Go! Go! Go! Go!

 

It’s that time… Pre-Orders are live!  Head over to the pre-order page and get going!

 

Here’s the blurb from the W* News announcement:

We’re worked into a lather to announce that WildStar is now available for Pre-Order! The only prerequisite? Being awesome! Can’t decide if the standard or digital deluxe edition is right for you? Don’t sweat it, you’ll be needing every last drop for character creation! Our Pre-Order page will drench you in all the nitty-gritty details of what each edition offers. But don’t forget, only the lucky few brilliant enough to pre-order get the whole shebang of exclusive pre-launch goodies, including a swanky rocket house from the windows of which you can mercilessly taunt the unpunctual at your palatial leisure, a housing trophy to throw at them, an in-game title to make them read, and in-game storage bags to fill with all the schwag they’ll most likely leave behind. Did we mention the 3-day headstart and access to every single bone-crushing beta weekend? If not, WHY not?

So what are you waiting for, adventurer? Quit suckin’ that thumb and raise it proudly to the universe while there’s still time! Our next beta weekend kicking off in just two days, so pre-order now to join us and our mutual friend adventure on Nexus!

Holy Adventure Information overflow!

The flick last week was apparently just the start of the information iceberg for Adventures!

Following up on the flick’s release, we received a DevSpeak, an Info-Drop page, and the Reddit AMA.  If you had questions about Adventures, odds are… they got answered this week!

Let’s start with the DevSpeak:

At first glance, it looks like a plain, boring disclaimer this week.. but, there is a quick flash of a more…colorful disclaimer:

Keeping like colored letters together to form words, and then putting those words into sentences.. gives us:

“The Disclaimer guy loves you and wants you to be happy so do like wise with your fellow gamers and be excellent to each other.  party on!”

So..Disclaimer guy is obviously either Bill, or Ted:

 

Actual highlights from the DevSpeak video are:

• 5 person simulations that take place in alternate versions of zones you’ve already seen
• Leveling/Elder game modes for each Adventure
• Unique mechanics that may not exist in other parts of the game.
• Choice matters
• The Malgrave Trail (level 45 Adventure) is shown as an example of choice mattering.  You protect a caravan, and have to select from multiple paths to get to the destination.  Each route could be geared toward a specific path (Solider, Explorer, Settler, etc..)..and will have different challenges along the way.

 

• Siege of Tempest Refuge (level 30 Adventure) has “Tower Defense” elements, to help you fight off the attacking forces.
• XP, medals, achievements, and titles can be awarded in an Adventure.

 

The Adventure Reddit AMA on Weds. afternoon, was just chock full of good information, here’s my favorite Q&As:

Q: Hello! Are there any advantages in having various Paths by people in the Adventures?
I mean do Settlers and such get to build some stuff for their team? Do warriors get some missions that the rest of the team can participate in? Etc.
A: Hi! Thanks for the question. Paths will only come into play in the higher level adventures. And even then, the path composition of your group won’t have any run-making/breaking affects. We don’t want to add the extra difficulty of getting that optimal group combination in.
I can give you an example of the effects you will see though! In The Malgrave Trail adventure, for every player you have in your group with a particular path, your caravan will receive a particular buff. This includes things like Your caravan moving slightly faster for every explorer you have, a percentage of the caravan becoming armed for every soldier, maximum supply stores being upgraded for every settler, and your caravan’s max health being increased / starting supply of medicine for every scientist.

Q: How much replayability do you aim on Adventures having for endgame players?
A: Four of the six launching adventures will have veteran difficulty modes that drop level 50 rewards. These modes will also have tougher fights and additional mechanics in place to take the challenge to the next level.
Each adventure accomodates a fair number of playthroughs without your group seeing the same content twice. Replayability is among our top priorities when we make adventure content!

Q: Are adventures truly dynamic? Or are they “solvable” in that there is a particular solution that you/your party should know in order to get the maximum rewards?
A: The lowest level adventures respond pretty predictably to player choice, but once you’re past those introductory instances you’ve got a lot of different variance in the mix. One of our key goals is to make sure that a good group of players will always see better results from a solid strategy they cooked up in real time than one they read off the internet. We also spread out loot rewards across the various routes through the content to ensure that making the same choices every time isn’t the way to go.
Adventures and dungeons will be similarly rewarding, and the expected time to complete isn’t wildly different between them. As far as difficulty, dungeons and advenures are challenging in different ways. Dungeon content tends to stress a group’s ability to cohere in combat, while adventure content rewards groups that communicate and strategize well on the fly.

Q: It seems the adventure concept will greatly increase replay-ability for leveling alts or repeating adventures. Will there be different adventure choices based on faction for even more variety?
A: We’ve generally avoided faction-specific choices, mostly for balance reasons (we don’t want a case where the Dominion has an easier route through an instance, for example).
Each faction does have its own exclusive introductory adventure, however.

Q: Are different options in adventures tailored to be more difficult / have better rewards? Will the “elder game” difficulty of adventures have any differences outside of increased difficulty?
A: Our approach to increasing the difficulty of veteran adventures definitely extends beyond the mobs hitting a little harder. We have additional mechanics in place for every veteran modes.

 

We also got the info drop via the WildStar website (make sure you stay on the page for several moments, so you can experiences all of it’s personalities).

Here, we get a short introduction via the caretaker, a brief description of each of the initial Adventures (including their level requirement).  There’s also a sample of how you can choose between different options during an Adventure.. so, make your choice! see the outcome!

 

 

If that wasn’t enough information for you… Carbine also ran a 40,000 invite “beta weekend” event this weekend, which, is one heck of a stress test.  Speaking of Beta… Gaffney swung by Reddit..and gave an interesting Beta statistic:

The total we’ve let into the beta (not counting stress tests) is something like 3.3% of the people who have signed up, after one removes all duplicate emails from the numbers. Demand is high.

3.3%.. so, if you got in.. consider yourself really lucky!

That wraps up this week’s news on Nexus, I’ll see you guys next week!

 

Listen up Cupcake… it’s Adventure Time!

The big reveal this week, was a new WildStar Flick about Adventures!

Highlights from the video:

• The CareTaker… reminds me of some DMs I had playing D&D when I was younger… that dude has gone crazy!
• Adventures seem to be more ‘mega questy’ than a ‘normal’ dungeon.  Looks to be a ‘simulation’ inside WildStar, instead of a traditional dungeon as well.
• Choices matter, good choices get you rewards, poor choices…. not so much.

Looking forward to getting more information from Carbine about what we can actually do in an Adventure.  This flick was great at teasing it, but didn’t give me as much ‘real’ information as I would have liked to see.  Really, we just know that Adventures are 5 person instanced group content.  Fortunately, the Carbine team will be conducting an Adventure AMA on Wednesday, in the WildStar sub-reddit, starting at 2 PST.

 

There are more ongoing beta key giveaways (check the Official WildStar page here to see the current ones), and Jeremy Gaffney swung by Reddit (he really loves that place!) to chime in on some of his thoughts about that (and some other interesting beta tidbits):

As more hardware is coming online, we’re going to up the scale of the testing we’re doing. Compared to other historical betas, we’re still in “dev” stage (actively changing/fixing things using players as guinea pigs) rather than “marketing” stage (where really you are out of time to be changing things and you’re trying to just raise awareness.)
Though given our internal mentality, we’ll probably be changing things based on feedback through and after launch too (that’s how we’ve set ourselves up; to be flexible and responsive) so for us the distinction will be pretty blurred.
Our purchase intent surveys from beta testers in-game say there’s player desire to say “ship it!” but to gently disagree with the survey feedback (most of those folks haven’t seen elder game yet, for instance so can that truly be a full judgement?) and to respond more to beta forum feedback which is more strongly opinionated on polishing/critical things to work on: we want more testing on elder games because we haven’t had enough mass tests of that yet and also in our opinion we want more polish on areas like UI, encounters, small group play, etc.
As hardware comes online, and as stress tests succeed or not with that hardware, we’ll start with more wide availability (soon, if things go well, somewhat later if not).
Obviously there’s a lot of pent-up demand; hopefully we can walk the right path (or close enough) between polishing/finishing the game responsibly, making folks waiting for access happy, not burning folks out through delays, and having a successful, stable launch.
Oh, forgot to respond actually to OP: we’re doing partner giveaways in part to be nice to our partners (we respect ’em for having helped out and so it’s a way for them to get some traffic/etc when in the past they are the ones who have been giving US traffic) and in part so that there is some outlet for players to have other ways to get keys (contests etc.) other than our scientific-but-unsatisfying-if-you-don’t-win-the-lottery base random selection method.

This current round of Beta Key Giveaways, runs until the 24th, so you’ve still got time to get a key and jump in and help test!

There was a stress test over the Valentine’s Day weekend, and nothing appears to have gone KABOOM over the weekend (didn’t see any tweets/vines about Carbine team members mourning for server hardware having gone up in smoke).  That’s probably a good sign, maybe they’re getting closer to opening beta up to more people, now that they’ve raised the beta level cap to 50, and that end game content is getting tested by players!

Want to see a Chua cry?  Of course you do!  Lucky for you (and the rest of us), the folks over at MMORPG put together a short video showing off a whole mess of emotes that have been added to the game over the last update.  For being such little models, the Chua can be pretty expressive!

That covers the WildStar news for the past week.  I’ll see you next week!

Not only were the Chua not happy with eating last week’s Wildcast from the MOG Nation folks… They apparently ate my calendar too (or, caused all the stuff at work that kept me too busy to write this last week.. take your pick).  This is what happens when you let Chua eat after midnight folks, so keep that in mind!

 

Over the last two weeks the big official news drop out of the Carbine camp… was all about customization!  Check out this DevSpeak:

This week’s disclaimer gives us a ‘leaked’ look at an unannounced (and, not real) PvP mode “Asaraven’s Assault”.  You can read the whole disclaimer here.

Highlights from the DevSpeak.

• We see some armor with various dyes applied to it (same suit, different colors).
• We get a quick look at the character customization sliders.

Quick look at some housing customization:

 

Definitely a wide variety of housing appearances possible, not to mention all the internal customization.

• You appear to be able to customize part of the sky’s appearance (shows changing it from snowing to a rainbow).
• Weapon stats can be customized (after level 15)
• Crafting system provides for a lot of variability/customization on the ‘standard’ recipes.
• Mounts can be customized!

We’re also given a sneak peek of the talked about (but not seen) WarPlots, which will allow quite a bit of customization as well.  Carbine has a write up, showing some screenshots of the dye interface as well, so check that out over here.

We got part 2 of the “B-Team” web comic (featuring the Engineer’s Bots!).  This part, we find out what ‘the new guy’ is actually capable of doing.. and he does it well!

Jeremy Gaffney swung by Reddit, and offered a small glimpse into some of the challenge in marketing WildStar based off just one ‘thing’ (Like Rift’s rifts, for example).:

The pro and con for WildStar is that the “thing” is action combat, environmental hazards that affect combat, discoveries, raids, housing, housing dungeons, 100’s of hours of levelling content, adventures, level by pvp/group pve/solo pve, Paths affecting a % of content and having social benefits, warplots, solid elder games for solo pve/pvp/group pve of various sizes, frequent updates post launch, yadda yadda.
So honestly how to package all that? Dunno, you can go trite with “MMOs done right” or pick one and hype it up knowing that any single feature some people will love and some won’t care about, or any single feature might not carry the freight of the whole enchilada.
We made a game that was fun to play, not easy to market – it’s the downside (and upside) of being a dev team at inception rather than a biz team. Good games sell in our opinion. We figure if we work our butts off to make it fun, the main goal then is just let people play it and figure out if they like it. In the interim we’ll dig deep into every given feature through devspeaks and let players who like it decide for themselves.
Maybe Rift (and similar titles) had a better plan – there were a lot of good systems in that game beyond the Rifts, but that was a good one (IMO) for them to segment out and have as being a sellable reasonably unique feature.
We could market ourselves as being “Paths of Pathy Pathness Online” or “World of Warplots” but that IMO would be selling it short (that last one is kinda catchy but might not fly with legal).
So yeah, tough question. YMMV. It’s double tough with a new IP; everyone knows what Star Wars Online implies. City of Heroes was IMO a great name – got the whole concept of the game across in 3 words.

 

Gaffney likes Reddit.. he also chimed in on a thread discussing some of the customization choices (character body wise):

Too many points to respond individually! But a few notes:
No body sliders at the moment because of the skeletal variance we have – you’ll note few games with very different racial silhouettes have sliders of note; clipping and armor stretching and weirdnesses abound. You can get away with it with a few humanoid skeletons (see: City of Heroes, etc.).
Not that we might not solve the tech hurdles eventually but for instance metal armor needs to not “breathe” with the character and if you allowed body sliders it’s approx the same tech that keeps it from “breathing” that keeps it from turning into a potbelly.
That might not be English but you get the thought.
Not all classes can be done by all races in part because as a tech issue not all the animations necessarily exist; we went the route of “lots of class animations” as an aesthetic choice (vs a cast and swing animation then used with particle combos for almost everything else like Some Games). On the flavor side, IMO class variance per race is one of the things that gives races flavor and affects the lore. One can like the variation or not, but as with anything it’s a tradeoff made during dev.
Sit-in-able chairs etc. exist (there are some vids floating around).
Huh, not familiar with MRP, I learn something new every day. Don’t see why a similar addon couldn’t exist, we don’t have anything quite like that in-game now but finding things to help RPers is a plus for us (they are VERY hard to systemize for IMO since many RPers like different rulesets to support RP!)
Numbers exist in names in part because Mechari names often contain them.
Interesting thought on RP instances, never considered that.
Characters of one faction only on PVP enabled servers.  Not much RMT at launch (server transfers perhaps) but more will likely follow (recustomization is a natural, especially if we add more character options at some point after launch)

The tidbits about single faction only on PvP servers, and the minimal RMT are nice.  I know a lot of PvPers who will be very happy about the single faction thing, since they feel that makes your faction identity ‘stronger’ than if you can switch between factions.

 

MMORPG.com ran an interview with Philip Chan (Carbine’s crafting guru).  Read the whole article if you’re into crafting, lots of good information in there.. my favorite tidbit came from near the end:

Even more promising is the news that we’ll be able to craft incredible, competitive items for raiding, using materials collected from those raids. “For those of you that are interested, I am fighting very hard for crafting to mean something.” That could even mean being able to sell those items to others. “In my mind, even in elder game crafting, I want players to engage in the elder game, whether that’s PvP or raids, I want them to get crafting specific materials from those elder games, and I want them to be able to craft things that they can sell. “

“I would like for everything that your raid earns to be up to them to decide what to do with it.”

Yeah.. that’s right.. crafted gear might be viable for raiding!  Woo-hoo!  Can’t wait!

 

That pretty much wraps up the last two weeks of news drops for WildStar.. but, the Carbine crew did tease us about a new flick coming next week:

The W* Flicks are always entertaining, and this one will obviously give us some insight into the W* Adventure system (5 man group content with a variety of gameplay types).  So, stay tuned on Tuesday!

 

Ahoy Nexians!

Time for your weekly dose of WildStar News!

 

Let’s start with the biggest news of the week… Beta Key Giveaways!!!

Yeah, you read that right.. the first beta key giveaways are underway.  Carbine has teamed up with some WildStar fan sites, to allow you the opportunity to win a beta key!  Now, because there are some…unsavory folks out there who may try and scam you out of your personal information…and not give you a key… Carbine has posted an official list of the sites participating in the giveaway.  Head over here, to view the list…then go try and get a key!

Official news from Carbine this week, was centered around the Guild System.  We got a shiny page describing the basics of the system.  Guilds in WildStar will be able to have all the ‘standard’ stuff (Guild banks, customizable ranks, optional guild tax, etc).  Plus, they’ll have the WildStar twist to guilds as well (because, really… if the news was ‘our guilds are just like everyone else’s, it’d boring).

We get Holomarks:

IN WILDSTAR, GUILDS WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE A HOLOMARK: A HOLOGRAPHIC EMBLEM PROJECTED IN THE AIR AROUND, OR ABOVE THE CHARACTER. YOU CAN SET THE VARIOUS ELEMENTS OF THE LOGO (WE’VE GOT 65 INNER AND 65 OUTER DESIGNS AT LAUNCH, WHICH MEANS AROUND 4225 POSSIBLE COMBINATIONS AT LAUNCH), AND THEN EACH PLAYER CAN DECIDE WHERE THEY WANT TO DISPLAY IT ON THEIR CHARACTER. SNAZZY!

This is, essentially, a guild tabard..but, done very differently.  The 4,225 possible combinations of elements (at launch), should reduce the chances of multiple guilds on the same server, having the same Holomark.  Which is good, because how many times did you see a guild tabard in WoW that had the identical image as 3, or 4 other guilds.  The added benefit to it being a holomark, and not a tabard, is also that it won’t cover up whatever armor/costume piece your character is wearing.

In a shot at the “blindly invite everyone you see that is unguided, but never actually play together’ type of guilds.. Carbine has added some…encouragement for you to actually… play with your guildies! (Shocking right?!?!  I mean, who wants to play with their guilds!)

This incentive comes in the form of Guild Influence, which can only be raised by grouping with your guildies, and playing the game with them.

WITH WILDSTAR, WE WANT GUILDS TO WANT TO PLAY TOGETHER, AND WE’RE GOING TO DO EVERYTHING WE CAN TO INCENTIVIZE THAT THROUGH A GUILD CURRENCY KNOWN AS INFLUENCE.

So, now we have this guild currency… what is it good for?  Influence can be spent in 3 major categories:

1. Guild unlocks (including additional bank vaults and player summoning)
2. Guild-wide buffs
3. Consumable guild items

The buffs are things like boosts to experience gain, reputation gain, etc.  Under this system, it looks like a small guild that plays together should be able to unlock just as many ‘perks’ as a guild of 500 people who rarely group together.

Jeremy Gaffney swung by the WildStar subreddit to provide a ‘state of the beta’ (that, should be appearing in some fashion on the official site soon too).

Here’s a quick version at least (yeah, we should do an official one, I agree, I’ll send this to Scooter):
Just did a big update (37 pages o patch notes if I recall). This was from our work in December, so it’s a 4 week update minus 2 weeks from most folks from holiday break.
Major foci:

• Doing a polish pass on the 15-35 content
• Polishing some of the 35-50 areas (which aren’t enabled yet for the CBT testers)
• Rebalancing class abilities across PVE and PVP (pretty good number of changes there, generally based on feedback or the data mining we’ve done)
• Bunch of new itemization in various areas

A ton more. Did we release those patch notes? I forget.
The other thing we added in the last patch (NOT in the patch notes) was about 6 different crash bugs (due to the way we did QA testing over the holiday break, we added in about 50 new QA testers and for various technical reasons this basically disguised a bunch of crash logs which we normally fix during the staging period before a build goes live; it was a combination of adding new QA folks and the fact that some of our technical guys were on the holiday break. Sorta ironic that adding testers added crashers, but there ya go)
So I believe as of right now, the crashers are licked, folks are back testing/playing more stably. The crashes sucked for about a week or so though, so that was a pain for the guys fixing and the beta folks.
Current things we’re currently looking at internally (based on implementation schedule, data, board feedback, or just playing and saying “we could do that better”) – these aren’t guaranteed to be in next update (or any if we find blockers) but are things we’re either working on or discussing:

• UI updates (we got some great new guys on our UI team) on many/most UIs, especially the obviously-placeholder ones
• Extending the cap to 50 for next update
• High level economies across the various elder content (level 50 playspaces, vet dungeons, raids, warplots, arenas, new content additions post launch)

Batting around ideas to help small-group play:

• a lot of people like playing in/near small groups, and some quests are set up well for it/some aren’t – we are fixing those
• Fighting in the outside world as a small group is often too trivial (some few monsters and challenges are aimed towards it, and but 2 or 3 people fighting a mob tuned for 1 person is awful easy). That sounds tricky to fix, but we actually have some ideas. Some of those might also make for some interesting variation in killing quests (something we aim for is to reduce kill grindiness whenever we can) But we’ll see, that’s all in discussion. Not guaranteed to go in, but Donatelli is examining.

So in net: Personally I’m relatively happy with where we’re at. Lot of pro and con feedback on the boards about some of the above issues (and others) but it feels IMO like a pretty healthy set of discussions and I love the team’s pace of new additions and polishing existing content right now.

 

Carbine is also seeking WildStar fan art submissions for possible featuring on their Social Media pages:

 

And that’s it for your Nexian News Wrap-up for this week!

It’s Stalker Time!

We got the long awaited Stalker live stream this week…and, the possibly even longer awaited Pappy vs Frost epic PvP battle!

Let’s jump into the stream, and then pick up the rest of the week’s tidbits.

The stream opened up with the Stalker DevSpeak, and since it’s been a bit since that one was released, here it is again:

The gameplay portion of the stream starts with a look at the single target DPS build for the Stalker.

We see the action set using abilities like Shred (basic attack), Impale, and Stagger (Stun).

The Stalker’s innate ability is stealth, and depending on the stance picked, provides differing bonuses.  Stealth can also be used in-combat.

 

Opening from stealth, using Analyze Health, and Impale was doing some serious damage to the mobs, most were going down to a little less than 50% health just after the opener.

As is normal, they did various short Q&A segments during the gameplay portions.

Q: Will Stalkers struggle to stay in Stealth? Creatures with AoEs?
A: Unlock AMP to keep damage from breaking stealth.. can avoid telegraphs
Q: What constitutes ‘behind’ target? Does flanking from the side count too
A: about the full 180* arc behind the target

Q: Relative position to enemy changes your chances of being detected?
A: Zone of awareness is pretty much the same for all players/creatures. You’ll see the icon over the head if you are in the zone. Based off levels, bonuses, etc..

After showing off a bit of the DPS roll, they moved into the Stormtalon dungeon, to show off some Stalker Tank play.

The tank build they’re using includes:

Whiplash (basic attack +25% threat), Nano field (life siphon), Stagger, Collapse, False retreat (jumps you back, use again to jump back forwards), reaver (taunt).

An interesting bit to note, is that the nameplates showed by the team during the stream aren’t the default ones, they’re actually using an add-on developed by one of the beta testers, they go on to talk about a DPS add one developed by another tester, that Carbine has been working with to refine further for internal testing too.

Q: What answers does Stalker bring to table, over classes that can kite more?
A: Pounce, (Pounce again, but described as a backwards version), Collapse (pulls in nearby enemies), various stuns, and snares.

Q: Stalker tanks have an ‘oh crap’ instant heal, or invulnerability button?
A: Steadfast increases deflect up to 60%, Stalker stance increases damage mitigation.

Q: Stalker Tanks get any use out of stealth?
A: Passive buffs from Stalker Stance

Q: Examples of tank traits in AMP system?
A: Deflect chance, health pool increase, some AMPs trigger off of deflecting attacks

 

While getting ready for the Pappy vs Frost cage match, the classes flick was shown again:

That’s always a fun video to watch.. poor guy is right.. there are a ton of those psychopathic Stalkers running around 😛

After the class video ended, PvP design lead Jen Gordy joined the stream, to answer PvP questions while the Pappy vs Frost match was underway.

The plan is for Pappy and Frost to cycle through all the classes, so they can pick which class they play, but not play any class twice.

The match opens with Frost playing a Stalker (One of the classes he’s better at), and Pappy playing a SpellSlinger (a class he says he’s not very good at)…

Round 1 was over… quickly… Frost decimated Pappy that round…

Next up, Frost took the Warrior against Pappy’s Esper… and Pappy was typing in chat the whole time (so, 11122233222311131, etc..), and didn’t do very well (since it means none of the actions he was trying to use were used).. so they took pity, and had that match replayed… and Pappy still lost.

Couple of quick Q&As with Jen:

Q: World PvP objectives in contested zones?
A: Probably not for launch, want to see where people end up wanting to fight at

Q: Level up solely through PvP
A: After level 6, yes. Trying to make BG vs Quest XP equivalent.

Match 3 was Frost playing a Medic, and Pappy playing a Warrior… that match handily went to Pappy.

After those three 1v1 PvP matches, the focus shifted to some 2v2.  Pappy teamed up with Chris Lynch (Lead Combat Designer), to take on Frost, and his teammate Marc Matzenbacher  (Warrior/Medic class designer).

Match 1 was Engineer/Esper (Team Pappy) vs Engineer/Medic (Team Frost).

This match shows us that if you’re in a PvP zone, and both you and the other faction are flagged for PvP.. the silhouettes of the other team will be red from a distance..and as you close turn ‘normal’.

Frost went down first in this match, but Marc’s Medic showed some pretty decent survivability against Team Pappy… Team Pappy did take Match 1 though.

Q: Melee seems to be dominating ranged in these matches, do the metrics match?
A: Ranged classes aren’t doing a good job at staying at range in Pappy vs Frost

Q: Skill cooldowns differ from PvP to PvE
A: Skills don’t..but the breakout gameplay can impact them

Q: How will PvP queues match groups and solo players
A: Two different systems, arena will match on rating… open match on gear

This stream also gave us our first look at one of WildStar’s Arenas!

There will be two types of arenas in the game, open (level 30+), and rated (level 50).  Rated gives you team/personal rating towards arena rewards, and open is more of a ‘practice’ type environment.

Arenas have a shared pool of respawns per team.. so your team needs to manage that aspect as well (who will use the respawns, and when).  For example, it might be more beneficial to have your healer take one of the last respawns, than it would be to have a DPS take it.

For the 3v3 arena, the team makeup is:

• Team Pappy:  Hugh Shelton (Esper), Steven Ingle (Engineer), and Pappy (Medic).
• Team Frost:  Jen Bardic (Warrior), Jade (Stalker), and Frost on a SpellSlinger.

Team Pappy suffered from technical difficulties on attempt one (Hugh’s computer rebooted).  Team Frost ended up taking the match.

To settle things once and for all, one last 1v1 match was called..both Pappy, and Frost were able to pick their best class.

Pappy went Warrior, and Frost went Stalker… it was a close match, and Stephen Frost emerged victorious!

Congratulations Frost!  (I’m still Team Pappy!).

The other big news for the week, comes by way of Jeremy Gaffney in the comments section over on WildStar Fans.  In the comments to their article about the NDA related plans, JG swings by to shed some light on the pre-order situation.  Short version is, no pre-order information till more testing on elder game content.. but, head over to WildStar Fans to read the comment yourself.

There has been some discontent with the art style for female characters in WildStar.  Particularly, regarding their breast size.  Carbine has addressed this, by changing the breast size for the Humans, and Aurin, in the latest patch.  This reddit thread (some comments are very NSFW), has a decent side-by-side comparison of the Human appearance, before/after the change.

When he wasn’t practicing for the big PvP match, Stephen Frost swung by the MMORPG.com forums, for a Q&A session.

Here’s some highlights:

Q: How much true end game content will their be when the game launches? Or will we as players have to wait for multiple content releases?

A: * Raids are only available at level 50 * Warplots are only available at level 50 * Veteran Dungeons and Adventures * PVE zones * Level 50 content instances for PVE players * Housing Items * there’s a ton that is only available ONLY at level cap

Q: im just wondering if rp rule will be enforced on rp server, and if classes with the same possible job will have equal potential or if one will overshadow others. like medic healing better than spellslinger/esper?

A: Not sure on the RP server, actually. I’d have to chat with our live producer. Regarding healing, different classes have different spells and feel to them. Some people prefer the Esper, some the Medic and me, I like the Spellslinger healer. It’s a lot more precision based, and I like that gameplay style. It all depends on you.

Q: Are there going to be any mechanics which will allow me, once I reach max level and obtain the uberest of gear, to play with friends who are just starting? For instance, Guild Wars 2’s down-leveling (which is far from perfect). This seems to always be the biggest barrier to me getting my friends to try whatever game I’m playing. I hate rolling alts for this purpose. Also, beta key yada yada…

A: Yeah we have mentoring and rallying in our game. We wanted to make sure that you were able to play with your homies, even if they picked up the game after you did.

Q: just wondering about your WARPLOTS i watch every video about them but to this day i really want to know how do you create one meaning what level , how to upgrade in general everything regarding them. i was a stress tester for the winter beta but didnt reach that far , plus the game deleted my character so yhhhhh … PS: cant wait to see you & papi go @ it #TEAMFROST BTW can you hook a brother up on a beta key please just had to add that part in XD

A: Despite the fact that I said I wouldn’t talk about Warplots, I’ll answer a couple of questions here. You can create a Warplot ONLY at level 50, they are Elder Game content. You get upgrades by earning a currency within Warplots, I won’t say what those upgrades are, but you can use that currency to buy instruments of death. Also we’ve said that you can capture a raid boss and unleash them upon a rival team before… so… you can do that by getting a rare drop off of a boss in a dungeon or raid. Watching/playing that in playtests is pretty damned entertaining as they crush hordes of players. I’m extremely excited for the coming weeks and months ahead, because I think people are going to love seeing and playing this feature. 40 vs. 40 death fortress combat! What’s not to love? Also thanks for the #teamfrost support. I will eviscerate Pappy.

 

And that’s it for the week.. can’t wait to see what Carbine has in store for us next week!