I keep seeing this repeated over and over and over and over again but its simply not true at all. Carbine pretty much listened rarely anyone on the forums.
No they listened a lot of people before the game went live, especially during the closed beta, as well as on twitter and facebook.
Go ahead and look back at their marketing, "The Devs are listening!"
For months and months they spouted this trying to get input, and there were droves of suggestions all over the forums, some of which definitely ended up in game.
One of the most memorable was the issue of breast size reduction in female characters, as well as the suggestions for Body types. Both of which actually happened.
Problem is that Once NCSoft pushed WildStar out the door before it was ready to fly on its own, Carbine had to go full steam and try to get the rest of this sh*t done, AND fix the bugs issues and problems, and work on a large amount of developer content at the same time.
There for now, all those so called "Good suggestions" like the stupid freaking 40 player raiding from people still with their head stuck up in the past, are biting them in the ass.
Look at them now, having to completely retool a raid because the game can't physically operate around 40 player raid content.
Just look at how many guilds just dropped the game and quit. Just outright quit.
If they had paid attention to market metrics and research instead of getting hooked up on these people stuck in the gold ole' glory days Carbine wouldn't be stuck up river without a paddle scrambling figure out how to get them out of rough waters.
I can't begin to express how stupid of an idea Warplots was, and even with feedback about its excessively large size, they went with it anyways, because people thought it was so cool.
We'll here's the thing Carbine, 90% of the time Players don't actually know what they want, and they end up getting the wrong idea about what's viable and actually meaningful for their gameplay experience.
That doesn't mean Carbine screwed up entirely, They did a really fantastic job of innovating the action combat trend, Started with games like vindictus, got more intuitive with games like Tera and Guild Wars 2, and now WildStar just tops it off with a fantastic fusion of it all.
But Dual factions? Warplots? 40 player end game content?
Just a heads up everyone and the powers that be, requiring a lot of players doesn't make a game hardcore, requiring a lot of skill and coordination does.
Don't even get me started on all the massive problems with PVP, and super short level cap.
Man I was excited to hear a while back that Carbine originally intended to the game to be a 250hour 1~50 leveling span, a bit short for my tastes but would have been insanely better than the 97 hours it took for me and a team of people goofing off and dealing with log in queues off to get max level.
There were so many problems and mistakes made by listening to user suggestion, and Carbine's "The Devs are listening, stuck in the past, lets make world of warcraft right" mentality.
I hate to be so harsh on Carbine, because there's a lot of the game that's bloody fantastic, and I absolutely do not want this game to fail, and if it can stay pay to play.
I'm totally ok with paying 15$ a month for this game, but I can't validate that when I log in, and by the time I've tried to get anything done, I'm fustrated that It took so long to do anything.
Even sitting around in blighthaven gold farming, for hours and hours on end I still can't find enough people to get my Blighthaven reputation done most days.
And that's really *cupcake*ing frustrating.
Right now I'm thinking of just heading back to Vindictus, because I'm still not max level 400 hours later, and its still ridiculously fun to play, and I don't have to worry about crap holding me back because other players aren't around.
It may not be the best game out there, but at least I can log in and I got plenty of stuff to do rather than waiting around for a raid to start or sitting half AKF waiting for scorchwing to spawn so I can get that one time daily quest...
