All the top posts are people looking for guilds, everyone cool has stopped posting, and I cancelled my sub last week. I'm going to leave this forum on the site open, but officially, COMMUNISM@Wildstar is mothballed. We tried, we really did, and look how many rad dudes we got from there. I consider this a resounding success.
The game suffers from a poor choice of community moderators, a just-"controversial"-enough vibe to attract mostly reddit-style "new sincerity" types, and for a game that initially kind've seemed big about PvP, the PvP was wholly eclipsed by the PvE since the PvP was just a shitshow of colors and not knowing what the fuck was happening, IMO. Also they thought people wanted classic WoW 40 man inaccessible poopsocking shitshow levels of "difficulty", and then equated that notion of "difficulty" with tedium instead, when people I think really craved ulduar-tier "convenient" challenges (that is, hard actual content but not a slow ass grind and several gates to get to it). They could improve almost all of it if they tried, but I doubt they will.
I really wanted to like this game, I really did. So much so that I had a reserved car on the Hype Train for a year prior to getting into beta. I enjoyed leveling but the tedium of post-50 game play hit me like a ton of bricks. When I was younger, I was more than content to lose days, even weeks to grinding in various other MMOs (like when I didn't sleep for three days so I could run in circles and collect digital sand) but I guess I just don't have the patience for that shit anymore. Also, Prude hit the nail on the head about PvP: battlegrounds are a big mess of color and explosions that have no apparent meaning until you are dead and arenas are full of exploiting, rating-tankers or people paying for carries. While the dev team are certainly at fault for many of the game's short-comings, the community can also shoulder some of the blame for shitting the place up before the game was even released.
They tried to recapture some weird version of peoples nostalgia and it just didn't work because all the people that fondly remember Vanilla WoW and BC WoW are all older and cant do that shit anymore. Throw that in with limited casual content and overzealous forum mods and a shitty in-game community and it just didn't work. I'm not ruling out a return, Ive heard they are adding some newer 50 stuff for less hardcore people, maybe after the new year if it looks good we can jump back in. Maybe after it goes F2P.
Their financial approach is also shitty. Nowadays people expect either a low cost of entry + a sub, or just one upfront cost, or F2P with microtransactions. It'd be easiere to slog through the game if it wasn't costing me money each month in addition to the initial purchase. Fortunately I only actually paid for 1 month of gametime since the first was free, and maybe the purchase of the game itself will be worthwhile in the future once it's F2P (if that's how they choose to go).
In summary: Carbine should be fucking dragged behind a shed and shot. They got in, they got out... "$$$ and Done" success story. The content you see for the next 6 months will be shit that should have been there at launch, but they delayed it to make it seem like they had "plans" in the works. If anything, I honestly feel duped by them... it had a chance. RIP
