14 DAY TRIAL // Wildstar was touted as a World of Warcraft killer before launch, but now, after six months have passed, many see it as a dead game, and Carbine is doing its best to make things work.
The game was over-hyped, and while its bold, colorful visuals, interesting gameplay mechanics and personality are still pretty strong points in its favor, the community is slowly dwindling, with many gamer struggling to find companions for undergoing the meatier challenges, such as the fabled 40-man raid.
40-man raids give off this unique feeling that you're playing a massively multiplayer online game, making the adventure feel truly epic, but the cold hard truth is that they're a hassle for most players.
Back in the day, when World of Warcraft came out, they were all the rage, but there is a pretty simple reason Blizzard Entertainment decided to lower both the player limit and the requirements to be able to actually engage with the content.
The Burning Crusade expansion came with a ton of new and exciting raids but also with a lower player limit, as its biggest encounters were reduced to 25 players. Those encounters, however, were gated off by some rather lengthy quest lines, which players had to go through before being able to enter, in order to provide a sense of achievement and to prevent noobs from stumbling upon the entrance by mistake.
Nowadays, the need to find 40+ eligible players, who are both attuned and capable enough, puts a veritable strain on many guild runners and causes many people to abandon the game.
Big raids and guilds require a sizable active population
Carbine is testing a 20-man version of Datascape on the PTR, and the plans are to reduce some of the logistical and performance issues of 40-man raids by making all future raids 20-man instances.
Just to get an idea of the scale of the problems that 40-man raids and difficult attunements pose, an estimated 0.3 percent of all the people who bought the game managed to completely clear The Genetic Archives, the 20-man raid before Datascape..
The Wildstar Progress website tracks the progress of raiding guilds, showing that only 73 guilds in the entire world can brag about clearing the raid in its entirety.
Furthermore, Wildstarlogs shows that only 1,650 players managed to clear Dreadphage Ohmna, the final boss of the 20-man raid The Genetic Archives, a prerequisite for gaining access to Datascape.
One of the barriers standing in the way of raid progression for newcomers is the difficult and time-consuming attunement process, which many see as an artificial barrier that is slowly killing the raiding community.
Similar complaints surfaced regarding the difficulty of timed dungeon runs and finding people willing to help you get through them, even in guilds, and regarding the first season of PvP, with combat feeling erratic and with the first people getting PvP specific gear being nearly invincible.
