The Year in Review
Let me preface this post by saying "Yes, I was a WildStar Fanboy". To some extent I still am. For those of you who don't know who I am, let me rewind a bit to give you some backstory. If you want a TL:DR then skip to the bottom.
Last year around July, my family and I went to San Diego to visit some friends and go to Legoland. While we were there, we stopped off at the home of Carbine Studios, creators of the MMO WildStar. My wife and I had interacted with the developers and composer (Jeff Kurtenacker) for around a year and a half thanks to WildStar Central and sites like the now defunct Turntable.fm. We came complete with starry eyes and the wonder of a kid in a candy store.
Jeff Kurtenacker gave us the grand tour of the buildings. He took time out of his very busy schedule to walk us around for a few hours as we delivered donuts and gifts to our favorite developers. We met every department, met new faces, old "friends" for the first time, and left feeling like we'd just done the "coolest thing of our gaming lives". I still believe that, and I'm pretty sure my wife and eleven year old do as well.
We didn't get a warm fuzzy reception from the higher ups. I wasn't expecting them to stop what they were doing to meet us, but when you get introduced in the hallway and you reaction is to ignore us, and walk away, that is generally a sign that you're a pompous douchenozzle. So as usual, the people on the bottom of the organization were the cool ones, and the people in charge were not worth knowing.
The "underbelly" of Carbine Studios was totally different. They were a class act. Friendly, sociable, and happy to show us what they were working on. We missed a few of our favorites because they had moved on to other jobs. Bull, Andzayn, Mattekay, Troy, you all never got enough of the credit, but you all put in ludicrous amounts of work. On a side note, Anhrez (Mr Econ PvP) probably did more actual work than ANY tester in Alpha / Beta. He and Bull worked tirelessly to make it less likely that people could cheat the systems in place, and he wasn't even on the payroll. I say that again, he wasn't even on the payroll. If that doesn't speak volumes for his character, then nothing can.
Onto other things....
The "hype-train" was well underway, the game launched under its "hardcore" motto and the first month saw a very large population. No, it was not a "WoW Killer" and that fact that it was even branded as such, was hysterical to me. Hardcore cannot trump casual. Ever. That's the nature of the MMO world, always hype beyond hype, release, and then the inevitable exodus of players, when it falls short of their expectations. Blame the game, blame the community, blame PvP, as long as you blame someone other than yourself. Anyone who has played more than one MMO in the last decade knows this cycle to be true.
The second month rolled around and soon the exodus was well underway. It turned out that Warplots were not working correctly, and that end game raiding was much too complicated to even get into, much less accomplish. Unless of course you were unemployed, had a few months to spare, and the desire to stop sleeping, eating, bathing, and seeing sunlight. Needless to say, the elephant in the room was World of Warcraft and it welcomed all the returning hardcore raiders back to it's raids with open arms.
On the third month I lost my job. Money was tight, and we couldn't pay for the two subs. As anyone with a family, two cats, a mortgage, and two car payments can attest to, you need every dollar to make it. Gaming faded from my list of hobbies as I frantically tried to figure out what to do and how to support my family.
Soon after the inevitable happened, timetables for game updates were changed, staff was let go, management was shuffled, the usual gaming fiasco when a launch doesn't do well. Anyone who has been around gaming knows how this works.
A few months later, after a large portion of the population had given up and gone elsewhere, Carbine announced the "Zero to Fifty" web series staring Tony Rey. It would show him being wild and funny as he played WildStar in his quest to reach max level. No doubt to prove that if Tony Rey (a great actor, great community guy, and great attitude, but not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination) could do it, then anyone could. Well it failed, and lasted about as long as the population at the launch of the game.
From what I could read and see on Twitter, MMORPG.com, and Facebook, the game was NOT doing well at all. It seemed that Free to Play was the only real chance the game had left. When it was announced, it really didn't surprise many people.
The Free to Play announcement brought me back out of gaming retirement and I thought that maybe the community (which was the best community of any game launch in the history of mankind) would start coming back. I logged back in only to find that my two factor authentication was still set so I had to contact support to get it removed. No big deal right? I went grocery shopping, made dinner, did the dishes, and logged back in thinking it was probably resolved. Nope. It took another twenty four hours before it was done. Apparently I wasn't the only one, I saw lots of posts (tens maybe) on the official forums asking how long it would take. That's pretty poor customer service, but great for potential profit on sub numbers.
The optimist in me saw the uptick in people coming back and I got excited. Changes had been made to make it easier for filthy casuals like myself to be able to play again. I logged in, ready to see people running all around the starter zones, just like launch. Much to my dismay I saw maybe 10 people in Deradune and 10 people in Elevar. There's really only one server so I thought "maybe there is a huge disparity in the number of Exiles to Dominion players". This meant that pvp should be an instant pop for a Battle Ground. I queued and went about questing. Four hours later, I had one Walatiki Temple pop in the newbie bracket. One. I logged out disappointed in the lack of pvp but happy to be playing again.
A week passed, I made some alts to test out the classes and races again. I stayed queued in PvP the entire time. Not one Walatiki Temple popped. Why is this such a big deal? Well it's a pretty good indicator of the number of people playing at any given moment. Yes there are lots of higher level players that may have come back. What there isn't however, is a population of low level players. Without those new players a game can't grow. There is really only one PvE server, so a dozen new players isn't going to make waves.
Then came the announcement of an anniversary event. I'll spare everyone my feelings on it, because I'm pretty sure people on Jupiter know how much I hated the handling of that event.
This morning when I checked Twitter, I saw a post from Omeed saying that that event was the first event since Closed Beta. That comment took me by surprise. This was a company who said over and over, that doing things with the community was paramount to the success of the game. Yet they never did a single event while I was gone for nine months? It turns out that basically everything that the community rallied around the game for, fell flat on its face. One terribly run event in a whole year? It wasn't even a complicated event. One mob, one fight, much silliness was to ensue. It's not like it was a quest chain ala World of Warcraft, or a seasonal event like Halloween or Christmas. It was ONE MOB, ON EACH SIDE, ON ONE SERVER.
On the note of failures, what ever happened to fishing? It was removed to be "fixed" and never came back. How revolutionary do you have to make fishing? How complicated was it to be removed from the game and thrown in the trashcan? It wasn't THAT bad!
Then I had a moment of "omg derp" clarity.....
The incompetent, useless, bigwigs up top couldn't deliver what they promised. If anyone deserves to receive the negative comments, publicity, and anger, it's them. Not the people who are trying to make the game better, and are trying to interact with the community.
So in closing, I'd like to apologize to all I lashed out at for the handling of the event and mishandling of the previous twelve months. I know it's not your fault. Those of you on the front lines of the community are being assaulted for all the wrong reasons. Question is, how can we change how this process works? How can we get to the top and get them removed? Free to Play is a step in the right direction, but it's only a small step.
TL:DR The higher ups at Carbine are to blame. The regular people who work to make the game run deserve our admiration and respect. If you want to point the finger, point it right at the top. They get paid to take the heat, maybe it's time we turn it up.
