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to transition the game to F2P. Considering they already have things like CREDD, housing, and cosmetic systems already built into the game it's pretty easy to monetize.

[Acidbaron]

Bad precedent to look to. CoH was a roughly 8 year old game in a niche genre that was not aging as gracefully as it could have been. It was still strongly supported up until it was closed. It was closed because in the years leading up to the closure, the game was registering between 1-5% of revenue for NCsoft, closer to 1% in the last few quarters.

And honestly, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to transition the game to F2P. Considering they already have things like CREDD, housing, and cosmetic systems already built into the game it's pretty easy to monetize.

Pretty much this, the whole CoH closure has been overplayed by fanboys looking for a target to hate on. If the game is no longer even viable with a skeleton crew that's what you get. CoH had more support then WHO ever had and more time.

As for another poster SWToR was in a negative spiral for about a year and it's IP didn't save it, a large F2P transition were a lot of parts got monetized. Fair to say if Carbine went as far as with swtor with that approach, it's good bye.


I'm hoping this week we get something more concrete on the server changes and an eta on their system changes, and a mention worthy patch.

[Edge-]

I'm hoping this week we get something more concrete on the server changes and an eta on their system changes, and a mention worthy patch.

If they announce virtual realm clusters and get it launched within September that would be huge for them. It would help with the population issues without having to deal with any of the headaches/bad perception of actual server mergers.

[Khorm]

Bad precedent to look to. CoH was a roughly 8 year old game in a niche genre that was not aging as gracefully as it could have been. It was still strongly supported up until it was closed. It was closed because in the years leading up to the closure, the game was registering between 1-5% of revenue for NCsoft, closer to 1% in the last few quarters.

And honestly, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to transition the game to F2P. Considering they already have things like CREDD, housing, and cosmetic systems already built into the game it's pretty easy to monetize.

You don't seem to know the costs of producing raid content of Wildstar level. CoH was able to puff along for 8 years as you didn't need 40 people for raids.

Exactly. They have housing and cosmetic systems, that's it! Casuals still want something to do with their time and the lame daily areas don't cut it.

[Acidbaron]

You don't seem to know the costs of producing raid content of Wildstar level. CoH was able to puff along for 8 years as you didn't need 40 people for raids.

Exactly. They have housing and cosmetic systems, that's it! Casuals still want something to do with their time and the lame daily areas don't cut it.

There's 1 40 man raid in the game, let's not pull things out of proportion here. There are enough people to do 40 man raids with the problem right now is how spread the population is (what you get if you go add 4 times the amount of servers you originally intended at launch.) The people getting burned out from raids such as guilds from engima is not that there aren't enough people aren't, there aren't enough people around who want to go in multiple hours every day of the week and raid.

Part of the problem is Wildstar is proving to take much longer to clear out then what WoW previously threw at people, what was generally a month of crunch time, we are far beyond that now. So by using an approach they're used to in other mmo's but just going balls to walls till it's done, it's no wonder people simply say "i'm out".

It took what a month to clear out SoO? Now you have to imagine a lot of these top guilds share the same players from said WoW guilds not all but some, we are now looking at what month 3? with some lesser periods when GA was on farm but then still having to farm 300 patterns per person or farm gold.

You have to see it all in it's context, now don't read this as that every server is majorly populated and doing fine it isn't.

Another thing that sets in player attrition is the length of certain raid encounters that require you to play without error, and that's something that goes up in GA it averages from 8 to 11+ minutes, in DS is suppose to be another 4 minutes on top of that by design.

[notorious98]

Jsut curious but what is with the housing in SWOTR?

I just started playing with it a little today. It's not as free as Rift, but it's still pretty cool.

[RoninaThorstone]

I just started playing with it a little today. It's not as free as Rift, but it's still pretty cool.

Well, in Rift you can recreate battles from Star Wars as rooms in your apartment :P

I can't think of another housing system in an MMO as free as Rifts.

I am not even sure one should hold it up as the ideal because it is so extreme.

I mean, they expanded that system to player generated battle grounds too.

[notorious98]

Well, in Rift you can recreate battles from Star Wars as rooms in your apartment :P

I can't think of another housing system in an MMO as free as Rifts.

I am not even sure one should hold it up as the ideal because it is so extreme.

I mean, they expanded that system to player generated battle grounds too.

Honestly, aside from LotRO, it's the only other one I've experienced. And, compared to LotRO, TOR's housing is far superior.

[notorious98]

Woah, woah, woah back up here.

Yeah, I gotta say that AcidBaron has been relatively level-headed until this point.

And it was only 5 levels in MoP, not 10. But, seriously, the comparisons between the two can't be made. Blizzard gated their raiding content by telling their community they were gating it. Carbine artificially gated their raid content through arbitrary timers in dungeons. And that still doesn't include the amount of leveling involved.

[Acidbaron]

Woah, woah, woah back up here.

First off, top guilds GA clears happened pretty much close to the same timeframe that top guilds in WoW were clearing the first raid instance in MoP. (Not the first tier, mind you, just the first instance. I use them for comparison just because they had the same number of bosses and were at the beginning of content drops.)

Nevermind that in MoP people just had to get 10 levels and then hop into the raid, versus leveling to 50 and doing the attunements in WS. That's also ignoring the gigantic clusterfuck of bugs that Ohmna was at first.

Moving on to the 40-man, yeah it's taking longer to clear, but a huge chunk of that time was apparently spent waiting around after their Ohmna kills to actually get 40 people their 300PPs, not to mention the talk about the first boss in the 40-man just not able to be killed for a while.

Seriously, lets not pretend that the actual RAID CONTENT in WS is much harder and takes guilds much longer to clear. What you meant to say is that there are just a lot more arbitrary hurdles and issues placed in the way of guilds. This is also pretty much why people are fed up with it.

Yeah, I gotta say that AcidBaron has been relatively level-headed until this point.

And it was only 5 levels in MoP, not 10. But, seriously, the comparisons between the two can't be made. Blizzard gated their raiding content by telling their community they were gating it. Carbine artificially gated their raid content through arbitrary timers in dungeons. And that still doesn't include the amount of leveling involved.

If we include the time spend during beta, then wildstar did take longer to progress in. Now seeing you got offended by that, is it much harder then heroic raiding? It's on par but in WoW you got a different set of rules and mechanics, more on that later.

I'm aware ohmna had plenty of bugs, this is however no different from WoW regarding first clearers. Sometimes bugs help you, sometimes they hinder you.
Seeing this isn't all public knowledge but those guilds you see progressing first also had access to another beta layer and actually got to see ohmna before the rest including part the 40 man content. They also had access to it when amps were stronger and making it easier to deal with things, not speaking even over the incombat resurrection bug during beta.

Now in addition to that we need to include the gate system, the initial gate didn't take as long. nor did leveling those going for it were done in the first week-end (myself included, what was about a day difference from the leveling of wotlk to cataclysm) As gearing up for raids was pretty much done by the time you hit dungeons and getting silvers wasn't all that hard cause well, those doing PvE had probably ran every dungeon up to 10 times at least before the game came out. Being so quickly out of the door even world bosses didn't prove to be a problem cause there was no competition.

The timers weren't an issue and yes if you could run the dungeons in silvers you could play, only those who couldn't get it done complained about arbitrary "timers", all the rest simply did them without issues. If you could play even if you failed once during a server crash or what not at launch you got it the next time around, by now we have pugs running silvers what translates simply into it being something you learn to do, you learn to optimize and you learn to have an interrupt rotation for the entire dungeon etc. Something that's needed in raids. We learned to do all that during beta.


My personal opinion is that WoW's difficulty comes more from a tactical level while in wildstar it's more punishing on the execution bit, part of that is we can play WoW blindly and we have gotten accustomed to the rules in it, while in wildstar there are a bit more mechanics and rules in that make it different, the amount of people hit by your heal and the heal being targeted. What means if you all fall back to "let's stand on the tank" you'll kill your tank.
You also have no recovery mechanics such as in combat resurrections. Your healing has also to be looked at as a case of coverage, if your raid is more spread out it came down to having more healers in just for the sake of range, rather then sake of pure output.

Then you have a few mechanics in that require people to be more aware, such as golgox 20 interrupts in 20 seconds where every interrupt deals 15K raid wide damage and that interrupt management is often a red line through encounter design, that's also you don't have that often in WoW where a single dps screwing up can be a wipe, they are in there but less.


Having done a good chunk of raiding in WoW and having done the 20 mans in Wildstar that's my assessment, now you might dislike it for whatever reason but having done both it puts me in a pretty good spot to judge things. find it a bit odd that people that didn't raid are bothered by that.

[Tekkommo]

Acidbaron, if you play WoW blindly in heroic progression, you are probably one of the guys in guild people complain about.

There is little to no difference in WS/WoW playability, apart from it's easier to dodge stuff in WS due to the obvious graphics. It's one complaint I have with WoW, raiding in MoP is littered with crap on my screen, so as a melee it is easy to not see stuff. Thank god for boss mods

It's obvious you are biased towards WS, but I'll leave it at that.

such as golgox 20 interrupts in 20 seconds

Sounds really hard.

[Acidbaron]

Acidbaron, if you play WoW blindly in heroic progression, you are probably one of the guys in guild people complain about.

There is little to no difference in WS/WoW playability, apart from it's easier to dodge stuff in WS due to the obvious graphics. It's one complaint I have with WoW, raiding in MoP is littered with crap on my screen, so as a melee it is easy to not see stuff. Thank god for boss mods

Not sure why people would complain about me for the sake it.

There's a difference in play style, not sure why people who didn't do the dungeons and especially didn't raid want to keep saying that, you approach things differently.
As for dodging stuff either you can dodge stuff or you can't, it's not noticable harder in WoW there's always a graphic and often by default every WoW boss mechanic has a voice over, so you generally have a better warning due to that voice over, even ignoring boss mods that warn you ahead of time.

Where in Wildstar i generally have to get a sense of when it happens and look at start fight timer and generally predict it on that.

For the record i generally play melee, if you play melee you generally go for that extra challenge or you stick with a ranged class and play a turret mode.

- - - Updated - - -

Sounds really hard.

There's plenty things in the fight that can kill you depending on what council setup you have, the interrupt in itself are easy the raid damage you take from every interrupt is what causes the problems. A single dps can interrupt at the wrong time and kill a person (15k per interrupt 30K ish health per person when fully maxed that's with shield), that person could be on the interrupt list. That person could be a healer, as that 20 man fight has anywhere between 2 to 4 tanks and their appointed healers. In addition to that you need your interrupts for ersoth that heals, you need your soakers on golgox and if you lose a dps and have vragtrog you won't make the dps check causing another wipe.

So bit more to it then just the "20 interrupts in 20 seconds".

[Deleted]

Hello everybody I was asked to come here. I'd like to ask for trial key for Wildstar EU. If anyone of you have one to spare I'd be grateful. Cheers.

[zito]

Pretty much everyone that raids or raided in Wildstar will confirm that the content feels harder because there is more emphasis on individual execution, that and the combat is also a lot faster paced and the fights thus feel more intense, whereas in WoW it feels a lot slower with a lot more room for reaction time, or even much easier/slower DPS cycles.

I would not comment on the difficulty of WS raiding unless you've properly played it yourself. There is no chance in hell that WS raiddifficulty is lower than WoW's. You're never going to convince me or anyone who raided in Wildstar about this. Bottomline? Wildstar is more hardcore, both in content difficulty and in timesinks and attunements.

Wrong

*insert reasons*

Cwutididthar?

[Tekkommo]

Bottomline? Wildstar is more hardcore, both in content difficulty and in timesinks and attunements.

Wrong.

Acid has agreed WS raids are on par with WoW heroic raids.
I have done all of the silver attunements in the 5 mans, I can say learning Challenge Modes in WoW was harder.
WoW has some challenging solo content, proving grounds and brawlers guild (if you don't over gear it). WS has zero challenging solo content.

Where is this harder content then?

[Tekkommo]

If you actually take a minute and read what I said, I used Acids comments on raid content, saying it's on par. Maybe you don't know what the word par means?

Besides MoP and DS, I've probably got a lot more experience than you.

[Acidbaron]

Wrong.

Acid has agreed WS raids are on par with WoW heroic raids.
I have done all of the silver attunements in the 5 mans, I can say learning Challenge Modes in WoW was harder.
WoW has some challenging solo content, proving grounds and brawlers guild (if you don't over gear it).

Where is this harder content then?

CM vs Gold runs is a hard comparison as one scales your gear down the other doesn't so there are many factors you need to set parameters for if you wanted to hold a comparison, would say gold runs from WS are ahead if done in intended gear but this is more something you want to compare on a dungeon to dungeon basis, same goes for raids. In general there's a greater focus on individual pressure, were in WoW they still have the habit of shoving that off to just a key players in the raid for certain encounters another part is having 10 minute plus fights were you need everyone alive till almost the very end and having not a single combat resurrection.

What will make you rage at times.


Anyway going to pull in the same line again that i did during the whole "10 vs 25 mans which is harder!" it's purely encounter based. X89 gives you a lot more leeway to do it with only 16 people. Phagemaw is also not that hard as you only need 2 people controlling the bomb explosions and the rest following, convergence and ohmna are then again harder, kuralak is when not outgearing it an also hard awareness check where one person can pretty much make you wipe.

I would say things like healing in wildstar is more challenging as you need to take a different approach to it also regarding heal setup.