Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[Miasma]

I liked playing through GW2 a lot, it was definitely worth the box price, but the endgame consisted of PvP which was more accurately described as PvDoor and their group content was long, boring and terrible.  There was nothing fun to do at max level.  I imagine that has been mitigated since launch.

[Threash]

The end game is actually pretty princess dress up.

[Rendakor]

I'm with Riggswolfe; the lack of any character build customization killed GW2 for me. The things it did right were either UI stuff (crafting mats to bank) or just iterations and improvements.

[Simond]

Um.

http://intothemists.com/

 

[Senses]

For me the death nail for GW2 was the lack of trinity without putting anything in its place.  I just couldn't ever enjoy dungeons in that game. 

[Senses]

For me the death nail for GW2 was the lack of trinity without putting anything in its place.  I just couldn't ever enjoy dungeons in that game.  Also...Gw2 was free.  If Wildstar had released as a f2p I bet people would love it.

Lol quoted myself instead of editing.  Oh well, point stands.

[kaid]

For me the death nail for GW2 was the lack of trinity without putting anything in its place.  I just couldn't ever enjoy dungeons in that game. 

That is the thing that really hurts gw2 for me. Grouping in a dungeon is just 5 random glass cannons leaping around like flying squirrels. If you don't have viable tanking or viable healing then everybody is just going max dps because that is the only role left.

[Venkman]

Basically, you might get tired of playing GW2 and never come back but you won't walk away saying "what the fuck were this idiots thinking?".

This^^^ 

I got tired of GW2 after 3 months, but never felt like it was a bad game or had missed opportunities.  GW2 was a well crafted game that improved the MMO landscape even if it wasn't to everyone's liking. 

This. But I'm still with Falc. I wish there was more of it. I played for two separate two month stretches, lazily maxxing out an Elementalist and a Mesmer. Though half the zones I made it through were the same, the experience felt different. Their ability to give you ad hoc abilities, to swap out your core abilities based on context (sometimes known, sometimes random), all of it in a extremely fast paced game with the mother of all "what's around this corner", public quests that were predictable enough to coordinate around and populated enough if you just wanted to jump in, and player abilities that seemed to mesh well though I never got deep into the endgame stuff (been years since I've been able to, so no slight on GW2 there).

In fact this stupid thread is making me want to go give Necro or Engy a shot 

Must resist. Need to finish Divinity!

[Father mike]

In fact this stupid thread is making me want to go give Necro or Engy a shot 

Must resist. Need to finish Divinity!

As someone who mains as an engineer, let me tell you ... just don't.

[Simond]

Engineer's a hell of a lot better than it was at launch, though.
Mind you, so are most of the classes.

[Venkman]

Cool. Necro it might be.

[Simond]

Meanwhile, talking about Wildstar, someone linked this old pre-launch article on SA: http://gamingbolt.com/wildstar-interview-raids-more-raids-and-even-more-raids-in-your-mmo

Q: From a business standpoint, what do you have to sacrifice when you have to focus on this one percent of players?

Mike Donatelli: I can tell you that, and it was money. (Laughs) Lots and lots of money. We almost doubled the size of the team in the last year. The whole idea here is we’re in it for the long haul. I understand that an MMO is about value. We’re asking you to pay a sub so we need to make sure that you have stuff to do, and I’m not lying when I say that we have multiple dungeons and raids in production as we speak, for post-launch. This isn’t going to end. We expect people to attack it, blow through the content and keep on trucking, and we’re going to keep providing more so people can do that. We had to inflate the team. We have a team that concentrates on the one percenter stuff for PVE, so we blew up the dungeon team. We wanted War Plots, which was this gigantic insane raid for PVPers, so we inflated the PVP team. We’re just keeping everyone working. We just spend a lot of money.

Q: What’s the advantage of targeting the one percenters, as you call them?

Mike Donatelli: Honestly, I’m just going to speak from my own personal experience. I like PVP. I’m going to be doing War Plots more than I am going to be doing raiding, but I’ve done some raids in WoW and there was just something really, really awesome about having some aspirational content that I could look forward to doing if I wanted to.

Having people run around in that awesome raid gear that you’re like, “Holy crap, where did you get that?” and then not seeing everyone in the city in the same stuff because you dumbed the raids down so any schmuck could do it.

 

[Surlyboi]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fLrpBLDWyCI

[Nebu]

You mean to tell me that alienating 99% of your playerbase is a bad financial strategy?  Who knew?

[Pennilenko]

When your business approach is to think of a majority of your customers as schmucks, you were destined to fail.

[Paelos]

When your business approach is to think of a majority of your customers as schmucks, you were destined to fail.

I think most MMO devs think this way though.

[Fabricated]

Of all places, CtrlAltDel kinda hits the nail on the head.

Not the comic, the comic is terrible. Buckley however pretty accurately explains why he gave up on Wildstar after being really into it and a previously relatively hardcore raider in WoW.

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/

[Miasma]

Meanwhile, talking about Wildstar, someone linked this old pre-launch article on SA: http://gamingbolt.com/wildstar-interview-raids-more-raids-and-even-more-raids-in-your-mmo

Q: From a business standpoint, what do you have to sacrifice when you have to focus on this one percent of players?

Mike Donatelli: I can tell you that, and it was money. (Laughs) Lots and lots of money. We almost doubled the size of the team in the last year. The whole idea here is we’re in it for the long haul. I understand that an MMO is about value. We’re asking you to pay a sub so we need to make sure that you have stuff to do, and I’m not lying when I say that we have multiple dungeons and raids in production as we speak, for post-launch. This isn’t going to end. We expect people to attack it, blow through the content and keep on trucking, and we’re going to keep providing more so people can do that. We had to inflate the team. We have a team that concentrates on the one percenter stuff for PVE, so we blew up the dungeon team. We wanted War Plots, which was this gigantic insane raid for PVPers, so we inflated the PVP team. We’re just keeping everyone working. We just spend a lot of money.

Q: What’s the advantage of targeting the one percenters, as you call them?

Mike Donatelli: Honestly, I’m just going to speak from my own personal experience. I like PVP. I’m going to be doing War Plots more than I am going to be doing raiding, but I’ve done some raids in WoW and there was just something really, really awesome about having some aspirational content that I could look forward to doing if I wanted to.

Having people run around in that awesome raid gear that you’re like, “Holy crap, where did you get that?” and then not seeing everyone in the city in the same stuff because you dumbed the raids down so any schmuck could do it.

 

That is a very good counter argument to "the business suits always ruin things".  The idea that somebody who unironically uses the term 'blew up' in regards to staffing was allowed to make staffing decisions is terrifying.  Also in regards to a prior comment about reading the mythical man month, these fuckwits clearly never did.

[Simond]

Of all places, CtrlAltDel kinda hits the nail on the head.

Not the comic, the comic is terrible. Buckley however pretty accurately explains why he gave up on Wildstar after being really into it and a previously relatively hardcore raider in WoW.

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/

Compared to his old B^U days, that comic is art. 

[Shatter]

"Having people run around in that awesome raid gear that you’re like, “Holy crap, where did you get that?” and then not seeing everyone in the city in the same stuff because you dumbed the raids down so any schmuck could do it."

Perfect, he got what he wanted with the only difference being there are no schumcks around to drool at the person in that gear.

[Fordel]

That's hardly surprising, it's the same logic that took Blizzard half a decade to implement an appearance tab. This idea that the masses look onto the 'raiding elite' in awe and wonder... I'm pretty fucking sure it's never been true outside of the heads of said raiding elite. Replace 'raiding elite' with <top pvp team> or <top ladder rank in thing> or anything like that.

The number of people who actually give even half a shit about any of that, is tiny and not worth listening too, even if they are really fucking loud.

[Rasix]

I don't know why you'd want to look like the raiding elite.  We were all in best-in-slot clown suits.

Tailored toward the individual and not the blob, this game could have been something.  But, there's a lot of glaring issues that a change in focus can't fix.  In the end, I just wasn't very into the world, the class design, the crafting, or the combat flow.   

[Threash]

It's like somebody spent all day baking you a shit flavored cake.  All your effort and loving care isn't going to make me eat your shit cake.

[Lantyssa]

This is what happens when you have a game For Achievers By Achievers.  It's not about fun, because everything in it has to be working towards some 'meaningful' end and harder (translation: dick-punchier) than the thing before it.

[Draegan]

I dunno, I like a game that has rare stuff in it. I dislike a game where everyone is the same, looks the same, has the same stats. But don't get me wrong though, I don't really want my future games to be all about 20-40 man raids. I'm done with raiding. I'm done with DIKU games as well.

[Surlyboi]

There's nothing wrong with rare shit. The problem is basing your entire fucking game around it. It should be the icing, not the cake.

[Ingmar]

The way to avoid everyone looking the same is to do appearance customization, it's nothing to do with gating access to gear. Everyone looked the same in vanilla WoW too, except for a few people who looked really dumb in their bug suits.

[Draegan]

There's nothing wrong with rare shit. The problem is basing your entire fucking game around it. It should be the icing, not the cake.

Well outside a few raid instances, the whole game was nearly soloable or done with 4 other people. I would call that basing your game around it.

Basing the game around it would be gating level 10 around a raid.

[KallDrexx]

The way to avoid everyone looking the same is to do appearance customization, it's nothing to do with gating access to gear. Everyone looked the same in vanilla WoW too, except for a few people who looked really dumb in their bug suits.

I'd counter that one of the appeals for people (and what makes GW2 legendaries so enticing) is that the rare gear has a very distinct look that allows you to show off.  People want gear that shows off their accomplishments (at least those pertaining to this particular discussion) and appearance customization works against that.

[Ingmar]

The literal millions of dollars people spend on cosmetics in SWTOR would seem to argue against that.

[Rasix]

GW2 legendaries are time and resource gated.  They are not some sort of uber accomplishment in that it somehow shows your in game prowess.  You can even just RMT them by buying gems and converting them into gold. 

They honestly just show that you played the game a lot and maybe got lucky with a precursor drop.  Doesn't mean you and your ingame team of badasses actually did something worth mentioning.  You get a colored yak finisher for that.

[Threash]

People DO want stuff that makes them stand out, that doesn't mean that people want a game designed about shitty hardcore raiding.  The two things have absolutely jack shit to do with each other.  You can get GW2 legendaries entirely on your own even if you have at most 5 mins to play.

[HaemishM]

*/ in crotchety old coot voice */

You know, I remember back in the days me and my posse played EQ1. We would look at some loot site whose name I forget every day to see the new postings of amazing loot gotten by high level raiders and just hope that one day we could get such great loot.

Then we discovered how long it would take, what kind of single-minded OCD fucksticks we'd have to become and we decided FUCK IT. PEACE OUT.

[Maven]

Playing the Old Republic, prestige is lofted on the player character from every NPC he meets, especially as they go along. The Jedi Consular gets the VERY FIRST LIGHTSABER EVER MADE as their weapon, that's how special snowflake they want to create in the characters.

The point? Prestige is one fo the products game designers deliver to its customers, along with that sense of empowerment. Keeping that under lock and key for the elite alienates the rest of your userbase. It was 4% of the base that did Naxxramas in vanilla WoW, right?

I mean, that's where games are going. Isolate the individual from the reality of global awareness and status, and tell them they're the best. There was an interesting passage in The Circle where a student was randomly selected from all students and, using data algorithms, found that she was #1246 out of 176,000 or something students. That student was crushed to find she wasn't the best despite being in the top 1%. I think that shows a key part of human / gamer nature.

[tazelbain]

Partying like its 1999...