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Freakazoid_ posted:City of Heroes died so this game could live This really is the tragedy here
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Sep 7, 2018 04:03
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Wiki says Carbine formed in '05, and their only game, Wildstar, released in '14. Did it really take 9 years to release a buggy, not-quite-done MMO? I've heard multiple ex-employees say upper management was loving awful, sounds like this thing was a total shitshow.
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Sep 7, 2018 04:49
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Corvinus posted:Wiki says Carbine formed in '05, and their only game, Wildstar, released in '14. Did it really take 9 years to release a buggy, not-quite-done MMO? Yes. Yes it did. I should note that it's been theorized that their code was so spaghetti that they couldn't do rollbacks, as evidenced by their ineffectual flailings whenever some horrible new economy destroying bug cropped up. Edit: And the exploiters of said bugs never got more than a slap on the wrist because they couldn't afford to lose any more of their player base.
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Sep 7, 2018 05:22
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My favorite thing at launch was that their talent tree equivalent wasn't hardcore enough, so they actually forced you to buy or find items to unlock certain talents. This included spec- or class-defining talents, some of which were either one-time quest reward options that could be missed or, even better, super-rare world drops. 
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Sep 7, 2018 05:34
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They should make an MMO where to unlock the high end talents you have to actually mail pints of your blood to the developer. The highest talents are physically impossible to acquire in under a month unless you kill yourself or steal blood from other people. It would be very hardcore.
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Sep 7, 2018 06:47
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Stay safe, Caydiem. I'll always remember how your game not only outlasted Black Baby Goku's prediction (by like 3 years), but it outlasted Black Baby Goku himself. I'll also always remember how rabidly insane the goon thread here was about Wildstar, to the point where nerds shouted angrily at me for two whole pages for the crime of not liking the beta.
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Sep 7, 2018 06:53
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Corvinus posted:I've heard multiple ex-employees say upper management was loving awful, sounds like this thing was a total shitshow. Warplots were announced in an interview. Announced to people looking for Wildstar news and to every member of the dev team.. A big name feature was invented whole cloth during an interview, with no input from any other employee, who then had to scramble to make it barely work for release. Remember that.
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Sep 7, 2018 07:41
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We lost City of Heroes to this pile of poo poo. I will never not be angry at that.
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Sep 7, 2018 12:53
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Schubalts posted:Warplots were announced in an interview. There's a number of post-mortems floating around out there that make it clear how much of the game was sunk by upper management incompetence. An example is that the dev team realized very early on that the numerous ground telegraphs everything had would create a ridiculously noisy environment. In a game like FFXIV, this was likely planned around by making the art style fairly desaturated in order to allow the telegraph markers to be more fully saturated and thus "pop" better, but Wildstar, with its WoW-like aesthetic, didn't have a similarly easy out. They were shouted down and told to "make it work," which turned combat into a predictable GW2-esque clusterfuck of overlapping ground effects.
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Sep 7, 2018 13:40
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Unoriginal One posted:Yes. Early on wasn't there an exploit found with gardening or something that gave you infinite money? Instead of punishing the people who exploited this they were just told, "they better be on good behavior from now on!" I think I remember reading that this basically permanently destroyed the in-game economy because a whole bunch of people had pretty much infinite gold
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Sep 7, 2018 13:44
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It was something even dumber than that, it was something like you were able to buy some vendor materials, craft them with some entry level skill, and then vendor the resulting product for more than you paid in the mats. Repeat until economy broken.
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Sep 7, 2018 13:49
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Asimo posted:It was something even dumber than that, it was something like you were able to buy some vendor materials, craft them with some entry level skill, and then vendor the resulting product for more than you paid in the mats. Repeat until economy broken. There was definitely a gardening exploit. Hilariously, it even had a, "Confess within 24 hours and we'll reduce your punishment!" bit, which tells me that they either had extremely limited means to track the exploiters or that they were terrified of the game going belly-up because of how large of a percentage of the playerbase had used it.
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Sep 7, 2018 14:02
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I thought the game was too red. I didn't give it a chance since the starting zone hurt my eyes.
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Sep 7, 2018 15:41
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eonwe posted:Like this gets posted as a joke, but I think the idea of having stuff like this is really cool. It shouldn't have been tied to end-game content, but MMOs should add all kinds of these weird things like that and just make some dumb cosmetic on the end. The actual idea of it is pretty neat, but they decided to go the dumbest possible route with it. Yeah, long and complex quest chains aren't a problem in and of themselves. I think they can be pretty fun and cool. But Wildstar's problem was that it made that chain a prerequisite for the only real endgame content the game was planned to have, and also it was incredibly buggy. Vermain posted:There's a number of post-mortems floating around out there that make it clear how much of the game was sunk by upper management incompetence. An example is that the dev team realized very early on that the numerous ground telegraphs everything had would create a ridiculously noisy environment. In a game like FFXIV, this was likely planned around by making the art style fairly desaturated in order to allow the telegraph markers to be more fully saturated and thus "pop" better, but Wildstar, with its WoW-like aesthetic, didn't have a similarly easy out. They were shouted down and told to "make it work," which turned combat into a predictable GW2-esque clusterfuck of overlapping ground effects. Really it's way worse than GW2, because the art style is full of bright and bold colors, as are the telegraphs, and also telegraphs are used for aiming almost every player ability (including melee attacks which just cleave in an arc in front of the player), so there's basically no escape from constant flashing telegraphs everywhere. That's not to say GW2 is great or anything (the sheer amount of faded-out circles showing up any time more than a few players are fighting in the same area is hilarious) but Wildstar's almost unparalleled when it comes to visual noise.
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Sep 7, 2018 16:39
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Welp. I'm proud of what I did and what I fought for. Shiphands/Expeditions ended up being solid content people enjoyed. The holidays were pretty dang successful. My contributions to the final raid were mostly not terrible. Housing system is still one of the best on the market. We had a lot of really talented and passionate folks there too, and they'll bring awesome things to life when they land somewhere. I don't begrudge any of you your turn tap-dancing on its grave.  Just felt like giving my own li'l eulogy in the midst of it.
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Sep 7, 2018 17:15
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Cyster posted:Welp. Like I said above, I place the blame far more on upper management being incompetent than on the rank-and-file. I think the team did about the best they could with the dictates they were given.
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Sep 7, 2018 17:29
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Cyster posted:Welp. You should feel proud of what you did, if anything contributions from people like you is probably the only reason it lived as long as it did
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Sep 7, 2018 17:39
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Asimo posted:It was something even dumber than that, it was something like you were able to buy some vendor materials, craft them with some entry level skill, and then vendor the resulting product for more than you paid in the mats. Repeat until economy broken. The gardening exploit was the primary one I was thinking of, but I'm pretty sure yours happened too. From what I can recall, the worst exploiters of the gardening bug only got one week suspensions; and while they took the gold away they didn't do anything about the items they may have used the gold to buy, so a lot of these guys had literal years worth of the local PLEX equivalent stocked up afterwards.
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Sep 7, 2018 18:09
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Asimo posted:It was something even dumber than that, it was something like you were able to buy some vendor materials, craft them with some entry level skill, and then vendor the resulting product for more than you paid in the mats. Repeat until economy broken. Iron Pipes. In the first trade skill tier. It persisted for more than 3 weeks.... after launch.
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Sep 7, 2018 18:58
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Could someone rip out the housing and just throw it on Steam for  ? It was the only part of the game that seemed to get universal praise and it always seemed weird to me that it was buried at the bottom of this trashcan.
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Sep 7, 2018 22:02
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Cyster posted:Welp. appropriate av/post combo
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Sep 7, 2018 22:31
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Orthodox Rabbit posted:Early on wasn't there an exploit found with gardening or something that gave you infinite money? Instead of punishing the people who exploited this they were just told, "they better be on good behavior from now on!" I think I remember reading that this basically permanently destroyed the in-game economy because a whole bunch of people had pretty much infinite gold Nah, they overinflated the vender sell costs of completed crafts to something like 3x material costs. Once everyone got their first house most folks would chuck down a mining plot because “Why not” increasing material supply and driving their prices down. So I’d just buy 1000 spacebucks worth of ore and turn it into 2-3k spacebucks worth of furniture which I then sold to a vendor. When I eventually inflated the costs of that ore type due to my shenanigans I’d move onto the next undervalued ore and do it again. Even better their LUA security was so bad you could automate the build process via add on, which lead to me doing things like buying a quarter million worth of raw and quadrupling my stake by watching tv in another room. On my last days in the game I was handing out stacks of 10 mil which was “buy anything you want lol” money to random people.
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Sep 7, 2018 23:02
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Cyster posted:Welp. My biggest Gripe about wildstar will be that it was very obvious that a LOT of love was poured into the product, only for it to be ruined by the word "HARDCORE", I've been that HARDCORE raider before, but I know the bills are mostly paid by housemoms and dads who queue for LFR. Look at it like this, except for the mega-competator servers in WoW there's maybe two or three raid teams vying for that "Server first/2nd" whatever stuff. That's your hardcore base, and it will be between 30 and 60 players, with another 10 here and there that act as floaters for when someone is sick/whatever. Pretty much the entire rest of the population either muddles through content at their own pace, or doesn't engage with it at all. Each server probably has a few thousand people playing on it. Why in gods name would you cater to those 70 players and leave the other say.... 5930 holding their dicks with nothing to do? It's stupid as gently caress. Regardless, shiphands were fun, the Halloween event was the best I've seen in one of these stupid MMO things, and the Christmas event sucked rear end. I hope you landed on your feet.
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Sep 7, 2018 23:50
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Cyster posted:Welp. I don't blame you or people in your position. You worked hard to make quality content, but the very foundation of the game was rotten all the way through. Anything good you made got sabotaged by poor infrastructure or lovely direction. I've heard so many stories from ex-Carbine people saying they were worked to the bone, their constructive feedback was ignored, and their ideas for fun content was discouraged. I'm surprised Wildstar turned out as functional as it did. The sheer arrogance of its high-level direction.The unsustainable fixation on 40 man raids and hardcore content. The CUPCAKE attitude. The utter brokenness of its underlying structure that hampered any attempts at fixing the game. The fact that it tried to compete with World of Warcraft in 2014! That's the stuff I'm happy to watch go up in flames, and I hope the MMO industry learns from Wildstar's failures. The little guys like you aren't responsible for these. I hope you find a company that will actually value your creativity and hard work, then make content for a game that works far better and lives far longer.
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Sep 8, 2018 03:07
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yea every non 'lol RIP' dive on the game has centered around 'oh my god the bosses were so dumb guys, everyone else under them really tried but oh my god the bosses are so dumb'. I liked...parts of Wildstar, there was genuine affection in the development that is noticeable. I knew the people actually making the poo poo were doing their best with what they had even if I eventually took my cupcake self back to WoW when I found out the solution to my progress ending bug was a fart sound effect followed by 'reroll????'
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Sep 8, 2018 03:23
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Vermain posted:There was definitely a gardening exploit. Hilariously, it even had a, "Confess within 24 hours and we'll reduce your punishment!" bit, which tells me that they either had extremely limited means to track the exploiters or that they were terrified of the game going belly-up because of how large of a percentage of the playerbase had used it. It feels dumb to punish people who use exploits. Like it's your lovely design that caused it, plug the hole. If the economy is broken and you can't reset it because you'll upset people just make a new currency (for like some kind of cosmetic or raid item) or some kind of money sink. I'd make some kind of exponentially increasing cost to buy new said currency. Though of course I say that because the last time game currency was a limiting factor for me in an MMO was original WoW's mount costs.
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Sep 8, 2018 03:31
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I remember logging in, getting a goon guild invite, doing a dope rear end jumping puzzle that ended in a giant slide into a fishbowl, and doing it again. That's the most fun I had in this dead game. rest in piss.
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Sep 8, 2018 03:53
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Cyster posted:Welp. What's depressing is that Wildstar seemed to be on a pretty decent track through mid-beta. Adding the insane attunement, and spending so much development capital on Warplots was so drat stupid. I really liked the Adventures, and I'm a bit peeved no other MMO has stolen the idea. Safeword posted:We lost City of Heroes to this pile of poo poo. I will never not be angry at that. I am entirely sure CoH dying had nothing to do with Wildstar, but drat if I'm not suprised people are still holding a grudge 4 years later.
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Sep 8, 2018 04:12
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I hope the tombstone for this flop becomes a popular local dog urinal.
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Sep 8, 2018 04:38
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eonwe posted:Like this gets posted as a joke, but I think the idea of having stuff like this is really cool. It shouldn't have been tied to end-game content, but MMOs should add all kinds of these weird things like that and just make some dumb cosmetic on the end. The actual idea of it is pretty neat, but they decided to go the dumbest possible route with it. WoW's had stuff like this since at least WoD, crazy chains of stuff you do for a mount/pet/etc. The Waist of Time (a belt cosmetic with a clock face on the front) could probably make a flowchart that dwarfs that, especially if you include getting and upgrading Uuna.
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Sep 8, 2018 07:09
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Deki posted:I am entirely sure CoH dying had nothing to do with Wildstar, but drat if I'm not suprised people are still holding a grudge 4 years later. CoH died for the same reason Wildstar is dying, ain't nobody playing it. CoH however was actually worth playing.
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Sep 8, 2018 09:36
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Cyster posted:Welp. You did good work and I hope you've found a place that values you. Meanwhile I'm actually seeing some of the old upper management tweeting and getting kind of livid about it (Stephan Frost has had the temerity to crawl out of the hole he fled into after he led the game into a flaming dumpster, and his Twitter bio doesn't even cop to being ex-Carbine anymore!) Mizuti posted:The fact that it tried to compete with World of Warcraft in 2014! To be fair, Final Fantasy XIV did the same thing, but not only with a bigger name and budget behind it but also a lot more competence (as alluded to here). And frankly that's yet another problem Wildstar ran into: maybe it could've found a bit more of an audience of folks tired of WoW and looking for something Similar But Better In Their Opinions, but on top of its own bad decisions the game ran straight into the bonfire that was XIV's phoenix-like rebirth.
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Sep 8, 2018 10:54
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Its a shame the upper management were stupid and dickish enough to sink this on their own, I suspect the lesson about trying to pander to people who don't realise they've just outgrown their MMO cocoon will be lost. Mizuti posted:The sheer arrogance of its high-level direction.The unsustainable fixation on 40 man raids and hardcore content. The CUPCAKE attitude. The utter brokenness of its underlying structure that hampered any attempts at fixing the game. The fact that it tried to compete with World of Warcraft in 2014! That's the stuff I'm happy to watch go up in flames, and I hope the MMO industry learns from Wildstar's failures.
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Sep 8, 2018 14:49
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Saint Drogo posted:Its a shame the upper management were stupid and dickish enough to sink this on their own, I suspect the lesson about trying to pander to people who don't realise they've just outgrown their MMO cocoon will be lost. They didn't even pander to that group successfully. The guild I ran with in WS was full of exceedingly poopsocky types, and the lack of balance and Carbine's favoritism RE: exploits turned them off like it did everyone else.
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Sep 8, 2018 15:15
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I installed Wildstar for a weekend trial or something, against my better judgment. Spent a bit of time playing with the customization options on a robot person, clicked 'OK', and all of my effort was hidden behind a full-body layer of brown sackcloth. I shook my head and alt-F4'd out because I read that as a sign of things to come.
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Sep 8, 2018 18:42
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Saint Drogo posted:the best part is cannibalized WoW subs were the only target audience for this thing, and thry did coincide their first couple of years of life with a reviled expansion that alienated their exact demographic (lol @ the idea of this thing trying yo compete with Pandaria a couple of years earlier). if they'd got the game in an acceptable state in that time it might gave attracted enough MC raiders to limp along on freemium forever. SpaceDrake posted:Meanwhile I'm actually seeing some of the old upper management tweeting and getting kind of livid about it (Stephan Frost has had the temerity to crawl out of the hole he fled into after he led the game into a flaming dumpster, and his Twitter bio doesn't even cop to being ex-Carbine anymore!)
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Sep 8, 2018 19:19
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It's hard to admit but people were legit excited for this game, myself included! I had some neat systems, like paths and the housing, unique combat, and an appealing artstyle if you surgically removed the CUPCAKE stuff. Then they threw it all away and concentrated on their dumbass raid endgame. They were determined to beat WoW by picking up the hardcore raid ball that it dropped, only to run it to their side of the field...? Whatever, this is a dumb metaphor for stuff others in the thread have already said. I also remember that the Engineer class was broken for a long time too. EDIT: Wait, I got another one: They tried to take a shot at King WoW, but they didn't just miss, the goddamned gun blew up in their hand. Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Sep 9, 2018 |
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Sep 9, 2018 00:28
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Wildstar will forever stick out to me as the game that didn't manage to make the warrior class, the most easy and brain dead 'hit thing with sword' class, actually fun or satisfying to play. That's sort of an accomplishment, right?
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Sep 9, 2018 03:38
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They also made the Medic class the worst healer (although it was a fun aoe dps build) which is just astonishing.
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Sep 9, 2018 03:47
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i love wildstar because it gave the old school mmo babies exactly what they wanted and they all hated it. i can't wait for the same thing to happen with the old school WoW server
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Sep 9, 2018 04:57
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