Last year I was introduced to WildStar, the brainchild of Carbine Studios, a development studio started by 17 former World of Warcraft vanilla/BC developers. Their intention was to create a new IP that was to bring back the challenge found in WoW classic and Burning Crusade. They also wanted to challenge jaded, veteran MMO players and grab new players as well. With this lofty goal they went out of their way to work on this title for nearly 8 years.
I was excited to try out the closed beta and open beta of the game. The fluid action combat and its use of a telegraph system, which helps players recognize what to avoid from other players and mobs and bosses, is what helped draw me in.
The sense of humor that permeates this game is great. The awesome voice overs and the hilarious one liners that are sent to you when you level. The fantastic PvE battles in adventures and dungeons and raids all are designed to keep you enthralled. The amazing housing system that suckers players to spend hours adorning their home with all kinds of nifty decorations and bling. All those features are without a doubt top notch.
Getting Into the Game
When I beta tested the game I decided not to reach max level. I did not want to spoil the experience for the launch of the game. While waiting for WildStar I was still subbed to World of Warcraft. I was biding my time. On May 31st I started my headstart account in WildStar. I also bid WoW farewell. I decided to go with the Dominion faction, and created my rascally Chua engineer: TheBlueMeanie.
I was excited and could not wait to experience it all. I was pumped to find out I could form premades for random battle grounds (BGs) as I leveled from level 6. I was hooked on the combat so much, I pretty much leveled up 95% of the way from 6-50 purely via PvP. As an experienced and rated BG player from Wow, I was used to premade BGs. I learned I could do so in WildStar.
So I formed my guild began recruiting and began to run premades. We used Teamspeak3 to coordinate and it was a blast to play together and level up that way. The game was designed to scale up players stats from various levels in brackets. At level 6 in random BGs my stats were scaled up to 14. I was equal to a level 14 player. The experience was more about skill and strategy than about gear. This continued all the way through 49.
PvP at Level 50
Then I hit 50. I had saved enough Prestige, the currency for PvP, to purchase my entire set. I entered my first BG with my guild and watched us all die in a matter of seconds. What I didn’t realize was that in the first 3 days of headstart, many closed beta players knew that PvP gear at 50 was broken.
PvE gear was far better to use right up to 40% PvP offense and 40% PvP defense. Basically you only wanted to wear about 3-4 pieces of PvP gear. Also, many top players were win-trading their way to high arena rating and then getting epic PvP gear. By the time the majority of the guild had hit 50, we ended up facing a huge uphill climb. You had players in BGs especially Warriors and Spellslingers with high rating arena gear destroying players in blues.
It was disheartening.
Sadly, what is worse is that Carbine will not be fixing these issues until August 1st. For many players who were happily and slowly exploring the wondrous world of Nexus… they are now hitting 50 and when trying to do rated PvP they are facing a monstrous barrier. Some are resorting to cheating by buying plat from gold farmers to stack high runes for PvE gear.
You even have the high-rated players purposely down-rating their ratings in 2s so they force the queue to have them face legitimately new rated players… who don’t have epics equipped. The queue times for rated BGs have drastically increased to the point where tonight, solo queuing for rated BGs has hit a new high of nearly 25 minutes.
The final the kicker, the one that really sticks into many players’ craw, is that Carbine knew back in April that PvP stats were broken. And they went ahead and let the game launch with a PvP season doomed from the beginning. Now, mind you, I have had discussions with other PvP fans and some excuse this as being a new launch. “Hey, it’s a new MMO give them some slack.” But I explained to those defenders considering that since Carbine has observed many other MMOs, this system breakdown should have been considered a no-go for a launch. Since Carbine has obviously taken notes from those MMOs and tweaked and made improvements to what’s seen in those games, there is no excuse. Now the question is will Carbine be able to resolve this issue and actually repair damage they made to WildStar with the PvP side of things?
Published: Jul 1, 2014 06:51 pm