WildStar

[Lucavi]

Informative vid, but I chortle a bit at the "bittersweet" comments about the "casualization" of the game. Is it bittersweet because it didn't work in today's market, or is it bittersweet to realize that what someone who wears the "hardcore" mantle proudly is irrelevant today? I imagine that it hurts one's pride to realize that what they truly love has little place in the big picture.

I suppose that's what vanilla private servers are for. Just about every game has them at this point.

I may check out the free trial a bit later.

[Katlan]

There is a place for hardcore in every MMO. woW has top tier difficulty raids, XIV has savage mode for example. But when that's all your game offers nobody is gonna want to play it because the population who wants that type of content is under 4%

[arus2001]

The real battle is convincing that 4% the other 96% matter.

[Gulkeeva]

I kind of liked the game difficulty to lvl/fight in the beta where it was actually hard to progress myself ;/

Well I'll still play it with all its nerfs thrown in for casual mode, especially when the FFXIV 3.0 servers come crashing down and unable to login for hours, like the good ol 2.0 launch days.

[Kachiko]

FFS, that video....

Generic is /= to casual. Is automatic transmission, in cars, a casual feature, or just the fucking gold standard?

Oh well; I've lamented how the game became a missed opportunity, and, without a player-base, a game is basically 'dead'. Being F2P, later in the year, likely won't solve that problem. It has to be a really big gut-kick to know you were the likely the final nail, in the AAA MMORPG offerings.

[Lucavi]

FFS, that video....

Generic is /= to casual. Is automatic transmission, in cars, a casual feature, or just the fucking gold standard?

It makes others feel better about their preferred choice when they slander the other alternatives. Human nature. Its never going away.

[Sho]

Wildstar simply died because it marketed to the lowest common denominator of player, the hardcore set.

Saying 4% was way to generous. More like 0.5~1%.

It also shows the irony of the common MMO player -- they don't know what the fuck they want despite he or she whining about changes that should happen to a game or clamoring for something to be "catered to hardcore players." The common player almost always assumes that the new "hardcore" content should be easily accessible, have an easy bar of entry and have non-bullshit mechanics that can be figured out and overcome with time.

When given a game where even the dungeon trash is difficult to kill, you see these so called hardcore types quickly quit, and call the game shit despite the game being "what they wanted" in the purest sense.

[Elcura]

Wildstar couldn't offer what people wanted, which wasn't a hardcore game it was just fucking nostalgia in a different package. "Hardcore" was never supposed to be an intentional thing, you don't design things to be inaccessible, obtuse and retardedly difficult for the sake of it (HI DARK SOULS 2) because that's not what makes things difficult.

Wildstar should've tried to make things work, stable and interesting/fun before adding the difficulty. Doing it the other way around is...well obviously a dumb idea.

[Ornery Sheep]

the lowest common denominator of player, the hardcore set.

?_?

[Sho]

?_?

It was a stupid way of explaining that, I admit. Just saying that hardcore gamers, the highest of the top tier players, are the smallest set of MMO players.

[Sho]

Wildstar couldn't offer what people wanted, which wasn't a hardcore game it was just fucking nostalgia in a different package. "Hardcore" was never supposed to be an intentional thing, you don't design things to be inaccessible, obtuse and retardedly difficult for the sake of it (HI DARK SOULS 2) because that's not what makes things difficult.

Wildstar should've tried to make things work, stable and interesting/fun before adding the difficulty. Doing it the other way around is...well obviously a dumb idea.

I think Vanilla-WoW difficulty/nostalgia can be used interchangeably with "hardcore" in most instances. 40-man raiding, excessively long raids, long ass dungeons with semi difficult trash mobs, fustrating boss mechanics. As the game got easier with WotLK and Cataclysm, the nostalgia of more difficult times was naturally created (by those who could suffer the gauntlet of bullshit). Even if Wildstar was supposed to be a circle jerk of nostalgia for vanilla WoW players, it did have touches of difficulty that did require a higher level of group cohesion and a general level of focus an attention to mob mechanics, same as vanilla-WoW. The higher level of mental engagement has to be there for Wildstar when it was released all the same.

We know now in 2015 that a game that is made "hardcore" isn't the way to do things, but when it was 2004/2005 and WoW was bringing the Everquest model into a new MMO standard, these ideas were just as good as any as they were pioneering forward. This is where the developers of Wildstar failed. They sincerely tried to cater an almost 10 year outdated MMO model to an almost 100% casual playerbase. I also agree that Wildstar should have tried to make things work, but now we an at least say that the "what-if" scenario has been played out and we've seen the results.

[Ornery Sheep]

I think its worth pointing out that the hardcore player isn't always the one that wants difficult content and the casual player doesn't always want piss easy content either.

Interestingly enough, the largest difference between the casual player and the hardcore player (with the way the terms are generally used) is the amount of time they play the game.
Clearly, the ones who spend the most time are generally (though not always) more well-equipped (doesn't matter if we're talking skill/experience or gear) to tackle the 'harder' content but that isn't really necessarily a difference in wants/needs or mindset. This is just a difference in time spent.

Obviously no developer should aspire to please the people who are going to be on the game every waking hour and not only because they are tiny in number but because they will almost always consume content faster than it can be created. Its a pointless endeavor. What I see people talking about in here primarily has nothing to do with the so-called hardcore in its most often-used fashion. I recognize, however, that you are talking about those folks who want to be consistently challenged. Lets not forget that some weekend warriors also have a hankering for that really tough content too. There's no quantifiable number for the amount of people who want this content because I don't think anyone's ever done any polling for it.

I will say the number is probably miniscule, the amount of people who finish even short single player games is extremely small and the amount of people who finish them at higher difficulties is microscopic so in essence you're still correct but I still think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. At the end of the day though, I don't see that there's any truly correct answer since the more casual crowd (in common terms, the ones who play less) is more likely to jump ship quickly even if the game is aimed toward them and the hardcore crowd is just smaller but its still possible to alienate both by setting the difficulty too high and I think WildStar may have done just that.

This post is probably all over the place but the tl;dr is hardcore has little to do with how hard people want the content to be so I'd be hard-pressed to say they don't know what they want etc

[Elcura]

I dunno how relative the vanilla WoW era is to hardcore in general, because I can count various Korean/asian MMOs that have hardcore sensibilities but I get what you mean. Ultimately I think that none of these people did it intentionally (as the concept just gets reduced and concentrated more and more) as that would mean that people would've expanded and explored the idea more. As well as basically just admitting that those sort of commitments are rare and hard to put together organically or otherwise.

I mean difficulty is generally "play perfectly or die", and MMOs have that thing where players generally have to do the fight how it's designed. Being skilled rarely means anything to how the fight progresses, likewise being unskilled has a massive detrimental effect on the group as a whole. So more difficulty is finding players who are generally skilled then expecting them to play perfectly for 15 minutes as they replay the fight for the nth time after memorizing all mechanics and possible outcomes. I don't find that difficult as I do awkward and frustrating and naturally that gives people with time to accomplish things that shouldn't be that hard to accomplish.

The boss being unpredictable and hard to read, or my attack plan/strategy not being up to scratch (never mind optimal) is what makes things difficult generally when controls or camera aren't an issue. Not whether random Joe 4 fucked up. That's kind of what I liked about some parts of TERA, as a tank being basically invincible as long as my encounter knowledge was adequate and being able to solo or single handedly correct a wipe/failure. More MMOs need players to have actual accountability and weight to their own actions, because 90% of MMOs design you as part of a whole, which isn't as much fun.

[Lucavi]

"Play perfectly or die" with 40 people who now have families/jobs/lives as opposed to their "sleeping through morning classes" college past selves was foolish and any company who seriously attempted to make that the main attraction to their little carnival deserves to have its doors closed within a year. No ifs, ands or buts required.

That said, there's a difference between hardcore gameplay and "Korean grinder", and I struggle to even use the two in the same sentence, although games like TERA, with its obvious Korean grinder aspects of upgradable weapons that have bullshit chances to break and massive chances of failure to artificially extend the use of currency and craft drops are far different from actual "challenging" content inclusions such as near-immortality of tanks provided they're skilled enough as a player to dodge or block incoming attacks.

Regardless, Wildstar deserved to suffer, if for nothing else than to punish the minds that created it, thinking that the rest of the world shared their silly sentiments about what "truly" makes a game good. It ain't the 40-man raids. The experiences within those raids is what made the memories, not the assembling and maintaining of 40+ man rosters that hinge on not one person having any sort of split second fuck-up and wiping the group for the 4000000000th time.

I remember constantly saying that if every person wiped in ARR once during a raid fight, that was at minimum, 8 runs required to clear an encounter. More than enough wipes to annoy anyone. To imagine every single person in a 40-man raid having just one slip-up on their night... that'd be over 40+ attempts at a long, annoying, draining fight just to have a shot at clearing.

Yeah, this game needed to die. Good riddance.

[Kachiko]

Wildstar did die; many of the core people were fired or left the company, and there's very little, in terms of an active, supporting community. The remaining question is whether or not it makes the changes necessary to become a good F2P game and whether enough people will care enough to build the required community needed to support it, with things like an active Wowhead and modding community.

[Corrderio]

Out of curiosity, what was endgame like in WS? I only made it to 15 before I said fuck it.

[Lucavi]

I think its one page back. Check out that long rap-sheet on how to get properly attuned. There's that, there's PVP (world PVP servers are dead, so do instanced PVP on PVE servers) and uhh...

[arus2001]

Out of curiosity, what was endgame like in WS? I only made it to 15 before I said fuck it.

Know how some people bitched in XIV about having to do the main story quest to access dungeons (and later quests for later dungeons)? Well, I give you how to attune for your raid. THEN you can have your "fun" with 40 others.

Anyway, since the usual blowhards of the XI section don't seem to lurk here, I'm just going to assert that my "desire" from a game as a "hardcore casual" is the general elimination of the caste concept that comes from emphasizing one aspect of play too much. For games like WoW, Rift, and XIV, this tends to mean raiding. For other ones like Aion, Tera, or whatever, it usually means PvP. Crafting has ultimately become a combat-related afterthought for most MMOs anymore because of RMT fears, while Magian-like progression systems have seemingly never really been revisited since XI dropped them post-Abyssea. Regardless of being hardcore or casual, playing and progressing on some level tends to be the order when putting time in. Having fun in the process should hopefully be a given. Playing and not feeling like you're getting anywhere is a big issue for those who fall outside the Raid/PvP demographic, and even if they do get content bones here and there, the rewards get capped pretty low because people mistakenly believe no amount of time and/or effort in "things they don't like" should dare rival their precious.

It seems like the real hurdle nowadays is finding a fresh-blooded dev team that isn't trying to relive the olden days because what they grew up on has forever stained them with nostalgia. WS seemingly personified this on the extreme worst end of the spectrum, but even the more casual-friendly WoW "clones" fall into this trap BECAUSE they don't design actual accessible open world endgame content for the sweeping majority that need more than collecting pets/mounts/costumes to feel like their time is worth it. And since MMOs are almost always combat-related games first and foremost, that means you've absolutely gotta give good gear to chase. And not in the, "Well, you need 3 months to finish one item..." kind.

I generally don't include dungeons because they're:
A) Raid-lite and subject to the usual cookie-cutterisms and dancing the style has evolved to. Consider the Red Mage's dilemma of XI as an example of where player expectation can clash with community.
B) Queue times are unreliable and thus tend to demand an hour or more of time set aside, especially if a DPS role.

So, while something like the Magian system was really just glorified kill/fetch quests, they were usually attuned in such a manner that even if you only had a short block of time, you could go knock off a few kills or whatever. Eventually, though, you'd get your shiny, and aside from RMEs and +2 gear, you weren't really at the mercy of others 100% of the time. I do somewhat think SE basically eliminating the Dynamis cooldown recently is something interesting to look at on the Relic end of the spectrum since it removed the enforced time sink of daily access even though actual manpower hours haven't changed. Some speculated the currencies were gonna crash hard, but looking at FFXIAH and bazaar listings, they appear relatively stable or even a little higher a couple weeks after the fact. I guess I would've been more interested to see this change circa-2007 or so, or with the overall revamp to Dynamis, but alas. Dead game or something.

[Corrderio]

Wow, fuck all that shit just to do endgame.

[Gulkeeva]

Wow, fuck all that shit just to do endgame.

It was like that back in the world of warcraft days too, but people actually liked doing it back then O_o

http://www.wowhead.com/quest=10949/e...e-black-temple

Just scroll down a bit, has a nice long list. Required reputation, killing stuff and raiding to access even further raids for "end game". I miss those days.. so very few got that far.. and the gear was rape... and I was on a PVP server so... /pushbuttonsomeonedies