Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[LC]

Has the new game shine worn off enough for everyone to cancel yet?

[Hawkbit]

I'm only playing 45 minutes a few nights a week.  I haven't seen the issues yet that others have.  I'll be subbing, but I'm not likely to see the problem content for another month or two. 

[Evildrider]

My only problem is lack of play time.  Being busy sucks.

[Goldenmean]

The Stained Glass Window housing decor item, crafted by Architects, no longer sells to the vendor for Elder Gems.

That was in the patch notes for tonight. People who took advantage of that better as hell have gotten rolled back, because that's 10+ months of grinding they saved themselves. Whoops!

At least the Crimson Badlands rep vendor is back, and apparently sells junk worse than you get from veteran adventures. I replaced a janky green helm I was wearing, but now at least I know I only need to do those if I'm falling behind on the elder gem weekly cap.

I'm still having fun with the game, but now that I'm up to the point where I need veteran dungeons instead of veteran adventures, I'm probably going to be alting until more of my friends hit 50, because doing those with PUGs... Hahahahahah, NO.

[Simond]

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

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

your friends will abandon you
your heart will explode

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

Thing is, they do already know all of this shit. They just think that the time that they (personally) were working on WoW (early TBC) was the apex of game design. PvP gear worse than PvE? Check. Heroic/Veteran dungons being essentially unpuggable gold-sinks mandatory for raid attunement? Check. Faction grinds everywhere? Check. And so on. None of this is an accident - it's how they want the game to work.

And when they're fired six months down the line and NCSoft turns it into a Pay2Win grinder before shutting down the servers in three years, they and their fans will point fingers at everything except the game design.

[Numtini]

Has the new game shine worn off enough for everyone to cancel yet?

When the attunement jpg was posted, I put in a request for a refund and got it. Does that count?

[Nija]

When the attunement jpg was posted, I put in a request for a refund and got it. Does that count?

Only if you linked the jpg as the reason for the refund request.

[Azuredream]

That jpg was actually slightly incorrect in its cockstabbiness. It says you can do the same world boss over and over and it gives credit- but that's wrong, you need to kill ten separate world bosses.

[Goldenmean]

That jpg was actually slightly incorrect in its cockstabbiness. It says you can do the same world boss over and over and it gives credit- but that's wrong, you need to kill ten separate world bosses.

Apparently it was bugged. Early guilds could just farm the same world boss over and over. That's been "fixed", except some of the bosses bug out frequently, so, yeah, now there's whining about early guilds getting a free ride. Don't you just love early MMO drama?

[jakonovski]

Tried the first dungeon with my tanky warrior. Beat the first boss until some of the puggies had to leave and the whole thing fell apart.

I didn't like the boss dynamic at all. It was 100% about dodging telegraphs, which is pretty terrible, being overly simplistic and needlessly hard (twitchy) at the same time. Also trivializes the skillbar, doesn't really matter what you spam even as a tank, just as long as you dodge shit.

fake edit: special mentions to the bad sound design, it's all a cacophony. You'd think a smart game designer would put something like a resounding CLANG sound when the boss makes everyone lose their weapons. Instead it was just a confusing "why do I have to run at these glowy blue things" moment.

real edit: I just noticed I'm not getting credit for group quests just by damaging the quest mob before it gets killed. Is it a bug or did they really fuck up group quests on purpose?

[Rasix]

Why is that a bad thing?  I'd rather not race for a mob or wait on a respawn.

[jakonovski]

Why is that a bad thing?  I'd rather not race for a mob or wait on a respawn.

I think you misread me (or I wrote funny). With this change or bug you have to formally group up and get there first or you have to wait for respawn. It went from GW2 style to old WoW.

[Rasix]

Ohh. Hmm.  I could swear you do get credit.  At least for 2-3 man mobs. I suppose if it's group 5 they strictly enforce it.  That is unfortunate.

[amiable]

Has the new game shine worn off enough for everyone to cancel yet?

I played for about 2 weeks and leveled up my medic to 25, I had a good time in PvP and an OK time in PvE, but looking at the dick punch of an endgame that would mean I would 24-7 to gear up to play in BG's and warplots I just decided it wasn't worth it to jump on that treadmill.

[Fabricated]

Awwww, Gabe is just discovering the joy of being the MT in an MMO and doing difficult content:



Given he up until recently was a self-admitted clicker and that Wildstar's PVE content starts at "Dickpuncher" difficulty- how long do you give him before he quits in a huff?

[jakonovski]

Is Penny Arcade doing product placement in their comics now?

[Fabricated]

I would say yes, defenders would say they're just drawing what their setups actually look like. Incidentally Razer gave Gabe a bunch of free shit.

[01101010]

Is Penny Arcade doing product placement in their comics now?

Better question: are you surprised? 

[jakonovski]

More like, "right, now I remember why I stopped reading them".

[Pennilenko]

My wife has played and raided in MMOs with me for a very long time, although it has been a couple of years since she was interested in playing. She was watching me do one of the level 20 dungeons with some guild members and a pick up guy. After about 15 minutes and a boss fight, she asked me if I was raiding already. She was floored when I told her it was one of the first dungeons.

[kaid]

The adventures are pretty reasonable difficulty level but the dungons are deffinately more like the TBC level wow dungeons difficulty wise with more ground stuff to dodge thrown in.


One odd thing after doing a bunch this weekend the XP for both is pretty bad compared to leveling and other than some interesting fab kit drops the loot is actually not even as good as the reputation stuff you can unlock for doing a zone. At max level they probably will be more useful but there seems little to recommend about the dungeons for leveling bad cash due to wipes, minimal gear thats side grade at best and bad xp.

[jakonovski]

Man, I just spent a few minutes running off the eastern edge of the map in Galeras. Such majestic sights, huge rolling hills of grass and rocky islands off the coast. Not a creature in sight, just the landscape and the player. Why did they have to stuff all the zones so full of shit that you can't go two steps without aggroing a mob, when they're clearly capable of making awesome vistas of the proper scale?

edit: screenshots!

[kaid]

I would agree that a lot of zones have a bit of the gw2 undead area feel of zone population density. Some it is hard and or annoying to attempt to move through zones even when mounted because it is pretty close to impossible to maneuver around without tripping off agro. This is doubly so if you are an engineer who's bots attack everything that even glances at you in an aggressive fashion.


I am wondering if some of it may not just be they have the zones spawns set high for initial month crush of levelers to make sure people are not running around just looking for stuff to kill.

[Merusk]

Is Penny Arcade doing product placement in their comics now?

Now?  I'm pretty sure it's been going on for years.

[Rasix]

Man, I just spent a few minutes running off the eastern edge of the map in Galeras. Such majestic sights, huge rolling hills of grass and rocky islands off the coast. Not a creature in sight, just the landscape and the player. Why did they have to stuff all the zones so full of shit that you can't go two steps without aggroing a mob, when they're clearly capable of making awesome vistas of the proper scale?

edit: screenshots!

My dominion character went explorer, and while I was initially put off, you do get to see some neat stuff baked into these zones.  I combined it with stalker, so the mob density isn't a massive issue, although a lot of stuff seems to look straight through it.

[Senses]

I think the difficulty of the pve content is probably the one thing that has me the most excited about this game.  I can see how the average f13 poster would be in tears though. 

[Rasix]

The spider queen is an interesting noob introduction to the difficulty in this game.  I got in a group that probably could have done it with just 4 of us, but in all 4 attempts someone would do something dumb and die in the first 2 seconds.  The underleveled spellslinger pulled it without telling anyone a few times, the warrior ate every telegraph, etc. Neither spellslinger would heal or attempt to heal.  Ended up beating it finally with a group of 5 that included a medic.   I died to white damage, because my stalker wasn't geared/specced to tank after the warrior made a mess of it.  Of course, that was one time I didn't make it out of the telegraph.  The medic was suitably annoyed.

That spider queen telegraph is a bit of a bitch, however.  It's one that follows you and a couple times that I thought I was out of it, I ended up getting hit anyways.     Very difficult to avoid instagibs are not fun.  I'm not sure I'll stay for the group PVE, unless they tone it down or I find an add-on that makes it easier for me to process visually.

[Simond]

I think the difficulty of the pve content is probably the one thing that has me the most excited about this game.  I can see how the average f13 poster would be in tears though. 

You also enjoy watching a game implode because there are never, ever enough "uber" poopsockers to actually pay the bills? 

[jakonovski]

It's really weird though, the open world content is really not hard at all compared to the dungeons. So they start up catering for normal people, then they fuck it all up by making dungeons not appealing unless you're willing to put a lot of time into them (my summer vacation ends in a week, no chance of me doing these sorts of dungeons after that). I feel the TBC comparison is a bit off, because back then you could do regular dungeons no problem with pugs. You didn't miss any dungeon content if you were a filthy casual, but if you wanted it you could sock your poop all day.

edit: and that's not even taking into account the gold/silver/bronze system. That I believe will kill this game even for poopsockers. Because people will drop or start arguing, constantly.

[HaemishM]

Is Penny Arcade doing product placement in their comics now?

Now?

[Maven]

Robert Khoo is a smart man. I fully believe he'll exploit every available opportunity for revenue to bring profit to Penny Arcade, Inc, including Mike and Jerry, and for Mike, Jerry and all the employees, it's in their interest to do what he says.

[Senses]

I think the difficulty of the pve content is probably the one thing that has me the most excited about this game.  I can see how the average f13 poster would be in tears though. 

You also enjoy watching a game implode because there are never, ever enough "uber" poopsockers to actually pay the bills? 

I prefer it to guild wars 2 dungeon mechanics yes.

[Rasix]

That's a low bar to hurdle.

edit: To be fair, I didn't dungeon crawl much in GW2 other than a few fractals.  It was not pleasant.

[Draegan]

Almost every DIKU MMO with a Trinity has easy as balls dungeons that you can faceroll through. I don't see a problem with a game with hard ones.

[jakonovski]

It's not about there being hard ones, it's about there not being any easy ones. And on top of that, the medal system drags out the same kind of problem as MOBAs: one guy fucks up, the entire team is screwed. The difference is, in Wildstar there is no penalty for leaving and no penalty for bad behavior. On top of that it seems that progress is tied to getting gold medals, so as time goes on, the less chance new level 50s (or people who play slow) have in terms of accessing content.

My prediction is that this game's community will be extraordinarily toxic within a month or two, and most non-poopsockers will be gone.