Wildstar Beta Dev Post roundup- July 9th, 2013

Brief notes: additional PVP statistics from Jen Gordy

"

We had 117 Walatiki matches

6 crashed

69 were Dominion wins

42 were Exile wins

Killer Participants, by Class (# Unique Characters Who Dealt at least 1 Killing Blow)

Spellslingers - 152

Stalker - 82

Warrior - 163

Esper - 120"

a beta player's explanation for these results:

the reason for Dominion winning so much is not entirely that they're better PvPers (although that might account for some of it) but because quest itemization is currently favoring the Dominion over the exiles in quality of gear and chips. Also, once domin started roflstomping BGs with premades on a regular basis, exile chat told people to stay the hell out of PvP which leads to even more lopsided battles for the random exiles that did queue up.

The itemization will be fixed in future builds, and premades will eventually be weighted different from solo queuers in the matchmaking system.

So Dominion guilds pubstomping and obnoxiously bragging about it doesn't matter too much atm because it's only early beta, but keep an eye on the pvp win rates in the weeks and months to come. If one faction gets to be known as THE faction for PVP, like empire in SWTOR, that might actually skew faction numbers one way or the other for metagaming reasons come release time. Multiple people have brought this possibility up to carbine, so they're aware of the potential problem.

Topic 1: Winners of the Wildstar Housing contest

Scooter, community manager.

"Hey all!

We've published our CBT2 Housing Contest Results as this week's WildStar Wednesday! Take a look at the screenshots and houses, and the winners are listed below:

Jump Scare Award: Bowie

Best Loft Space: CardinalBiggles

Best Spiral Staircase: Ceo

Most Delicious Barbeque: Cute

Best Bartender (and Hat): Decipher

Best Arms Dealer This Side of the Fringe: Inori

The Toiler Award ('Nuff Said): Jibily

Best Throne Room: Kampvogn

The Houseception Award: Larken

The Stand-Up Comedian Award: Lethality

The What-The-Heck Award: Mithranda

The Coolest Ceiling Award: MycoGenik

The Creepiest Room Award: Tordeus

The Protostar Housing Trophy isn't in-game yet, but it should be coming in the next week or two, at which point we'll distribute the trophy to the winners to show off in their houses. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated.

Want to earn another trophy? Join in the CBT3 Housing Contest and enter to win!

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Topic 2: Taunts

Merkal, Carbine staff.

"Hey All,

I wanted to quickly drop in and give some information on how taunts work. Currently when you taunt an enemy you will be forced to the top of that creature’s threat list for the duration of the taunt. Note that this does not actually modify your threat so when the taunt fades your position on the threat list will be re-evaluated based off of your current threat. A couple things to keep in mind are, you will still be generating threat during the taunt as will others, if a DPS is going ham and the tank is really low on threat it is highly likely that the DPS will still have threat after the taunt. The other is that only one taunt can be active at a time so if another tank taunts while the creature is already taunted they will instead become the “forced” top threat and the previous tank will return to normal threat.

With all of that in mind we see some issues with the way taunts are working, mostly because of how creature AI is responding to taunts. Currently when you taunt a creature it does not interrupt their behavior so if they are in the middle of attacking another player they will continue to do so until after the attack at which point they will turn to face the tank. Additionally with the inherent nature of telegraph attacks it can often feel like you haven’t fully gotten the creatures attention.

We are exploring a variety of things to improve how taunts feel (disclaimer: these are just in the testing/design process and might not make it into the game):

Having all taunts interrupt casting without disabling the creature like a stun

Having some taunts be “hard” taunts which will actually modify your threat value to be equal or higher than the current highest threat player (This is more likely to come via tiering or the upcoming implant system)

Giving some creature (dungeon creatures and bosses) more attacks that directly target the highest threat target that will face them at that unit

Adding closer range restrictions on some creature abilities, the goal being to give tanks the ability to correctly position enemies."

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Topic 3- Buffs/debuffs on nameplates

Matteekay-

Nameplates will absolutely be getting some love, though I can't gaurantee 100% that buffs and debuffs will be included. There were initially concerns about the memory hit from drawing that many windows (16 buff/debuff windows over hundreds to thousands of nameplates could be quite the ouch) but we have a new buff window class that should alleviate some of that. The bigger concern would be screen clutter - at low levels when you're only taking on 1-3 mobs this isn't a huge deal, but once you get into more pulls (to say nothing of PvP or raiding/dungeons) it could very likely be too much to process. We'll have to try it and see.

I'm talking with combat now about a couple of options for balancing out the nameplate/target frame interaction. Thanks for the feedback!

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Topic 4- Quest Rewards

J-Tal

"We've done a full pass on quest rewards from 3 to 35 for CBT4. These changes include:

Added Heavy Armor to the reward progression from level 3 to 35.

Reitemizing all rewards to reflect the new armor distribution among classes (Light Armor now has more Spellslinger/Esper stats, Medium Armor now has more Stalker/Redacted stats, Heavy Armor now has more Warrior/Redacted stats).

Reitemizing all rewards from 3-8 to give you almost exclusively your primary stat(s) and Grit.

Reitemizing all rewards from 9-15 to slowly introduce your secondary and tertiary stats.

Reitemizing all rewards from 16-35 to further encourage rechipping of your quest gear. (This should better introduce players to gear chipping at a gradual pace instead of "If you don't rechip your gear, you die constantly at level 9".)

Smoothing out the pacing of recieving quest rewards and filling in some gaps that were lacking for certain item slots.

Reducing the amount of times you needed to choose between that new pair of pants or a new implant. Most choices will now be between Heavy/Medium/Light armor (not necessarily the same item slot) or between multiple accessories of different stats (i.e. Brutality Shield, Moxie Shield, or Tech Shield).

Fill out some of the group quests that were missing rewards. All of these should now reward a new item, usually of blue quality.

Balancing out the distribution of items between zones - each zone of the same level band should award roughly the same item slots at the same level at the same pace (though not always the same stats).

You should also start getting Heavy Armor from vendors, world drops, adventures, dungeons, etc. starting in CBT4."

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Topic 5- Body Types

mmocarski-

"Hey all! It great to see you guys interested in body types. I'm Matt, the Art and Creative Director here at Carbine. I would like to weigh in on this topic. Character customization is very near and dear to me. It's always a tough call to walk that line between player choice and iconic representation of the races. Because WildStar is a new IP, and no one really knows anything about these races, we tend to lean towards selecting what we think are the more icon versions of these characters. We feel it helps us establish these characters and their traits. Also, like WoW or TF2 we knew that silhouette would also be a strong factor in PVP. That's why we initially decided on one body type per race/gender. It's our feeling that if you can make an Aurin as tall as a human, they just become humans with ears adn tails. Their small size is a defining feature of their race.

Another factor was a technical one. The Armor in WildStar is all geo and has to be resized for each body type. Believe it or not, this is a huge production sink. Although we have some tools to get us half way, in the end it has to be adjusted by hand. We have 2 full time artists devoted to these. So, even if we wanted to, adding a completely new body type would be a huge undertaking... unless we use sliders.

Sliders offer a interesting challenge. As some of you guys mention, they can make some characters look awful. There's also an issue with stretching the geo of the armors to a point where it looks broken. This issue can be solved by limiting the extents of the scaling. We do a lot of this with our face sliders but you'd be surprised how easy it is to ruin the look of the face. The face sliders are still WIP and we plan on tweaking them until the end of the project until we get it just right.

Moving forward, we are currently looking into adding more options for player customization. Height is the easiest one. We allow the design team to use a range in the game that doesn't break the archetype of the characters or the animation (something that easily can happen). So we are considering adding height to the game. We are gonna look into other sliders for body types but I'm worried that we might have to limit it so much that you'd barely notice. They best way is to make them by hand but we don't have the time or resources at the moment. For launch, the body types are gonna stay the same.

Keep the comments coming though. We definitely want to expand on the customization options in the future."

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Topic 6- PVP feedback

Jen Gordy, pvp lead.

"Our first beta week for CBT3 was fantastic and offered us a large amount of data and feedback to work with. We'd like to thank you for helping keep Walatiki Temple matches going by queuing up repeatedly.

Some of you have expressed some frustration with PvP mechanics, class mechanics, Group Finder queuing behaviors (solo vs. premade) and how these things have impacted your experiences in the Battlegrounds this past weekend.

Please understand that many of these systems are still in development (and not yet present)! Things like:

Weighting queued groups (based on group size) for placement in rated matches

Class and combat changes (see Chris Lynch's Combat Status Update for full details)

PvP rewards (including PvP statted items)

Deserter penalties (if you leave or afk in a match , you'll be locked out of queuing for a while)

We'd like to encourage you to continue queuing for PvP, giving us feedback, and helping us ensure our matching and gameplay mechanics are solid. If you get frustrated, take a break. Don't like PvP? You don't need to dive in if you're uncomfortable. However, please don't undermine testing efforts by encouraging others to not participate.

Halls of the Bloodsworn is just around the corner for many and we'd like to get feedback on this new Battleground type. We can't do that if there aren't people queuing because of spreading negativism!

Need to report someone abusing gameplay mechanics repeatedly? Going AFK in matches instead of playing somewhere else? Use /ticket!

Thanks for listening,

Jen

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Topic 7- Quest Hubs vs open-ended questing

Justin Z. Bartlett - Lead Content Designer

"This is a debate that we often have in the office. "How much do we need to direct the player?" There are many MMO players that want to be directed and guided through a linear story. But there are also many players that just want to explore and stumble across quests. As things stand now, we try to lead players through the zones AND we have some quests that are just out in the world that you are not explicitly directed to. It's a tricky balancing act that we are still trying to figure out.

Off the top of my head, i would say that 20% of the quests should be "found." And "found" is a very broad definition. Sometimes it refers to a quest unlocked by a path (not really hidden for the unlocker, but hidden for everyone else). Sometimes it is a quest hub that when you get within proximity you get your breadcrumb (the Protostar in Coldwater Gulch). But don't hold me to the 20%, it is late, and i dont have my spreadsheets and documents in front of me.

Regardless, another wrinkle comes into the mix with "found" quests and that is the leveling curve. If we require you to complete 100% of the quests in a zone to be at the correct level range for the next zone, missing those "found" quests really starts to hurt. You are now going into zones underleveled, completing quests that are possibly overleveled for you... You dont realize that you missed X number of found quests and the found quests you missed don't scale, so going back to find them when they are trivial doesn't help a whole lot (after a certain point).

Another argument would be to not require 100% of quests in a zone to be completed. But balance comes into play again. Say we were to say "We expect players to complete 75% of the quests" but now players who have completed 100% go into the next zone overleveled.

Now some might say, "Well this is where an achievement or quest tracker that explains how much you missed would help." And it would help some people out... But now we are back to the original question, but with a slight twist. "How much do we need to direct the player in a meta-game sense?"

So long story short. It's tricky. We have our guided path, and we have found content. We also have lots of dials we can tweak and turn to adjust balance. We can add more found quests or turn existing quest hubs into found hubs by adjusting quest delivery. We are watching to see how you guys respond to the content."