127197-how-did-this-game-do-poorly

== Content ==
			
I ask because i loved the game when it first came out, the reason i stopped playing was not due to interest but a mixture of income, real life changes, and on top of that my account was actually hacked.
 
i was sad to learn my chua medic was deleted and i couldnt get it restored, so i started leveling again.  this game is easily the funnest leveling experience of any mmo ive ever played...ever.  ive played wow, rift, tera, sacred world, guid wars 1 and 2, dc universe, in fact the only mmo thats came to the united states in the last 5 years i havent played yet is ESO, i mean i played the beta but i hear its a lot different now.
 
it really is that fun.  insanely fun.  the combat is easily the best ive experienced (ya there is tera and guild wars 2 i personally feel wildstar is just plain better).
 
the aesthetics is better then any mmo ive ever played.
 
the housing for me was and still is revolutionary for me.
 
as much as people complain about bg's/pvp its also the most fun ive had in a mmo.
 
this isnt the rose tinted glasses, this is the jaded mmo and rpg player.  the game is just damn good even without the raids.
 
or is the raids its failing point?
 
perhaps im just one of the few where wildstar hits every single sweet spot for me.  i dont know. but i loved this game, and can easily tell just from the little bit of playing on my new character and my one non deleted old character that this game is still every bit as amazing as i remember. 
 
i hope f2p treats it well, because i hope to play this game for years to come, spend money on expansions, and when i can do the signature service. 	
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Well I can tell you why 90% of my friends didn't play it: 
It cost money	It wasn't WoW	it didn't have an anime style	It's SciFi	It's an original IP	It didn't have lolis	I like it	Hardcore
I can tell you some of the reasons that people quit
 
Grind	Bugs	Optimization	PvP was a mess (still is, but has gotten a lot better)	
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I want to play but this game is still so poorly optimized :/
 
 
I can play ESO,WoW,SWTOR,LoL,HoTS and etc on high with 60FPS+ easily.
 
 
I get on this... and struggle around 25 FPS.
 
WHYYYYYY	
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I think Zombiechan pretty much covered everything except
 
9. the content is too difficult for the average player	
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I want to play but this game is still so poorly optimized :/
 
 
I can play ESO,WoW,SWTOR,LoL,HoTS and etc on high with 60FPS+ easily.
 
 
I get on this... and struggle around 25 FPS.
 
WHYYYYYY
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			Monthly sub won't work on any game besides wow because those people, literally, cannot leave.	
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Well I can tell you why 90% of my friends didn't play it:
 
It cost money	It wasn't WoW	it didn't have an anime style	It's SciFi	It's an original IP	It didn't have lolis	I like it	Hardcore
I can tell you some of the reasons that people quit
 
Grind	Bugs	Optimization	PvP was a mess (still is, but has gotten a lot better)
 
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{| class="blockquote"
I think Zombiechan pretty much covered everything except
 
9. the content is too difficult for the average player
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Well I can tell you why 90% of my friends didn't play it:
 
it didn't have an anime style
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{| class="blockquote"
I think Zombiechan pretty much covered everything except
 
9. the content is too difficult for the average player
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Mhh.. I think the content is not too difficult at all (it is just challenging to me). The learning curve is too bad, though. As a new player it's very hard to get familiar with the speed of reaction you need in Veteran Dungeons. Well, they did protogames to learn things but I think this game needs more elements which show how to interrupt in a group etc.
 
@zombiechan made my day!	
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1.hardcore mentality..and too hard content for most players
2. *cupcake* poor pvp
3. housing is lackluster for the majority of players. 99% of ppl are unable to build anything that looks ok'ish...and the ones that are able to make it should rather get payed to do it rather than waste their effort on Free-work
4. Apart from Action combat there is nothing realy new about the game.....
5. Attunement that in all other games died out with the dinosaurs	
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3. housing is lackluster for the majority of players. 99% of ppl are unable to build anything that looks ok'ish...and the ones that are able to make it should rather get payed to do it rather than waste their effort on Free-work
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{| class="blockquote"
I think Zombiechan pretty much covered everything except
 
9. the content is too difficult for the average player
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Wat. o.o;
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I disagree with that and replace it with this
 
9. Players refused to learn content that took time to learn but is easily doable by even below average players as long as they put effort into learning.
 
 
Running GA, is not hard now, it was when I was first learning it but now I can run GA halfassed and barely even try, and goof off by playing without a UI for shits and giggles.
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Going to cross post this since it is the same topic. Didn't want to paste a giant message on this forum and hog up space. Just add optimization to the list of why it didn't do well. Luckily a ton of this stuff was changed for the better.  :lol:. Which would be it's own separate list.A summary of why it didn't do well.Edit: Added spoiler version for non-reddit peeps.
 
BETA was somewhat successful, but in the shadows guilds were testing raids. Carbine ignored a ton of important feedback provided by the same guilds they asked to test things because they "Wanted to stick to their design choices #Hardcore". Causing raids to be gigantic widely untested mess when people finally got there.
Release was insanely unstable (as most MMO launches are). People who bought a copy for the 'name reservation' were met with crashed out services that cause them not to to able to reserve anything until 48+ hours later. To make up for that they gave people more boom boxes to compliment the ones they got from BETA. Which were full of RNG terrible prizes.
Players were provided with a 3-day headstart. They could not play it due to servers constantly crashing from a playerbase so high you would have never thought we were talking about Wildstar. On top of that when you did finally get in you were likely met with a login queue. Login queues weren't too big of a deal when you finally got it in. Just had to make your character automatically move so you never lost your place and got stuck in a 6-7 hour queue time.
The game also launched content at the same time as other huge games causing it to be overshadowed.
Don't get it wrong though. Not many people cared specifically about some of those things. This is a story of a ton of failures adding up.
Finally landing inside the game. Players began to notice how much server instability the game had. Zones crashing. Improper instancing. Mobs bugging out entirely because of hit-box issues. Important quest mobs that would bug and stay dead or "invincible" forever. Which carbine had no way of fixing besides just telling people to try another instance.
The second you started your character you were met with a massive amount of UI bugs that caused certain things to constantly make noise or cause assets to appear and permanently cover sections of your screen. This was doubled with constant error messages during combat or questing.
Finally getting off the ship most players were met with either a unique questing experience. Or a bland copy-paste one. A lot of the quests were malfunctioning. Quest mobs as I mentioned were bugging out.
Getting to your first dungeon was a blast. They kicked your ass. Ton of fun to figure out. Finally a good moment! But then...
PVP was a huge mess. Constant UI errors and broken exploitable mechanics served as a fast way to level but a disappointment with the game.
At max level these issues only continued to get worse. Constant win-trading. Exploits. Class imbalances. It quickly drained the PVP community of it's player-base. Simply because carbine had no idea how to handle it. So, they didn't do anything.
Warplots were a mess. They later showed that with their current system they would quickly become forgotten content. Despite being a large reason from youtube video hype that people wanted to join the game.
Now onto PVE. Adventures were buggy as all hell. The attunement was also buggy as all hell. Passed the initial wave of players veteran dungeons became a nightmare. Because of how much harder these were with the gear people had. (Comparatively much less DPS vs today's class changes as well). The timer became a race. The run ever going "Somewhat" bad was an instant disband. This is what filtered out a lot of the more relaxed player-base who just wanted to do them for fun.
You couldn't even buy your key to start attuning because they gated it behind a time wall. Elder Gems were a terrible system at first.
The raids were largely untested. Kuralak had insane bugs that caused you to crash-out and the entire raid to wipe. This was back when you did every phase of kuralak with barely enough DPS to beat the "Enrage" mechanic. Phagemaw had an issue on wipes where he would permanently lock people out of the room until they reset the instance. Forcing raids to re-clear the entire hallway of mobs after every attempt. Council sometimes would not properly do their mid phases. Ohmna was a buggy piece of shit.
Finally, people cleared GA. Double your raid to 40 players from merging with other guilds or an insane amount of recruiting. Feeling good. Now onto this gigantic progression wall that is system daemons. System daemons successfully managed to kill 75% of the guilds that progressed on it. It was the very first boss of datascape. There was no "Skipping to mini-bosses for loot". There was no "Single add room". The boss was insanely brutal. Which in retrospect was what everyone wanted right? It's just a shame the only available fight of the entire instance was a gigantic progression wall.
Finally down system daemons, Met with gloomclaw. Oh gloomclaw. The murderer of morale. The fight was constantly changed because albeit the BETA testing guilds did on the raids. Carbine felt they could have players test the game live for them. So they made untested changes to Gloomclaw that they would constantly push out live and force guilds to test and re-progress on. This caused a lot of the top end guilds to leave. Who wants to constantly test a game live when the company refuses to listen to consider your feedback?
Get passed gloomclaw, head to elemental pairs. Some of the pairs were fun. The others just didn't work at all. More live testing was constantly done to these pairs causing guilds to re-progress certain aspects of the fight they already had down.
Now onto items. The gear was terrible in this game. The itemization was terrible. There was no rune adding or rune rerolling. You had an ohmna weapon with 1 life slot. Your friend had an ohmna weapon with 5 fire slots. You had to farm these rare items out to get any sort of "decent" rune slots on them. It wasn't just raid gear either. A ton of the stuff from adventures and crafting were BIS. Causing players to dump countless hours into that content to get BIS.
Meanwhile just about everything from dungeons was crap. There was no renown or glory gear to help bridge the gaps. You geared up from crafting and adventures.
GA gear was okay. Some upgrades. Tons of feedback from players about how stats were really poorly done. Stat designer said "TBH i'm not even sure how some of these stats work with these classes".
DS gear was something you constantly vendored because a ton of it was a downgrade compared to crafting gear.
Oh.. and the gear that wasn't gated behind RNG drop chance raid content. Was time-gated behind Elder Gems. Not only did you have to unlock it. But you had to wait behind a time window for an item that might not be an upgrade because it ends up with 1-slot. Instead of 3-4. So to get a 3-4 you had to constantly buy them. Which meant extending the time windows every time.
There were not a ton of ways to get AMP/Ability points like there are today. So most people were grinding a ton of rep. Which was as fun as it sounds. You couldn't max out your character without repeating those long, painful, sometimes buggy grinds.
Alt-characters were out of the question because the long process you had to do on your main? You also had to do that on every alt character. There was no "GA key" that gave you attunement to DS at the click of a button.
Wrap all this up with a company that was stubborn on the majority of it's feedback from players. What they were not stubborn with they ignored because they had no fix for it. Nor an idea what to tell the community. The attitude also sometimes came off as "No, that idea is bad. We're making decisions we know are right".
Turns out valuing your dreamland game design choices over customer feedback would cause the playerbase to quickly dwindle. the company was forced to make changes on not only it's employees but it's way of doing just about everything. They closed a ton of servers and implemented megaservers because of the small amount of population left.
Then they opened some really weird one-way transfer(Funnel sytem) from PVP Megaserver to PVE Megaserver. Thus causing all of the 40-man guilds to move to the PVP server for recruitment issues. Because PVE server players could not go to PVP servers. Thus causing the PVP server to completely die off. (Still is a ghost town). Turns out they were not done with bad decision making just yet.
As carbine team got smaller. Employees were let go/quitting and the problems continued. Finally a ray of light shined on the game and Carbine started to fix everything according to player feedback. Raiding, Itemization, Gearing up, Maxing out, PVP, Open server transfers to BOTH megaservers. The game is really starting to look up again. But unfortunately could no longer support a sub model (despite players starting to slowly return) and was forced to go F2P. Most people wouldn't pay for the subscription because of their previous experiences and the games reputation.
Going F2P. People don't have to invest money so they feel more inclined to give the game a second chance. Now Carbine just have to continuously make good decisions as they have been in recent months. Continue making the game fantastic.
_______________________________May have missed 1-2 things. But writing this has truly reminded me why I love this game. It has come so so far from it's hardships. The company has learned so much about how to handle a playerbase. Fixed so many issues. I'm confident that it's second launch can be a success if they keep up this improved path with the game. Improved decision making.
Recent content has been fantastic. Dear god PVP is finally a thing again. Raids are working. I hope they keep that quality up and rebuild. It's been a pleasure seeing it grow._______________________________
Tl;dr Game make many many bad choices but then through hardships learns how to make many many good choices. Game loveable again. 
 	
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Yeah, let's blame the players for the game's fault. That's worked so well for us last time!
 
The problem with dungeons is twofold: they are difficult and unrewarding. Most players go into it, wipe a lot of times because everything is very unforgiving, lose a lot of their free leisure time and then at the end they got the RNG to bless or screw over them. Once they added glory things became better but, again, they were kind of late with that mechanic.
The problem wasn't just the ammount of effort players were expected to put: the problem was the rewards weren't fit for a lot of players. For a lot of them, they never got to see the rewards because man, we wiped so much and all I'm going to get is a piece of gear and maybe a decor? Forget that.
 
EDIT: Cheetos's link is also a good summary.	
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Leiji Matsumoto, Rumiko Takahashi and Hayao Miyazaki. 
 
You sir have just earned my seal of approval!  ;) 	
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			Well said Cheetos. Amazing how many things you listed people put up with for so long. I didn't, I held on till November-ish and bailed. Just came back a month ago. Game is looking up now though. Here's hoping it continues to improve as it has recently.	
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Cheetos speaks truth. I've always loved Wildstar—I was never going to leave—but things really have gotten substantially better lately. The game seems to be moving in the right direction, and I have high hopes.
 
And now it's going to be so much easier to get friends to try it out. Looking forward to that. lol	
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1. IMO the leveling experience gets very tedious. This is true in most MMO's however other MMO's you can split this up with dungeons or PVP. In Wildstar they never pop so boredom sets in.
 
2. Rewards are lackluster and carbine doesn't really know how to handle them. Why run adventures or dungeons below 50 if you get worse XP than questing and poor gear. If it was just the poor gear fine but worse XP and poor gear ? nah.
 
3. Optimisation, my first stab at Wildstar was with a PC that could achieve above 60 FPS in basically any other game on high graphics but not in Wildstar. I had to get a new beefcake PC in order to find it acceptable.
 
4. The community at launch was sludge. It was gold reward or gtfo, dungeons constantly dispanded and new players were isolated.
 
5. 0-50 live stream was a joke, sorry but it was.
 
6. Raid gear, it makes the rest of the game pointless. "but you can totes take it off guise" no. They need some sort of level down mechanic, not too harsh but enough to stop you one shotting everything in the newer areas.
 
7. Attunement. Boring.
 
8. Dailies. Boring
 
9. World bosses need looking at, they shouldn't just be for attunement and should give some nice gear.
 
10. Very small last thing - the AFK timer that disconnects you is far too short, in FFXIV I can leave it for half the day and my character is still stood there. In Wildstar I make some toast D/C. Make a drink D/C. Sneeze D/C. Coupled with the authenticator it ends up getting frustrating.	
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No game can live up to the hype that players create for it in their own minds. 
 
But the main reason WildStar didn't get traction is almost solely:
 
Players had too much equity elsewhere, likely WoW, and were afraid to give it up. 
 
It's extremely hard to pull someone away from all of their progression and achievements and social struct, even even if it's a better product. Same reason a company like Google couldn't even make a dent in Facebook - users had too much equity built up on Facebook, not because G+ wasn't better.
 
Everything else becomes a barrier to breaking through #1... little bugs, difficulty of reaching success, controls, balance, perceived grind, whatever. These small nitpicks feed back into the subconscious position established above.
 
This is why, for all I dislike free-to-play models, getting more players to try the game that haven't yet (and there are a lot!) is huge... even for returning players, though that's not the same desirable audience IMO. Players are more ready to give that equity up, and so their mindset and approach to trying new games like WildStar. 
 
WildStar, ESO, SW:TOR, etc are not bad games, in fact they're quite excellent... but that's not the reason they didn't achieve initial expectations.	
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There are players out there that would play the game Carbine originally envisioned, technical difficulties aside. The question is are there enough to actually support a game with Wildstar's budget? It seems the answer is no.
 
Carbine does some things well. Reacting quickly isn't one of them. This isn't always a bad thing, but prevented them from addressing the disparity between who they designed the game for and their actual customer base. They've made good adjustments, but too late.
 
I wouldn't call Wildstar a failure, yet. The direction the Carbine was taking during beta and at launch definitely was, considering all the variables that were in place.
 
This is hardly the end-all, be-all of the reasons why Wildstar struggled even more so than other games. It's just what strikes me first.	
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CheetosMascot basically won the thread. I'd just emphasize how terrible the itemization was; Spellslingers were getting pistols with tank stats on them. And the constant flow of untested changes was just nuts. It was like they were afraid if they got feedback they'd have to scrap things because they'd be forced to admit that people hated the ideas, so they tried to ram stuff down people's throats instead. Never a smart move when the person receiving the ramming can just get up and walk away, because they will and they did.
 
But like Cheetos said the game is in a much more fun place now.	
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Players had too much equity elsewhere, likely WoW, and were afraid to give it up. 
 
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It did badly not because of bugs, but of egos..... 
 
The game is one of the most challenging I have played, I have not done dungeons or group content as challenging as Wildstar (and fun!) and I honestly believe a lot of people left purely because their ego got crushed by wiping for an hour in SSM (or failing to get silver for the attunement).	
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Going to cross post this since it is the same topic. Didn't want to paste a giant message on this forum and hog up space. Just add optimization to the list of why it didn't do well. Luckily a ton of this stuff was changed for the better.  :lol:. Which would be it's own separate list.
 
A summary of why it didn't do well.
Edit: Added spoiler version for non-reddit peeps.
 
 
BETA was somewhat successful, but in the shadows guilds were testing raids. Carbine ignored a ton of important feedback provided by the same guilds they asked to test things because they "Wanted to stick to their design choices #Hardcore". Causing raids to be gigantic widely untested mess when people finally got there.
Release was insanely unstable (as most MMO launches are). People who bought a copy for the 'name reservation' were met with crashed out services that cause them not to to able to reserve anything until 48+ hours later. To make up for that they gave people more boom boxes to compliment the ones they got from BETA. Which were full of RNG terrible prizes.
Players were provided with a 3-day headstart. They could not play it due to servers constantly crashing from a playerbase so high you would have never thought we were talking about Wildstar. On top of that when you did finally get in you were likely met with a login queue. Login queues weren't too big of a deal when you finally got it in. Just had to make your character automatically move so you never lost your place and got stuck in a 6-7 hour queue time.
The game also launched content at the same time as other huge games causing it to be overshadowed.
Don't get it wrong though. Not many people cared specifically about some of those things. This is a story of a ton of failures adding up.
Finally landing inside the game. Players began to notice how much server instability the game had. Zones crashing. Improper instancing. Mobs bugging out entirely because of hit-box issues. Important quest mobs that would bug and stay dead or "invincible" forever. Which carbine had no way of fixing besides just telling people to try another instance.
The second you started your character you were met with a massive amount of UI bugs that caused certain things to constantly make noise or cause assets to appear and permanently cover sections of your screen. This was doubled with constant error messages during combat or questing.
Finally getting off the ship most players were met with either a unique questing experience. Or a bland copy-paste one. A lot of the quests were malfunctioning. Quest mobs as I mentioned were bugging out.
Getting to your first dungeon was a blast. They kicked your ass. Ton of fun to figure out. Finally a good moment! But then...
PVP was a huge mess. Constant UI errors and broken exploitable mechanics served as a fast way to level but a disappointment with the game.
At max level these issues only continued to get worse. Constant win-trading. Exploits. Class imbalances. It quickly drained the PVP community of it's player-base. Simply because carbine had no idea how to handle it. So, they didn't do anything.
Warplots were a mess. They later showed that with their current system they would quickly become forgotten content. Despite being a large reason from youtube video hype that people wanted to join the game.
Now onto PVE. Adventures were buggy as all hell. The attunement was also buggy as all hell. Passed the initial wave of players veteran dungeons became a nightmare. Because of how much harder these were with the gear people had. (Comparatively much less DPS vs today's class changes as well). The timer became a race. The run ever going "Somewhat" bad was an instant disband. This is what filtered out a lot of the more relaxed player-base who just wanted to do them for fun.
You couldn't even buy your key to start attuning because they gated it behind a time wall. Elder Gems were a terrible system at first.
The raids were largely untested. Kuralak had insane bugs that caused you to crash-out and the entire raid to wipe. This was back when you did every phase of kuralak with barely enough DPS to beat the "Enrage" mechanic. Phagemaw had an issue on wipes where he would permanently lock people out of the room until they reset the instance. Forcing raids to re-clear the entire hallway of mobs after every attempt. Council sometimes would not properly do their mid phases. Ohmna was a buggy piece of shit.
Finally, people cleared GA. Double your raid to 40 players from merging with other guilds or an insane amount of recruiting. Feeling good. Now onto this gigantic progression wall that is system daemons. System daemons successfully managed to kill 75% of the guilds that progressed on it. It was the very first boss of datascape. There was no "Skipping to mini-bosses for loot". There was no "Single add room". The boss was insanely brutal. Which in retrospect was what everyone wanted right? It's just a shame the only available fight of the entire instance was a gigantic progression wall.
Finally down system daemons, Met with gloomclaw. Oh gloomclaw. The murderer of morale. The fight was constantly changed because albeit the BETA testing guilds did on the raids. Carbine felt they could have players test the game live for them. So they made untested changes to Gloomclaw that they would constantly push out live and force guilds to test and re-progress on. This caused a lot of the top end guilds to leave. Who wants to constantly test a game live when the company refuses to listen to consider your feedback?
Get passed gloomclaw, head to elemental pairs. Some of the pairs were fun. The others just didn't work at all. More live testing was constantly done to these pairs causing guilds to re-progress certain aspects of the fight they already had down.
Now onto items. The gear was terrible in this game. The itemization was terrible. There was no rune adding or rune rerolling. You had an ohmna weapon with 1 life slot. Your friend had an ohmna weapon with 5 fire slots. You had to farm these rare items out to get any sort of "decent" rune slots on them. It wasn't just raid gear either. A ton of the stuff from adventures and crafting were BIS. Causing players to dump countless hours into that content to get BIS.
Meanwhile just about everything from dungeons was crap. There was no renown or glory gear to help bridge the gaps. You geared up from crafting and adventures.
GA gear was okay. Some upgrades. Tons of feedback from players about how stats were really poorly done. Stat designer said "TBH i'm not even sure how some of these stats work with these classes".
DS gear was something you constantly vendored because a ton of it was a downgrade compared to crafting gear.
Oh.. and the gear that wasn't gated behind RNG drop chance raid content. Was time-gated behind Elder Gems. Not only did you have to unlock it. But you had to wait behind a time window for an item that might not be an upgrade because it ends up with 1-slot. Instead of 3-4. So to get a 3-4 you had to constantly buy them. Which meant extending the time windows every time.
There were not a ton of ways to get AMP/Ability points like there are today. So most people were grinding a ton of rep. Which was as fun as it sounds. You couldn't max out your character without repeating those long, painful, sometimes buggy grinds.
Alt-characters were out of the question because the long process you had to do on your main? You also had to do that on every alt character. There was no "GA key" that gave you attunement to DS at the click of a button.
Wrap all this up with a company that was stubborn on the majority of it's feedback from players. What they were not stubborn with they ignored because they had no fix for it. Nor an idea what to tell the community. The attitude also sometimes came off as "No, that idea is bad. We're making decisions we know are right".
Turns out valuing your dreamland game design choices over customer feedback would cause the playerbase to quickly dwindle. the company was forced to make changes on not only it's employees but it's way of doing just about everything. They closed a ton of servers and implemented megaservers because of the small amount of population left.
Then they opened some really weird one-way transfer(Funnel sytem) from PVP Megaserver to PVE Megaserver. Thus causing all of the 40-man guilds to move to the PVP server for recruitment issues. Because PVE server players could not go to PVP servers. Thus causing the PVP server to completely die off. (Still is a ghost town). Turns out they were not done with bad decision making just yet.
As carbine team got smaller. Employees were let go/quitting and the problems continued. Finally a ray of light shined on the game and Carbine started to fix everything according to player feedback. Raiding, Itemization, Gearing up, Maxing out, PVP, Open server transfers to BOTH megaservers. The game is really starting to look up again. But unfortunately could no longer support a sub model (despite players starting to slowly return) and was forced to go F2P. Most people wouldn't pay for the subscription because of their previous experiences and the games reputation.
Going F2P. People don't have to invest money so they feel more inclined to give the game a second chance. Now Carbine just have to continuously make good decisions as they have been in recent months. Continue making the game fantastic.
_______________________________
May have missed 1-2 things. But writing this has truly reminded me why I love this game. It has come so so far from it's hardships. The company has learned so much about how to handle a playerbase. Fixed so many issues. I'm confident that it's second launch can be a success if they keep up this improved path with the game. Improved decision making.
Recent content has been fantastic. Dear god PVP is finally a thing again. Raids are working. I hope they keep that quality up and rebuild. It's been a pleasure seeing it grow.
_______________________________
Tl;dr Game make many many bad choices but then through hardships learns how to make many many good choices. Game loveable again. 
 
 
 
 
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CheetosMascot basically won the thread. I'd just emphasize how terrible the itemization was; Spellslingers were getting pistols with tank stats on them. And the constant flow of untested changes was just nuts. It was like they were afraid if they got feedback they'd have to scrap things because they'd be forced to admit that people hated the ideas, so they tried to ram stuff down people's throats instead. Never a smart move when the person receiving the ramming can just get up and walk away, because they will and they did.
 
But like Cheetos said the game is in a much more fun place now.
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Disagree. I spent thousands of dollars on both GW2 and SWTOR, huge amounts of time, thousands of achievements and titles, gear grind and legendaries. I still moved to Wildstar and still stayed here...
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No game can live up to the hype that players create for it in their own minds. 
 
But the main reason WildStar didn't get traction is almost solely:
 
Players had too much equity elsewhere, likely WoW, and were afraid to give it up. 
 
It's extremely hard to pull someone away from all of their progression and achievements and social struct, even even if it's a better product. Same reason a company like Google couldn't even make a dent in Facebook - users had too much equity built up on Facebook, not because G+ wasn't better.
 
Everything else becomes a barrier to breaking through #1... little bugs, difficulty of reaching success, controls, balance, perceived grind, whatever. These small nitpicks feed back into the subconscious position established above.
 
This is why, for all I dislike free-to-play models, getting more players to try the game that haven't yet (and there are a lot!) is huge... even for returning players, though that's not the same desirable audience IMO. Players are more ready to give that equity up, and so their mindset and approach to trying new games like WildStar. 
 
WildStar, ESO, SW:TOR, etc are not bad games, in fact they're quite excellent... but that's not the reason they didn't achieve initial expectations.
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I dunno. My feeling is that any individual feature or bug is not the reason the game didn't get the traction that was expected. They do add up, though, and work against breaking through that equity barrier I mentioned above. So there have been many fixes to help smooth out that experience, but also players are in a different place regarding their approach to the game now, which is going to help immensely with an influx of new
 
 
 
WildStar was basically an upgrade to WoW in every sense, and that was their target market. All of my friends - every one of them - came from WoW and went back there.
 
This is not just why WildStar hasn't performed to expectations... it's the reason pretty much every game hasn't performed to expectations. Players don't want to change even when something is better. There is no single "in-game" problem with any of these games that made them shed players.
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No offense, but you are obviously the exception to the general rule. Obviously "some" people made the switch and never looked back ... but come on, you can't deny that thousands more came in, played for a month or three, then jumped right back into WoW as soon as the expansion hit.
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			I blame the Aurin...	
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Disagree. I spent thousands of dollars on both GW2 and SWTOR, huge amounts of time, thousands of achievements and titles, gear grind and legendaries. I still moved to Wildstar and still stayed here because I enjoyed the game. The bugs and all the things that Cheetos wrote plus the fact that raids required groups way larger than what me and my guild could muster making us have nothing we can do as a guild are the reasons my guildies and friends went back to their previous games.
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As I haven't ever played WoW, I can't tell you. But, as I mentioned in the rest of my post all my guildies DID move back to their respective games not because of "equity" but because of bugs and the rest of the stuff I mentioned.. I also went back so I can play with them, but still continued to sub and log in to play a few times a week.
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EDIT: Good Lord, I am on the same side as Lethality. :lol:
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Equity was a helpful way out for people that still played World of Warcraft. Which of course applies to some of the player-base that left. Bugs were not the only topic nor the main topic. There were a plethora of reasons. It would be insanely silly to try to put it all under one factor. 
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I experienced none of the bugs you describe.  I have never experienced a single bug while levelling any character either.  The only bug I've seen was Ohmna and the third page LAS.
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You guys knew that raid size going in, no?
 
Anyway, that list of items are contributory factors, yes. Each one becomes a pillar to stand on and shout, which makes it easier for players to go back to their previous game without looking like the choice was their fault.
 
Yes, it would be better if games launched with fewer bugs and better balance, better itemization, etc, but the fact is they can't without being informed by real user behavior data and feedback.
 
Same rationale we're getting Windows 10 next month... I mean, why didn't they just start with Windows 10? Why did we have to go through the first 8 versions?!? ;)
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How did it do so poorly?
 
Personally I blame nothing but the community itself I stopped reading this forum for a long time due to how depressing it was (started again recently but feel nothing much has changed). People crying how the game was dying a week after headstart when at the time, it really wasn't. You say something enough and people start to believe it. There was some idiot on my server who was stood outside the market day in day out complaining about the population. I could warp to malgrave after listening to him *cupcake* to do some challenges / farm for trigger fingers, come back and he was still crying about it. Every time a new player would ask what the population was like (it was good!) he would be the first to answer "it's sucks, don't come here!".
 
I mean it really was day in day out, every *cupcake* second, in the most populated location. It was pathetic. 
 
Then it really did start to drop in population. The forum was the same though, and I strongly believe the community were more to blame than Carbine, who BTW, I believe tried their best and listened (mistake) to the players more so than most other companies (not all, but most). They certainly changed a hell of a lot of things people were nagging for. 
 
Then ofc Carbine are to blame for the massive lack of advertising. Something myself and many said from the start they should focus on. 
 
Then you got all the bandwagon children banging on how the game sucked despite never playing it, because they heard it from their mothers aunties sisters boyfriends little brothers dog walker that got it from the cat next door. 
 
Lack of advertising while being bad mouthed from nay-sayers in other communities and hearing from it's own community how it has sucky population IMO caused more damage than anything. People can have their own opinion but there's absolutely no way I'm budging on mine on this :P	
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2. Rewards are lackluster and carbine doesn't really know how to handle them. Why run adventures or dungeons below 50 if you get worse XP than questing and poor gear. If it was just the poor gear fine but worse XP and poor gear ? nah.
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