104596-psychology-of-losing-interest-the-nerf-bat-swings-hard

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So for the first time since launch last night, I found myself unwilling to clamor out and do Dailies.  I'm an avid 'Pro Wild star' pumper, and even more so in support of Carbines attempt at what I'd call 'transparent development'.  I'm the type that has a 'scheduled' play window due to real life, and W* is one of my self centered indulgences I've allowed into my life.
 
Just as much fascinated by the fact that I had, bluntly, lost interest in the product suddenly, I figured a little self analysis as to that reason was due. (and as you'll see, the issue itself is petty, it leads to more broad scope issues)
 
Foremost, what attracted me to Wild Star?  Being a developer/programmer by trade, open design and toy boxes fascinate me. 18 Ice cream pails of Lego's in the basement? That's my youth.  WS hits this nail on the head, especially with the amp build possibilities for those that got to experience Beta.  Some of the gear specials and imbuements lead to incredibly versatile play and character design.  Want to be that guy that's hard to control and take out? You can have that, crit monster? Go for it.  Build your character how you like.  I'm not yet raid attuned, and I have yet to set foot in a BG, Warplot or Arena, but I enjoy seeing what I can do within the system and how far it would bend.  Ever wonder why they increased the base monster speed of Black Temple in World of Warcraft?  Because someone figured out that you could pull half the instance at once, run in circles for 15 minutes as a paladin dropping consecration, and collect all the loot solo.  I'm that guy, it's what I enjoy.
 
So that's it, primarily.  We've been given some pretty awesome tools with a very flexible system, and allowed to run with it.  And you know what? It's fun and was worth throwing some cash at in my off time.  I was allowed to design and build my own personal temple of awesomeness, invest hours and neglect the misses for a bit each night designing a character within the environment that was all mine.
 
So what happened?  Basically the same as someone coming over while at the beach and stampeding over a sand castle you've spent the last 2 hours meticulously designing and building.  Time and effort was spent towards something, and then a few rungs knocked out completely negating everything you invested.
 
What happened specifically?  (and as a fore note, the initial issue is petty) In particular I was very happy with my crafted shield system with the 1 interrupt armor.  I built upon this base, that i could activated additional IA on top as needed, and basically my gear and action set was designed around being very hard to CC, crit, or control.  This design was an important thing, which I had leveled and saved up for, in addition to crafting multiple iterations of until receiving one I was happy with. (Guess my class?)  There was a lot invested.
 
Come yesterday, I noticed what I had done, wasn't having any effect.  I had built around avoiding random CCs from mobs, very happy with it, and gave me a bit of time to run away (I won't lie) if I got into some world PvP.  The buff was coming off after a swing or two of getting hit, and my shield based interrupt armor was pretty much 100% negated via the patch.  I thought this a bit odd, and instead of jumping to conclusions, I did some forum work and investigated the cause.
 
At this time I was searching for a work around to the problem, but discovered something a fair bit more disturbing.  Apparently the special was nerfed because medics in PvP has to much interrupt armor, and could keep the buff up a few times during arena.  Instead of taking time to sort out the issues, a knee jerk (opinion) response was issued completely eliminating the special from functioning for anyone all together. (It comes off when you take a hit or two now, not when hit with a CC)
 
And this is where it hit me, the design process within the system was under such dramatic swing that building a stable foundation or design of any type towards your character is not worth the time investment or cost.  Not that I had lost one piddly IA armor off an item, rather that the systems we build our characters and world around are of such volatility that you can't be certain that your investment won't be taken away completely by a few simple design choices after hours and hours of investment.
 
And that's it.  There's such huge buggy changes that nothing we're investing our time in currently is worth it, and with the itemization changes forth coming, it's only going to get worse.  After further review, the problems and changes of this past drop are a profound historical marker of how things will be going forward, and it's just not worth the investment or attention I've been giving it, as much as I love pretty much everything about WS.
 
No, I'm not unsubbing, and I still enjoy my time, but something was certainly lost yesterday that'll impact how I play WS, and how long i stick with the product as a whole.  And it's the way the product is being handled and changed, not what you can do with it.  That the changes they make destroy what I build completely.	
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			For the most part my stance is that nerfing/buffing abilities is great.  Nerfing/buffing items is not.  	
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			That was some very eloquent QQ.	
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You're this upset an item got nerfed?
 
"The psychology of losing interest" lmao pls
 
 
There are 100 more valid reasons to lose interest in Wildstar and they've all been elaborated on this forum many times.
Having an OP item which was becoming the expected playstyle for PVP was bound to be nerfed. Just like the snare weapon attachment.	
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You're this upset an item got nerfed?
 
"The psychology of losing interest" lmao pls
 
 
There are 100 more valid reasons to lose interest in Wildstar and they've all been elaborated on this forum many times.
Having an OP item which was becoming the expected playstyle for PVP was bound to be nerfed. Just like the snare weapon attachment.
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			You say you couldn't be bothered logging in to do dailies. However, your ability to do dailies wasn't really altered. Lack of logic there.	
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			Why is this post tagged "Pedo Bear"...	
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			nerf to an op item/class/ability!!??...never happens in mmo's....<sarcasm off>...did you play a huntard in wow? i did vanilla-panda...i know about nerfs...you should learn to roll with the patches  :P  	
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			Unfortunately, Wildstar seems to be following WoW in that regard. Flavor of the month, where the buffs/nerfs are noticable, and come every month or so, creating a shift in which are top or not. Give it half a year to a year, and Medics may be top of the food chain in DPS, and Spellslingers bottom tier, and Warriors top tanks while Engies struggle. That said, I do sympathize. Trying to build something unique and having it stripped away, especially for reasons that don't explicitly affect what you were doing (IE, PvP balance affecting PvE) definitely sucks...but ultimately its up to the devs to change things how they feel, and given they're previously from WoW, well...its not likely this will stop any time soon.	
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Unfortunately, Wildstar seems to be following WoW in that regard.
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I lost interest in Max Level PvP with the most recent patch. I was only just starting and I was a healer. Since I had almost no level 50 PVP gear to speak of, aside from 5000 prestige worth of blues, I was getting melted pretty fast before but could at least keep myself up with 1 DPS focusing me so long as they weren't fully decked out in 1500s gear.
 
Now there's just no point in trying to do the gear progression as a healer. Any 1 DPS can melt me when before it took at least 2 dedicated sub-1500 geared DPS, 3-4 if they were terrible players who just AOE spammed carelessy, or 1 1500+ geared DPS.
 
I've become a hindrance on my team for wanting to heal them. I'm an empty slot. If carbine just wants PvP to be DPS Jousting then they should have said something.	
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			If you like IA, there's a gadget technologists can make that adds 3.	
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			These are former WOW devs. It shouldn't come as any surprise that they'd follow the path of wild rollercoasting nerfs/buffs and FOTM builds.  Judging by the rest of Wildstar,  I don't think they know any other way to build a game.  	
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I want to reaffirm that this isn't a squabble over losing one IA.  I openly admitted that it's a feeble and unworthy reason to lose interest in a game.  However, it let me to realize how heavy handed the changes are that sweep out the underlying foundations we invest considerable time building.  And how what we build can be wiped out by a few changes.
 
No one likes building something creative and fun that works, only to have that project and investment fail or be significantly impact because someone changes the rules after the fact.
 
More a self analysis as to what made me instantly lose a significant portion of the draw to this media.	
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			"significant portion of the draw to this media"?  Now, I'm all for better language and grammar.  But come on man!  Nobody "really" talks like that do they? Also, your boring sentences are somewhat completely filled with unneeded or unwanted adjectives and adverbs that just make the normal reader sometimes cringe just from the sheer ridiculousness of your long-winded writing and or typing. 	
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Builts that are too efficient will always be wiped out.  That is the nature of any competitive scene.
 
Like the Sharkskin Racing Suit by Speedo that was so effective even the Olympics banned it - because it become everyone uses this or be at a disadvantage.
 
I have mostly warriors so the nerf didn't impact me much.  3 vs 5 targets - I can live with that.  	
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			I understand where the OP is coming from having learned my lesson from WoW ... twice. The first time was when BC came out and the many months of raiding to complete Tier 2 and add a few T3's went away when my gear was replaced by quest blues in the first week. I came to expect similar gear jumps in future expansions, and was not disappointed in that regard. As a result, once an xpac release date was announced I stopped raiding, bought as many (Wrath) heirlooms as I could and started leveling alts because tier gear would become obsolete almost before the first dungeon.The second was when MoP completely reinvented WoW's talent tree system. Having burned out on the Firelands raid trinket grind, I went back on a 30-day gift sub from our old guild's GM when it launched. After 2 weeks I was left questioning whether I wanted to in essence learn a whole new WoW, or really change the channel and go play a whole new game.In both cases, it was a hard-coded direction the game went. I could either ride it or get out of the way. So I chose to get out of the way and left for a whole new game.While I can't compare the scope of my experiences to the scope of what OP's going through because we are different players with different preferences playing different games in different eras, I definitely get it. If it's a simple one-off thing then there probably isn't much to worry about. However if it's a systemic ecosystem change that ends up obsoleting months worth of effort and doesn't seem fun enough to pursue, then it could be major decision time.	
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"significant portion of the draw to this media"?  Now, I'm all for better language and grammar.  But come on man!  Nobody "really" talks like that do they? Also, your boring sentences are somewhat completely filled with unneeded or unwanted adjectives and adverbs that just make the normal reader sometimes cringe just from the sheer ridiculousness of your long-winded writing and or typing. 
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Shall I speak engrish gooder? ;)
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"significant portion of the draw to this media"? Now, I'm all for better language and grammar. But come on man! Nobody "really" talks like that do they? Also, your boring sentences are somewhat completely filled with unneeded or unwanted adjectives and adverbs that just make the normal reader sometimes cringe just from the sheer ridiculousness of your long-winded writing and or typing.
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Another victim of "surely we can balance PvP and PvE using the exact same system".
 
I don't understand how so many devs fall for this delusion.
It literally canNOT work. And that much should be obvious from the way gameplay works in both modes.
But nooooo, they insist on doing it anyway.	
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I think that's supposed to be "more betterer" ...
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That was some very eloquent QQ.
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The second was when MoP completely reinvented WoW's talent tree system. Having burned out on the Firelands raid trinket grind, I went back on a 30-day gift sub from our old guild's GM when it launched. After 2 weeks I was left questioning whether I wanted to in essence learn a whole new WoW, or really change the channel and go play a whole new game.
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It's one thing to dislike Pandaria talent system of choosing one of three talents that are thematically similar per tier; it's a whole other matter if you can't understand it & need to "re-learn it." There was nothing to learn, it's simple choices on a single screen.
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It wasn't so much having to learn an newly simplified tree system. It was more having to relearn how to min/max with a greatly minimized talent system in combination with enchants and gems for every class of character. I went from hardcore to casual after Wrath and really had no desire to start from scratch, respecing stables of toons across multiple servers and retuning all their gear.
 
That doesn't mean the new system sucks. It just means I questioned whether or not I really wanted to deal with it, which is synonymous I think with how the OP feels about the situation he/she described.
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"People make shit posts about why the game sucks so we attack them! Maybe if they made more constructive posts!"
 
"lol this is very eloquent QQ"
 
Welcome to the Wildstar forums.
 
Why am I still here.	
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Mr. Robot, man.
 
Mr. Robot.
 
It'll even point you at what drops are upgrades, and how much of an upgrade they are...
 
I mean, it doesn't do the clicking for you, but it does mean all you need to do is the clicking.
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Mr. Robot?
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That was some very eloquent QQ.
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Ask Mr. Robot.
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This and the posts that followed really sadden me. Why do people have to be so hostile and so rude to a well thought out / honest post?
 
I completely understand what the OP is saying. I un-subbed this morning (yes I know you don't care, I won't let the door hit me in the ass on the way out). The reason was much the same. I have nothing attainable to strive for, because the basic mechanics of this game are in serious flux. Anything I build towards could be dramatically different next month.
 
I was working on crafting blues. That's being nerfed. Not much interest in running dungeons, because they don't provide rewards I'm interested in. Are the changes Wildstar is implementing necessary? Absolutely. Crafting needs to be nerfed so the gear from dungeons is worth while. But that's something that should have been fixed in beta. You shouldn't need to radically re-design major game systems right after launch. I'm primarily a PVPer and we all know how that's gone.
 
I wanted to love this game. I leveled five different characters, 2 to 50 and one to 44. Yet now I can't summon the interest to login. Yeah, I get that you don't care. But the devs should, because every player like OP and myself who get to the point of quitting means less revenue. Less revenue means their game dies.
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And this is where it hit me, the design process within the system was under such dramatic swing that building a stable foundation or design of any type towards your character is not worth the time investment or cost. 
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