Content by Grace
Drop 6 renamed Shiphands to Expeditions. I figure this is a good time to pull all my guides together and remind you that shiphands expeditions are awesome and fun and still one of my favorite things in WildStar!
Introduction and Wrap-Up with useful general information.
More expeditions are in the works, and I’ll be adding new guides when they are released.
Definitely not the end! There’s more to come!
This first week of Free-to-Play has certainly had its highs and lows.
This was relatively mild for Entity
On the one hand, it makes me positively giddy that there are so many people who want to play WildStar. On the other hand, all that interest has translated into some major problems for WildStar’s megaservers. After struggling for days with lag and queues on my main server, I finally gave up and rolled an alt on Entity-2.
It is worth making the switch
Entity-2 has been a pleasant surprise. It feels a bit like the game shortly before the F2P launch – there’s always people around but nowhere near the mob on Entity. One big difference from that time is that the low-level zones are bustling again now. There always seem to be people looking for groups to kill bounty board targets and the like. Dungeon and PvP queues are cross-server, and even as a DPS I’ve had really short (~5-10 min tops) queue times.
If you are new to WildStar or coming back as a free player without a lot of social ties I would strongly encourage you to choose Entity-2 or Jabbit-2. The play experience is much better there for now. If you have friends you want to keep in touch with you can always “account friend” them and you should still be able to chat. For veteran players, if the crowds are getting you down I would encourage you to transfer or roll an alt on the new servers as well. As a bonus, making some alts there will let you keep a few extra character slots when the servers get merged again!
It is hard to believe we’re only one week into this Drop. The congestion-based issues seem to be improving a bit every day, so hopefully soon they’ll be nothing but memory. With a little luck the revitalized crowds will still be around to see the game in its best light.
This first week of Free-to-Play has certainly had its highs and lows.
This was relatively mild for Entity
On the one hand, it makes me positively giddy that there are so many people who want to play WildStar. On the other hand, all that interest has translated into some major problems for WildStar’s megaservers. After struggling for days with lag and queues on my main server, I finally gave up and rolled an alt on Entity-2.
It is worth making the switch
Entity-2 has been a pleasant surprise. It feels a bit like the game shortly before the F2P launch – there’s always people around but nowhere near the mob on Entity. One big difference from that time is that the low-level zones are bustling again now. There always seem to be people looking for groups to kill bounty board targets and the like. Dungeon and PvP queues are cross-server, and even as a DPS I’ve had really short (~5-10 min tops) queue times.
If you are new to WildStar or coming back as a free player without a lot of social ties I would strongly encourage you to choose Entity-2 or Jabbit-2. The play experience is much better there for now. If you have friends you want to keep in touch with you can always “account friend” them and you should still be able to chat. For veteran players, if the crowds are getting you down I would encourage you to transfer or roll an alt on the new servers as well. As a bonus, making some alts there will let you keep a few extra character slots when the servers get merged again!
It is hard to believe we’re only one week into this Drop. The congestion-based issues seem to be improving a bit every day, so hopefully soon they’ll be nothing but memory. With a little luck the revitalized crowds will still be around to see the game in its best light.
This post has minor spoilers for and images of Alpha Sanctum, the level 15 lore instance. Fairly warned be ye.
This place is just beautiful
I purposefully held off on doing the Alpha Sanctum during beta. I wanted to wait and experience it for the first time on live servers, and I don’t regret that. It was a pleasant diversion to escape the chaos of launch week, hop on my lowbie dommie spellslinger, and score some sweet sweet lore.
Lore is the shiniest of shinies.
The instance itself is straightforward, as befitting its low level introductory status. It gave some nice background on the primal elements and the different groups of Eldan participating in the Nexus project without giving too much away. There wasn’t too much in the way of new information for a veteran player, but it was nice to see it all laid out plainly instead of gathered in bits and pieces from data cubes scattered around the world.
Even good old you-know-who put in an appearance
Overall I enjoyed the experience. I hope that this earlier introduction to the Eldan and their “great work” helps get even more people hooked on the lore of WildStar.
