WildStar – Those Attunements Again
582 words.
For some reason, the topic of WildStar raid attunements seems to be nearly as volatile as sexism in gaming, but hey, it’s something to write about, so here it is.
To summarize the story so far: Some elitist jerk guild made an infographic showing the 12 hardcore steps you need to complete before you can raid in WildStar, and various bloggers have commented on it, with viewpoints ranging anywhere from “That’s insane!” to “That’s awesome!”
All In On Wildstar Attunements: Legacy of the Burning Crusade
The WildStar Raid-Attunement Debate
Previously, I gave a tentative endorsement to hardcore raiding, but I questioned the business logic of it.
As a concept, I don’t have a problem with an Attunement process. It’s not unreasonable to expect players to pass some tests before they can take on hard content in which a lot of other players will be depending on them. However there’s a point where that testing becomes excessive or redundant, and I personally think WildStar passed that point.
For example, why complete every veteran dungeon with a silver medal or higher? Once someone does one, they can surely do any of the others. One makes sense, the rest is just a grind.
Still, if I were going to do raiding, I wouldn’t hesitate to do all the steps. Most of those things I would be doing anyway (the adventures and dungeons, at least). I might be annoyed while doing some of them though. I see a few pointless steps in there right off the bat. For example, Step 2, “buying an attunement key.” How does “having a ton of money” in any way indicate that a player can handle dodging telegraphs in a raid?
Step 4, a faction grind. Again, pointless. I’m hoping that by the time you get to 50 most people will already have most of that faction rep, but I don’t know. Maybe you have to start at 50. That would be annoying.
Step 11, kill 10 world bosses. That also seems pointless. Obviously the world bosses are not going to be as difficult as 25-man or 40-man raid bosses, so how is that preparing you for raids? Completing the veteran dungeons would be far better practice.
I didn’t see anything in there about gear or ability level requirements, which to me seems like the most important thing. Maybe that’s so fundamental to a raider that it isn’t even worth mentioning.
Incidentally, FFXIV has something like this when you get to the endgame. There’s a sequence of quests you need to complete before you can get your Relic weapon, and a certain sequence of instances you have to go through before you can get into the harder instances. Sometimes it was annoying. Sometimes the steps were inane and had nothing to do with whether you had the skills to do the harder content. Sometimes they were just time-consuming fetch quests.
Anyway, as for the business logic of hardcore raids, a comment by Ragerz on that infographic post struck me:
I’m starting to understand now that they want to make raiding so tedious that not many people want to do it. Thus they can focus giving content to the non raiders."
I don’t know if that person was being sarcastic or not, but that actually does make a certain amount of business sense. More sense than planning to drive away casuals and retain only raiders at least.
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