123520-i-came-back-after-6-months-the-state-of-this-game-is-sad-page-2

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There were well over a hundred people within 25m of me in Thayd last night, it's not empty. This game can, in fact, stand to make money and win as a subscription game if the drops we get are of the caliber we get from Drop 4 and the apparent quality we'll get in Drop 5. I don't think I've ever seen so much given in a single three month period from a game developer to its subscription community. Not from WoW, not from EVE, not from anyone. That's paying dividends as the population rebounds. In fact, instead of making the game functionally worthless and hoping you can sell things in it, Wildstar is currently proving that you can get more players in your game by just making your game better. It's a radical approach nowadays in the era where everyone will try to scream for an F2P game out of some misguided value judgement, but it does still work. But yes, I've stated this before. If this game includes a free option, as long as it's self contained, I don't care. As long as my 15 dollars a month qualified me for everything that's been developed still, and the free players are the ones getting gouged, dealing with advertisements, or generally not asking for extra money from me to cover them in order to get around a pay wall, it's not really a F2P game. They're being recouped directly, not having the game's monetization redistributed. If this game actually goes F2P, there won't be a goodbye post or any whinging or feedback. I've given that feedback already. I will immediately cancel my subscription, log in one last time to pass guild control off to someone who plans to stay, and I will leave. And since that transition is a one-way street, I know I'll never come back. I'll have no regrets, but I'll not be here doing what I've done so far. I've seen where that F2P road goes; I've seen the games it produces and I understand how they make money and from whom they make money. Changing the payment model to go after me makes me no longer a target audience, it just makes me a target. I'll go to someone that values me as a player and a community member rather than treating me like one of those guys at the mall kiosk who wants to sell me soap.


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Vanilla WoW was the best mmo experience I've had, by a long long, shot and I'm sure it'll continue to be until someone creates a virtual reality mmo. Blizzard did everything right with WoW which is why it's an mmo behemoth now. I don't really care for what current WoW is, with the dancing pandas and all that crap, but back in 2005 WoW was a different experience to anything else and was truly brilliant.


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Um....no. I was there at launch, too. And it was a buggy mess. Right off the top of my head.... Launched with multiple incomplete zones that accidentally had no quests in them Attument for Onyxia raid wasn't functioning at all, for either faction. "No Loot" Bug Warriors perma stunned if they are stunned while casting "Charge". No working Deeprun Tram from SW to Ironforge Falling through the world constantly Night Elf Wisp form having terrible collision detection. Couldn't max your crafting to 300, even though it was intended. No working /stuck command Enemies that made totems chased you forever, and didn't deaggro unless you killed them. Mage's Blink spell CC'd/rooted the mage USER in place after the animation finished Swimming wasn't even functioning with the diving by tilting up and down The camera constantly borked out when you WERE swimming, between inconsistently going above and below the water "Drowning" when you're in caves. Vanishing UI when you're on an air taxi, which caused you to have relog. Which you couldn't do mid-flight. If you were priest MC'd you could still cast spells against them.


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No, but FF14 had a few million people straight out of the gate. And when they wanted to relaunch the game, Final Fantasy got recognized and publicized. There's no guarantee that gaming magazines will run full spreads on NCSoft relaunching Wildstar; NCSoft doesn't have that kind of reputation and Wildstar doesn't have that name recognition. And we're really ignoring how absolutely bad WoW sputtered out of the gate into launch. I'm not saying it was a bad game (I played it, of course), but I was there entirely because it had the name "Warcraft" attached. FFXI and EVE were performing as generally expected by then. WoW was bugged and broken in many areas. The difference was that we were willing to eat it back then, make our own groups, make our own guilds (to field 40 man raid teams, no less!) etc. It's a different world now with automated group finders, much broader game perspectives, and a much more jaded population. Fanboys play a HUGE role in getting people to play an MMORPG. SWTOR wouldn't be half the game it even is now (which isn't half the game it was supposed to be) if Star Wars wasn't attached to it. ESO wouldn't have even gotten off the ground if it didn't have Elder Scroll's name attached to it. And the reason for that is that I was one of those Warcraft fanboys that kept playing WoW even though it could be frustrating. It was all about seeing where it was going, not where it was. And it got places. Wildstar can go places. At this point, the most cogent criticism people usually give it is that there aren't many players. Which isn't entirely accurate, especially not as accurate as it was in November, and is almost entirely perpetuated simply because people say it's true. Much like people complaining about queue times instead of trying to convince people to queue are essentially creating their own problems, the biggest problem right now is entirely generated by us. We are telling people, in spite of the player population growing, that nobody is playing and that's retarding the growth of the game. By not even acknowledging the improvements, players are self-inventing their own problems. I just put this down to people not understanding how their reports are received. Again, there are a lot of people who complain that queue times are long, that guilded players who just don't deal with the problem don't understand, and that the only way to fix it is to go F2P. That will immediately make sure that anyone reading their report of the situation has a negative view on the Group Finder and just finds a guild. Nobody ever says how nice the Group Finder can be, can give reasons that it's better, and tells people playing the game that they should queue, only that people shouldn't even bother trying. Those 131 people I saw on last night, they could all queue for PVE and you'd have no queue problem. They don't because... nobody queues. If you really support the game, really think about whether you're shooting your own cause in the foot. You can self-inflict your own doom.


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^This. I haven't been without a job since I was 17 or 18 years old. I work so I can do what I want, when I want. $15.00 a month is less that 50 cents a day. I understand that some people may have a hard time with money but if a sub is out of their price range then rethinking their entertainment budget needs to be a priority. If you can't afford it then you should not be wasting your hard earned money on a game anyways. There is a lot to do that is free.


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I can say that I have been working, my first job being a Dairy Queen in Columbus, OH, since I was 15 and a half years old. I have only been jobless twice, having been laid off for a month apiece. Both times, my unemployment check more than covered my WoW subscription and I got a new job quickly. 15 dollars is less than dinner for two at Wendy's. I've always been able to afford that, even at Dairy Queen. Even working as a cart attendant at Target, fifteen dollars was nothing. If it came down to it, I'd probably just make a sandwich two days a month and still pay my subscription. Or, in the case of Wildstar, I'd take a night to just grind up some plat and buy a CREDD. It might take one night a month. If you literally are down to nothing but bare essentials of life and you don't have 15 dollars left over, F2P might be your last option. Then again, you'd think you'd be in some dire enough straits at that point that you might not want to spend time gaming.


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I have no loans. Nada. Why with all of that do you consider it to be smart to even spend 15 a month? Especially when you owe 3K credit to a bank?! Heck that's the situation that I'm avoiding by instead spending less than living with my head being burried in loans. I've seen my mother pay off a 40 year appartment loan and split her hair over going jobless twice in that time. No, no, no. Loans are a really bad idea. And if you have such a huge loan on your head, it's better to get rid of it faster than to add monthly commitments on top. How does one even allow their credit card to get into a minus anyway?

Nope. While on free 10 day trial just saying. There's probably a lot of people that could be playing Wildstar right now and pay as they get the money for it. But they do not, because it's sub based.


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Precisely this. And the larger problem is that F2P and B2P ask players who do have more money to shoulder a much larger percentage of the burden to get the same amount of return on their investment for development time. If the premise is that people without money should be allowed to play, you're asking those same players who were already paying to pay more or get less. Our current system is incredibly fair, because the only way around paying your share is to be accounted, every month, but someone else in a direct transaction for plat. There isn't much more of a fair system that doesn't exclude CREDD and simply asks everyone to pay the exact same amount. To ask us to pay more or be happy with less (not even bringing up how much less product we'd be getting anyway once design priorities shift to making things they can sell us rather than just things we want to play) is hardly fair.

I did go to college. I do have debts. In fact, I pay for a car loan, too. And myriad other expenses. If 15 dollars a month is too much to ask for entertainment on top of a loan, and you're really that worried about it, why not get another part time job and spend your time doing that instead of playing any game? I've never been in such dire straits that 15 dollars a month was beyond my scope or that I felt guilty for paying it, and if I did I wouldn't be spending my time in ANY game, F2P or otherwise. Obviously, I'd need to make more money if that was really my stance on life. But, of course, it's really not. There has been no point in my life, regardless of my personal debt, where I simply have not been able to invest in recreation. 15 dollars a month is a pretty good deal when I consume regular AAA titles in a few weeks at best with no other personal interaction with players. I still have a long way to go in Wildstar to get everything I want, and I wouldn't be able to buy a modern AAA title for that subscription money in four months.


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I don't think everything's fine, I just don't agree with any solution that promotes F2P as an easy fix. It's not a fix, it's a swap, and a mighty unpredictable one with a game as unstable as Wildstar is right now (so far as reputation). It could work... but it's a gamble at best. I do understand your perspective on debt though. I'm sure there are a lot of areas out of North America (and particularly in the region of the old Soviet bloc) where money is much more necessary, and debt much more troublesome. I've been raised with a lot of safety nets so they've given me the leisure to make decisions like taking on large student loans. In my situation, I had been out of school for about fourteen years and was 27 when I entered university. I watched my sister support herself by working full time through university, and it hurt both her grades and her interest, I think. Now, as she's making six figures for the government, she's doing great. But being a wealthy poli-sci graduate with political sensibilities was never going to make me happy, haha. Instead I pushed hard the first few years, got a $17k scholarship offer for a Masters, then decided to turn it down. I'm hoping to get employment with JET next year so I can show Japanese kids how to fail money and love life. :P Anyway, it's all just to say: We all operate with different circumstances. And that does mean that some people will have a harder time getting that $15 a month, for sure. I just don't see why Carbine should be expected to do anything about it. :(   Especially when we've already got a hybrid system. I feel like people asking for F2P are ignoring the fact that Carbine's been offering a compromise from the very start. If players can't get the money, and can't farm the CREDD (there are numerous ways to make gold fast), should it be on the studio to elevate them up? I'll step out of this debate for now, as you're dealing with more than enough 'opponents' already. ;)  Now is the time for hummus and cheeses!


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You have no idea what their resources are, their allocation is, or their income is. You cannot be "rational" without all of this information. I suppose I should just believe you and quit, though. Maybe one day you'll convince me.


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"Looking at the current numbers" - Which numbers? Where can I look at them? "knowing that they [population] won't all of a sudden double" - How can you possibly know this? "There is no money for new content anymore" - How do you know this? And how are they bringing out new content then? "With the sort of money they are bringing in at the moment... we won't see that much new content." - Now I know for a fact that you do not play the game. There has been an unreal amount of new content that has come out since release a mere 6 months ago. "So, you all have to understand that probably most of their team is currently working on the business model switch and everything else that it implies." - There is ZERO indication that ANY of their team is working a new business model. You sir, are bringing no value to the game by what you are saying. It is completely unfounded, has no basis in reality, and is aimed solely at wanting a game to fail. I am at a loss for reasons for how ANY of your posts are not doom saying.


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The last three drops have had numerous changes, and a corresponding reversal of the population trend. There's plenty of change to go around.


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