Because the current model of raiding is working so well. /sarcasm. Things have changed a ton since 2008. WoW's raid finder changed things for one thing. The hardcore raider demographics is practically non existent in this era as proven by Wildstar's initial failure when they tried to target them. Let the casuals click a button and do their raids, more people will play, and Carbine/NC Soft will make more money, simple as that.
When content is made trivial, it loses meaning and devalues the experience. That in turn leads to significantly higher churn. The fall of WoW and the rise of FFXIV show that you are incorrect in thinking the 'hardcore raider' demographic doesn't exist. It does exist and is at least 4+ million strong; they seem to like a well-made fantasy subscription-only game moreso than WildStar.
Since we're a little off topic already, sorry but no. When Carbine was setting up the forums we pushed hard for the ability to post screenshots, and until they change the forum rules, there's nothing wrong with a post with 2 screenshots.How you choose to view forums is on you, not on the poster.
I was hoping not to need to put an ad blocking addon just to ignore embedded screenshots. I guess emptier forums will be emptier then. Enjoy the echo chamber.
Encourage people to try the pvp servers. Stop killing luminai again.And if it does die again, I'm gone. I'm not paying £100 to tfer all my chars to jabbit.Or carbine could open up free tfers to pvp servers once in a while to encourage a stable population across both servers.
Free transfers to and from PvP servers will not solve the issue. The PvP servers are full of elitist toxic cupcakes (NSFW Language). There is nothing that Carbine, NcSoft, or any other publisher/dev that can reasonably solve this issue without completely removing the open PvP aspect altogether.I always discourage new players from rolling on a PvP server even if they like PvP. With cross-realm queues for Arena/BG stuff there is zero need for the 'World PvP' aka 'gankfest'.The only reason that many people seem to like 'World PvP' is so they can ride through and one-shot lowbies for laughs. They have so much salt that they feel the need to seed the entire server with it. As long as the game design permits griefing on PvP servers, you will not find much of a population there.
As someone who avoids PvP servers like the plague I can't help but wonder every time I see a post like the OPs asking to just merge all the things.I suppose you rolled on a PvP server because of (unconsensual) open world PvP, considering everything else is instanced and also available on PvE servers.
They don't want to admit it but many of the people posting about low population are the same sour cupcakes that grief lowbies on PvP servers then wonder why their servers are empty. They don't care about fairness in structured or world PvP. They only care about obtaining a significant gear/stat advantage over someone else and stomping them down to raise their epeen to make up for their tiny rpeen.Personally, I absolutely despise the MOBA-RTS subgenre because of the promotion that these epeen-cupcakes throw around and get rewarded with despite their obscenely bad toxicity towards their own teammates and other players. It is so commonplace that if they really were to outright ban those players then the 'scene' would vanish with them.
One thing I've noticed about this game is a lot of people actually don't like to use group finder for dungeons and adventures. They will spam zone chat, or the player made channels on their server to form groups. So I don't think judging queue times is a proper way to determine population. Anyone having trouble with long queues, find out if there's a player made channel on your server, join that and look for groups there.
People avoid the queues the same reason that they do in every MMO: player quality. If you can at least talk to a person and get someone from your server, then the possibility of a sour cupcake is significantly reduced. If you take a higher risk and just solo queue then you are asking for pain and frustration. The solo queues and queues in general are the ones that tend to be filled with anti-social derps that don't know how to MMO. I never get people who join a queue but don't want to interact with others. Why don't they just form their own group? Oh right, because nobody wants to invite the sour cupcakes to their group. So the queue ends up being a breeding ground for the viral toxicity of whatever MMO you're playing.
You'd actually be surprised how many people enjoy open world pvp.Sure it's a minority compared to the pve population, but it still happens.See, if this was the other way round and pvp'ers were being so mean about pve people and wanting to completely shut down their part of the game, you'd scream bloody murder.But we're used to it I guess. Everyone thinks we are horrible people:/
Because open world PvPers act like horrible people; overwhelmingly so. I guarantee that I can go on YouTube and search for 'PvP videos' to get tens of thousands of results that are nothing but 'gank' videos from stealth classes in whatever MMO has them. Then several more thousand results of obviously stacked odds or obvious hackers showing their epeen and still being terrible (alongside terrible taste in music).Do you know why so few people even bother to go anywhere near the PvP section of these very forums? Toxicity. And when it bleeds over into General Discussion the majority of responses tend to be 'bugger off and take that salt back to the PvP section'.The main reason that many people roll on PvP servers are so that they can show their epeen by one-shotting lowbies on a Stalker or w/e. That's pretty much it. If the majority of WildStar's playerbase opts out of this then it is the fault of the cancerous PvP server players, not the rest of the WildStar playerbase.The main way to treat cancer is to flood it with targeted radiation, but sometimes if it infests too much territory you need to just cut it all out and triage the remainder.So I'd say the 'solution' Carbine might come up with is to just nuke the PvP servers from orbit with a targeted swarm of Ion Cannon Fire from the Dominion Fleet and ignore the whiners as they force PvE server rules to everyone. However, this solution would upset those who enjoy being on a PvP server.In this case, it may be better to just not even worry about PvP population and do more from the player/community side to counteract the massive amounts of toxicity present on such servers.Do you or anyone else defending PvP servers want a quick test? Make a completely fresh f2p account and make a character that jumps straight to the game and skips the tutorial area. Join your server's LFG channel equivalent and just sit there and log all the chat for a few hours at both off-time and prime-time. Now do the same on a PvE server. That should give you all the information you need.EDIT:Real Life Examples of Toxic Terrible People:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HG2MYX4N4shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_L53ebAsSkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SLDgPbjp0M<---this was the first big media blitz about harassment in gaming; and it is NOT uncommon nowhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ii-5KknyY<---more Cross Assault stuffThis is why I do all my holiday shopping online. Better deals and avoid the rabid animalistic sour cupcakes.;)I could link every single word in this post to an example of toxic behavior directly related to PvP. Could you do the same for raiders or PvE players?;)
Edited November 28, 2015 by FantasticCupcake
