Quote Originally Posted by Broken_Wind View Post
My thought on Wildstar is they wanted to capture the segment of players that liked big time sinks or coordination efforts like guild attunement. they wanted the people who sunk 8-10 hour days into EQ and WoW, and liked the challenging of herding cats into a 54 man, or bigger, raid where the challenges were much more organizational/tactical then "skill". This is a niche market for sure, but certainly existed during Wildstar's launch time
That's more or less accurate.

Don't get me wrong, I was demonstrably very fond of the game; I still get asked periodically "are you the same Packetdancer from WildStar?" I nearly took a job at Carbine. I still am friends with some of the devs. It's the only game made after I left the game development industry as my day job where I'm in the credits. But I think they made two really big mistakes.

First... I don't actually think the action-based combat system was the wrong choice, but I do think the way they scaled it up over the level range was; the game didn't have a skill curve so much as a skill cliff. The early levels were relatively easy and accessible, but after a certain point it ramped up so abruptly that a lot of people slammed into a wall like Wile E. Coyote trying to chase the Roadrunner through a painted tunnel. ("Meep meep! Pthb." *WHAM*) As it also didn't provide a ton of things to help folks get past that sudden dramatic increase, many folks got frustrated and left. A smoother ramping up might have led to less frustration and more player retention. (Whether or not it would've been a significant amount more retention, I don't know. But I don't think a smoother difficulty curve would have made player retention worse.)

Second, the devs were predominantly veterans of the original WoW team or the Everquest and Everquest 2 teams, and when they heard a lot of raiders talk about missing the old days and wanting meaty content that required huge parties and a lot of organization... I feel like they took that very, very seriously, and tried to recapture the feel of those early days of MMO raiding. But as a result, that was basically the only endgame that existed at launch. Which meant folks more interested in other endgame activities wandered off... and it turned out that no matter how loud a lot of old-school raiders were about missing the old days, many had little things like "jobs" and "families" and "social lives" now, and did not actually want to put in the massive amount of effort required to tackle those types of endgame content any longer.

And I suspect that's part of the reason that Square-Enix tries to simplify/streamline the primary content. Because no matter how vocal folks are here on the forums, I strongly suspect we're a fairly small portion of the playerbase. And much as I really wish I had a more interesting DPS rotation (or, y'know, enough DPS button variety for something to count as a "rotation" in the first place) as a healer, I also strongly suspect that making the combat more complex would alienate many players. And no matter how it sounds here in the forums, I genuinely wonder if the vocal few here would be enough to keep the game going indefinitely were they to reverse course... or whether it'd be a situation where, a few years from now, players were reminiscing about their much-lamented MMO's demise and holding an impromptu wake on Twitter.

(As is happening for WildStar right now.)