Wildstar: The Bad

As not-so-subtly alluded to in the previous post, not all is well in Nexus.  Big surprise, right?  Some of it is downright awful but we'll save those for last.  These are the bad things, not necessarily game breaking, but frustrating and a mar on an otherwise very good game.


Death Taunts
This one's easy:  every time you die, an announcer taunts you.  Every. Freaking.  Time.  If things are good and spirits are high these are sometimes amusing.  "If you like living so much, why do you keep dying, hmm?"  When things are down and you're frustrated, not so much.  You might wipe dozens of times trying to learn the dance for a particular encounter.  "You just be tired of dying over and over again.  Dead tired, heh.  Get it?  Ahahaha!  Dead tired."  The group I played with wiped for three weeks on the final boss of the first dungeon alone.  It got very old very quickly.

This is one of the few writing and style missteps in the game and it's a doozy.  "Aw, what a shame, I planned such a lovely funeral for you." This doesn't make the game better and poking an angry bear doesn't seem so smart.  "Do you have a death wish?  So do I!  I wish you'd stop coming here!"  I don't have any statistics to back this up (not like Carbine had a survey of why people quit for the first few months) but I suspect a nonzero number of people bailed because they got sick of hearing these.  "Maybe you should take the hint."  Don't kick your players when they're down.

I'll just just leave this here for the morbidly curious.  (I couldn't help myself!)

The UI

We interrupt this rant for a pretty picture.

Wildstar's UI isn't outstanding. It misses the mark about as much as Rift hit the mark so many years ago.  On top of being slow, it's also clunky and without much consistency.  As someone who's worked on MMO UIs in the past, I know that it's a high cost and low reward kind of thing but I can't help but feel that Carbine could have tried just a little harder.

One example that caused me great consternation was that mail isn't always available.  Mail in the game works in two basic ways:  you can read any of it and take cash from the little icon in the bottom left. Attachments have to be grabbed from a "physical" mailbox somewhere in the world.  Settlers even have an ability to plunk one of these down for a short duration--handy!  Unfortunately, if you log in, then log out, then log in again, your mail is not available, sometimes for quite a while.  I suspect this is either to reduce bandwidth costs or intended as a way to curb the botters that plagued the game's release.  Either way it is super, super annoying for people (like me) with a lot of alts.  I suppose it could also be a bug.

The guild roster display is another example.  Until many months in, there was no way to show just the folks who were logged in.  As we'll discuss later, the roster boss looms large and it isn't uncommon to have way more people offline than online.  There is a mod to fix this and to Carbine's credit they did eventually add it to the base UI but it should have been there at launch and probably wouldn't have taken all that much effort to add.

One of the more interesting examples is one of the myriad ways that crafting can fail.  Go to a crafting station, play the little mini game, click the make-shit-happen button, watch the bar fill up and then...nothing.  No failure, no messages, no nothing.  The bar fills up and that's it.  You have to cancel out, saving your items in most cases, and try again.

The problem?  You're mounted.  It is extremely uncommon to not run around in city and overworld zones mounted.  The game (for whatever particular reason) has decided that you shouldn't be hoverboarding and crafting at the same time and fails.  Months after launch, Carbine acknowledged how annoying this was and made it so that you'll be automagically dismounted if needed when you start crafting.

New problem:  start crafting and cancel out leaving your materials at the table.  Now you can't mount at all!  The game doesn't bother telling you this.  You click the mount button and it does nothing.  At best, it just looks broken.  Notice this when you're far away from a crafting station and you'll be very sad.  Luckily most of the time you'll be able to get to housing where you can hopefully access one or more tables.  Why is it like this?

The game is playable with the base UI but it isn't good a lot of the time.  Small frictions add up over time and UI is generally one of the safer places to make changes at launch.  While they did address issues, it was painfully slow which we'll talk about in more detail later.


Mudflation
Before we really talk about mudflation we have to talk about the game's tiered content and gear.  For those of you who played, this will be dull.  Sorry.  There are five (or so) basic tiers.  In relative order of difficulty and coordination these are:  overworld questing (usually solo), adventures (5 person instance), dungeons (5 person instance), small raids (20 person instance) and large raids (40 person instance).  There's other minor bits like group mobs and world bosses and whatnot as well but those are the basic ones.

Gear rewards generally follow the same kind of pattern:  greens and blues for overworld questing, blues and epics for adventures, better blues and epics for dungeons, etc.  Crafted gear rather breaks the mold since it can be tuned to specific builds/stats/whatever within some loose guidelines.  In fact, the tuning is so good that specific bits of crafted gear outperforms many small raid rewards.  Carbine has said in the past that they didn't really expect people to min max quite like we do. I don't know why they wouldn't expect that!

Of course there's more!  Up until recently, all reasonable gear had a sometimes wildly variable number of slots of completely random types. One to four slots on blues was not uncommon.  If you were lucky you got a piece you cared about with a bunch of slots.  If you were luckier than that they were the good slots where you could stack the things you cared about.  The amount of yield for sticking a rune into a slot scales with the tier of the gear being slotted.  This effectively compounds the differences between tiers three times: base stats, rune slot count, and rune slot yield.

Remember how housing harvesting plugs gave a limitless surplus of easily gathered resources?  Clever players did exactly what you'd expect:  they burned piles of crafting materials to make that one piece with exactly the right slots and the highest slot count, dumped the reasonable results on auction, and salvaged everything else. This is part of why crafting gear performed so much better than its intended tier. Crafting resources generally aren't scarce in Wildstar and I can only imagine how much more non-scarce they would be without people constantly draining supply trying to get that one perfect piece.

You can probably see where this is going.  The difference between questing greens and crafted blues is enormous.  It is not unheard of in the circle of folks I played with to almost instantly double their effectiveness upon hitting 50 and getting decked out with new gear. Also as expected, there's a jump between adventure/dungeon blues and 20 person raid purples which is just about as big and another similarly sized jump from 20 person raid purples to 40 person raid oranges.

The effect of wild differences in gear level on the game is disastrous given the relatively straightforward damage mechanics.  A DPSer in tuned and runed crafted blues can easily double the output of an equally skilled player of the same spec and class but in unruned and untuned questing gear.  While the skill cap is higher in Wildstar than it is in many games, it isn't high enough to offset the difference in gear tiers except in the most lopsided cases.

Large differences in effectiveness trivializes the majority of the encounters in sometimes non-obvious ways. Doubling group damage halves the time spent in any encounter stage which usually translates to half the time of the dance in that phase.  Recall that most of the difficulty of an encounter is in the dance and that some of those dances are goddamn hard.  I suspect that this was at least partially done so that older content becomes easier for those who have run it a lot but Wildstar takes it to an extreme level that effectively robs itself of one of its best aspects.

Time Gates

This is a normal 'slinger Gate, not a time gate.

And then we get to the time gates--tried and true methods of keeping players occupied until more content arrives. Wildstar has a lot of them and they were even more plentiful when the game was new. Want to raid? One of the first steps is buying your key which costs slightly more elder gems than you can get in a week. Level cap early in the week? Well, you're stuck waiting (but enjoy your increased income!) until scheduled maintenance. Think you'll be clever and get a headstart on the next parts of attunement? Don't bother, they're (mostly) not retroactive.

Then there's the rest of attunement.  The process is long and can seem convoluted and at launch had steps that were pretty freakin' difficult.  Some of those steps were even broken.  The first hurdle is usually attaining the highest level of reputation with your faction. Even doing every quest and every dungeon pre-50 you still wind up thousands short.  This means that you have to grind it, except that for most people there's nothing you can effectively grind outside of dailies.  At launch there was one daily zone which is usually crowded and you might get 750 rep for clearing.  I guess it's something to do while you wait for the week to reset your elder gem count but it gets dull very quickly. Content additions after launch including new zones help but it's still a pain.

The next big hurdle is to silver all four adventures, some of which are extremely buggy.  Tempest Refuge, anyone?  A couple bits and pieces after adventures and you needed to silver dungeons.  Silvering all four dungeons entails clearing all objectives within a very tight time window unless you massively outgear dungeons at which point you don't really ever need to go back.  They did eventually change this to only needing bronze (all objectives but not timed) but I suspect that half of the game's subs were already lost by that point but we'll rant more about that in a bit.

Once dungeons are complete there are more bobs and bits and then you need to kill a mess of world bosses which are on long spawn timers and often broken.  Now you can raid!  Prior to the change to only needing bronze dungeons there were very, very few people who were attuned and a great many of the raid encounters were broken too.  This never felt necessary--why hide your best content, the reason so many people tried your game, behind such a grind?

Crafting at 50 is also heavily time gated.  Upon hitting 50 you'll receive a trivial fed-ex daily quest from your trainer in the capital city.  Completing this quest gives you between one and four Eldan data fragments.  The vast majority of times it was one with a seemingly tiny chance of giving more.  I did these diligently for the better part of nine character months split between my two 50s and saw multi-fragment rewards exactly six times.  Other crafters I played with report similar results so I don't think I'm especially unlucky in this regard.

Why the beef with data fragments?  The first few recipes you get cost one.  Do your quest and get a new recipe, fine.  The next tier of recipes are typically 7-10  data fragments.  OK, so one week and a half of turning in a trivial quest and get a new recipe.  These were typically better than the first tier so that's OK.  The tier after?  That'll be 17.  The tier after that is 21 or 28.  Four weeks of drudgery for one recipe.  I hope it's a good one!  In a given tier there are two to six recipes so completionists in some crafts still can't have a fully unlocked tree outside of buy-a-lottery-ticket-right-now levels of luck and the game has been live for half a year.  This seems excessive and unnecessary especially given how incremental most of the top crafting tiers are.

Whew.  Rough.  Next time I'll really get my rant on.  See you then!