118645-is-this-enough-for-you-carbine

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I hope you dont need really an answer to this...


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I don't think WS is ready to bring ppl who quit back. Maybe its heading towards the right direction compared to launch, but it still has a lot to do in order to bring ppl back. Btw i also don't think optimization improvements are something that you can advertise, at least not yet. Optimization is still in very low levels.


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I'm not saying that isn't true, but I am saying that there's only so much Carbine can do. The game will never be perfect; even WoW is dealing with its own crop of bugs beyond even its notable server issues. Unfortunately, Carbine has to gamble. They switched to the quarterly drop to clear out bugs and give them more time for content. And this patch was freer of bugs and contained more content; the issue seems to be more that people didn't think it was three months free of bugs and three months full of content. During the two monthly drops, the feedback overwhelmingly called on Carbine to hit the brakes until they fixed the game. They tried that for three months, and by the third month people were pleading with them to release the patch, even with bugs, because the community would rather deal with bugs that are hotfixed than be without content for so long. So Carbine released the drop, it has bugs, and they're being criticized again. So Carbine needs to pick a side or the middle ground. Their current timeframe has drop 4 releasing two months after drop 3. That's where this gets interesting. By January, WoW's expansion will have sunk or swum, but Carbine's living on its fat reserves until they have a better trial plan. It would be nice to be able to wait until drop 4, after all the WoW hype may have died down and they'll have had more time (the panacea to all an MMORPGs issues). However, it becomes a business question at that point. Will the game be able to remain viable as it is and is NCSoft willing to accept "viable" and strike when they aren't aiming at a stone wall? Time will tell as far as that's concerned. We're lacking a few key pieces of information, though our latest public information says that Wildstar is holding steady. Not taking off, but not failing, just holding. If that trend continues or the numbers upswing slightly, I imagine you could well be right that new plans for inviting players back (or to Nexus for the first time) may wait for a major content patch rather than a bug fixing patch. If the numbers swing down, I have a feeling we'll see them try to break the siege before they starve.

It's up in the air. People who were experiencing the most massive optimization problems (AMD incompatibility) received a pretty decent increase in performance. Carbine have said in their optimization notes for this drop that some improvements simply have to be in future content design, as in some things were designed that AMD drivers just don't handle well. That said, I have an AMD processor, and I noticed a noticable increase in game smoothness post-drop 3. Of course, there's a lot of room to improve. Optimization's a very tricky thing because you have to try to "optimize" for one kind of system without "breaking" another. It also doesn't help that Wildstar doesn't look hyper-realistic, so a lot of people completely underestimate the kind of wrenching muscle the game requires to function at a high level with its layered transparencies and shaders. Time will give them the space they need to hopefully write better optimization, or as is more likely the case time will simply catch the hardware up to the software. Unlike a lot of things, optimization is an ongoing balancing act where you're trying to squeeze more performance out of computers that you don't own without hurting the performance of other rigs; that's not something that really has a metric you can assign. It certainly helped some people, but we won't know until they come back. I'm assuming Carbine has some better metrics on hand with regards to reported FPS and data load, so if you're right, they'll hold off until they're in a place they feel comfortable. I doubt they're going to wait for it, though. Optimization can only carry you so far, and it's simply not going to matter as much as content.


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Well also to add to this at various points in time different aspects of the adventures were buggy enough to halt or hamper progression depending on a mechanic or choice. So the cookie cutter paths grew out of those as a result for being "safe". I remember Crimelords for example being a pain early on because Protostar path would bug out and couldn't finish the adventure and Tempest Refuge we were all told not to use snipers because they'd bug and your progress would be completely halted. While to my knowledge most if not all of this was fixed, the lasting effects and a significant portion of guides people watch still echo the impact on people to play it safe.


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