115507-mmorpgcom-interview-donatelli-moore-respond-to-concerns

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WildStar is in a very precarious position, and has been for a few months. At this point, the devs probably have no idea whether or not the game will be able to continue under the current payment model, and, in spite of some people's claims, we have no idea how much patience NCSoft has with Carbine. If WildStar brings in enough revenue after the megaservers and changes, they won't need to switch to F2P. If it doesn't, they will. There's no point in saying "we are 100% against F2P" when they don't know the effect that megaservers and the next drop will have on subscriber numbers. That being said, you can be damn sure F2P is being considered, and the shift to megaservers and incentives for subscribers would certainly make it much easier to introduce a hybrid P2P/F2P model.


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So designing a game for a niche is unthinkable blasphemy, is it? News flash, most games in existence have specific targeted audiences.


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Those you think are carebare questions? I thought they were asking tough but fair questions. Carebear questions would have been something along the lines of, "What kind of new content do you think will excite players in your new drop?" or "What has been the most difficult part of the process behind implementing your megaservers?"

I'm not sure when this happened, but games that aren't easy didn't used to be a "niche" or a genre called "hardcore". I have no idea where it came from, but that seemed to have happened somewhere on the periphery of my understanding. I knew games were tending towards the easy side of things, but I didn't know it was a sea change. If "I hate RNG" is what people mean by "hardcore", that's fine, I guess. Nobody likes running 25 dungeons and getting nothing to show for it. And that should be changed. But if people are calling this game "hardcore" meaning "relatively more difficult than the other games out there", I really don't think that should change. We used to really like games that required more than a pulse and a few minutes to beat.


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Making it not fun won't help. Pugging a new dungeon in under and hour, first try, means that dungeon becomes old really, really fast. Adventures do that, so there is that kind of content. I'm sure they will ad more. But I really don't queue for Adventures any more because they just aren't that much fun after the first few runs.


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What does that have to do with anything? Six months ago Massively was all about the Wildstar hype, they gave the game a great review and now they are asking the same question that many of the current and former players are all asking "if this game is so great, why is it in so much trouble right now?" This article didn't make up or deny facts. They didn't say "we hate this game and want it to be shut down." It did not attempt to hide the fact that it was an op-ed piece. It reported that they were invited to ask several questions about the current state of the game, and those questions have not been answered over a week later. It presented the questions that were asked, tough ones to be sure, and then also presented some of the answers given to much softer questions from another site and found them to be quite non-specific when the time for non-specific questions is past; this thread ( https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/115520-say-no-to-f2p/ ) exists largely because of the stilted and waffling answers given in that interview. Is it an opinion piece? Yes, it even says so in the article's search tags. Is it making anything up? No. They're calling out Carbine for inviting them to ask questions about the sate of the game, and then avoiding giving those answers; and biased or unbiased, that's what they're supposed to do.


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I think that's the thing. They didn't market to raiders any more than housing enthusiasts, but nobody calls this "the housing game". I mean, I know what made the news was 40 man raids because everyone wanted that old school vanilla WoW vibe, but Carbine advertised a lot more. They called it difficult. It's sort of a strange combination of players fetishizing raiding (especially what we did in 40 man vanilla WoW raids) coupled by most people's inability to do them. It was built up to be this huge focus of the game by the public, but there are only two raids and our first, what look like, 4 original content drops contained no more raids. Basically, this game has a reputation for being raider-centric completely at odds with anything Carbine actually did. And even with the game out, the first two patches dropped, the third and fourth combined for the next, and all the ways they've made it easier for casual players so far, people still seem to *cupcake* at Carbine for being so adoring to the raids. I mean, yeah, I knew the game would be harder than other MMORPGs, that's why I'm here. But I came because it was harder across the board. I still can't figure out where Wildstar gets this reputation for being nothing but hardcore raids for hardcore raiders. Personally, if a game releases with two raids and drops nothing for them except attunement easements, and I didn't know it was Wildstar, I'd have called that a pretty small-ball kind of game. I mean, where's the hardcore? I see the game's hard, but having played some really time-consuming games, Wildstar wouldn't even make my top five truly hardcore MMORPGs. It just ranks up there as one of, if not the, most difficult.


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The red highlight is mine. The answer's pretty simple: anything but the two raids and the PVP if you don't want to PVP. Which aren't much of the game, honestly. Raids are two instances that require attunement and a 20 or 40 people. You named a ton of stuff to do in your post (and mentioned why you wouldn't want to do them, which begs the question what exactly a casual is looking for if content that doesn't take long isn't taking long enough to be interesting), and didn't mention things like dungeons, challenges, world content, and others. Again, raids are a very small part of this game that, for some reason, are a very big part of everyone's chatter. Almost all of this game is casual and accessible. Once you hit 50, raids are the only things you can't queue directly into. Yeah, you'll get your ass bit off because you didn't gear up, but I'm constantly wondering where the Hell this criticism comes from. Wildstar has TWO RAIDS. It launched with them! How is this game raid-centric? They'll get one more by January, and we'll have gotten a TON of content for everyone else before then. Drop 3-4 is entirely focused around casual players unless you count bug fixes in the raids or that the gearing affects raids as well. The previous two didn't have anything for the raiders. That's the issue I have. "Casual" players don't ever really come off as casual players, they come off as people disappointed they don't think they have the time or skill to raid. What else could they possibly announce they're doing that would actually stop people from whining about how "hardcore" it is? Make sure all pieces of content can be cleared solo in ten minutes? Maybe that's hyperbole, but casual players have a LOT in front of them. For all intents and purposes, this game is almost completely built out of difficult, but easily accessible bite-size parts. There are four things I know of that take more than practice and an hour, raids, attunement, building a good warplot, and raising your RPVP rating. Of those, attunement is easily done in bite size chunks, warplots and RPVP simply take time to raise ratings, and that leaves nothing but raids as the sole thing in this game that doesn't get handled in bites in a few nights. That's if you are talking about doing the entire raid in one night. I'm not sure, maybe people are subconsciously not pleased that you have to be in a raiding guild anymore. One thing about getting older, getting married, and having kids is that you tend to draw into your own little castle and you don't want to get together with 20 or 40 people on some set night. I'm not sure why raiding, of all things, is catching so much vitriol or becoming so damn important to the discussion. It feels like people don't like it because they don't want raiding to exist, just things they can do in 15-30 minutes whenever they feel like it to reach the end of the game in a month. Considering it'll have been well over half a month since launch when a third 20 man raid is introduced, I just don't buy that there's any evidence Carbine's done anything BUT answer the concerns of non-raiding gamers so far. So the only thing that people seem to want is the end of raiding, because they can't do it and they don't want something to exist that they don't want to do. That's just unacceptable. If you can't raid, you should be okay with that. I don't raid, I don't think it's in any way fair to yell at Carbine that someone on my schedule hasn't beaten Datascape yet. EDIT:  I should add though, trying to turn all games into esports is absolutely annoying. Totally with you on that. Hopefully, Drop 3-4 will change the marketing a bit. What this game needs is a good free trial period after the game is "fixed" and to get those old players to try again and see what's changed.


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As a roleplayer who was dead center for that debate, I can weight in on this. Evindra just isn't enough server to stand on its own, and they needed us elsewhere. They said that; we may not like the answer. They originally intended to have megaservers, I'm assuming one was going to be RP, that simply didn't happen for whatever reason but we got a regular RP server, and there weren't enough RPers to make the standalone megaserver when the dust settled. It's a confluence of two lines of questioning that don't really cross. They originally wanted to do megaservers. They couldn't. They went with regular servers. We got an RP server. The servers went full, they added some. Then they contracted. They needed to merge them. Megaservers solve the problem permanently, so they could do megaservers. So what originally meant they could sustain a regular RP server doesn't mean anything once the regular servers aren't cutting it and they're going the megaserver route. It was considered to keep the RP server as a new megaserver, but it would have been too empty. Or Entity really needed the Evindra people to be more full. That's the only real question that is unanswered by their "metrics" comment. Did Evindra get rolled into Entity because there weren't enough roleplayers, or because they needed the roleplayers to be on Entity? I'm not sure that matters an awful lot. What's obvious is that Evindra wasn't born to die, but it became a necessity. Honestly, if the game pops back up in population and they give us RP phasing someday in about six months or so, we'll be better off. I get it. It's just not journalism, it's a forum flamethread that gets journalistic credibility. There are plenty of people on the forums that ask questions already answered elsewhere and then get mad at Carbine for not answering them. Why don't they get published?


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Just wanted to pipe in on this, was it Carbines call or NCsoft call? How much money did NCsoft make w/paid transfers and continued subs for rerollers? They were not ready? I prefer the comfy tinfoil hat that NCsoft knew what it was doing, and has from the start...even the upcoming model change. They're business professionals.


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Harder questions take longer to answer, news at 11. Seriously though, I think the Massively article would go over better if he wasn't so clearly bitter that other, lesser websites had their answers already. And that line about developers answering in more controlled venues was silly, since Donatelli and Moore aren't developers.

It seems to me that Donatelli has yet to meet a secret that he isn't compelled to leak.

Considering the cross server queues, cross server chats, cross server groups, cross server everything but raids and housing, I don't think its obvious that Carbine intended to create insular communities. Megaservers are really an evolution of a lot of what they already have in place.

Don't forget that this drop has OmniCoreOne (or however its supposed to be spelled and capitalized), which has been billed as Datascape for the solo player.

Is there anything actually new in all of that? It felt like a consolidation of a few different threads, with a ton of repetition.


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As the person who wrote and submitted these questions (and all the others for the MMORPG.com interview), let me shed some light. Please understand that I'm not criticising anyone else's method here, but just explaining how I do things. I generally go for a blend of gentler and more challenging questions, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I want the interviewee to open up to me, as it generally leads to more detailed, interesting answers. Picture yourself in that seat - if it feels more like an interrogation then you're more likely to clam up, or give the barest possible information. That's not good for me as someone trying to create an interesting article, and it's not good for the community that wants in-depth answers. But secondly, the gentler questions are more open-ended or open to interpretation, and how an interviewee chooses to answer them can be just as interesting. Sometimes, a subject will use them to expand on subjects that they are eager to talk about, either because they have news or information they want to share, but which my more targeted questions have missed. I also try to target my questions to the person I'm interviewing, and to what else is going on. I wouldn't ask an artist about game mechanics, and I wouldn't ask an engine programmer about music composition. By the same token, I wouldn't ask for detailed itemisation or class updates from the studio heads - I'd target the respective leads directly. On that particular subject, I knew that one of my colleagues had a crafting interview in progress, and Donatelli said on the Nexus Report that he was planning a more detailed post on the stat updates. And as for the last two questions, they're still relevant for two reasons. Firstly, no game is created in a vacuum, and every developer tries to create the very best game they can. After all, happy gamers that are having fun result in a successful company. So it's useful to know, from an insight standpoint, if a studio thinks they read the market wrong. This is because it helps to frame the direction and purpose for any upcoming changes, but also because it helps to indicate where the future of MMOs as a wider genre is heading. That also goes for the people heading up a game - what experience do they have, what previous titles did they work on that might guide their decisions, what direction and opinions do they bring to the role.


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Can I welcome you to the real world when you enter it? There's companies who have QA in their dev cycle, there's companies who do not..... Please don't generalize.


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