The Steamy edition!
Big news for the week, is that Wildstar has officially launched on Steam! Even better news.. is that so far, it’s been doing pretty well on Steam, even cracking the top 100 list! Peak Concurrent players via Steam, so far has been 5040:
Reviews on Steam have been overwhelmingly Positive so far as well as well, with 711 Positive, 183 Negative reviews.. and members of the community have been adding screenshots, guides, etc.. to help out new Steam players. If you are playing on Steam (and, remember.. if you link your NCSoft account via Steam, it automatically logs you in.. so not recommended for those of us with multiple accounts) make sure you leave a review!
Chad Moore also posted a “Welcome new Steam Players” post. In it, he hints at upcoming content.. none of it is really new (limited faction drop, the new race/class combos going live, RMT, Halon Ring, more PvP incentives..etc..), the only real new tidbit of news (for existing players, obviously.. if you’re new to WildStar it provides a good roadmap) is that they will apparently be giving veteran players a way to quickly get a new max-level alt (sounds like they’re going to be selling ‘insta-50’ tokens):
Are you a veteran player with a hankerin’ for a max-level alt? There might be some good news on the horizon.
Friday had a ‘play with the Devs’ stream, where Chad and Micah ran through some expeditions (and, in Micah’s case.. started leveling a new character) with some players to kick off the Space Chase festivities. They did hint at a new event coming this summer, so perhaps something to fill in the July 4th time frame where Starfall was originally slated.. and they hinted at swimsuits. Other than that, I didn’t hear anything new in the parts of the stream I was able to listen to.
As for Space Chase, it has returned with the standard RNGBox setup, just like previously. This time did have the potential to be way more player friendly though. This tidbit is in the announcement:
But that’s not all! Space Chase Cases now also have a chance to drop rare NPC décor for Artemis Zin and Dorian Walker, as well as a Dog of War mount and Lonely Lost Larva pet, along with gold, Service Tokens, and various flasks. But you can also get the décor, mount, and pet (and music tracks mentioned above) directly from the Expeditions in the form of new mini-cases that have a chance to drop at the end of Expeditions.
And then there was this quote from Chad Moore on both the forums, and Reddit:
Hey all! Just wanted to chime in here. Glad to hear that you are excited about the changes that we made to the event. All of them were based 100% on your feedback.
Looking forward to chasing some space with all of you!
Pappy
Unfortunately… based on drop rates reported by players over the weekend (yes, it’s anecdotal..but it’s all I’ve got)… this is a lip service only “change”.. I know of 3 of the mini-boxes that dropped between Friday when the event started, and late Sunday night when I’m writing this (with one person having ran 75 expeditions over the weekend, with no drop). Which makes sense I guess.. considering if Carbine had really taken into account how much the Community HATES RNGBoxes… they wouldn’t have given us this year’s Cash-Grabiversary (which, by the way, is still ongoing, if you feel the need to buy yourself a ‘thank you for supporting us’ gift for WildStar’s birthday this year… I know I don’t).
Speaking of Cash-Grabiversary… It’s now ran for two weeks.. and there has been zero response from the Carbine team about the negative feedback from players about having Anniversary ‘rewards’ locked in RNGBoxes, instead of given to the players like every other game does… so, it looks like we won’t be getting any comment from them, or change to address this ‘event’, that is (IMO) grossly disrespectful of the player base that has supported WildStar for the last 2 years.
Ending on a more positive note for official news.. Bardic has announced some very welcome store related changes!
- There will now be a forum post in the marketplace section of the forums detailing limited time deals, and this post should have the end time for when that sale will go away.
- A fix for the much disliked Account Inventory changes made a few weeks back. They will be adding an ‘account bound’ inventory type, that will let you mail items between your alts after the store (or daily login reward) auto-pushes it to your inventory. I’ve been very vocal about how un-user friendly the new system was.. this sounds like it’s a good step towards fixing that.. it will probably need some tweaks as it goes..but it’ll at least help. My request now is for bigger bags and/or a shared account bank (like a guild bank) to put all this stuff in, since we can’t use the ‘old’ account inventory to store these items in anymore.
The PTR has also been updated again, so make sure you update your PTR client, and continue to help test Redmoon Terror.
I do believe that’s it for the week.. no Community news since everyone was scrambling to get online to welcome new Steam players, since we were only provided 2 days notice before launch.