120646-wildstar-fading-into-nothingness

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Wildstar fading into nothingness?
 
First let me state this is not some random troll post! I've been here since the three day head-start, and probably be one of the last stirring at my screen if the servers shutdown.
 
Never in my history of gaming have I come across so much nothingness from a game studio, no PR, no hype, not really any BS....just nothing.
It's like they have given up all hope and that feeling is spreading deeper into the community, visit most of the fan-sites and you'll see the same nothingness, can't just blame the holiday period, that just added to it and made it all the more obvious!
Many of the player base (myself included) don't want the game to go F2P, but are starting to accept it will because nothing is telling us it won't, it's like they have lost the will to live.
If Carbine can deliver drop 4 (it's still if at this stage) they will have the product many also feel they should have had at launch, rushed or forced launch? Who really knows outside Carbine?
So come the end of January/February (please don't chuck this out of the door if not ready) we will have in my opinion the best MMO on the market, this itself will not change the future, the outcome will still be the same if Carbine don't shake off that funeral jacket.
 
A fantastic product, fantastic community....but who will know apart from the nothingness?    	
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Wildstar fading into nothingness?
 
First let me state this is not some random troll post! I've been here since the three day head-start, and probably be one of the last stirring at my screen if the servers shutdown.
 
Never in my history of gaming have I come across so much nothingness from a game studio, no PR, no hype, not really any BS....just nothing.
It's like they have given up all hope and that feeling is spreading deeper into the community, visit most of the fan-sites and you'll see the same nothingness, can't just blame the holiday period, that just added to it and made it all the more obvious!
Many of the player base (myself included) don't want the game to go F2P, but are starting to accept it will because nothing is telling us it won't, it's like they have lost the will to live.
If Carbine can deliver drop 4 (it's still if at this stage) they will have the product many also feel they should have had at launch, rushed or forced launch? Who really knows outside Carbine?
So come the end of January/February (please don't chuck this out of the door if not ready) we will have in my opinion the best MMO on the market, this itself will not change the future, the outcome will still be the same if Carbine don't shake off that funeral jacket.
 
A fantastic product, fantastic community....but who will know apart from the nothingness?    
 
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			It's not a troll post I've seen him post positively for Wildstar again and again on the MMO-Champion forums. He's just getting a bit worried with the lack of communication from Carbine lately. I love Wildstar too it's currently the best hope for people that miss the Vanilla/BC WoW style of MMO (though Wildstar is still alot more forgiving than games from that era)	
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As much as I love WS, it's a love letter to a time long past. It's like that antique store on the corner that never has more than a car or 2 in the parking lot. We asked, got hyped and begged for it, then when we got it, we realized that oops, only a few thousand of us actually really wanted it.
 
Bobs antiques either needs to shut down, or become IKEA. You can rage/cry/sniffle/be idealistic/wax poetic about how things were 15 years ago, but it's the truth.	
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As much as I love WS, it's a love letter to a time long past. It's like that antique store on the corner that never has more than a car or 2 in the parking lot. We asked, got hyped and begged for it, then when we got it, we realized that oops, only a few thousand of us actually really wanted it.
 
Bobs antiques either needs to shut down, or become IKEA. You can rage/cry/sniffle/be idealistic/wax poetic about how things were 15 years ago, but it's the truth.
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As much as I love WS, it's a love letter to a time long past. It's like that antique store on the corner that never has more than a car or 2 in the parking lot. We asked, got hyped and begged for it, then when we got it, we realized that oops, only a few thousand of us actually really wanted it.
 
Bobs antiques either needs to shut down, or become IKEA. You can rage/cry/sniffle/be idealistic/wax poetic about how things were 15 years ago, but it's the truth.
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They told us about 3 weeks ago about their plan. If you can't take the time to find and read it, it's not carbones fault.
 
Give people a proper holiday you know. It's not like you can't play the game.	
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			you got a point there, Once the game released, the PR and everything for this game just vanished. Heck, I forgot this game existed until a couple of days ago. As for the going f2p route, well as I said before on facebook "Going f2p will give them a boost in players for a brief time period (like a month or so...at best) But, what WildStar should focus on right now, is fixing up their game based on the many feedback they are getting. Not from there forums, but through reddit, youtube, and etc." Heck, I only bought this game because I was in the beta and wanted to see how the end product turned out. I don't hate this game, but the game I am playing seem to have not listened to most feedback during the beta, only listening to the client issues and etc. Plus, the community size in-game/outta game right now is less in size and activity than what I seen in the beta and seems to grow smaller and smaller with every day. Either way, I should stop saying anything more because as I heard on reddit and etc, the mods tend to ban/ delete thread & posts without good reasons. 	
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you got a point there, Once the game released, the PR and everything for this game just vanished. Heck, I forgot this game existed until a couple of days ago. As for the going f2p route, well as I said before on facebook "Going f2p will give them a boost in players for a brief time period (like a month or so...at best) But, what WildStar should focus on right now, is fixing up their game based on the many feedback they are getting. Not from there forums, but through reddit, youtube, and etc." Heck, I only bought this game because I was in the beta and wanted to see how the end product turned out. I don't hate this game, but the game I am playing seem to have not listened to most feedback during the beta, only listening to the client issues and etc. Plus, the community size in-game/outta game right now is less in size and activity than what I seen in the beta and seems to grow smaller and smaller with every day. Either way, I should stop saying anything more because as I heard on reddit and etc, the mods tend to ban/ delete thread & posts without good reasons. 
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In case you haven't heard, here are a few bulletpoints of the current situation:
 
-Carbine's staff (and probably the NCSoft NA teams) are still on holiday or just getting back in
 
-NCSoft thinks the game's doing okay, and wants to do another big push as far as commercial stuff goes.
 
-Right now, Wildstar has a major issue right now between WoW's last expansion having been released and a perceived load of bugs in the game that needed to be fixed in drop 3 (whichever side of the bugs argument you were on, there is a public perception that it was buggy).
 
-Lately, a lot of players have been coming back to the game from WoD and elsewhere.  That means Wildstar is on the upswing again, beginning a long, slow rise back to where they want it to be.
 
-NCsoft doesn't want to push the game from and advertising standpoint until they know that the people they bring in aren't going to immediately leave.  I imagine drop 4 is going to be that patch, but they've not said.  It may end up being drop 5 if they feel the need to do another PVP centric patch.  We don't know what's on the horizon for drop 5.  All they've said was that NCSoft wants to get Carbine to put the game into the best position possible, get all the kinks worked out, and wait for the initial Wildstar hateload to die off before they start really pushing the game.
 
-Keep in mind, Wildstar is sort of an MMORPG player's MMORPG.  It was designed, almost completely, to answer complaints MMORPG players had about the games they were playing.  As such, most of the people who do know about Wildstar are actually gamers who play MMORPGs already.  Advertising will have to push outside, to players who don't actually know about Wildstar and thus people who don't have their ear to the ground for the subgenre.  That means the game can't be in "good enough" shape.  It has to be in "good" shape, whatever that is.
 
-Also keep in mind, slow and steady growth is better than a spike that dies off.  The best thing to do if you're really worried about getting the word out about the game is to get the word out about the game.  I've recruited probably 20 people to the game, a sizeable majority are still playing because they become part of the fabric.  Those people either didn't know about the game or heard bad things about it.  NCSoft is very well aware that word-of-mouth advertising from players is going to be ten times more effective than putting up banners, bumpers, and game inserts to get the word out.  The best part about that is that if you get your friends to play, you get to hang out with your friends.  I've probably recruited more players to Wildstar just posting screenshots of what I do on Facebook to my friends than NCSoft would be able to do for a thousand advertised dollars.
 
The only reason people wouldn't know about Wildstar is if you never told them.  And, let's face it, if nobody's ashamed to send me another stupid yolo post about making cookies, I think they can damn well see a picture of my guild running the bullet hell phase on Trogun.  My facebook page looks so much cooler...	
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They aren't going FTP, thats why they are expanding into China. For box sales and revenue.
 
Donatelli also stated that when he met with NCSOFT he was nervous but they were totally supportive and didn't push him to change the business model at all.
 
Stop bringing up the FTP crap and stirring up the pot when its completely baseless.	
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In case you haven't heard, here are a few bulletpoints of the current situation:
 
-Carbine's staff (and probably the NCSoft NA teams) are still on holiday or just getting back in
 
-NCSoft thinks the game's doing okay, and wants to do another big push as far as commercial stuff goes.
 
-Right now, Wildstar has a major issue right now between WoW's last expansion having been released and a perceived load of bugs in the game that needed to be fixed in drop 3 (whichever side of the bugs argument you were on, there is a public perception that it was buggy).
 
-Lately, a lot of players have been coming back to the game from WoD and elsewhere.  That means Wildstar is on the upswing again, beginning a long, slow rise back to where they want it to be.
 
-NCsoft doesn't want to push the game from and advertising standpoint until they know that the people they bring in aren't going to immediately leave.  I imagine drop 4 is going to be that patch, but they've not said.  It may end up being drop 5 if they feel the need to do another PVP centric patch.  We don't know what's on the horizon for drop 5.  All they've said was that NCSoft wants to get Carbine to put the game into the best position possible, get all the kinks worked out, and wait for the initial Wildstar hateload to die off before they start really pushing the game.
 
-Keep in mind, Wildstar is sort of an MMORPG player's MMORPG.  It was designed, almost completely, to answer complaints MMORPG players had about the games they were playing.  As such, most of the people who do know about Wildstar are actually gamers who play MMORPGs already.  Advertising will have to push outside, to players who don't actually know about Wildstar and thus people who don't have their ear to the ground for the subgenre.  That means the game can't be in "good enough" shape.  It has to be in "good" shape, whatever that is.
 
-Also keep in mind, slow and steady growth is better than a spike that dies off.  The best thing to do if you're really worried about getting the word out about the game is to get the word out about the game.  I've recruited probably 20 people to the game, a sizeable majority are still playing because they become part of the fabric.  Those people either didn't know about the game or heard bad things about it.  NCSoft is very well aware that word-of-mouth advertising from players is going to be ten times more effective than putting up banners, bumpers, and game inserts to get the word out.  The best part about that is that if you get your friends to play, you get to hang out with your friends.  I've probably recruited more players to Wildstar just posting screenshots of what I do on Facebook to my friends than NCSoft would be able to do for a thousand advertised dollars.
 
The only reason people wouldn't know about Wildstar is if you never told them.  And, let's face it, if nobody's ashamed to send me another stupid yolo post about making cookies, I think they can damn well see a picture of my guild running the bullet hell phase on Trogun.  My facebook page looks so much cooler...
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The only reason people wouldn't know about Wildstar is if you never told them. 
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I actually mentioned the other day that I was still playing Wildstar...I also mentioned that the game hadn't gone FTP and someone actually purchased it within minutes of that...I was like O.o
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I want to trade my friends for yours.  :lol:
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They aren't going FTP, thats why they are expanding into China. For box sales and revenue.
 
Donatelli also stated that when he met with NCSOFT he was nervous but they were totally supportive and didn't push him to change the business model at all.
 
Stop bringing up the FTP crap and stirring up the pot when its completely baseless.
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I just fear that a year later is too late to *start* trying to advertise and bring people in. Anything that would cause new players to leave right away (low pop/difficulty etc) won't be fixed in drop 4 or 5 or 6. The time to start bringing people in is now. Not 5 months from now when they've moved to mega mega servers. The "hateload" isn't going to die down, it's going to get steadily worse until NCSoft actually fights back against it, something they've not done at all.
 
And what MMO player complaints has WS addressed beyond a higher base difficulty? If anything the lack of addressing (and difficulty ironically) has been what pushed most people away...
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You'd be amazed.  Lots of games have been "dead" and slowly come back to life.  Even F2P didn't save Conan, it was still a miserable wreck for a year or so.  Apparently, it's doing fine now.
 
I think you're somewhat overemphasizing what a company like NCSoft can do.  They can try to advertise the game to players who may not have heard of it before, but NCSoft's name isn't exactly a shining mark of sophistication.  They could just as easily shoot themselves in the foot.  More importantly, they could spend millions of dollars advertising the game and not cover their losses.  The only advertising force on Earth that is actually going to help are players, and that's where the slow but steady stream of new players lately has come from.  People inviting their friends to come play.  The cut in the initial investment price from 60 to 40 dollars was the best thing NCSoft has actually done for the game; it could very well mean that the biggest burden to incoming players is the initial box price.
 
Either way, to answer your question, some complaints about WoW and other MMORPGs I played and paid attention to the forums for that I personally knew were all over their forums there before I started playing Wildstar:
 
-Dungeons are too easy
-Raids are just PUGs now
-Crafting is worthless, we should be able to add our own stats to make our own armor (this was a long discussion)
-Games don't make you pay attention, they aren't active
-There's no player housing (games that have player housing either made it too expensive or too limited)
-That if your guild isn't doing something you want to do, you need to make a chat channel for it because there's no "second guild"
-Not enough open world bosses and events
-No costume system (later that the transmog system was clunky and expensive whenever you changed gear)
-There's no skill involved, it's all a numbers game because you aren't actively doing anything but dodging a few mechanics
 
That's all I can think of off the top of my head without really looking or taking more than a few minutes.  You can see elements of player complaints from other MMORPGs all over this game.  Whether people actually really WANTED all of those things is up for debate; obviously WoW's gotten more popular as Blizz made their game easier and less group-oriented.  Still, there's the argument to be made that, in that environment, Wildstar wouldn't have survived.  They don't have the safety net of brand recognition that a game like SWTOR or ESO has.  Wildstar having a niche background core of players who actually did want this kind of game has probably saved it from going F2P, at least in the short term.
 
If they're playing a long-ball game (and it sounds like NCSoft might be doing that if they haven't panicked and thrown the baby out with the bathwater yet), they're probably doing exactly what smart companies would do.  Don't advertise until the players playing the game are, in the majority, satisfied, you're established, and people start to burn out on WoD.  Then you start making sure people remember your game's around, you run promos to your ex-players telling them you've fixed their problems, done optimization, etc.  And you won't fix it for everyone, but for enough people you might.  Then NCSoft's advertising might be worth it.
 
Nothing's going to be as good as just having the players telling their friends to play the game, though.  Me telling my friends how much fun I'm having and how much I love this game will work better than anything else, because my friends trust my opinion more than any magazine, website, or video game company.
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Just to pull a snippet out, I only played WoW for ~8mo for the panda xpac, but endgame raiding was plenty active and hard, and I heard with the WoD stat squish and changes dungeons have gotten harder again. I don't get where people seem to think WoW raiding is skill less LFR only, there is a huge amount of hard mode guild raiding happening. I'm not sure if you've done SoO, but it plays a lot like WS, lots of movement and dodging. Plenty of skill and a solid group is needed to clear the harder tiers. WoW has top end content, mid tier, and low end, and that's not a bad thing. WS just has top end.
 
WS has much better costuming and housing IMO, WS dungeons aren't hard anymore so that's not really a selling point or keeping people interested. I don't disagree that WS is much better at it's core than WoW, in every single element. We just desperately need multi tier content and more consistent rewards.
 
So maybe the solution is to polish the game into something that has a broader appeal before they advertise, time will tell.
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Sadly some have jumped on the word F2P, the post is not about the game model! The subject was only injected into the OP in relation to >>> anything could be happening because nothing is telling us otherwise!
 
This is Carbines official forum for the game, the post is about bad PR, if you can call not having any bad? If your satisfied with the last news & announcements being a post from Tony Rey dated 15th December......then there is nothing for you here....keep moving  	
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Sadly some have jumped on the word F2P, the post is not about the game model! The subject was only injected into the OP in relation to >>> anything could be happening because nothing is telling us otherwise!
 
This is Carbines official forum for the game, the post is about bad PR, if you can call not having any bad? If your satisfied with the last news & announcements being a post from Tony Rey dated 15th December......then there is nothing for you here....keep moving  
 
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Well to address the issue of poor PR, I would like to refer back to my first post. 
 
Even though I brought someone in because I mentioned I was still playing it and that it hadn't gone the path of swtor. I have also effectively, due to problems at the time, most likely turned others away from wildstar. There are still big issues and thus I believe it is not a good time to go full on ad mode. I mean, are we all going to ignore the elephant in the room and pretend PvP is acceptable in its current state? More numbers wont fix the problems that made all those numbers leave in the first place.	
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Well to address the issue of poor PR, I would like to refer back to my first post. 
 
Even though I brought someone in because I mentioned I was still playing it and that it hadn't gone the path of swtor. I have also effectively, due to problems at the time, most likely turned others away from wildstar. There are still big issues and thus I believe it is not a good time to go full on ad mode. I mean, are we all going to ignore the elephant in the room and pretend PvP is acceptable in its current state? More numbers wont fix the problems that made all those numbers leave in the first place.
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Well to address the issue of poor PR, I would like to refer back to my first post. 
 
Even though I brought someone in because I mentioned I was still playing it and that it hadn't gone the path of swtor. I have also effectively, due to problems at the time, most likely turned others away from wildstar. There are still big issues and thus I believe it is not a good time to go full on ad mode. I mean, are we all going to ignore the elephant in the room and pretend PvP is acceptable in its current state? More numbers wont fix the problems that made all those numbers leave in the first place.
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Either way, to answer your question, some complaints about WoW and other MMORPGs I played and paid attention to the forums for that I personally knew were all over their forums there before I started playing Wildstar:
 
-Dungeons are too easy
-Raids are just PUGs now
-Crafting is worthless, we should be able to add our own stats to make our own armor (this was a long discussion)
-Games don't make you pay attention, they aren't active
-There's no player housing (games that have player housing either made it too expensive or too limited)
-That if your guild isn't doing something you want to do, you need to make a chat channel for it because there's no "second guild"
-Not enough open world bosses and events
-No costume system (later that the transmog system was clunky and expensive whenever you changed gear)
-There's no skill involved, it's all a numbers game because you aren't actively doing anything but dodging a few mechanics
 
 
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First off, to the OP: If they're still incommunicado next week, get worried. The fact that they've gone quiet over the last few weeks says nothing about the health of the game and a lot about the vacation habits of US workers around the holidays.
 
Second, I've been watching to see how many new players show up here this last week and frankly, I'm worried in a way that I wasn't two weeks ago. I've got an alt who sat in the 15-29 PvP bracket queue this weekend for more than 3 hours with nothing popping. A week or so after The Great Unwrapping, the 15-29 bracket is dead. This is not good news.
 
Third, and this one is to Vic and anyone else who thinks we all ought to be talking up this game: you've got it the wrong way around. FIRST the game improves, THEN I tell my friends how much better it is. Because they're my friends, and my honest description of this game has them willing to check it out again in a few months, but I can't honestly tell them that the reasons they left in the first place are any better now than when they left. When I can and still be honest, I will. But not before then.	
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I'd hope they just drop the box price entirely and make it just a pay sub.
Free game, just pay the subscription or buy the CREDD on plat.
 
Encourages CREDD buyers and users to increase their frequency. And you can make the Deluxe upgrade a "Cash shop" Account addition.
A mount and costume+whatever else it came with for 15$ Pretty damn nice price considering a perm single character mount in TERA is 16$ account wide 26$ and WoW an account mount is 25$ if you get one of their cash shop ones.	
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Free trials would help bring more players, clearly. A wider level range of PvP practice battlegrounds (1-49 for example) would also help with the queues (or any PvP solution, since casual PvP is perhaps one of the most fun things to do while leveling imho).
 
Making the game more alt-rewarding would be a nice touch as well. (account wide dyes & mounts for example, bonuses to reputation gaining for consecutive characters etc). Make creating a new character a desired process.
 
Then there are tons of marketing tricks we see other games using that could also work here too.
 
Wildstar is a gem of a game and it deserves more but all of these solutions (or any solutions) take time to add and quite a bit of effort.
 
Hopefully everyone returning from the Holiday break is recharged, rested and ready! :)	
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I'd hope they just drop the box price entirely and make it just a pay sub.
Free game, just pay the subscription or buy the CREDD on plat.
 
Encourages CREDD buyers and users to increase their frequency. And you can make the Deluxe upgrade a "Cash shop" Account addition.
A mount and costume+whatever else it came with for 15$ Pretty damn nice price considering a perm single character mount in TERA is 16$ account wide 26$ and WoW an account mount is 25$ if you get one of their cash shop ones.
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You do realize they make like 80% of there money off box sales right? This would be a disaster.
 
Thats why Guild Wars 2 is B2P. Box sales are everything.
 
I think the best idea would be make levels 1-20 free trial. Its like a good drug, the first ones free, then your hooked :)
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I'm fairly sure a lot of people are turned off from the game simply because it's a "box" they need to buy first.
Nearly everyone that I've tried to get to try wildstar has said they'd rather not have to buy the game first.
 
People buy GW2 because it has no subfee afterwards, just like a lot of other games.
Pay once it's over with.
 
WildStar is a Box AND sub.
 
 
A Free Trial would be cool, but I think level 20 isn't a very good place to cut off. I'd rather cut off post when players get the hoverboard(25).
But then again Whitevale is a garbage zone and players coming back from level 20 to go into that crap would probably do more harm than good.
Seriously Whitevale sucks.
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I'm fairly sure a lot of people are turned off from the game simply because it's a "box" they need to buy first.
Nearly everyone that I've tried to get to try wildstar has said they'd rather not have to buy the game first.
 
People buy GW2 because it has no subfee afterwards, just like a lot of other games.
Pay once it's over with.
 
[...]
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You must know a lot of people that have never played video games if they don't understand the common MMO archetype or box+sub. Many games have done it, many games will continue to do it. It's simply the best way to fund the game, anyone can tell you that. The "box" pays for the game itself and investment and effort put into the creation of the game, the sub pays for literally everything after that, down to the latest post in the dev tracker. 
 
People buy GW2 because they liked GW1, it's that simple. Their B2P model has no bearing on whether people will play their game or not.
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Wildstar definitely deserves the title of 'least exciting mmo of all time'. Now that the game has released and the PR gits have been sacked/moved on to greener pastures; there is almost no interest in the game outside of these forums. You could ask just about anyone about W* and they won't even know what it is. The worst part is that, even though I personally enjoy the game, I wouldn't really recommend it to any of my friends over, say, WoW or FF14 in it's current condition.
 
I don't mind supporting Carbine though, despite the fact that the forums are more fun than the game at the moment. I like where this game is trying to take the genre and while it's not there yet, I'm sure it'll find its footing in the mmo world eventually.	
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I have plenty of platinum and CREDD for 2 accounts, but I pay 15$ a month in the off chance that someone over at Carbine fixes this game.
 
I much prefer buy once (GW2) or F2P with subscriber benefits (Planetside 2).  Part of the reason I think people quit this game is because they feel that they're wasting their 15-20$ a month because they're not getting something that works.	
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I know Carbine cannot provide the wo*man-power to do things as fast as Blizzard, for example. Still, I can no longer support this game in its state :/. I do not get the feeling that they put in effort to get things right because they do it too slow and without any news or notifications for us.
 
For instance, if I have a look at the bi-weekly patch 12/16/2014 and just quote medic patchnotes:
 
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Medic
AbilitiesAnnihilation
T1+ will now properly apply effects to targets that enter the field after the initial placement
AMPsEntrapment
Debuff is now properly applied via Restrictor and Magnetic Lockdown (No debuff icon).
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