I started day 2 of Wildstar doing challenges, as I am an early riser, and the challenges were better with less people around. I was usually just trying to get the satchel of salvaged goods, as sometimes it contains AMPs. But on second though I should have taken the decoration items where available, as those sell for good money to vendors.

Then I joined up with two guild mates to do the shiphand mission Steady Traveller, during which I dinged 13. You can solo that one later, but if you go in at level 12 with a group, the two guaranteed items you get are really good. After that I did a bunch of quests, until I dinged 14. Then I went to Illium to get my house. I took the rocket house I got from the pre order, and got a mineral plot and a garden as well. I had found some decoration during my adventures, including a "discarded bra", which makes my house feel like a bachelor pad. :)

Not that my draken is likely to attract any females in the outfit he is wearing. I found a witch doctor's mask a headpiece, and looting the boom box today gave me pink dye. So while I was in Illium I visited the stylist, put on my pre order costume pieces, and dyed them pink. Not pretty, but probably rather unique.

Then I quested some more, until I had all the quests in Deradune done, and was level 15. The map has a helpful slide-out list on the left side which tells you how many quests or other things you are still missing in a zone. As I haven't done a lot of explorer stuff yet, I'm at 84% of the zone done. Worryingly I am also being told that I have done 24% of the world. 24% of the world in two days? It doesn't look as if there is a lot of content. Then I crashed to desktop with a memory leak.

Getting back in wasn't easy, I was stuck in a queue. The queue still says in red that guest accounts have lower priority, and on the forums the opinions are divided about whether that means my account is wrongly flagged as a guest account and has longer queue times. I know that at the start of the game my account must have been flagged as guest, as I wasn't allowed to chat. I can chat now, but now sure if the login issue has been fixed or not. Anyway, the queue timer at first said over 2 hours, but in the end it took only half an hour to get back in.

Next I did an adventure with my guild. And I hated it. Not because of my guild, because they were nice even when things failed. But the design of adventures is A) very hardcore, and B) full of glaringly obvious design flaws. In adventures you can choose which path to go (by majority vote), and we made the mistake of just choosing options at random. First design flaw: The different options are not just different, they have hugely different difficulty levels. And due to the hardcore design and us having chosen a hard option, we got stuck on a boss we couldn't beat, even after several attempts. For that boss we would have needed Teamspeak to coordinate interrupts, which we haven't set up yet. Fortunately the instance server crashed and everybody in that adventure was ejected, so we had to start over anyway. This time we choose all the "newbie" options, and beat the adventure. The second big design flaw, in two parts, is the way dying is handled in this adventure: In one cases you could just rez yourself right next to the fight, and continue endlessly. And in several instances the fastest way to advance was to get killed by trash mobs, as you would respawn behind the trash and right next to the next boss fight.

I don't think I will do much dungeoneering in Wildstar if the adventures and dungeons are like this. In my opinion all options in a level 15 adventure should be doable by a guild group in the kind of gear you are likely to wear at level 15. Having only one beatable option negates the effect of having options at all. And if even the lowest level adventure is hardcore like that, I'm not interested in the long run. I was never the twitchiest player, and now I'm even slower than I was a decade ago in WoW. I like the Wildstar combat system for soloing, because it is much harder than WoW and thus more interesting. But dungeons were already hard enough in WoW, and with the need to constantly move and dodge through a myriad of "telegraphs". And I object to needing a third-party software, Teamspeak, to be able to do content in a game. For me needing Teamspeak is a sure sign that the game is too fast for other forms of communication, and that makes the game too fast for me.

After beating the adventure I returned to Deradune and started doing explorer missions. That didn't help my warrior level, but gained me explorer levels. And I think the slower I take Wildstar, the longer I will enjoy it before hitting that hardcore wall which will make me quit.