Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[Evildrider]

Teaser for the July update. 

[Flood]

I've been dicking around with alts and loading up Pavlov with rest XP before I try for 30, but I'll get on tonight and look for you guys for invites, if Golden isn't around etc etc.

[Goldenmean]

The full URL contains more information http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/drops/1/strain/

I'm guessing the timeline on the side there is for when they're going to tease the information, not when it's getting patched in. So sounds like contentwise we get two new zones. Blighthaven is meant to be the third part of the Grimvault and Northern Wastes is supposedly another daily zone.

Which is great and all, but as is, our existing daily zone doesn't actually offer any rewards. They yanked out the rep vendor for Crimson Badlands due to some bug and he hasn't shown back up since. I'm still doing it every night because it's as good a place to get Dominion rep as any, but it would be nice to at least see *why* I'm grinding Badlands rep before they give me another rep grind without a vendor...

And I'll look for both Stabbitha and Amiable when I'm on tonight (will probably be 7 PST or about 6 hours from now). I think both people need to be online at the same time for circle invites unfortunately, but I'll keep looking for you both. Or if you want to pester me, my 50 main is Tirith, and if I'm not on that, I'll probably be messing around with my medic, Kasao.

[Maven]

C'Thun again?

[Goldenmean]

C'Thun again?

Pretty much, yes. The Strain are veeeeerrrrry elder-gody in aesthetic.

[Feverdream]

Thank you so much for the pass.  And Signe, I do have a friend who was looking for one, so I will pass yours along with my thanks as well.

Trivial detail: I'm not a "him", but it's not like you could tell that from my posts =P

If anyone has a guest pass you'd be willing to send my way, I'd really appreciate it.  I'd like to give this one a look, but from what I am reading I just can't tell whether I'd regret actually buying the game.  

Thanks. I realize that by now a lot of you have probably already used your guest passes, but I figured I'd ask just in case!

[Hawkbit]

Check your PMs and please edit your request so nobody else sends one.  Enjoy!

[Signe]

I sent him one.  Sorry.  Just pass it on to someone else.  :)

[Goldenmean]

Yeah, the more I play my 50 character, the more I feel this game needs some sort of deserter debuff stat, because it's miserable to play with PUGs and their hair trigger willingness to drop group if anything goes wrong. Here's a summary of last nights attempts at veteran adventuring with my friend.

1) Malgrave Trail - Go down the same old, same old path. 3/4 of the way down the trail to the first encounter we get a caravan member missing event. Go running around looking for him for maybe 30 seconds when someone says "You still haven't found him?" (note the implication that it's not this person's job to look), and two DPS drop. Mind you, at this point, we're still perfectly capable of getting gold, but of course by the time we replace those two DPS, we actually *have* lost a caravan member, so the replacements promptly drop upon joining. We sigh, and leave as well.

2) War of the Wilds - Actually goes reasonably, except we do too well. Someone captures an 8th totem, and so we watch in dismay as our troops manage to push through and win the match without any further direct help from us before the second objective pops, so no gold for us. We requeue with the same group because they actually seem fairly competent at least.

3) War of the Wilds again - First optional pops up and it's the "Kill the big troll" event, except that also happens to be where all of the enemy heroes are hanging out, so we fail, and of course, everyone else promptly drops, because now we could only possibly get silver.

I was all set to bitch about what an idiotic job they did with the medals on War of The Wilds also, but looking at the patch notes from last night, it seems like they actually fixed all of that (or at least are in the process of doing so). For those who haven't experienced it in its former form, it actually incentivized you for playing poorly. You couldn't capture too many flags or push too far, because then you'd win before the optional objectives popped, and those are what gave you silver/gold. So most of the match was spent standing around not actually doing anything, just waiting for those to fire off so you could discover whether or not you just wasted your last 20 minutes.

Even with those fixed though, I am not exaggerating when I say that at least 60% of my veteran adventures have included people dropping. It makes playing without a static group incredibly painful.

[01101010]

Yeah, the more I play my 50 character, the more I feel this game needs some sort of deserter debuff stat, because it's miserable to play with PUGs and their hair trigger willingness to drop group if anything goes wrong. Here's a summary of last nights attempts at veteran adventuring with my friend.

1) Malgrave Trail - Go down the same old, same old path. 3/4 of the way down the trail to the first encounter we get a caravan member missing event. Go running around looking for him for maybe 30 seconds when someone says "You still haven't found him?" (note the implication that it's not this person's job to look), and two DPS drop. Mind you, at this point, we're still perfectly capable of getting gold, but of course by the time we replace those two DPS, we actually *have* lost a caravan member, so the replacements promptly drop upon joining. We sigh, and leave as well.

2) War of the Wilds - Actually goes reasonably, except we do too well. Someone captures an 8th totem, and so we watch in dismay as our troops manage to push through and win the match without any further direct help from us before the second objective pops, so no gold for us. We requeue with the same group because they actually seem fairly competent at least.

3) War of the Wilds again - First optional pops up and it's the "Kill the big troll" event, except that also happens to be where all of the enemy heroes are hanging out, so we fail, and of course, everyone else promptly drops, because now we could only possibly get silver.

I was all set to bitch about what an idiotic job they did with the medals on War of The Wilds also, but looking at the patch notes from last night, it seems like they actually fixed all of that (or at least are in the process of doing so). For those who haven't experienced it in its former form, it actually incentivized you for playing poorly. You couldn't capture too many flags or push too far, because then you'd win before the optional objectives popped, and those are what gave you silver/gold. So most of the match was spent standing around not actually doing anything, just waiting for those to fire off so you could discover whether or not you just wasted your last 20 minutes.

Even with those fixed though, I am not exaggerating when I say that at least 60% of my veteran adventures have included people dropping. It makes playing without a static group incredibly painful.

This is the kinda shit that makes me glad I passed on this. How in the hell did the devs NOT see this as having a negative effect on grouping? Just seems fuckstupid to put that in while courting the very players who will give up as soon as something doesn't pan out.

[Spiff]

Do you think a deserter debuff would increase the chance of people not dropping from a dungeon, or increase the chance of them dropping their subscription?
Because I think most people aren't willing to put up with that kind of penalizing design anymore, certainly in an MMO. I wouldn't anyhow.

[Nebu]

They need to change the loot model in adventures and punish botting more.  Both would go a long ways.

[Ingmar]

A deserter debuff would probably do little to fix the problem, if the problem is that 'this stuff is generally too hard for PUGs but it's the content we're offering to PUGs, ho ho ho'. Deserter debuffs didn't do anything to stop people from insta-dropping from Oculus pops in WoW.

[Goldenmean]

Do you think a deserter debuff would increase the chance of people not dropping from a dungeon, or increase the chance of them dropping their subscription?
Because I think most people aren't willing to put up with that kind of penalizing design anymore, certainly in an MMO. I wouldn't anyhow.

I haven't been paying attention to WoW for this last expansion, but they haven't dropped the deserter debuff have they? Not that I'm saying that "WoW does it, so it must be right", because there's definitely a reason I haven't been paying attention, but this actually seemed like a reasonable solution to me, and as I recall, there was some mild grumbling when it was implemented, and then everyone just forgot about it.

I don't know how else to solve this, honestly, other than "Only ever grouping with people you know", which is what I plan on doing once all of my slacker friends catch up with me. Obviously designing a stick instead of a carrot isn't optimal, but I think the only carrot that would be sufficient for people is just giving them gold level rewards regardless, which completely invalidates the whole purpose of the medal system, and honestly, I like the *concept* of the medal system. Getting better loot the better you do in an instance feels right to me. The current implementation of some of the medals however really just encourage this sort of toxic behavior though.

[Goldenmean]

A deserter debuff would probably do little to fix the problem, if the problem is that 'this stuff is generally too hard for PUGs but it's the content we're offering to PUGs, ho ho ho'. Deserter debuffs didn't do anything to stop people from insta-dropping from Oculus pops in WoW.

That's not the problem, at least for adventures. Dungeons are hard. The level 20 dungeons were punishing enough that I'm just not even attempting the veteran dungeons until I've got a static group for it. Adventures, on the other hand, are actually quite easy. It's possible to get gold with only a slightly above average group with a mix of greens and blues. The problem is that there's a fair amount of RNG at play in lots of them, and the community as a whole seems to be under the impression that just giving up as soon as the possibility of purples disappears is a better use of their time than sticking it out to the end and getting some more blue upgrades that will help to mitigate future bad RNG

If these were people already in all blues and they only needed the gold level rewards, they'd be right, and that's definitely going to be a problem down the road. People in greens doing the same thing are being impatient. It's definitely largely the fault of the game for allowing this behavior, but there's a community component to it as well.

And yes, they brought this on themselves with their "ARE YOU HARDCORE? WE'RE HARDCORE. COME BE HARDCORE IN WILDSTAR!" party line. Surprise, surprise, a vast majority of people who consider themselves hardcore are raging cock-weasels who live to game your systems. As someone who considers himself fairly competent, and enjoys a challenge, but is not a miserable waste of flesh most of the time, I'm finding the community pretty grating.

[Rokal]

There already is a deserter debuff. If the group votes to disband and the majority accepts it, nobody will get the debuff. Otherwise leaving too quickly will net you a debuff preventing you from requeueing for ~10 min IIRC.

They could probably fix this by giving a cache at the end for bronze/silver that also has a chance to drop epics. You may lose your best chance at epics if you fail a gold objective but you'd still have a shot at an epic if you stuck around.

[Goldenmean]

There already is a deserter debuff. If the group votes to disband and the majority accepts it, nobody will get the debuff. Otherwise leaving too quickly will net you a debuff preventing you from requeueing for ~10 min IIRC

Huh. Thanks for the info. It must be intelligent enough to not apply to you when you drop after other people already have, because I've never seen that. If that's actually working properly it makes these people's behavior even more baffling, because dropping at the beginning of Malgrave can save you quite a bit of time, but dropping after the first optional objective has already fired off in War of the Wilds means there's only going to be about 10 minutes left regardless.

[sam, an eggplant]

the problem is that 'this stuff is generally too hard for PUGs but it's the content we're offering to PUGs, ho ho ho'.

That is exactly the problem, and the devs have no intentions to change it. NCsoft may have a different opinion, though. We'll see in a month or two when subscriptions start to fall off a cliff.

[Spiff]

well my perspective comes from GW2 being the last game I pugged dungeons in, and I wouldn't have enjoyed this kind of thing there, but in this kind of 'hardcore' setting it makes more sense I guess.

They could probably fix this by giving a cache at the end for bronze/silver that also has a chance to drop epics. You may lose your best chance at epics if you fail a gold objective but you'd still have a shot at an epic if you stuck around.

That is actually the best solution I could imagine, just give it a 20/40/60% droprate or something.
Odd that such a simple and non-annoying design wasn't just implemented in a modern MMO, they're usually so good at that 

[Goldenmean]

It's not the way I'd go, personally. Just finishing adventures with a bronze is actually almost trivially easy right now. Even with "only" a 20% drop rate on the proposed purple reward cache, it would be too easy to just fail your way through the gearing process.

I'm a sucker for progression, so my platonic ideal system would be something along the lines of "You do veteran adventures and don't really have a chance of getting gold until you've geared up enough to be in mostly bronze/silver rewards, then if you're in a decent group, you might get your epics". But as is it's "You do veteran adventures, and just reroll until you luck into your purples"

[Zetor]

I think the main problem here is that there are at least two different kinds of people trying to run these endgame adventures:
1] new 50s that need pve practice / need to start gearing up, and they're fine with bronze/silver
2] 'l33t' 50s that need epics, and accept nothing below gold

So why not have two versions of the same adventure, kinda like normal/heroic (or even Rift's normal/heroic/master)? That way the 'gold or bust' people will have to do a much harder version of the dungeon, but they WILL get the gold rewards if they finish (failing to do the gold objectives results in a fail state instead of downgrading into silver). Everyone else can do the easier version that gives bronze or silver rewards.

[Goldenmean]

I'd support that change wholeheartedly, but it probably makes entirely too much sense to ever actually get implemented.

Though as an aside, I don't think adventures actually serve as a very good introduction to the dungeon experience as it stands, and I'm not sure I actually want them to. Some adventures work very differently than the strict tank/heal/dps trinity that you need to learn to deal with the punishing dungeons. Malgrave trail downright rewards everyone for running off in separate directions. You're probably going to be splitting the party to a certain extent in the Tower Defense and MOBA adventures as well. Crimelords of Whitevale has never actually popped for me, so I can't comment there.

[luckton]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGr27imHXmU

Flick video for first content drop. Good to see they kept the marketing team around post-launch.

[Nebu]

If only the game were as good as their marketing department.

[Maven]

If only the game were as good as their marketing department.

I am suddenly reminded of Firefall.

[Tannhauser]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGr27imHXmU

Flick video for first content drop. Good to see they kept the marketing team around post-launch.

When's that game coming out?  That looks like a lot of fun. 

[MisterNoisy]

Tried this on a trial code.  It's certainly a pretty game, and I like the combat, but the constant running at horrifically slow travel speeds and boring quests make it a nonstarter for $60 plus a sub.  Pity, since I can see potential there.

[Nebu]

End game has some serious issues.  

- Dungeon runs are costing money to run with high repair costs that only get more absurd with gear improvements.  Pug runs are a net loss of gold requiring you to grind or play the market to afford dungeon runs.

- Dungeon/Raid gear outperforms PvP gear in PvP.  This will outrage the PvP folks.

- Crafting still buggy.  Ran into several bugs with recipes from crafting daily vendors.

- Still no Crimson Badland faction vendor.  

- Caps on how you obtain elder gems.  

- Bots everywhere including harvest bots exploiting the z axis (as was seen in WoW cataclysm release in droves).  

I'm done after my free month.  I'll keep an eye on changes.  I estimate F2P within the year.

[Numtini]

Dungeon runs are costing money to run with high repair costs that only get more absurd with gear improvements.  Pug runs are a net loss of gold requiring you to grind or play the market to afford dungeon runs.

That sounds in keeping with their general philosophy.

[Miasma]

As soon as wildstar's headstart began the number of bots in ESO went way down.  I assume they relocated there.

[Evildrider]

Dungeon runs are costing money to run with high repair costs that only get more absurd with gear improvements.  Pug runs are a net loss of gold requiring you to grind or play the market to afford dungeon runs.

That sounds in keeping with their general philosophy.

Hardcore.

[jakonovski]

Dungeons costing gold is pretty much where I'll draw the line. So far the game is great fun, but if fun becomes something you have to buy with grinding, then fuck off Carbine.

[Count Nerfedalot]

- Dungeon/Raid gear outperforms PvP gear in PvP.  This will outrage the PvP folks.

And quite reasonably so. And PvP gear outperforming PvE gear in PvE Dungeons/Raids would (also appropriately) outrage the PvE folks.  PvP and PvE are NOT chocolate and peanut butter and any developer who doesn't separate the balancing and gear rewards appropriately deserves to fail.  Unless of course their target market (and budget) is for that small sub-niche of folks who enjoy both (in the same game, with the same characters, at the same time, etc) equally.

[Morfiend]

Its like every company has to relearn the same shit over and over again. Except maybe Arena Net.

[Nevermore]

That's ok, Arena Net is also clueless in their own way.