[Megathread] Wildstar - Now F2P

[Sy]

Separating you from your friends and familiar faces is just another way to keep your community divided. I know people like to cling to that dual faction, pvp jazz, but it's another outdated principle in games.

i actually agree with that, even though i love some wpvp every now and then. most of the fun of wpvp can be provided by other means i think, without splitting the community in half, or even third -- except for the players who find ganking and griefing to be fun, which really wouldn't be a big loss for the community :D
i hate having to decide between people i like whenever i try a new mmo :[

gw2 was supposed to be the game that would finally allow me to play with everyone i knew (who was also playing the game, that is^^) regardless of 'faction', server or even region. sadly, arenanet never really delivered the guesting system they had promised for "at or shortly after" release =/

i only played rift in beta and until a few weeks after release though, were it was still very much divided into two factions. i heard they changed something about that a while back, but how does it work now?

To be fair, I only had a handful of posts with the other avatar. :P

fair enough. i think i got the first early version of my avatar around 70 posts or so^^
looking back at it now though, it was terrible quality. not sure how i could ever use that <_<

The 7 years in development is starting to show. No kind of cross realm play to play with friends is meh

indeed =/

but I have no friends so its ok!

yay..?

Its a brand new game wouldn't people roll characters with their "friends" on the same server anyway?

Why again is cross realm technology necessary in a brand new game?

some people have several friends across the internet who they'd like to play with, that don't necessarily all want to play on the same faction or servertype, that don't necessarily all even know each other and that don't necessarily even come from the same continent.

i'd love to play with some people from this thread, but i will probably not be able to do so as i also want to join a friend who doesn't use this forum and who himself has a group of friends that he wants to join.

This is how in game friendships start and have always started in MMOs by playing with people within your community.

The only thing cross realm mixing solves is population issues and people from separate servers playing together which neither should be an issue for a newly launched MMO.

you really seem to have a very narrow view of the issue^^

i agree that a tight server community is something awesome, and forcing someone to play with random people outside that community isn't a good idea, but i also think it should be possible to play with people from other factions/servers/regions who i already know.

[wombinator04]

Here's hoping server xfers will be available very soon after launch(obviously when servers calm down a bit).
I'm so bad at picking a good server, every single time I pick a server when an MMO launches it ends up being some Brazilian/Australian/MLP unofficial server.

[RoninaThorstone]

The fact that we are even talking about "cross realm" tech in an era where you could boil it down to one or two servers per continent is pretty bizarre to me.

At this point, Blizzard is trying to get rid of having a ton of realms while also maintaining that "realm feeling" which is just silly to me.

Why not have 1 NA PVE server and 1 NA PVP server? That would solve the "xrealm" problems and the "single server among many" problems.

[wombinator04]

The fact that we are even talking about "cross realm" tech in an era where you could boil it down to one or two servers per continent is pretty bizarre to me.

At this point, Blizzard is trying to get rid of having a ton of realms while also maintaining that "realm feeling" which is just silly to me.

Why not have 1 NA PVE server and 1 NA PVP server? That would solve the "xrealm" problems and the "single server among many" problems.

The only argument is community. But a lot of servers barely have any community, there's only a couple that have a healthy one.

[Sy]

The fact that we are even talking about "cross realm" tech in an era where you could boil it down to one or two servers per continent is pretty bizarre to me.

At this point, Blizzard is trying to get rid of having a ton of realms while also maintaining that "realm feeling" which is just silly to me.

Why not have 1 NA PVE server and 1 NA PVP server? That would solve the "xrealm" problems and the "single server among many" problems.

i don't think that would be a good idea. the tech may say it's possible, but the gameplay would probably disagree. fewer servers would be good, but not that much fewer.

it works fine in swtor, which has three servers (pve, pvp, rp) per language (english, french, german) in europe. but swtor also has only about one tenth or less of the active playerbase that wow does.

[Arlee]

Why not have 1 NA PVE server and 1 NA PVP server? That would solve the "xrealm" problems and the "single server among many" problems.

Because if you don't have tons of servers it clearly means no one plays your game and it's a failure.

[Deleted]

At this point, Blizzard is trying to get rid of having a ton of realms while also maintaining that "realm feeling" which is just silly to me.

i actually think its brilliant and its the way in which low population realm's / servers should be handled.. i dont want cross-realm in the open world. We have cross-realm dungeon's and pvp which is enough.

Im sure people would love cross-faction grouping too.. as not all friend's are the same faction.

[SirRobin]

omfg medacted is the next class reveal

WOOO

I was thinking it was redactedneer

I thought they were going with Medacted and Redactineer?

[RoninaThorstone]

i don't think that would be a good idea. the tech may say it's possible, but the gameplay would probably disagree. fewer servers would be good, but not that much fewer.

it works fine in swtor, which has three servers (pve, pvp, rp) per language (english, french, german) in europe. but swtor also has only about one tenth or less of the active playerbase that wow does.

Swtor also uses very old server tech.

You can do what WoW and several others do which is having a bunch of servers but then mask the fact that there's many servers by linking them together and showing it as one server on the client side. WoW could, technically, link all it's servers together if they wanted to.

[Kelimbror]

The only argument is community. But a lot of servers barely have any community, there's only a couple that have a healthy one.

It's a little more complex than that. Economy is one of the largest, but so is the fact that these identities have been established over almost a decade. Factoring that in to character names and guild names and you can see why having one server is not ideal for such a large game. On top of that there is their server structure, in depth support, and things of that nature.

And to get super deep, the game is not large enough for that many people. How many people are frustrated enough at never seeing a rare mount or spawn with the low number of people on their server and now the difficulty from CRZ? I can't even imagine how bad it would be if 2 million people were competing for something. That's starting to get to lottery levels of probability and that's simply not fun gameplay.

Even with sharding, it's an unreliable way to spend your time. Do you let people switch? What about people who constantly hop to abuse rare spawns? So many things to tackle it's not worth it at all. The only games that can get away with one server design are games like GW2 where no one is competing with you for gathering nodes, everyone can be a teammate in a world event, and the rest of the time you can generally play however you want. That's not possible in traditional MMOs and would certainly not be possible in W*.

[Arlee]

What if Wildstar were to launch with the model similar to Gw2 where you don't tag things. If you run by and someone is killing something you need so you help and you both get credit for the kill and loots. That would put it right with the philosophy that you aren't competing with other players and would make the megaserver concept work better.

[wombinator04]

What if Wildstar were to launch with the model similar to Gw2 where you don't tag things. If you run by and someone is killing something you need so you help and you both get credit for the kill and loots. That would put it right with the philosophy that you aren't competing with other players and would make the megaserver concept work better.

Wait, Wildstar doesn't have that model? Does it have the WoW style model where if you tag a mob you get all loot and xp?

But yes I think all MMO's need to have the GW2 model. That's a really good system, the mob tagging nonsense needs to go.

[RoninaThorstone]

Wait, Wildstar doesn't have that model? Does it have the WoW style model where if you tag a mob you get all loot and xp?

But yes I think all MMO's need to have the GW2 model. That's a really good system, the mob tagging nonsense needs to go.

I think they publicly said that it now is shared rather than tag based.

[Sy]

Swtor also uses very old server tech.

that's not the point. regardless of tech, the zones and cities of wow are not designed to have like 30+ times as many players in them as they do now. i'm not talking about server lag or something like that, but simply that they would be overcrowded to the point where you can't see your own character anymore when near the bank in sw. quest zones would need to be tuned for respawn times of only a few seconds. and regardless of how high tech your servers and your coding are, many people are playing wow on pcs that would simply not be able to handle displaying that many characters at once.

to compensate, every zone would need to have several instances of itself on the same server, which can lead to weird stuff like people visually disappearing on crossing a zoneborder. and it might be very hard or even impossible to implement that in a way into the currently existing code that would still allow everyone to seemlessly transition from one zone into another without any loading screen (contrary to how it may look, phasing does not change the instance, which is why it doesn't need loading screens).

if you want to get rid of that border problem, there would need to be several instances of each continent on the same server. but then some of the zones of each instance would again be overcrowded, while others feel empty. in which case you might as well just keep servers and simply allow people to 'guest' to others or to cross-realm zones for when someone wants to play with a specific person from another realm.

i still agree that there should be less wow servers than there are now, as empty zones and underpopulated servers seem to be a widespread issue, but merging all of them into one or even a handful of each type would not work for reasons that go beyond server technology.

It's a little more complex than that. Economy is one of the largest, but so is the fact that these identities have been established over almost a decade. Factoring that in to character names and guild names and you can see why having one server is not ideal for such a large game.

two more good reasons that i didn't think of myself.

But yes I think all MMO's need to have the GW2 model. That's a really good system, the mob tagging nonsense needs to go.

agreed!

I think they publicly said that it now is shared rather than tag based.

\o/

[jearle]

some people have several friends across the internet who they'd like to play with, that don't necessarily all want to play on the same faction or servertype, that don't necessarily all even know each other and that don't necessarily even come from the same continent.

TBH if you're playing a (new) game with people that don't want to roll the same faction as you (if they are warring factions) or don't want to play on the same server type as you (PvP vs PvE ect) its not the games responsibility to allow you to play together.

Stay in touch via Skype or Ventrilo or something.

What games do you currently play that satisfy this requirement of yours?

[RoninaThorstone]

that's not the point. regardless of tech, the zones and cities of wow are not designed to have like 30+ times as many players in them as they do now. i'm not talking about server lag or something like that, but simply that they would be overcrowded to the point where you can't see your own character anymore when near the bank in sw.

That's not how it works.

There's player caps on shards. Even in something as archaic as swtor, they have a player cap of 200 or so per shard. Games like Vindictus figured this out years ago. There were times when there were 80+ channels of the main hub.

[Arlee]

Wait, Wildstar doesn't have that model? Does it have the WoW style model where if you tag a mob you get all loot and xp?

But yes I think all MMO's need to have the GW2 model. That's a really good system, the mob tagging nonsense needs to go.

I don't think they have addressed how exactly it will work, and people in beta can't really comment unfortunately because of NDA :/ but yes I generally agree with you.

Another option they might consider is freeform for anything quest related, and and tagging for world boss type things. That could work pretty well too.

- - - Updated - - -

TBH if you're playing a (new) game with people that don't want to roll the same faction as you (if they are warring factions) or don't want to play on the same server type as you (PvP vs PvE ect) its not the games responsibility to allow you to play together.

Stay in touch via Skype or Ventrilo or something.

What games do you currently play that satisfy this requirement of yours?

Well Rift got rid of all the faction divisions, but you still can't play cross server.

[Sy]

TBH if you're playing a (new) game with people that don't want to roll the same faction as you (if they are warring factions) or don't want to play on the same server type as you (PvP vs PvE ect) its not the games responsibility to allow you to play together.

Stay in touch via Skype or Ventrilo or something.

What games do you currently play that satisfy this requirement of yours?

1) i didn't say it was the games "responsibility". but technically, nothing is. it's a game. but devs will obviously always try to make the experience as fun and entertaining as possible for as many people as possible.

2) as i already said, it's not just an issue of what i and 'my friends' decide, as that isn't a single, closed circle. i want to play with some people that the friend i mentioned doesn't know, he wants to play with some people that i don't know, and in both directions many of these people that only one of us knows of course also have other people they want to play with that neither of us knows. makes sense?

3) whether i stay in touch over another program (which we do already) or not really doesn't matter for the game. i want to play together with these people.

4) none, which i adressed in a post last page. gw2 was supposed to provide the possibility for it, but the devs didn't manage to make it work as they had said they would. but if wildstar only satisfies requirements that other games already do, then why the hell would i play wildstar at all? why would anyone play a new game, if the old/current ones still had everything they wanted?^^

That's not how it works.

There's player caps on shards. Even in something as archaic as swtor, they have a player cap of 200 or so per shard. Games like Vindictus figured this out years ago. There were times when there were 80+ channels of the main hub.

did you actually read what i wrote? i adressed the issue of having several instances per zone (in wow) in detail. as did Kelimbror.

[Kelimbror]

But yes I think all MMO's need to have the GW2 model. That's a really good system, the mob tagging nonsense needs to go.

Infinitely agree. Make the game hard, make the game require grouping up with people, do whatever you want to the game. Don't make it arbitrarily difficult because you just made Joe1234 the Human Engineer my enemy even though we're on the same faction. We don't need to make a campfire and sing cumbaya to work together, allow organic grouping and assistance without the need for jarring UI interactions like inviting people.

I think open tagging with individual loot combined with Rift's ease of inviting and joining public groups would be the most ideal system.

[SirRobin]

We are the WildStar Stalker Class Team AMA