The SF-MMO WildStar appears in the quarterly report from NCSoft. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the sales figures. Between 400,000 and 600,000 units are estimated to have been sold.

The quarterly report from NCSoft has been intriguing for the MMO sector for a long time, as they have an important western title in their portfolio with Guild Wars 2 and lead one of the dominant MMO titles in the east with Blade & Soul. This April/May/June quarter was even more exciting, as a triple-A MMO was released in the west with WildStar. And WildStar players, former players, and interested observers naturally want to know how the game is performing.

The answer: Not that great, but not terrible either. The budget figures do not allow for a precise number to be calculated because the game was sold at various prices; it was more expensive in the Steel Edition and significantly cheaper during discount promotions than the standard price. WildStar is estimated to have sold between 400,000 and 600,000 units – a figure just under 500,000 is the most commonly heard number in the calculations.

How this figure should be interpreted and how it affects the future of WildStar surely depends largely on how many of the buyers also subscribed and how many players Carbine had counted on in their plans.

With sales of 400,000 to 600,000 units, the game is certainly not a flop, but the feedback from fans on social media and forums is sobering. One wonders what Carbine could have done differently. Whether it’s the marketing that prevented the title from selling better, the season, or the lack of a ‘big name’ behind the product. With a Meta-Critic score of 82%, the game stands well, but it was already noticeable that fewer critics discussed the game compared to the previously released competitor The Elder Scrolls Online.

Looking towards the release date of “Warlords of Draenor,” the World of Warcraft expansion, whose announcement is scheduled for later Thursday evening, some are looking anxiously to the future. Since WildStar was targeting former World of Warcraft players, it was already assumed that the start of Warlords of Draenor would leave Nexus even emptier.

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The SF-MMO WildStar became the victim of quite a severe trolling incident that stirred up quite a commotion in the fan base.

When WildStar’s head of public relations, Technical Director CRB_Cougar, logged into social media for the first time on Tuesday, the Chua mess was already steaming. Fans were screaming that this was the absolute last straw. This meant the topic “WildStar” was now completely off the table. They wanted to delete their accounts immediately, sell their dearly held plush Rowsdower on eBay, set it on fire, and generally never hear about this “WildStar” thing again.

What happened? A user claimed on Reddit to have discovered a nasty exploit just before the server maintenance. Players could obtain the coveted Ancestor Gems for free! And AMPs too. This was allegedly already common knowledge, and some exploiters had stocked up for 9 months! A tremendous breach in the delicate balance of the game, which set the fans into a frenzy – especially because they felt disadvantaged since they could no longer access the free loot.

And since the servers were down anyway (most likely to fix this exploit!), it couldn’t be verified whether this was true or not, but it was already too late. Even more suspicious was the fact that no one at Carbine admitted that this exploit even existed. It must have been so significant that merely mentioning it was enough to severely damage WildStar. So it had to be kept quiet.

When CRB_Cougar indicated that he would look into it, fans took it as confirmation of the news. Directly, the originator of this uproar contacted Cougar: He had played a prank. A hoax, a falsehood, set loose into the world. Cougar was undeterred and looked into it more closely, and indeed: There was absolutely nothing to it, just a gag to really hit back at the previously mentioned Chua mess on Reddit.

Cougar later explained in a stream that if this had actually happened, they would have done everything possible to reverse the damage. But there was simply nothing to it. And by the way: Anyone who truly discovers and exploits such an exploit in the game will face the full consequences of WildStar. As Cougar explained: “It’s like I open my front door, and there’s a bag full of cash inside, and you can tell from the paint splatters on it that it probably comes from a bank robbery: I close the door and walk backward into the house, but I take nothing from the bag.”

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In the weekly stream of the WildStar developers “The Nexus Report”, they discussed in detail the future plans for the MMO and aim to focus on two aspects in the upcoming weeks, which have already been developed: the difficult raid access quest and the rune system.

“You’re not getting in here!”

Raiding has so far been reserved for a very small percentage of players in WildStar, who have struggled through the lengthy attunement quest series. Obviously, they want to change this and encourage more players to at least take a look into the raid instances – they can always scream and flee later.

Three parts of the quest series will be shortened:

• It will no longer be necessary to complete all Veteran dungeons on silver; a bronze rating will suffice. Previously, players achieved this only by repeatedly running the same instance over and over until they had enough routine to meet the tough time limits.
• Secondly, it will only be necessary to collect 100 data patterns instead of the previous 300. Even hardcore players often criticized this intermediate step, as it represented merely a “time-sink” that forced them to run through the same adventures repeatedly.
• Finally, they want to change the task for which all world bosses had to be killed – what this change will look like has not yet been definitively decided, but a reduction in the required bosses is probably the most likely scenario.

These announcements are currently causing a massive outcry in the official forum and on the communication platform reddit, as Carbine had long insisted that they did not want to change the access quests to maintain their difficulty level and the “hardcore” factor of the raids.

Realistically, nothing changes about the difficulty: Only lengthy tasks will be shortened, which only take a lot of time but hardly require any specific gameplay performance: The required bosses still need to be defeated, and nothing changes about the raid instances themselves. However, it is problematic that players who are already raiding have spent a lot of time on this quest and now feel slighted.

We reported on this conflict a few weeks ago and can understand Carbine’s move very well. Some raid guilds attributed the shortage of new raid players and the associated loss of players to the cumbersome access quest. Changes seem appropriate here, and a significant part welcomes this decision.

Clear rune rules are needed in the land…

The second major announcement is the massive change in the rune system. Previously, rune slots were distributed relatively randomly on items, both in type (water, fire, fusion, etc.) and in number. It could happen that during the first visit to an adventure, you receive a strong weapon that had a rune slot and during the next visit find the same weapon again – this time, however, with 4 rune slots.

To make armor from similar gameplay content more equivalent going forward, a uniform distribution of rune slots will be introduced, which looks as follows: Green items will only have one rune slot, blue items from crafting professions and reputation vendors will have two, and all armor pieces from adventures and dungeons three. However, what type of runes an item has is still random. Only items obtained after the respective patch will be affected by this change – all items previously obtained will remain completely unchanged.

… and new runes too!

Often as a player, you are dissatisfied with the rune slots on an item, and a socket for fire runes would be much more useful if it were designed for water runes instead – going forward, you can influence this too! Through a new item, you will be able to exchange all rune slots, but only once per rune slot. However, you are not entirely free in this selection, as you get a choice of two elements each time.

Need an example? If an item has a slot for a fire rune, you can choose to change that slot and get a random selection, for example, “water” and “fusion” (but never “fire” – the original type will not be offered).

Finally, you will also be able to add new rune slots to existing items, increasing the maximum number of runes by up to two times – the corresponding item for this should be obtainable through both PvP and PvE activities.

These changes provide players with even more opportunities for targeted customization without completely negating the random factor in loot distribution – hopefully, these changes will have the desired effect.

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