Another week has passed and so it is once again time to express my discontent. Once again, my frustration is directed at WildStar, because the developer behind the cooking system of this game should urgently invite me to dinner, I have a lot to discuss with him!
If the bug has no bug meat…
In retrospect, I can’t say exactly why I decided to level the hobby “cooking” in WildStar to the maximum rank, probably to fulfill my “completionist craving” – back then I didn’t know what was in store for me. To briefly explain the system to the uninitiated: You master cooking by crafting each recipe in the game at least once. That sounds simple at first, but is complicated by the fact that almost half of all recipes must first be discovered on a coordinate system, as is common with professions in WildStar.
However, every attempt already costs the crafting materials, so it can happen that theoretically you should only have to craft “seasoned Girrok Kebab” one more time, but in reality you still need to find 20 Girrok meat to really discover that last recipe. That would have been manageable if not for the fact that some types of meat have a drop chance of under 3% – and this as a survivalist, who should actually be acquiring more cooking utensils. The real kicker, however, is a very special type of meat, the “Hookfoot Meat”, which can only be obtained from exactly one enemy in the open world. No, don’t get me wrong, not from a type of enemy. One single elite opponent with a 10-minute respawn timer drops it at around 15%. This means about one item per hour. As you can imagine, there were many long nights, thanks to the semester break.
The Kitchen of the Enemy
Halfway to my goal, I wondered why certain recipes seemed impossible to obtain – a little internet searching revealed to me that a handful of recipes are only accessible to the Dominion, which made completing the cooking profession impossible. One must positively note that Carbine reacted to this issue, but negatively how it was handled.
[quote_right]The cooking exiled community is being ripped off![/quote_right]
Under the radar, without it being mentioned in the patch notes, the missing recipes were made tradable: The first Dominion players who noticed it could list the cooking textbooks in the auction house by the hundreds and rip off the cooking exiled community (I’m a little proud of the wordplay!) that depended on the goodwill of the opposing faction.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love WildStar like I did on day one, but probably because I invest so much passion in this game, I can get so wonderfully worked up about it. Especially since I suspect that in one to two patches, the drop rates for meat will be revised so much that the whole thing can be completed in one evening. But don’t worry, then I will surely get worked up again. I simply enjoy doing that too much.
