Carbines SF-MMO WildStar adjusts the endgame design two months after launch. For the Warplots, a form of endgame PvP, only 30 players will soon be needed instead of the previous 40. A sensitive endgame topic in the community is the elaborate access quests to the raids.
Endgame PvP: Warplots for 30 instead of 40 players
In the latest episode of “WildStar Weekly,” the topic “Warplots” was extensively discussed. This is a form of rated battleground as endgame PvP. Currently, each team needs 40 players before the carnage can commence. But such a high number of players is likely hard to motivate for organized PvP at the highest level. The stress factor of “Rating” adds to it – as is known from other games, this deters some players; they have to overcome themselves to engage in Elo matches. Therefore, this mode often remains deserted. To increase the attractiveness of the Warplots, the team size will soon be reduced from 40 to only 30 per side.
The Warplots were one of the most important and spectacular innovations that Carbine wanted to add to the MMO genre before release. They aimed to connect this feature with crafting and raiding and presented it externally as one of the game’s great advantages. Apparently, they expected larger PvP guilds to emerge and adopt this feature.
Endgame PvE: Access conditions for raids too harsh
The WildStar community has been focused on the raids in PvE in recent weeks and months (aside from gold runs).
Not that the raids are too difficult – on the contrary, Carbine receives a lot of praise for the design of the raids and their challenging difficulty level. However, the tedious and lengthy access quests find little favor. The attunement, the access for the 20-man raid, is quite a hurdle.
“Normal” guilds attempting the 20-man raid struggle with the fact that some of their members are already raid-ready, while others, who invest less time, are still falling behind. This leads to internal tensions, as one can imagine.
This problem also affects the top guilds. In these guilds, players have long completed the 20-man access quest. However, if players from the core group drop out or if they want to expand the raid pool for the 40-man raids, they face difficulties in finding new recruits.
The access quest for the 40-man raid is even worse: players, when they reach it, have just weeks of experience in the 20-man raid and with challenging content behind them. Now, they are supposed to go back to 5-man instances to grind a specific item in 400 copies.
This kind of “grind” access quest, which requires not skill but patience from the player, finds little approval. Some say that Carbine wants to buy time with such methods.
Mein MMO says: The problem with the access quests is ultimately a matter of how one defines “hardcore.” With grind elements (“Collect 120 easily obtainable items, but you only find 2 every 30-minute round”), you are ultimately only testing the endurance and patience of players – even if some fans welcome it and say: One must show commitment here. Many players wish that more “skill” were required. However, Carbine deliberately employs these “content blocker” elements to prevent players from finishing the raids too early and shouting “finished”.
The difficulties in finding enough new recruits are already great for raid guilds, even without access quests. When the transition from the 20-man to a 40-man raid occurs, the problem is exacerbated. Furthermore, to cope with the initial rush, several servers may have been opened. This is now backfiring. If a raid guild is stuck on a server with few players, they are out of luck. But all these problems were actually to be expected. Almost every raid guild in every game faces recruitment issues – only the top guilds have free choice and even they lose players; the rest also feeds up. Content blockers and grind quests are often a necessary evil. Ultimately, there is no patent solution because designers cannot possibly design so many raid encounters that top guilds will never get bored.
However, that Carbine is adjusting the Warplots so early must be a disappointment for the developers. They were visibly proud of the feature. Surely, they had expected it to be received with much more enthusiasm. Perhaps the eSport hype in other games will have a long-term impact on the PvP scene in MMOs and also in WildStar. Or it may be that the currently very unbalanced PvP has driven away possible guilds. Here, they want to counteract with the next content patch, which is expected in the coming days.
