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DapperDraculaDeer
Aug 4, 2007

Shut up, Nick! You're not Twilight.
The old school mmo babies are obnoxious for sure but Wildstar really didnt give them what they wanted. The crazy hostility the developers demonstrated towards those people by constantly rebalancing raids to be impossible was definitely not what those people wanted. Its just another example of how hosed up Wildstar's management was, they even forgot to actually cater towards the demographic they marketed the game to.

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Blast of Confetti
Apr 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

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 players are part of some cult where anything that might be in the stratosphere of poo poo that shut down their game is automatically a major reason why it shut down

MadFriarAvelyn
Sep 25, 2007



I still never managed to queue into a Wildstar dungeon. Now I never will.

DapperDraculaDeer
Aug 4, 2007

Shut up, Nick! You're not Twilight.
Still a shorter queue time than for Warfronts.

SpaceDrake
Dec 22, 2006

I can't avoid filling a game with awful memes, even if I want to. It's in my bones...!

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.

Imma unironically hold that grudge for a long time yet, because the developers of that game got done dirty. The actual studio closure happened right in the middle of the goddamn Thanksgiving-Christmas season, and had been announced a scant two months prior. And was for a game that, by every report and indication, at least keeping its head above water, unlike the rancid poo poo that is the subject of this thread.

Paragon deserved better and I hope a lot of them have moved on to better things by now.

EDIT: Also even with the axe coming down early CoH lasted twice as long as this did. Forever mad, without irony.

SpaceDrake fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Sep 9, 2018

Shy
Mar 20, 2010

I'm really mad at Wildstar. It looked so cool and appeared to be exactly what I wanted: a plain WoW clone, instead Carbine not only wasted millions of money and man hours to follow up with terrible mismanagement but put a nail in the coffin of any such games coming out in the future. Seriously who's in their right minds sponsor another WoW clone when Wildstar is forever there as a cautionary example?

Philonius
Jun 12, 2005

Blast of Confetti posted:

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

Yeah. It's amazing how many rose tinted glasses are involved with old school MMOs. They're doing something similar in FFXIV now, with the Eureka zone being a throwback to FFXI style gameplay. Noone likes it.

Shy
Mar 20, 2010

someone made a fun comment on kotaku

quote:

Okay. I made this burner account because I need to correct the record here.

The stories passed around since the end of COH have been summed up as “Paragon Studios was so great and perfect until evil NCSoft closed them down.” And obviously telling this story would not be fun for my NDAs of the past...

And no, I’m not doing this out of love for NCSoft or any poo poo like that. We parted ways many many moons ago and we’re both happier for it. I just hate untruths being passed around because they let certain people keep skating around the industry causing the same poo poo over and over and being able to pin it on a nebulous entity to remove blame for their own actions.

Paragon Studios was shut down because they tried to pull a fast one on NCSoft. NCSoft was actually pretty happy with how COH was doing - they were never a huge hit, but they’d long since paid their dev costs and were a nice little money farm. They were happy enough with the brand that they even decided to move forward on an unannounced COH 2 project, and allocated funds to Paragon Studios for the development of a new COH property.

Yea, THAT is how committed NCSoft was to the brand.

So what happened?

Paragon Studios basically took the money, pretended to work on COH 2, but in actuality started building a completely unrelated new IP.

That’s right. NCSoft handed them a giant pile of money to make COH 2 and Paragon Studios, a studio literally created JUST to keep the COH IP going, said “Wait, no, let’s not do that. Let’s make some other poo poo nobody wants and not tell the publisher and presumably they will be completely understanding of it because we’ll show them a completely different prototype than what they asked for!”

NCSoft was not understanding.

See, this is what I learned when I worked for them - South Korean publishers are actually pretty hands off for the most part, as long as you give them reason to trust you. You hit your deadlines, you give them the product you promised, they’re actually pretty willing to put up with a lot.

Until you waste their money.

THEN the boot comes down.

The gap between the COH 2 debacle and the shutdown was less than a year from what I gathered talking to people in the know.

And now WildStar. NCSoft was pretty cool with us for a long time. They gave the company piles and piles of money and many years of extensions to get the game out. The totality of WildStar’s existence, from conception to release, was about a *decade*. A decade that NCSoft never saw a single return of investment on. So obviously... they had a lot of patience.

Carbine... was never a well managed studio. Ever. WildStar as you saw it was a completely different beast from what started development. It wasn’t even the same IP - Tim Cain, literally one of the creators of the original Fallout, used to be the creative lead and eventually he got pushed out of the studio. Which was a dumb idea because Carbine didn’t actually lock down their only IP when they did it and Tim owned all of it. So there was a huge freeze on production while they essentially had to do the game over from scratch because they didn’t own their own game!

And NCSoft actually let them when any sane publisher would have spotted the flaming shitshow brewing and cancelled the project entirely.

But okay. WildStar had its IP rebooted... then missed release date after release date after release date. The scope of the game was never realistic - we were supposed to ship with tons of extra zones, all of which got cut when they were well into production, because nobody actually knew what a pipeline was (oh but the higher ups would literally start screaming at the line designers for so much as laughing during work because obviously if we had time to laugh, we were wasting time that could have been used meeting these impossible deadlines.)

After yet another missed launch, NCSoft finally put the boot down and demanded more control over the project to actually make some money on this turd of an investment. Which meant there was finally an unmissable deadline that HAD to be hit. And then all hell broke loose.

Teams and personnel were constantly shuffled around at random without any real concern for if this was creating useable content. The economy team, which is, you know, the core of an MMO and literally the most important component to player retention and monetization, was a skeleton crew where staff were just flung at it when a producer didn’t like them but wouldn’t actually fire them. By the time someone went ‘Hey wait, isn’t the economy important?’ and reorganized the team, it was far too late to catch up on those systems... which included our end game content.

Hey, remember that memetic chart that went around showing all the obnoxious and pointlessly time consuming quests needed to actually unlock endgame raids? Guess what? That content was literally injected in at the very last minute because A) our raids weren’t actually completely done at launch and B) the creative director literally said we should add raid keys to artificially lengthen the game enough to force people to have to pay for a subscription past the free trial period in order to actually raid.

Oh there was poo poo from NCSoft, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not exactly the villains destroying the lives of saintly devs. Though they did try to push really hard on the art team to dress up all the female characters in the equivalent of lingerie. Given that they were already insanely over sexualized, this ended up being a tipping point and the artists tried to rebel. Believe it or not, the only reason the actual artists of the game got their way was because of Tumblr users kicking up a shitstorm over the obsessive pointless T&A. Those tumblr threads gave the artists enough momentum to at least keep the sexy ladies dressed in normal (but still revealing) clothing.

So with all this in mind... how did WildStar do?

They were already culling people before the end of the second month of release. Behind the scenes, they knew it was going to lose so much money that they were actually greatful so many people quit right after launch because it saved them money on personnel. But then people stopped quitting, so they started looking into how many people they could fire before someone at the state labor board got suspicious of them trying to duck out on the WARN Act. Given that they’d already gotten into legal trouble for illegally exempting employees from overtime pay, it’s kind of amazing they rolled the dice again anyway. But they did manage to hide the true state of the game until October 2014 when they finally had their first major layoff.

Coincidentally, most of that first wave were people that had at any point raised criticism of the company’s management.

I can’t speak to much to WildStar’s existence past their first huge layoff, because I was in that. I remember being shocked and surprised it stayed online as long as it did because it never, ever turned a profit - though almost all of the original leadership either quit or were fired, which is probably how it stabilized. But it still had a terrible launch that was actively on fire. We literally promised our players *monthly* content updates... then we couldn’t even hit the goal of *quartely* updates. Because, once again, nobody actually had a reasonable scope of what it took to actually make shippable content and how long that would actually take to be more meaningful than an occasional holiday event.

So really, you shouldn’t be angry at NCSoft for finally pulling the plug. My experience with them was that they were a tough but surprisingly forgiving master that overlooked an exceedingly troubled development and still put a lot of faith and money into a title they never saw an ROI on. WildStar had it’s four-year anniversary this June. Given that I assumed it wouldn’t even make it to a first year anniversary, that’s pretty darn impressive.

Also I learned that a few idiots running a game studio can basically screw over hundreds of talented game devs by performing utterly boneheaded decisions, but really, anyone who’s shipped more than one title can tell you that.

So now, you know... the whole story. From the mouth of an exChua on a burner account.

Pryce
May 21, 2011
I still believe the dungeons, adventures, and raids were some of the most fun content that no one ever got to see. I loved doing the 20-man raid with my guild at launch. It was very difficult, and very satisfying. Can't speak to the 40-man for obvious reasons, but the design on paper sounded pretty neat. Just...should've been 10-20 people, obviously.

Shy posted:

someone made a fun comment on kotaku

The story of Paragon is true. I've heard the exact same thing.

FrostyPox
Feb 8, 2012

I was on the NCSoft hate, CoH 5eva train, but as opposed to a lot of the weirdos on the internet I got over it pretty quickly. I was of course puzzled at its closure but just shrugged and eventually started laughing at the crazy exCoH'ers (I saw one just the other day hope that North Korea would invade South Korea and destroy NCSoft, loving LOL Jesus Christ what the gently caress dude), but it, uh, all makes sense after reading that story, and NOW I'm pissed that there could've been a CoH 2 and Paragon hosed it up.


I'm still very disappointed in Wildstar, I liked the combat, and thought it looked cool and was excited for its launch but then, loving 40 man raids and poo poo-rear end questing and all the other stuff... well, enough said

Hakkeshu
Aug 10, 2005

Blinging in the Wastes!
While it was an experience that I will never revisit, I got to 50 in 4 days of playing just to start raiding asap for those sweet world firsts. Genetic archives was a blast but Datascape sucked.

Pesterchum
Nov 8, 2009

clown car to hell choo choo
Remember when your hoverboard had a stamina bar

Forsythia
Jan 28, 2007

You want bad advice?

Anything is okay if you don't get caught!

... I hope this helps!

quote:

We literally promised our players *monthly* content updates... then we couldn’t even hit the goal of *quartely* updates. Because, once again, nobody actually had a reasonable scope of what it took to actually make shippable content and how long that would actually take to be more meaningful than an occasional holiday event.
This was one of the things that astonished me most in early Wildstar. Is there anyone in the industry that still tries to make substantial content patches on such a demanding schedule? Guild Wars 2 attempted to do modestly sized updates every 2 weeks with some month-long intermissions between story beats, and this schedule was so punishing to the staff that Arenanet dropped that model like a hot potato once their first "season" of story updates was complete.

All MMOs have weird buggy structure, but Guild Wars 2's structure is downright bulletproof compared to Wildstar's. They actually could patch that often without destroying their game. I remember reading that Wildstar's first round of post-launch patches were disastrously buggy. So disastrous that they had to cancel the Halloween and Christmas events for the year, since they needed a lot more polish before their debuts. Yes, Wildstar had to literally cancel Christmas.

I wonder who came up with that monthly idea. Were they delusional, or completely disconnected from how the game worked?

quote:

Carbine... was never a well managed studio. Ever. WildStar as you saw it was a completely different beast from what started development. It wasn’t even the same IP - Tim Cain, literally one of the creators of the original Fallout, used to be the creative lead and eventually he got pushed out of the studio. Which was a dumb idea because Carbine didn’t actually lock down their only IP when they did it and Tim owned all of it. So there was a huge freeze on production while they essentially had to do the game over from scratch because they didn’t own their own game!
This would explain a lot about how they spent 9 years in development with so little to show for it.

Despera
Jun 6, 2011
My life is full of regrets but paying 60$ for wildstar is my greatest.

RagnarokZ
May 14, 2004

Emperor of the Internet
I'm surprised they lasted this long.

Corvinus
Aug 21, 2006
I vaguely remembered that a couple years ago it came out that Carbine had terrible patch branching, and went looking for the reddit thread.

quote:

Pretty much. Right up until content lock for a patch, everything would be going into the main branch - including stuff for the patch and stuff that people were working on 3, 6, 9, 12 months out. Which meant that the patch branch would end up a giant clusterfuck for weeks, if not months, and one of the reasons that content would get locked 3 months prior to release. (The reason this is bad, is that you can't respond to player feedback when nothing but critical bugs make it to the live environment for minimum of 3 months, sometimes 6 months. It absolutely killed our community to have to constantly tell them we're aware of an issue and there's a fix coming, but not for half a loving year.)

This was compounded by the fact that Art and Code assets were in a P4 environment, which made merging them relatively simple (I say relatively because sometimes merging Art assets just straight up deleted them entirely, forcing a revert), but all game data was in some proprietary system because one of the lead programmers wanted total control over it. This forced the merging process to happen 2 or 3 times per change to a locked branch (i.e. bug fixing all that garbage in the patch branch). We would constantly accidentally push stuff up to the patch branch that shouldn't be there and constantly miss merges because someone would push the Art/Code portion of a change but forget the data half or vice versa - or the data half of the change would be in three separate changelists and only two of those would get pushed because the proprietary data management system was really bad at tracking changelists - compared to P4 anyway.

Then, to make matters even worse, merging privileges were constantly taken away from everyone whenever one of these mistakes would occur. There were times when my (subordinate) associate designer had merging privileges and there were times when my boss (a lead designer) did not. So, you never really knew who had privileges or who had the go-ahead to merge. You had to ask half a dozen people for permission to push anything up, and then after that you might not have the power to do so anyway. That meant that our two build engineers had to push all changelists into patch builds, for the entire company, manually. Which meant that less and less changes would get approved AND those two engineers were so swamped they couldn't actually work on optimizations/bug fixes for the actual build until they became critical issues - at which point, some devs would be given back merge privileges and we start the whole idiotic, disastrous process over again.

The end result is an absolute disaster where you can't release updates fast enough to appease your customer base AND those updates are bloated with unnecessary Art, Code and Data that causes unintended and hard to identify bugs or missing necessary Art, Code and Data that breaks literally everything in the game (see: Crafting).
Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

Edit: Uh, this thread is longer.

Corvinus fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Sep 10, 2018

Killed By Death
Jun 29, 2013


Can somebody link to me a source on the "rebalancing raids after they're beaten to make them hard/impossible"-thing? I'm certain it happened and that I did read about it like two years ago, but I'd like something a little more concrete, mostly for a friend of mine that didn't keep up with it.

Strategic Tea
Sep 1, 2012

Shy posted:

someone made a fun comment on kotaku

Just lol that anyone would willingly work for a game dev. Why yes I'd love to be treated like poo poo and paid half what I'm worth.

Philonius
Jun 12, 2005

Strategic Tea posted:

Just lol that anyone would willingly work for a game dev. Why yes I'd love to be treated like poo poo and paid half what I'm worth.

Yeah, the industry is notorious for basically exploiting the naivety and passion of young people. If you have the skills to be a professional coder you can make more money in pretty much any other industry.

Pierson
Oct 31, 2004



College Slice

Mizuti posted:

This was one of the things that astonished me most in early Wildstar. Is there anyone in the industry that still tries to make substantial content patches on such a demanding schedule? Guild Wars 2 attempted to do modestly sized updates every 2 weeks with some month-long intermissions between story beats, and this schedule was so punishing to the staff that Arenanet dropped that model like a hot potato once their first "season" of story updates was complete.
FFXIV managed a fairly consistent schedule of alternating one-small-content-patch-one-big-content-patch-repeat for about a year after Realm Reborn saved the game but that was during the time they were still desperate to prove FFXIV was good. I think the devs said later that keeping that schedule up while simultaneously developing the first expansion nearly killed them, and there was a big gap between 3.0 and 3.1 while they recuperated.

Philonius
Jun 12, 2005

Pierson posted:

FFXIV managed a fairly consistent schedule of alternating one-small-content-patch-one-big-content-patch-repeat for about a year after Realm Reborn saved the game but that was during the time they were still desperate to prove FFXIV was good. I think the devs said later that keeping that schedule up while simultaneously developing the first expansion nearly killed them, and there was a big gap between 3.0 and 3.1 while they recuperated.

They still do that, perhaps with a little less content each patch.

Percelus
Sep 9, 2012

My command, your wish is

blade and soul is a legit good mmo so ncsoft is far from the worst mmo publisher, they should stop giving money to lovely western developers though

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire
I remember playing this on launch, and enjoying the world but seeing through the poor level design by like halfway through the leveling experience. When entire portions of a map are just duplicate questing experiences for either faction, then laff. Like I remember the last three high level zones being basically mirrored down the middle for each faction.

I do find it interesting how once you realize "oh, none of this matters as I don't care about advancing my character anymore" how hollow the constant minute character advancement of the MMO-skinner box setup is.

I remember before my subscription lapsed that I took my maxed out level dude and went exploring, since technically there were no more mobs that were skulls to me anymore or such. It was weird to experience all of the zones that were already clearing out of players and becoming ghost towns, even like six weeks into the game. I can only imagine what it is like now.

Death of virtual spaces are weird. There is something comforting in knowing that some of like WOW's original virtual spaces from its launch in 2004 are still around. Having something be permanently closed is a weird feeling when an MMO dies.

But yeah, this game had laffo devs. The more I read the more I amazed it ever even launched.

lol if you
Jun 29, 2004

I am going to remove your penis, in thin slices, like salami, just for starters.

Corvinus posted:

I vaguely remembered that a couple years ago it came out that Carbine had terrible patch branching, and went looking for the reddit thread.

Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

Edit: Uh, this thread is longer.

never played this game but I did P4 admin stuff for game studios for a while and the only other product out there (pre-git era) was Alienbrain. i am now laughing at the thought of them storing art in P4 and code in AB because it is the SCM equivalent to wearing your shoes on backwards

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!
Spellslinger was a fun class, I'll miss it.

Forsythia
Jan 28, 2007

You want bad advice?

Anything is okay if you don't get caught!

... I hope this helps!

jeeves posted:

I remember playing this on launch, and enjoying the world but seeing through the poor level design by like halfway through the leveling experience. When entire portions of a map are just duplicate questing experiences for either faction, then laff. Like I remember the last three high level zones being basically mirrored down the middle for each faction.
I was wondering how this game handled faction-unique quests. Sounds like "they didn't". Can't blame them, as strapped for time as they were, but they were setting themselves up for mediocre content. Still can't believe this game launched with a hard faction divide in 2014. I bet they did it only because World of Warcraft has it, ignoring the slew of problems this system comes with.

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

(and can't post for 7 days!)

Percelus posted:

blade and soul is a legit good mmo so ncsoft is far from the worst mmo publisher, they should stop giving money to lovely western developers though

Is NCSoft a bad publisher or do they simply publish some real stinkers of games?

*strokes chin*

Can it be both?

Can't argue with B&S profits though. That game prints money going by their financial reports. Wish I didn't hate the combat so much I kept abandoning it every time I tried playing.

Shy
Mar 20, 2010

-

Shy fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Sep 11, 2018

Orthodox Rabbit
Jun 2, 2006

This game is perfect for empty-headed dunces that don't like to think much!! Of course, I'm a genius... I wonder why I'm so good at it?!

Mizuti posted:

I bet they did it only because World of Warcraft has it, ignoring the slew of problems this system comes with.

This sums up like 95% of wildstar

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Mizuti posted:

I was wondering how this game handled faction-unique quests. Sounds like "they didn't". Can't blame them, as strapped for time as they were, but they were setting themselves up for mediocre content. Still can't believe this game launched with a hard faction divide in 2014. I bet they did it only because World of Warcraft has it, ignoring the slew of problems this system comes with.

Yeah faction divides are questionable at best. Frankly I don't even think WoW should still have such a hard divide but it's just so ingrained into the game now that there's no way they'd actually ditch the factions. (To their credit, they did a very good job with the split faction questing experience in Battle for Azeroth.)

Even if it wasn't too ingrained in the game's structure, WoW still has more players than any other (western) MMO and plenty of players who'll gladly pay real money to faction change, so the faction divide is probably making Blizzard money :v: (I specified "western" there because I suspect there are Korean MMOs with higher player numbers, at least going by raw player count.)

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Percelus posted:

blade and soul is a legit good mmo so ncsoft is far from the worst mmo publisher, they should stop giving money to lovely western developers though

Blade and soul is loving awful I say as I spam rng boxes for 8 hours straight to upgrade my weapon.

eonwe
Aug 11, 2008



Lipstick Apathy
https://www.change.org/p/ncsoft-wildstar-s-revival

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

(and can't post for 7 days!)


:sad:

Despera
Jun 6, 2011
Wonder how many signatures a "keep wildstar dead" petition would create?

Orthodox Rabbit
Jun 2, 2006

This game is perfect for empty-headed dunces that don't like to think much!! Of course, I'm a genius... I wonder why I'm so good at it?!

Confused Person posted:

Wildstar is more than just another MMO, It's a concept and the players who played it were family.

Percelus
Sep 9, 2012

My command, your wish is

Confused Person posted:
Wildstar is more than just another MMO, It's a really bad MMO managing to stand out as particularly lovely in a sea of crap.

Rainbow Knight
Apr 19, 2006

We die.
We pray.
To live.
We serve

I actually enjoyed this game for the short time that I played it, but 100% of that was because of the goons I PvP'd with. Tanking a third of an enemy team while my team ran flags, abusing crafting to end up with 90% damage reduction, crawling around in someone's home that was a giant sized bar...

r i p

Cao Ni Ma
May 25, 2010



I couldnt even get past level 5. The game was generic poo poo through and through with horrible design decisions from the start

RagnarokZ
May 14, 2004

Emperor of the Internet

Cao Ni Ma posted:

I couldnt even get past level 5. The game was generic poo poo through and through with horrible design decisions from the start

Try it when it went Free, it was so awful, it made me resubscribe to Wow.

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FileNotFound
Jul 17, 2005


Cao Ni Ma posted:

I couldnt even get past level 5. The game was generic poo poo through and through with horrible design decisions from the start

I played it for a few days.

I remember absolutely nothing about the game.

I don't remember the class I was, the level I got to or what the story even was.

It's by far the least memorable mmo I ever played.

I remember more about NeoCron which I played once before uninstalling and never looking back.

Also I just checked - and apparently people still play NeoCron. This to me is more shocking than the fact that Wildstar lasted 4 years.

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