120908-my-list-of-ideas-to-help-with-wildstars-player-base-and-new-content

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Disclaimer!
 
 Hello everyone who is reading this. To start off, I will say a lot of this is personal opinion, some of it has been mulled over with other players, and some of it may not currently be plausible, with other current situations. I understand that there are always bug fixes which will take priority, but it would be nice to see some things implemented, to help grow our player base, and keep current players entertained.
 
Ways to help grow our current player base:
 
With the release of the next drop, a lot of bugs, and unbalanced PvP should be fixed. A lot of people who bought, and played this game early on were turned off by a lot of bugs, and problems in PvP at the time. I know I personally, immediately quit the PvP scene early on due to some of the balance issues, one being dual stalker tanks, being able to stealth an entire match, during 2v2. Many of these problems have already been fixed, and players who have been previously lost, could be brought back, if they knew that these things have been fixed. I believe if there was a set period of time that the game was free to play, say two weeks, players could try out all the new content, and new players could see what they have been missing. This could be following the release of the next drop.
Advertising. Lets be honest. The game has gotten a lot of bad publicity due to the things I have stated earlier. The PR team needs to get on the ball, and try to get that changed. This is also where a set period of free to play time could come in handy. Maybe a Youtube channel, where you highlight all of the changes in every patch, and drop, and the changes since the beginning of the game?
 
Ideas, and reasons, for possible new content:
 
 Everyone knows that this game was created for the hardcore gamer community, but a lot of people didn't know what they were getting themselves into, and quit, because the game was too hard for them. A lot of the problems which detracted from players that didn't have the ability to, or didn't want to complete the content, have been fixed, to the best of the dev teams ability, but there is still not a lot for the casual player to do, after hitting level 50. These are some of the ideas I have come up with to help with the casual players, and even something extra for the more hardcore raiding, and PvP players to do.
 
Racing! It's definitely not a new idea, but racing could easily be implemented, and could be a fun way to kill time, and even get prized. Of course speed buffs, such as the riding buffs, potions, or faster mounts wouldn't be allowed, but there could be some way to get boosts along the track. Checkpoints could easily be set up, and boosts could be placed in certain current areas of the game, that pop up, only if you are in the race. New areas could be created specifically for this event, and a matchmaking system could be created for it, or people could make their own on their housing plots, if given the tools.
Adventure, and Dungeon Cross Queues! Come on, this is a no brainer, and possibly very easy to do. Allow players to queue for adventures, and dungeons at the same time. It is very frustrating to be sitting in queue for a long time, when your queue for something else could have popped. This happens a lot when farming for gear.
Combined Housing Plots! Housing plots are just too lonely the way they are. Say you're sitting at your housing plot, and you want to run to your buddies place, and say hi. You have to go through your menus, find your buddy, and teleport there. But what if there was another way? You could have a system set in place that creates a road to your buddies house from your house, if he allows it, allowing you to walk right over to his plot! If this is implemented, you could have several people having adjoined housing, creating miniature towns, allowing for awesome things to happen. This may not be possible due to other players having access to players housing they don't want players having access to, but maybe there could be an option for people who don't care to do this, or a account specific blocks where invisible walls are placed around people's plots for blocked players? Just something for the dev team to mull over.
A Defile Teleporter in Thayd Honestly, this is a dailies area, and every other dailies area has one.
Multi-Person Mounts Say you have a friend or significant other, who wants to tag along with you, but either doesn't have a mount, or doesn't want to be actively pressing buttons to do so. The follow command just doesn't cut it. While it may not be used a LOT, it would still be fun, and could be interesting were the racing idea to come to fruition.
Setting Housing Items to Move Over a Set Path This could be difficult, but if you were able to set housing items to move back, and forth, or over a set course, then stop when clicked on, this could add a whole new level to housing plots, and could definitely be something for a lot of people to spend time on the game doing. (Personally, I would love to create an arena with moving platforms.)
PvP Audience! There could be a system set up for people waiting in queue for Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Warplots, to sit outside of the area, and watch current matches while they wait for their queue to pop. Sitting around in Thayd waiting for a queue to pop can cause players to just quit, and leave.
Hoverboard Tricks! Hoverboards are awesome, and all, but wouldn't they be even more awesome if you could fufill your teenage dreams, and performs tricks?! Easy skateboard tricks, and grinding rails could be added to allow the player to have something to do while commuting! ~Thank you Milhouse, for the suggestion of adding grinding on rails with your hoverboard.
Teleporting Area in the Middle of Thayd The bit of underground area with some useless, (At least to quite a few people,) NPCs could be turned into an area, with all of the points to teleport you to different areas of the game, such as Northern Wastes, and Crimson Badlands. At the moment the teleporters, are scattered, and annoying to try to memorize where they are. ~Thank you for the idea VicVanMeter.	
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I usually think these types of posts are dumb, but I actually really like these. Especially the PVP audience one. Kudos to you sir!
 
BUT...change racing to "Ability to grind rails on your Hoverboard."	
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{| class="blockquote"
 
Disclaimer!
 
 Hello everyone who is reading this. To start off, I will say a lot of this is personal opinion, some of it has been mulled over with other players, and some of it may not currently be plausible, with other current situations. I understand that there are always bug fixes which will take priority, but it would be nice to see some things implemented, to help grow our player base, and keep current players entertained.
 
Ways to help grow our current player base:
 
With the release of the next drop, a lot of bugs, and unbalanced PvP should be fixed. A lot of people who bought, and played this game early on were turned off by a lot of bugs, and problems in PvP at the time. I know I personally, immediately quit the PvP scene early on due to some of the balance issues, one being dual stalker tanks, being able to stealth an entire match, during 2v2. Many of these problems have already been fixed, and players who have been previously lost, could be brought back, if they knew that these things have been fixed. I believe if there was a set period of time that the game was free to play, say two weeks, players could try out all the new content, and new players could see what they have been missing. This could be following the release of the next drop.  I am as of yet unsure if Wildstar is in the position that this would have the most impact.  This is a good idea when PVP is in a state people would accept (mostly centered around the way ratings and gear are handled).  Of course, this could be by the next drop.
Advertising. Lets be honest. The game has gotten a lot of bad publicity due to the things I have stated earlier. The PR team needs to get on the ball, and try to get that changed. This is also where a set period of free to play time could come in handy. Maybe a Youtube channel, where you highlight all of the changes in every patch, and drop, and the changes since the beginning of the game?  I'm not entirely sure there's much raw advertising that would be better than just the community being vocal and inviting our friends.  However, the YouTube videos were a great idea, and helped people get into the game and into the new BG.  I'm not sure who they'd get to do the voiceovers, but more devspeak videos might not be a bad idea.
 
Ideas, and reasons, for possible new content:
 
 Everyone knows that this game was created for the hardcore gamer community, but a lot of people didn't know what they were getting themselves into, and quit, because the game was too hard for them. A lot of the problems which detracted from players that didn't have the ability to, or didn't want to complete the content, have been fixed, to the best of the dev teams ability, but there is still not a lot for the casual player to do, after hitting level 50. These are some of the ideas I have come up with to help with the casual players, and even something extra for the more hardcore raiding, and PvP players to do.  While I don't necessarily agree (almost everything Carbine developed, and probably some 80% of the original game, were built for casual PVE players.  They simply consume content more quickly.  One of the larger issues are people who play a LOT (meaning they aren't really necessarily casual), but have a very narrow field of things they like to do.  That's asking for burnout in any MMORPG.  Still, ideas for new things are ALWAYS good.
 
Racing! It's definitely not a new idea, but racing could easily be implemented, and could be a fun way to kill time, and even get prized. Of course speed buffs, such as the riding buffs, potions, or faster mounts wouldn't be allowed, but there could be some way to get boosts along the track. Checkpoints could easily be set up, and boosts could be placed in certain current areas of the game, that pop up, only if you are in the race. New areas could be created specifically for this event, and a matchmaking system could be created for it, or people could make their own on their housing plots, if given the tools.  Agreed.  I'll just leave this here.  It's an older post, but it seems like a good place to re-raise some of its ideas.  Also, there was at least one racing track I knew of running on Evindra.  There may still be some on Entity.  It's not a new concept, but the idea of codifying pieces, having dedicated start lines, finish lines, and others, particularly on housing plots is always a good one to bring up.  Obviously, it might be nice if the mounts, at the very least, moved a bit faster...
Adventure, and Dungeon Cross Queues! Come on, this is a no brainer, and possibly very easy to do. Allow players to queue for adventures, and dungeons at the same time. It is very frustrating to be sitting in queue for a long time, when your queue for something else could have popped. This happens a lot when farming for gear.  This is on the block already apparently, so it is on its way at some point in the near future.
Combined Housing Plots! Housing plots are just too lonely the way they are. Say you're sitting at your housing plot, and you want to run to your buddies place, and say hi. You have to go through your menus, find your buddy, and teleport there. But what if there was another way? You could have a system set in place that creates a road to your buddies house from your house, if he allows it, allowing you to walk right over to his plot! If this is implemented, you could have several people having adjoined housing, creating miniature towns, allowing for awesome things to happen. This may not be possible due to other players having access to players housing they don't want players having access to, but maybe there could be an option for people who don't care to do this, or a account specific blocks where invisible walls are placed around people's plots for blocked players? Just something for the dev team to mull over.  Something like this is already in the works.  They hinted at a kind of "neighborhood" system where groups of houses could occupy the same general area.  I'm not sure if any more specifics were discussed, but it was brought up.  There is also a very good post up here detailing some other uses of housing.  It might take some time to develop some of these ideas (and your aforementioned racing plots!) but it could pay dividends to increase player participation.
A Defile Teleporter in Thayd Honestly, this is a dailies area, and every other dailies area has one.  Always a good idea.  If space for a dedicated teleporter is getting thin, that may be a sign.  It might be that we should just have a big central teleporting unit to send you to several different zones.
Multi-Person Mounts Say you have a friend or significant other, who wants to tag along with you, but either doesn't have a mount, or doesn't want to be actively pressing buttons to do so. The follow command just doesn't cut it.  I can see this helping in very limited amounts when your wife needs to do something for a second and you want to get you both to a questing area.  It's fun, but sort of low on the totem pole of development in my opinion.
Setting Housing Items to Move Over a Set Path This could be difficult, but if you were able to set housing items to move back, and forth, or over a set course, then stop when clicked on, this could add a whole new level to housing plots, and could definitely be something for a lot of people to spend time on the game doing. (Personally, I would love to create an arena with moving platforms.)  This would be great!  If I had elevators, I'd have quite a few new additions to my plots.  I think that if they're moving in the aforementioned player-built direction, this is a necessity for racing plots, dungeons, and PVP areas.  Moving elements make the game far more exciting, even if it's just to have a mobile platform.   The difficulty with it is in things like challenge plugs for Shadespire Canyon or something, where taking an elevator to a huge height may actually make the challenge exploitable.  But worth investigating.
PvP Audience! There could be a system set up for people waiting in queue for Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Warplots, to sit outside of the area, and watch current matches while they wait for their queue to pop. Sitting around in Thayd waiting for a queue to pop can cause players to just quit, and leave.  I think I mentioned this somewhere a while back.  I wasn't the first or last.  While Twitch and its ilk are fun, being a spectator in the game might be a lot easier to manage and would, as you say, encourage people to be watching people playing the game from WITHIN the game, increasing concurrency.
Hoverboard Tricks! Hoverboards are awesome, and all, but wouldn't they be even more awesome if you could fufill your teenage dreams, and performs tricks?! Easy skateboard tricks, and grinding rails could be added to allow the player to have something to do while commuting! ~Thank you Milhouse, for the suggestion of adding grinding on rails with your hoverboard.  An absolute must for your racing idea.
 
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Yes, the 80% of the game was made for the casual PvE player. Then, suddenly, at end-game Carbine expects them to jump into the 20% they made for the hardcore, with the only alternative being "No more character progress for you, cupcake!". Carbine basically gave everyone a fun and relaxing ride around a park that ends with everyone thrown into an oven. No wonder a lot of people were burned out so easily.
 
Anyway, that's what I think Wildstar needs as a priority: allowing 'casuals' to improve their characters over time just like everyone else (albeit, of course, more slowly) while also providing some non-trivial content for soloers. Right now, Carbine's idea is that everyone should be a group player and that they would totally love it no really! if they only taught them how to have fun.
 
With that said, I don't have any complains about anything offered on that list. But I do think that none of those will actually help without giving all players a means to progress in power.	
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