Gracie Status Update – Page 38

Ups and Downs

October 5, 2015 by Grace

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.

Alpha Sanctum

October 1, 2015 by Grace

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.

Day 1 All Over Again

September 30, 2015 by Grace

I had a productive evening in WildStar last night, even though I didn’t do many of my usual activities. My server was quite laggy, so combat was difficult. It felt very strange experiencing launch day woes like over-taxed servers for a game I’ve been playing steadily for over a year. On the flip side, I am thrilled to see all the excitement about the game on social media right now, and crowded servers mean lots of people eager to play. I trust the devs to sort out the technical issues.

Looking pretty good for only using vendor dyes!

Unfortunately the lag was bad enough that after getting bronze on one vet ~~shiphand~~ expedition (and dying a lot) I decided to do more peaceful activities. I poked around at my house for a while, then decided to get a status update on some of my alts. It turns out that several of them were wearing mostly crafted gear. This meant that they were now wandering around partially naked at best, and at worst, well, take a look at my Granok lady here.

At least she still has her boots.

So I spent the rest of the night at the crafting station and in the holo-wardrobe, trying to make things right. My Aurin turned out cute at least. The Granok lady? Still a work in progress.

RELOADED

September 29, 2015 by Grace

Fancy Bug Mount

Last night I dutifully logged into the WildStar stream to join in the fun and hype in the last hours before launch. My plan was to hang out until the cinematic was revealed, then head to bed. Yes, it is kinda sad, but being an adult is often sad. However, one of the giveaways on the stream turned out to be a chance to access the game an hour early. I and 999 other folks from the Twitch chat were able to log in and beat the rush.

I ended up using that hour mostly to claim all the goodies I had unlocked, and to get all my rune tokens out of the mail. Not the most exciting thing, but it needed to be done. Plus I got to run around in the crawler mount pictured above an hour early. Totally worth it.

Disco snail gets me

Instead of going to bed like an adult, I ended up playing not just for my bonus hour, but another whole hour after the actual launch time. There were definitely some rocky patches to this launch. Once the servers were truly opened the lag got quite bad at times. While expected, that was still disappointing. Worse though, was the bug that caused some guilds to completely disappear. Folks who logged in planning to chat with friends and guildies all night found themselves suddenly alone. That was being addressed in an emergency maintenance as I was getting ready to leave this morning, so no WildStar for me until I get home from work!

Hopefully they get all the bugs sorted. The WildStar hype is real right now and I want it to translate into tons of new players, not internet rants about a rough launch. I know I’ll be eager to hop back in after work. Hopefully coffee and excitement can compensate for my lack of sleep until then!