Overtuned Encounters
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| My guns...they go here. |
On Stormtalon, any early death in a knockback phase, DPS or otherwise, dooms your group to failure if one of you isn't terrifically over-geared. If you're lucky enough that it wasn't your healer or tank who died, you'll either not be able to do enough DPS to down him before your healer runs out of focus or you'll not have enough interrupts after the knockback phase. For Drokk it's usually either the homing bomb phase, particularly during the switches, or the tether + suppression wave phases. I could go on but I'll spare you the details. If you've played the game and done these encounters, you already know what I'm talking about. I'd leave some fun youtube wipes here if you haven't played the game, but apparently Wildstar is too hardcore for that.
Some of these dances are so complicated with margins so thin that any early death for groups not stupidly overgeared ensures a wipe. It's hard on tanks and healers in particular but there are no unskilled positions in Wildstar. I strongly suspect that if these had been loosened up early in the game's history that it would have prevented quite a large number of rage quits. Most of the group I played with quit as a direct result of one or more of these overtuned encounters and that sucks more than might be obvious. More in a bit!
Antisocial Design
At launch, a huge number of the game's designs were antisocial. What do I mean by that? Any feature, encounter, reward structure, or otherwise confluence of mechanics in your design that causes players to actively screw other players out of anything (especially time!) is an antisocial design. Wildstar had these in spades at launch and though they've fixified some of them, many still remain.
The first and most egregious example is "gold or bust". Adventures and dungeons at launch had a guaranteed epic if you completed them well enough to score a gold medal. Gold dungeons were and still are largely out of reach for most folks, but gold adventures are fairly routine. For many of these, player deaths aren't a strict failure case but this wasn't well understood due to bad or malicious information. Spend 30 minutes in queue as a DPS, finally get a pop, then watch some chump quit at the first death with others sure to follow. "Gold or bust." Better yet, wait the same 30 minutes then watch one or more players quit because you're the same class and they'd have to roll on their epic. Great. Not everyone who played was like this for certain but enough were that it was a frustrating experience a lot of the time. Carbine's fix was to make epics extremely rare even if you did get gold, so other than doing attunement runs for your pals and trying to avoid daily zones to cap elder gems, no one really runs these anymore.
This gets worse for dungeon runs. Up until recently, there was no real reason to go back and try for a gold dungeon run once you were past the dungeon step of attunement. Because of the difficulty of completing dungeons, a lot of folks swear them off altogether even when this means their friends are left in the cold. It's easy to say "find better friends" but in practice the rewards should be better to offset some of the frustrations of teaching the dance and wiping over and over (and over and over and over) to yet another set of folks.
One of the more controversial pieces of antisocial design is in PvP. I did not do much PvP in Wildstar (odd for me) and I kind of dodged a bullet on that one. All damage is basically halved for normal gear to get around the silly mudflation plaguing most games. Instead you get PvP ratings from special PvP gear for offense and defense which can raise the effectiveness of both. The results are almost comical. Get into a PvP match with no PvP gear at 50 and you will eat dirt with alarming frequency. The discrepancy between PvP geared folks and everyone else is night and day even though they've gone through and retuned it a bunch of times.
Rewarding the victors to an extent that hurts competition is what we used to call "Counterstrike Syndrome". It's named after the game where in a multi-map rotation the winners can buy much better guns exaggerating skill differential between teams. Wildstar has this in spades where those who spend a lot of time in PvP who are already more experienced also get piles of PvP gear which puts them head and shoulders above folks testing the waters. (An example of this idea well executed is GW2's structured PvP for interested parties.) Earlier levels are less bad since the cap on PvP currency is small and gear is replaced often. At level cap, however, the gear differential can be so high that there's no real way to obtain that gear for new players except by being worked over for days on end. This is always bad but it's especially bad in a game bleeding players. Cannibalizing newcomers with awful introductory experiences ensures that the mode will die.
The Live Team
Most of the game's shortcomings were as obvious as a boss's telegraphs. Yet it seems that the designers and live team either weren't aware of it, didn't want to do anything about it, or couldn't do anything about it. Determining which of these is the most tragic is left as an exercise for the reader. So far, we've barely scratched the surface of the brokenness, most of which should never have seen the light of day.
Solutions to bugs, especially balance issues, were very late and often arrived in giant batches. Carbine's development cycle rolled small important fixes and tweaks into much larger drops with new content which unduly delayed them. Content drops, when they arrived, came without time on the public test realm (PTR) sometimes completely unannounced and often very, very broken. Hotfixes have been fairly common after a big drop and often even the things that were known to be broken in whatever PTR versions were available were still patched to live regardless. Sometimes the fixes (even the correct ones!) were worse than the issues they were trying to resolve.
The fabled "Drop 3" which comes with many (many) fixes some new content, and yet another serious rebalancing apparently dropped within the last few weeks. (I've not been playing so I'm not entirely certain.) We hadn't seen a reasonable set of fixes since August and even that one was both small and broken. Gamma Rays anyone? Players are fickle and won't wait around forever for you to fix your broken game, especially when there's a sub attached and even more especially when your fixes come with even more brokenness.
Carbine's live development process has the trifecta, then. Their changes are late, often "fixing" the wrong things, and often with serious game breaking bugs or further worse design. A slate of firings and public figures quitting paint a dark picture of the remaining development effort which further reinforces the notion that the game is dying, true or otherwise. This is no way to run a live team.
The Roster Boss
The roster boss is ultimately the winner in any game but Wildstar, through some combination of its foibles and its demographic, lost players at an alarming rate. You usually see a fairly dramatic dropoff at the 1 month, 2 month, 3 month and 6 month billing cycles. After that it plateaus for a while with upward spikes when new content is released. By my estimation Wildstar halved by the end of the first month and halved again at the end of the second and third months. I played on a low population server before the merges and by the end of that third month even the capital city was nearly a ghost town.
Eventually Carbine announced "megaservers" which basically rolled all the servers sharing a ruleset in a territory (except RP servers--sorry guys) onto the same server. At the same time they opened up free transfers to a couple of the larger servers. Many servers who were already on the ropes, mine included, crashed and crashed hard. People left in droves to the more populated servers which broke economies, guilds, and communities. This is dicey at the best of times and I honestly think that free transfers plus the four-ish weeks that it took for megaservers to arrive (that's pretty close to forever in internet time) did more damage than good.
This brings us to one of the worst parts. When you lose a member of your team, it's a big deal. This is someone you probably learned those dances with who knows how your group operates and who, if you're reasonably successful, plays at a high level. You cannot slot a rookie and expect to have the same success. Gearing issues aside, the game is just plain too complicated and after a couple cycles of teaching new folks to dance it starts seeming more like work than it does play. Once enough key people leave you stop being able to make any progress and after that, it's hard to keep playing. This is what ultimately broke the game for me so I feel especially ranty about it.
What's worse is that this wasn't just my experience. I spent months trying to coordinate a multi-guild alliance like we had in WoW almost a decade ago and every guild had the same experience: healthy numbers to start with a steep drop off after two or three months. If you weren't inviting anyone who still drew breath, you were dying. Once guilds stopped being able to make progress they broke up with a large portion on of their members never to be seen again which further depleted the pool.
My best theory is that people bolted once they hit level cap and started banging their heads against attunement. At release in WoW, leveling to cap took months and there were very few brick walls. In Wildstar, leveling to cap takes a tiny fraction of this and brick walls come early and often. This is awfully similar to what I observed in SWTOR. I think that short solo content to cap with a de-emphasis on grouping hurts the longevity of these kinds of games because there isn't sufficient time or reason to build lasting relationships. Without lasting relationships you can't have long-lived social games. MMO design in this day and age is pushing toward more streamlined and casual experiences, Wildstar included, which effectively reduces their stickiness and may be a death knell for the genre. As a fan of these kinds of games, I have never wanted to be wrong more.
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| It's as fun as it looks. |
I'm reminded a lot of Vanguard which had a terrible launch but despite its flaws was actually a very good game. The industry and gamers alike desperately need more games like Wildstar. As a fan of the genre and the biz, seeing a game with so much promise fail so quickly is very, very hard.
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