114841-another-suggestion-thread

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I don't post here often. I'm not the most hardcore player, nor the most committed, I don't have the most hours or the most achievements and compared to a lot of the feedback you get, I'm not really sure if my 2 cents will add much to the debate, but here goes.
 
I'm one of the many many people who scrambled for beta keys before open beta and then hurriedly purchased the CE of Wildstar, due to how amazing they found out. I also dragged 4 friends into this experience with me.
 
Now 3 months on, I'm the only one to still have a subscription. I haven't completed a quest in 2 months and I maintain my sub purely to support the people at Carbine, while knowing I really don't want to log in and play anymore.
 
I don't intend to give up my sub, as Wildstar deserves to be supported for the game it is and for the effort the devs make in responding to player needs and ideas.
 
Contained below are the observations of myself and my friends, this is offered as some small feedback that hopefully may be of assistance and is not intended as an offensive critique of the game:
 
Housing:
 
A few of my friends came from Second Life and loved the housing system, the only thing they didn't like is that housing lacked a detachable steady cam to zoom around the map in edit mode. Also you only had very basic deform item options, with no ability to stretch items. You could make things bigger and smaller, but in the main deforming an item was very basic. We could never work out how to stretch things on one axis without increasing it on all 3 and that led to frustration. I feel a lot of my friends would at least still be logging into housing if an option for a detachable steady camp was added in edit mode and extra editing tools were added to the items. Additionally we were all disappointed when we discovered instance, dungeon and raid bosses don't drop housing cosmetic items to commemorate your little victories. We didn't expect them to be anything other than rare drops, but the fact they weren't drops at all was such an over sight.
 
Having a wall in your house decorated with the head of Storm Talon, The staff of blade wind etc... each boss with their own vanity housing item drop. It would have kept us attempting them just for the housing bits and bobs.
 
Instances (scenarios/dungeons/raids):
 
Put simply far too difficult for far too little reward. Yes hardcore is epic and all, but their was very little learning curve and tanking and healing were incredibly tricky. When we finally did kill a boss, the drops were pure RNG, which is fine in games like WoW, where a lot of bosses are just tank and spank, but in Wildstar where you spend AGES trying to kill a boss, getting an item which no one can use or is actually a step down from what you have, is utterly disheartening.
 
Quests:
 
Inundated with these and all of them kinda blur into the same of "kill X of Y to collect Z" or fed ex quests. This is fine as its standard MMO fare, the problem being is that every quest felt like it dragged itself up. The XP reward didn't feel worth the time and it became grindy in the extreme. Many of my friends never saw lvl 50, as the grind became unbearable.
 
Crafting:
 
Un-intuitive and clunky. Also the cost to make anything was extreme. Everything felt confusing and over priced to make things you may not even want, with a system that made little sense and was not user friendly to new people. I enjoyed discovering patterns in the first instance, but not being able to just make it from that point onwards with more simple mats, was disappointing.
 
One off Achievements:
 
Achievements designed so that you have to do something on your first go or forever be stopped from getting it, were depressing to a lot of us. We were unaware of these initially and missed some and after becoming aware it was a case of continually googling to ensure that whatever quest we were doing didn't have a one off achievement attached, that we could miss forever. It slowed our progression to a crawl and was massively counter intuitive.
 
Lack of variation in things to do:
The world just always lacked other things to do. Sure you could get a challenge, but in the main that was something you were already doing, just more of it. Path pursuits were interesting for awhile but even then, they became much of a muchness. When you are tired of killing things, other than playing about in houses, their is just very little to do and occupy yourself with. 
 
Bugs and optimisation.
 
So many quest bugs, UI bugs and art bugs. At times it made it painful to play through certain zones and for people like me, art bugs would be massively distracting. (like the fact one of the mounts doesn't have eyes, just a white base place where eyes should be). In addition to that half of us had AMD cards (myself included), which apparently meant we were in for serious lag and FPS craziness. The game became unplayable and frustrating and even still their seems to be issues with AMD optimisation.  
 
Alt Unfriendly:
 
With all the above issues and the singular quest journey your characters are set on, due to a lack of lower level zones. It meant you were forced to lvl through the same zones over and over, with quests that were buggy, mechanics that were broken, UI that randomly stopped working and XP that was given drudgingly for the amount of time invested in gaining it. With the difficulty of instances, they stopped being a viable alternate method of levelling and all in all the game became a slog and a chore.  
 
 
Conclusion:
 
I have read about the complaints for end game. How this and that were an issue, (raiding, gold lvl rewards being so high that anything less results in a party to falling to pieces in dungeons, end lvl grind etc...) but out of the 5 of us who started together, only 2 reached end game due to the above reasons and both of them have now stopped playing. I myself only reached lvl 40 and could no longer bring myself to grind out quests that had me killing this and that for no great reward.
 
In conclusion I want to love this game. My friends and I are avid gamers, who play PC games nearly 6-7 hours a night. The fact we are all over playing in Firefall at the moment (a game which really does not match up to the potential of Wildstar) is a sorry testament to the state of the game.
 
We would not consider ourselves to be causal gamers, but alas unfortunately in its current state, Wildstar is not the game for us. I will continue to sub to Wildstar and I hope to visit again when wildstar is in a better state, but I am sad to see something that has clearly been crafted so lovingly and a team who clearly care so much, have unfortunately produced a game, that for some reason just holds little appeal to those of us who desperately want to like the game.
 
I truly meant all of the above as a positive critique and not as an insult to anyone, in the hopes that it may help. (although with so many threads, of this type, being posted, I assume this will just be one of the many voices adding advice and suggestions)	
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			Where's the suggestions? Should rename this to "Another hissy-fit"	
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sorry where did I have a hissy fit?
 
I'm giving feedback from 5 people who have left the game. the suggestions are easy to infer from the comments:
 
Housing:
 
Please add more vanity/flavour items from bosses
Please give more tools for deforming objects
Please give a free moving camera in edit mode
 
Instances
 
Please balance time spent to reward gained; either:making things easier (not to my taste) or	ensuring the things that drop are worthwhile, a proper upgrade and more loot for everyone in the team. (no more slave to the gods of RNG)
 
Quests:
 
Please make XP gain rewards from quests higher or decrease the number of kills needed for "kill X of Y" type quests.Crafting
 
Make it more intuitive and less of an ungodly grind.
Once a pattern is discovered, allow it to be remade more easily
 
One Off Achievements: 
Ear mark these clearly on quests or in zones (pop up bubble of some sort) to give people prior warning.Lack of Variation in Things to do: 
Add more stuff to keep people occupied when they get bored of killing things. (e.g fishing etc...) 
Bugs and Optimisation:
 
Fix bugs
Optimise game for all reasonable mid level GPU's and up
 
Alt Unfriendly:
 
Fix the above things to make things friendlier
Add more quest/story content in low level zones.
 
There we go: suggestions sorted. I wont make the mistake of assuming readers are bright enough to see the inference under the words again, even from Chua. Silly me indeed.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Where's the suggestions? Should rename this to "Another hissy-fit"
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Housing
I agree 100%
 
Instances
I feel like Adventures / Dungeons would be fixed by providing currency instead of drops that you can then spend on items off of a vendor removing the dependency on the RNG aspect of the game.
 
Quests
I don't feel like there's any problem with quests.  When I'm grouped up with someone questing (the wife and I do it all the time) we kill primes when available thusly providing a bigger boost to the percentage.  For example her and I made it from lvl 17 to 23 yesterday playing casually off and on during the day.
 
Crafting
I don't cook because I dislike the mechanic.  But tailoring is easy enough.
 
One Off Achievements
I can see this being beneficial, since I'm not a completionist it really doesn't matter to me but I support your want!
 
Lack of Variation in Things To Do
I hated fishing in WoW...  I really only play MMO's for the combat and action, I don't need downtime things to do other than housing.  However like the One Off's I can see how this would appeal to others so I support it but am not sure what kinds of things to suggest be added.
 
Bugs and Optimization
They're working on Bugs, at least that's what they say and I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.  My only problem is that they seem to be holding onto the majority of the bug fixes for major drops instead of just patching on a weekly basis.  Though this goes back to wanting to test it on the PTR so I get it.  As for optimization I keep my mouth shut on that front since I don't have any issues...
 
Alt Unfriendly
I do agree that the game is unfriendly to alts.  I'd love to see your housing decor box be account wide so you don't have to worry about which character you get a piece of decor on, same with dyes account wide and tradeable ftw.  I'm sure there are other things too but that's all I got atm.	
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I agree with everything you said Vincynt.
 
Some of the stuff on my list, were not things I particularly care about, but they did matter to some of my wee group of friends who quit. So I thought I would raise them here anyway. For example outside housing, I don't need anything else to amuse myself with and I personally dislike things like fishing, archaeology and so on... in WoW.
 
I agree with you wholeheartedly about dungeons giving a currency to buy stuff with. Even if it was still RNG drops, giving something like valor, could at least allow people to go and farm the currency for pieces, rather than doing run after run and get nothing. As I said total RNG is alright for games with a lower boss difficulty level, but nothing is more saddening than working your ass off on bosses, to eventually clear the dungeon and have no one get anything.
 
As for quests; maybe it was just the quests we were doing, but it felt like their was an awful lot of running about to kill stuff to complete a simple quest, for not much reward in the way of XP. Saying that we did often get distracted by challenges, so maybe that's what was slowing us down so much.
 
The only crafting I've personally tried is cooking and the one for making housing equipment. Both of them I found tricky and counter intuitive. They also both left me completely cold. I didn't enjoy the experience. From my friends they experienced similar things with their professions. (except the one doing tailoring, who reckoned hers was quite easy)
 
I was reading about the bugs and that's a great relief and additionally the extra optimisation they are trying to bring forward into the game. It does seem that its AMD GPU's that are most affected by these issues, as my partner has a low end Nvidia, which plays better than my fairly highend AMD.
 
As for alts: I agree with you. I personally feel that Dye, Costume Items, Housing stuff and mounts, should all be account wide. It would just make levelling alts more rewarding and enjoyable. (you also wouldn't be continually worried that that rare dye or rare housing item, drops on the wrong character)	
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