An Analysis on All Things Eldan
Feb 20 2024 Threads WildStar Central1)How Eldan Stuff Looks Like:
The hallmark of Eldan technology is the use of four main colours: White, Gold, Green, and Black.
The White usually makes up the ‘outer’ chassis of Eldan tech, whereas the Black is the ‘inner’ chassis and worky bits. Gold is used for highlights
Another visual indicator of Eldan technology (at least with regards to humanoid designs) is the favouring of a pseudo-splitting of the upper arm, most easily-seen in the Mechari. They don’t do this with all their humanoid designs, but it seems to reoccur on some. On the black portion of their tech, the designs also often have a banded pattern running along them.
I have to admit, part of the reason why I did this is not so much because we can’t tell when something is Eldan, but because it’s fun to imagine the kind of discussions Carbine’s art team must have had when devising the look of Eldan tech. ^___^
2) How do the Eldan Look Like?
When doing ‘research’ for this, I realised that maybe we DO know how Eldan look like. While we don’t know for certain, there are some compelling hints.
FIRST, the Eldan build a lot of humanoid robots. If they were a race of furry, tentacled, eight-eyed creatures, you’d think they’d build stuff that looked a little more like them. Now, humanoid robots is not in itself evidence that the Eldan are humanoid, but I think it contributes to that theory!
SECOND, Eldan consoles are pretty high! We can access them, but we’d probably have to stand on tiptoes. Eldan were possibly about as tall as a Granok. It looks about nice and eye-level for that chap.
THIRD, (and here’s where I get into ‘that’s-a-bit-of-a-stretch’ territory), I believe that Carbine chose the name ‘ELDAN’ for a reason. To evoke a very specific set of associations. Consider the latest League of Legends champion ‘Quinn’. Her creators have said that that name was specifically chosen to sound both tomboyish and intelligent.
So what does the name ‘Eldan’ evoke? One of the first things I thought of were the Eldar from Warhammer 40k, an ancient race of space-elves (sorta). In Tolkien, the name ‘Eldar’ is also used for a certain type of Elf. That’s the vibe I get from a name like ‘Eldan’.
FOURTH, consider the following:
ooooo faces. If I had to guess, ELDAN faces. Why? Again, their names might be supposed to evoke an elf-like association.
Note the high cheekbones and slender features. When I first saw the trailer, I was willing to dismiss that face as being ‘anything’, but that particular kind of facial structure has reoccurred since then, among Eldan stuff.
Speaking of elves…
This giant, pointy-eared statue in the Northern Wilds utilises Eldan colours (White, Gold, Green), and none of the locals in this region seem advanced enough to construct something so monolithic. It stands to reason that this was built by the Eldan and depicts a female one. The face is very similar to other images before.
So, that’s my theory for now, Eldan LOOK like space elves.
FIFTH (this one’s also quite a bit of a stretch), in the ‘Meet the Dominion’ trailer, the figurative humans are being ‘lifted up’ by the Eldan. Is the human-looking hand supposed to be just that – a representation chosen by the Cassians because they don’t know how the Eldan look like, or is it supposed to be an Eldan hand? I actually think it’s the former, though I’m throwing this out there, anyway.
3) Who is this Toric dude?
Toric’s primarily white armour with gold trim is in-line with Eldan aesthetics, leading me to believe that he is one of the Luminai: a human who is also part Eldan.
See that symbol on his forehead?
Looks familiar!
It’s the stylised Dominion logo that they plaster all over the place, so it’s a safe bet that Toric’s loyalties lie with them.
This Cassian lady’s dialogue suggests that Luminai are rarely-seen. The arrival of a Luminai in Bloodfire Village seems to be something of a big deal.
If Eldan do indeed look like space-elves, then that would explain why Toric still looks pretty human despite being part Eldan.
Do the Luminai know what’s up with the Eldan? No idea! Though they clearly get first-pick on all the cool tech they left behind, as evidenced by Toric’s getup.
4) What were the Eldan up to?
Well, we don’t know that either! What we DO know is that they’re up to all sorts of crazy weather shenanigans! Consider the Northern Wilds, with their big weather control tower.
Here are two snippets from the Eldan’s science logs:
In a nutshell, the Eldan are converting Elementals into Loftite Crystal which they use to power their machines. They make reference to ‘the great work’ and ‘the project’, though what those refer to is anyone’s guess!
The first log also tells us something about the Eldan’s character: there’s definitely a sinister edge to them, as evidenced by their casual disregard for the elementals’ lives.
Another clue is this massive, floating structure in the Galeras zone known as ‘The Focus of Air’. Its purpose is unknown, but it seems to be responsible for the strange dust storms in this zone.
Since the Focus of Air is a level 60 raid, how cool would it be if the experiments we saw in the Northern Wilds were what made the construction of the Focus of Air possible, and that it is part of the culmination of whatever this ‘Project’ or ‘Great Work’ is? It would be a nice way to tie the player into a story thread which began from the moment they arrived on Nexus.
Again, messing with the environment seems to be something of a significant goal for the Eldan. And to me personally, a name like ‘Focus of Air’ begs the question of whether or not we’ll see a ‘Focus’ for the other ‘elements’ of nature as well.
Fate Flyer’s thread may answer some of those questions: http://www.wildstar-central.com/index.php?threads/the-planet-nexus.1561/
As you can see from the images in that thread, a vast potion, if not all of Nexus, seems to have some sort of underlying non-natural construction. Could Nexus itself just be one big terraforming playground? That would account for its diverse range of climates and environments, but I suspect that Carbine and the Eldan would have something far grander in mind.
Ok, so environment stuff aside, what else do the Eldan do? Well, we also know that they’re big into augmentation.
http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/wildstar_wednesday_insights_into_eldan_technology.php said:
Although very is little is currently known about the specifics of augmentation, it is believed it to be a nano-technological process that results in a dynamic cybernetic transformation of the host. Unconfirmed theories posit that Augmentors inject their victims with a substance which carries the nanites responsible for facilitating the technological enhancements, following a complex set of selection protocols which determine exactly what kind of augmentation the host will receive.
Hey look, these Augmentors don’t care if their masters aren’t around anymore, they’ve gone ahead and started augmenting newcomers to their planet. Besides turning you into a cyborg, it’s not exactly clear what the process of augmentation does….makes you into a 20-man open-world raid boss? Presumably you gain special powers. That augmented lady looks like she’s floating around, which humans don’t normally do.
Also, take a look at this turtleshark! Do those markings on its shell look natural to you? Maybe yes, or MAYBE the Eldan didn’t just experiment with the weather, but had a hand in creating their own unique lifeforms. That said, weird patterns do tend to occur seemingly naturally on creatures on Nexus, such as many of the other inhabitants of Deradune.
Also, this just in:
I dont think that this is a coincidence. The three glowy points on the face, the fangs, the way the upper torso is mounted on three legs, the way there are those two things jutting out its back. The silhouettes are just too similar! Plus, the original filename for that Eldan machine is ‘Eldan Commander’. The Xenobite Queen is also a commander of sorts, controlling the Skeech.
Alternate theory: Nanobots are the tools, ‘Augmentation’ is the process, ‘metal is perfection’ is the goal? (or maybe the Eldan just made their commander robot look like a Xenobite Queen because they thought it looked pretty rad :))
5) One last thought
Nobody could get near Nexus before because of the Eldan’s planetary defences. However, now they’ve suddenly just stopped? We don’t know much about why they stopped, but I’m inclined to believe that they just entered a ‘standby’ mode as opposed to being destroyed.
Which begs the question: why have the Eldan, only now, chosen to make their planet accessible? If they set a timer (e.g.: wait 1000 years, then deactivate), why did they choose this specific time?
Just in case it wasn’t clear though, that was completely baseless speculation on my part. There are any number of reasons why the weapon systems may have stopped including, as Patrician points out, just being worn out by time. ^___^
I thought it’d be cool to collate these various little tidbits of information. One last round of wild and baseless speculation, because come March 22 (and eventually, the beta), I have a feeling like we’re going to be learning a lot more; and dissecting media for clues won’t be what it used to be.
MAC Client in Wildstar
Feb 18 2024 Threads WildStar CentralSo hello another MAC tread.
Personally I am not a fan of apple at all and now without Jobs, nobody knows where it’s going.
Anyways a LOT of people will demand a support for MACs and it’s really a shame that W* Dev team hasn’t thought of a solution for it yet; Even vanilla WoW was lauched with I-OS support, while Apple wasn’t even THAT popular back then.
Now I love that W*-team has realized that most of ‘casual gamers ( no offense) ‘ are reeaally turned on by Housing mainly and of course all the other features! They’ve presented their big advantages at the PAX and Gamescom. Awesome job!
Now this is mainly my own point of view but alot of causal gamers are using a Mac and do not play very often but still want to enjoy the game, its not like it will represent 1% of the market, i think it even goes up to 20-30 % nowadays.
The new players, that did not play any MMO before are mainly Mac users.
Please, for your own interest W*-team, enable a MAC supported game at release. It’s very important in my opinion for a good start.
Clearing up Misconceptions on Open World PvP
Feb 10 2024 Community NewsHey everyone! One of our awesome devs noticed a bit of confusion about how we plan on implementing open world PvP in WildStar and brought it to our (our = your WildStar community team and the PvP dev team) attention this morning. Since we want to clear up any misconceptions quickly, Aether thought it would be best if I got my WildStar Central forum name registered so I can give you all some info today.
Rulesets
We intend to have two rulesets at WildStar’s launch, a PvE and PvP ruleset.
World PvP Opportunities on PvE Ruleset
On a PvE Ruleset server, you may voluntarily flag yourself for PvP. In WildStar, there are some zones which are shared by both factions, in terms of PvE content. If you’re flagged, you may run into opposing faction individuals who have also voluntarily flagged themselves for PvP. If you do, I hope you both have some fun
If you try to go into an opposing faction’s city, you will be automatically flagged for PvP.
World PvP Opportunities on PvP Ruleset
On a PvP Ruleset server, PvP flagging is determined based on the zone your character is in. If you are in a zone that is affiliated with your faction, you’re not flagged…but you may voluntarily flag yourself. If you are in a zone that is affiliated with the opposing faction, you are flagged for PvP.
If you’re in a zone that is shared by both factions, you will be flagged for PvP. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to run into your enemy in a shared zone and slay the day away
If you try to go into an opposing faction’s city, you are flagged for PvP (though, this is redundant on a PvP server, because you’re likely in that faction’s zone anyway).
Sanctuaries
We will have areas within zones or entire zones where PvP is forbidden. These areas, called Sanctuaries, will be present on both PvE and PvP rulesets.
Objective-Based Open World PvP
We understand the strong desire for this type of open world PvP and many of us here at Carbine enjoy it. That said, objective-based open world PvP is not currently a focus for WildStar’s launch. Our intent, as I’ve stated in our Reddit AMAA, is to see how our PvP players interact with the world of Nexus so we can focus on areas which may appeal to a Wildstar PvP player for objective play before we make a deeper investment on open world PvP.
Experience
(Also from the Reddit AMAA, but I will also restate it again)
You will be able to level via PvP. You can earn experience off of player kills in the Battlegrounds and through player kills in world PvP. So, there is a little bit of incentive to kill your enemy, outside of the enemy just being an opposing faction player, on either Ruleset, because he’s probably worth some XP.
We’ll be monitoring this thread to respond to your feedback, which we welcome with open arms! Thanks for listening, everyone!
Ask An Aurin
Feb 05 2024 Threads WildStar CentralHello and good day everyone,
The weather is bad today in Algoroc – some high winds are blowing in from Galeras and it’s kind of miserable out, so I thought I would try and embrace this technology a little more. Hello? Is this thing on…?
Honestly, since we fled Arboria the other Aurin’s have taken to all this human technology and science – it seems like no-one but me cares about leaving our home! I know, I’m not being totally fair I guess, but I can’t help it! Leaving the forests of Arboria was the hardest thing I’ve ever done! So unfair!
So here I am, bored and feeling like I want to reach out to new people and make some friends so I don’t go to stir crazy being away from my favourite tree. Don’t get me wrong… I mean Nexus isn’t so bad, it does have it’s own kind of beauty too and maybe if we never get to go back it could feel like home.
But until then… I am going to try this blogging stuff, and maybe I could be of some help to others out there? YES… so there it is, if you need anything or have questions just ask, and I will try to help or answer your questions the best I can! SUPER!
I think I’ll feel better about leaving if I can help someone else feel better – it will give me a little karmic boost don’t you think?
Have a super sparkly day! Write me soon!
Love and hugs and kisses and rainbows,
L.
WildStar Is the Best MMORPG That Deserves to Die
Jan 19 2024 Community News WildStarAs the years went by, I expected the number of Reddit threads and video game forum posts about WildStar to decrease, but the game never really seemed to die. Although WildStar’s servers were officially shut down in 2018, the game died for me in 2015.
I always look back on my days playing WildStar fondly. Every time I go down memory lane, I try to judge whether or not I’m wearing rose-colored glasses, but I don’t think so. There are many things that WildStar does right and many other ideas that make it unique. It still has some of the most challenging and rewarding MMORPG raids ever created, one of the best housing systems ever created, and a truly unique world design; it even manages to offer a wide array of races that don’t cross over into space elves, dwarves, humans, and orcs.
Despite the amount of fun I had with WildStar, and the fact that I have yet to find another theme park MMORPG to replace it, I can now look back and understand that WildStar deserved to die. I have defended WildStar to the hilt in the past, blaming the game’s demise on NCSoft’s corporate greed with its rush to finish an unfinished game and slow response to fixing bugs, however there is a deeper issue that cannot be dismissed as simple incompetence.
WildStar Life Cycle
Given that it’s been over 7 years since I logged into WildStar, I had to piece together what I remember with my usual monthly column. From what I remember, during the first year of WildStar’s life there were 3 main phases that most players had to go through: leveling, attunement, and raiding.
It’s not unusual for MMORPGs to have a different feeling when transitioning from the leveling phase to the raiding phase with some attunement requirements in between, however WildStar was a completely different beast.
One thing WildStar does right is its tutorial. Despite being a very long introduction to MMORPGs, Crimson Isles was one of the most engaging starter zone experiences I’ve ever played. Unfortunately, after that the game transitions into a fairly typical theme park MMO experience. Accept your mission at the hub, kill or collect some stuff, then hand it back. Sure, there are some public events and trade skill related missions along the way, but nothing that really breaks the standard formula.
Personally, I didn’t care much for the leveling up experience in WildStar and even opted to complete a few levels by just doing PvP battlegrounds. While the quests are fairly generic, I think the Adventure system is a nice change in dungeons.
Instead of the typical Point A to Point B dungeon structure, WildStar creates Adventures that change based on group choice. This means there are often multiple scenarios and endings to each Adventure. Unfortunately, this often leads to debates about which final boss to fight as each boss has unique items, and most public groups often want to take the fastest or easiest adventure path.
Reaching max level in WildStar is not a huge challenge. It can be done through quests or PvP battlegrounds, and even on PvP servers there aren’t many challenges that delay players from reaching level 50. However, after reaching level 50, the difficulty increases significantly for anyone looking to raid, which is honestly the only thing to do besides PvP.
The attunement process has almost become a joke among the community because of how long and difficult it is. Many sites even created infographics detailing everything that needed to be done, and even those infographics were several pages long. At the time, there was an outcry from many casual players because some of the tasks seemed almost impossible, but after I switched to raiding, I knew that if you couldn’t complete the attunement process then raiding would also fail the range.
The main problem with the attunement process in WildStar is how unrewarding it is. It basically boils down to a few time gates, such as grinding Elder Gems, reputation, and killing world bosses. Having to kill 10 world bosses is often the most problematic as they don’t drop anything useful. This means that the only people who kill world bosses are the groups that do attunements, and those aren’t always available. I ended up getting around this a few times by tagging bosses and letting enemy factions kill them, but it does require some incentive to keep groups actively working on these bosses.
In addition to the time-limited content, there are some gear and skill checks along the way. Earning a silver medal for each adventure and veteran dungeon is no joke. It basically requires perfect runs while completing bonus challenges. Technically, you can still earn silver by dying, but having to reset fights often fails to meet the time requirements. Again, this isn’t very rewarding either since to achieve silver you already need the best drop from the veteran’s dungeon.
Finally, after completing the 11-step attunement process, players can enter the Genetic Archive raid…and be promptly slaughtered. The raids in WildStar are the best I’ve played in the entire genre, but also the most brutal.
The guild I finished the silver dungeons and adventured with was only able to kill one mini-boss in a Genetic Archives raid after a few weeks. Shortly after, I moved to another guild that managed to kill the first 2 bosses: Experiment X-89 and Kuralak the Defiler.
Experiment X-89 was mostly focused on tanking and proper positioning. The entire fight took place on a series of platforms that were destroyed based on the attacks the boss used. This leads to increasingly smaller spaces to fight in and players can be knocked off the platforms, which often leads to some hilarious deaths. I don’t think Kuralak is particularly fun, but the fight requires all attacks to be in sync or everyone will be wiped out by debuffs.
Next up is the Phagetech Prototype and Phase Maw. This prototype is one of my favorite attacks to tank in WildStar. The fight involves 4 different bosses with unique abilities and 2 active at any given time. Since the bosses phase at different times, there is a lot of tank swapping and boss stacking to maximize damage output. This also makes the fight dynamic and chaotic as you never know exactly what you’ll get in what order.
In contrast, Phage Maw is a fairly straightforward fight that mostly consists of boss kills and bombs placed around the room in turn. After a certain point, the bombs become uncontrollable and the entire raid will be wiped out regardless of how well you play, which makes most fights a DPS check.
The fifth raid boss in the Genetic Archives is the Phageborn Convergence, which actually consists of four of the five bosses that will be randomized each week in the encounter. Unlike the Phagetech Prototype, these individually felt like full bosses and my guild never made it past this point. Despite only making it to 5 raid bosses, the complexity and challenge of their mechanics still impresses me even today. I am aware that WildStar eventually released more raids, in addition to Genetic Archives and DataScape, but I hear these never lived up to the original.
A Narrow Experience
While I loved the challenging dungeons and raids in WildStar, focusing on these was also its biggest downfall and why the game ultimately deserved to die. With only one difficulty setting for its raids, WildStar’s end game was out of reach for most MMORPG players. The attunement process alone has weeded out many players and I know many more who quit after being unsuccessful for weeks in the Genetic Archives.
Aside from raiding, there isn’t much to do for casual players. The build is relatively simple and exists to support raiders. For a long time, there was no treadmill equipment available outside of raiding. All ranked PvP content gave access to the same gear, which was the equivalent of veteran dungeon drops or mini-bosses dropped from raids. After that, there’s basically nothing else to do.
The PvP side of the game is also underdeveloped. I love jumping into ranked combat when I’m not preparing for raids, but PvP rarely receives updates and when it does, it often comes with game-breaking bugs. The simplified gear between PvP types doesn’t help either. Ranked Arenas, Battlefields, and War Plots essentially give access to the same gear.
This creates issues with arena victory trading, which gives many players an early edge in raiding and PvP. Although Warplots, a 40v40 PvP death trap, sounds like the coolest thing ever, I never really experienced it because finding 79 other players to PvP with without a decent reward was literally impossible. I know a lot of raiders and hardline PvPers on my server, but I’ve only heard of a handful of people who have played Warplots.
Balance
Dec 20 2023 Community NewsHere’s some quick philosophy on the subject (still in the office at 6pm Sunday so I’ll have to be brief):
We do believe in catering to the 1% (actually a few different 1%’s). We spend more than 1% of our time on them. Why?
Well, the 1% grew over time in the MMO market. It used to be that few people were at the end game stages of the MMOs, but of course as time passes the percentage of players there grows. And some who hated PVP as noobies learned they loved it, and some who struggled in dungeons took on veteran dungeons and learned to raid, etc. So that “1%” of people who do the hard end-game content has grown a bit (it’s still not pervasive per se; and the toughest raids are still only finished by a fraction of the playerbase).
Several factors apply:
1) The 1% are pretty vocal. If they report back to the 99% that the elder game sucks, guess what? Lots of people leave – why bother levelling up if no love was put into the very top content? (Well there actually answers to that, but I’ll leave it for brevity).
2) Over time, your “1%” content becomes easier – better loot drops, people get more skilled, level caps raise. So that percentage our of time spent actually over time does get utilized well.
3) We devs often ARE the 1%. If you make a game you don’t love, it’s pretty damn hard to make it good. We want a game we want to play too. There are a disproportionate amount of hardcore raiders/PVPers in the industry (and probably also in those passionate enough to post here or on other MMO sites for that matter).
4) There’s some magic involved. Picture a game with no nigh-inaccessible content. You can go anywhere the first month, there’s nothing left unseen. From one perspective, maybe that’s great – there’s no earning your way into Counterstrike maps, and that game’s pretty damn fun. But from another…I dunno, it’s pretty tough to have a mysterious, huge-feeling world when you can trivially do it all, and even in games I don’t want to or don’t have time to raid in I’d like to know there’s more out there. That’s arguable though.
So we focus a lot on elder games. We’re trying to have innovative answer for each major playstyles:
Soloers PVE’ers (IMO under-served in most MMOs oddly as they are 65+% of the playerbase in most western MMOs) get more than rep grinds and dailies by having solo story dungeons released regularly, dynamic PQ content (most to be revealed down the road), big frequent updates, housing stuff, good tradeskilling, and more.
PVPers: Warplots (40v40 player built city v city combat) and arenas (to oversummarize)
Group PVE’ers: Dynamic raid content, weekly competitions for legendary gear, and more (some to be revealed later)
Some of that stuff (especially the group stuff) needs to be damn hard. We want the best guilds capturing raid bosses in challenging ways, and pinning them down on their warplots to go beat the out of the other fortresses. Many noobie players may never experience that – but hopefully they hear about it and aspire to it.
We’re trying to make everyone useful, so the major guilds will end up with raiders, warplotters, and soloers contributing to the overall guild’s success, in roughly the proportions they naturally exist in the playerbase. We’ll see if we succeed at that (beta’s all about finishing implementation, then tuning tuning tuning to make sure it all plays well individually and together).
Anyhoo, there’s tons more on the subject, especially as we do more reveals later this year on elder games, deeper dives on features, etc. Maybe we’ll muck up some of the execution (don’t believe so at the moment, but there’s lots to do still. I don’t expect or desire any “gimmes” from the MMO communities as a whole; there’s been enough hype in recent years in the biz that the proof HAS to be in the pudding for us and future games).
But strategically we have a set of goals that we feel passionate about. Opinions welcome.
It’s EXTREMELY refreshing to hear devs justify and create content that caters for ‘the 1%’. I’m sick and tired of watching the WoW devs justify LFR/hardmodes and all the different modes, just because it opens up more people to the content. It takes value out of that aspect of the game.
I have been around when the 1% existed, climbed into the 1% with numerous firsts in leveling and raiding, and then quit since. I do not desire to raid in top level content again because it’s a drag and the worth is sucked out completely out of it. I’ve cleared top level content, and what? It’s going to get nerfed in 2 months, 10m/25m share the same loot and even those raids are too similar and take the fun out of entering the new raids. I cannot put into words how simply perfect my day was when I entered BT and Hyjal following the massively difficult attunements. If LFR existed then, I’d have been in BT and that initial experience would be non-existent and meaningless. This highlights point 1 and 4 pretty well for me on a personal level.
I believe it is important to make distinguishable differences through better gear or whatever for the 1% of players, and those differences are generated from the difficulty of those raids. I do agree that entry to these raids needs to be provided, which I believe both solo PVE and group PVE would play a great role in that. But they should be a stepping stone to the 1% and not an alternative to it, which is where I believe WoW has fell massively short. I think that their justifications for opening it up for more people is simply to hide the fact that the correct stepping stones and content have failed to be provided to players who may enjoy similar, but different content.
As an interesting note, challenge modes from WoW are a GREAT addition, and simple to implement, providing just another slice of content for top players. I don’t know what Carbine intend, but a competitive and rewarding feature that didn’t benefit players capabilities was definitely something that is enjoyable.
Catering content to the 1% is important. It gives motivation and aspiration to the 99% which for me personally was a massive factor in my huge time spent when I was in that percentile. When that boundary was eroded, I believe it was the main factor as why my love for the game faded. I wholeheartedly support Carbine’s decision to cater for ‘the 1%’ and would be greatly disappointed to see this philosophy abandoned.
MeakGG said:
see the decline of players raiding.
It looks like you’re trying to use the numbers as a way of suggesting raider population has dropped. That wasn’t what I was referring to, I was referring to the fact that raider population was a tiny portion of the actual subscriber base to begin with. Your previous post runs on the premise that ‘everyone acquires everything’, when in fact only around 2% or less of the game’s subscribers actually clear the hardest encounter in each expansion while it’s relevant.
Maybe I’m missing something, and if I am, or I’m wrong, please let me know
What you’re missing is, your figures show all time completion for content that came out years ago, and you’re comparing it to the current tier of progression content. Of course there are more people in 2013 that have cleared WotLK content than the current raid tier – they’ve had an extra 5 years to do it in and the benefit of gear and character levels that allowed them to pretty much solo the content if they wanted to.
WoW has 10 million subscribers, and completely dominates the MMO market. Right now it has the largest and most dedicated hardcore raiding scene of any game, and that scene is still an incredibly tiny niche.
Blizzard provide their own figures for this showing completion for Dragon Soul among active level 85 characters 6 months after the content patch. Notice that only 4.4 million characters even meet the sample requirements of being lv85, out of 10 million subscriptions. Out of that already-selective sample of active lv85 characters, only 4% have completed Dragon Soul on normal mode. It doesn’t even show hard mode completion rates.
This is what you referred to as the easiest content of the expansion – The number of people who actually required harder content to test them was a meagre fraction of a fraction. It’s trendy to mouth off about how easy and casual World of Warcraft is, and most of the people doing that haven’t actually cleared the hardest content in the game at any stage of the game’s life.
WildStar Town Hall – October 2014
Nov 10 2023 Community News WildStar Central WildStar Town HallLadies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Granok, Rowsdowers and Chua of all ages…
For those veteran WildStar Community members among you, you may recall a series of Town Hall meetings (here, and here) hosted by the then popular vodcast “Late Night Dominion”. It’s been a while (almost a year) but WSC thinks it’s high time we gather together community reps to discuss all aspects of WildStar to bring some constructive feedback home to Carbine.
Participation
We have already contacted Carbine Studios who confirm that this time around, they will be taking part in the discussion directly, and attending the meeting themselves. Want to join us? Then you’ll need to pick up to two representatives for your organization (be it a fansite, multigame guild, WildStar specific guild or even a press outlet!) and register here:
( Register to Participate )
Don’t worry if you’re not a chosen representative of your organization, or are a lone wolf as each Town Hall will be broadcast via Twitch @ http://twitch.tv/wildstarcentral/ and the chat will be monitored for pertinent public queries. Or, simply post your questions here – we’ll cull the best for discussion on the day!
We will also be looking for around 3-5 moderators for the event – who will not take part directly in the discussion, but will serve to keep the discussion on track and civil. If you wish to apply for this, please message me directly here on WSC.
Format
You can see an example of the previous Town Halls here, but in essence, a moderator will be guiding the participants through a series of pertinent topics. These topics will be…
Game Population (inc. Megaservers)
Classes (inc. Game Balance)
PvE Quests
PvP Battlegrounds and Arenas
Raiding
Dungeons
Community
Events
Open Chat
Each topic will be under discussion for roughly a maximum of 20 minutes each for an approximate total duration of 3hrs.
Schedule
Of course, this is all no good if you don’t know when to turn up. There will be two Town Halls – one at US-friendly times and one at EU-friendly times to ensure everyone is reasonably represented.
North America Town Hall
Where: WSC Voice Comms
When: Wednesday 1st Oct, 7pm EDT (convert)
European Town Hall
Where: WSC Voice Comms
When: Thursday 2nd Oct, 7pm BST (convert)
The WSC Voice Comms server will be set up prior to the event, and communicated to the registered participants privately.
Questions
If you have any questions about this community initiative, or want to supply questions for the day then here’s your place!