Whoa, hold on a minute. Now I know that I signed up for a PvP server, but a full on capital city invasion just 2 weeks into launch is a little insane. Team Legacy, a prominent Exile guild on the server Pago, rolled into Illium on Saturday night and decided to crash our little Dominion soiree. I mean, we were all hanging out in our beautiful garden capital, doing the usual: crafting, dueling, micromanaging the auction house and just minding our own business. Then out of nowhere Team Legacy, and a few of their friends, decides to storm in and kill everyone in sight.
I love PvP, absolutely love it, but it was clear that I was going to be outclassed; a lowly level 30 against an onslaught of 50’s. Obviously, I hid in a corner and waiting for my next battleground queue, I’m not crazy after all. Running into a giant ball of red death and lag just didn’t sound like a good time. I’ve never seen framerates drop so fast, it was like an FPS black hole wherever they went. I can’t fight with 2 FPS, but when you have more collective firepower than a star destroyer I guess it doesn’t matter.
The streets were filled with blood…and lag. Mostly lag.
There were the occasional tryhards that actually attempted to band together a militia and hold back the horde, but it was to no avail. The Illium instance server even capped off during the main fight, so a good portion of the Dominion that wanted to revenge weren’t given the chance. Not even the massive NPC robots chock-full of laser beams could do anything. With the death of our leaders and our army in shambles, Team Legacy has declared the city theirs.
Here are their demands, according to Freelancer of Team Legacy:
“We impose 5% tariffs on all transactions in the city, and the following statutes will be established immediately:
We shall enter and patrol the city once a week on Saturday nights. When we enter Ilium every Saturday around 9PM EST, all Dominion shall bow while aligned against the left/right sides of roads, lest they be slaughtered from the might of the Exiles.”
Despite being on the losing end of the fight, I’m really glad to see that at least the Exile community on Pago is trying to stir up world PvP. There’s really no point in playing on a PvP server without it, and low level ganking hardly counts. Hopefully next round the fight will be taken outside, where more players can fit, and the Dominion will actually put up a fight.
It’s really frustrating when the “breakout” mechanic breaks…
Unfortunately, an Exile invasion wasn’t the only thing breaking Wildstar PvP, or servers for that matter, this weekend. There are some really serious issues still in this game, whether intended or not, that need to be dealt with. While playing a match at Walatiki Temple I had a teammate who would steal a Moodie Mask and then literally teleport back to our base with it. As much as I like winning, I still reported his ass. Bots are running rampant; a quick check of the official forums and about 25% of the posts on the front page are all about bots. It’s bad enough having a bunch of players on your team that aren’t very good, but most bots that simply run around or get stuck on walls make things much worse.
There’s even been some talk that PvP gear isn’t even working as intended. This completely defeats the purpose of PvPing to acquire the gear specifically designed for it. Generally, this gear comes with PvP Offense and PvP Defense stats. The original thought was that if you had more offensive power than the opponent had defense that you would do more damage. How it’s actually working is that the offense stat is mitigating the defense stat, but there’s no bonus for going over. This means that stacking PvP Offense is only efficient if it’s the same as your opponent’s PvP Defense, but the defense stat will always increase PvP damage mitigation.
PvP gear, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Not only are these stats incredibly ambiguous, but they also suffer greatly from diminishing returns. After around 40% in either stat (at least around level 30), the % granted for additional pieces reduces dramatically. Instead of playing this stat crapshoot it’s been shown that most of the time PvE gear is more powerful in battlegrounds and arenas. So instead of players who compete in battlegrounds and arenas all day dominating the casual dungeon raiders, it’s the opposite. All of these issues desperately need to be addressed unless Carbine wants to see a mass exodus of its PvP community, which was a huge draw to this game.
Not only are there issues in battlegrounds, but the servers still need a lot of work. A quick server update on Friday was supposed to smooth things over, but instead it caused even more issues. Prior to the maintenance I wasn’t having any problems at all and it was only supposed to be 15 minutes of downtime; no big deal. Afterward, however, I disconnected from ever other battleground match for the next 3 hours and eventually gave up on trying for the rest of the night. If you don’t complete the match experience gained in minimal and you don’t get any rewards even if you were seconds from winning; this meant myself, and many of my friends and guildmates, had wasted quite a bit of time.
Things are always breaking on Nexus, you can’t expect much more from an underdeveloped backwater planet, but “/reloadui” should not have to be one of my macros. If I can play one battleground without the breakout mechanism bugging out on my screen or buy a handful of items from the auction without addons crashing, I’m pretty happy. The same goes for my guild roster tab; it’s literally never worked.
On my signal, unleash hell. Preferably before the server crashes.
It might sound like I’ve been doing a lot of complaining so far, but it’s only because I feel it’s important to inform the community about important issues with Wildstar. In all honesty, I still really like everything this game has to offer at its core. The PvP has the potential to be some of the best in any MMORPG, the questing is generally entertaining with some comic relief, and the dungeons I’ve seen have been really cool. So when any of the aforementioned decides to randomly break, I get a little upset, but then remind myself of all the things worth playing for. It’s important to remember that Wildstar is still very young; give it a few months before you give up on it and hopefully I’ll see you in the Halls of the Bloodsworn.
