YMMV / WildStar

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Plentiful, given the setting's focus on Grey-and-Gray Morality.
  • The Dominion: Admirable (if not somewhat ruthless) empire with a noble cause and plausible claim to Nexus, or a completely unredeemable and megalomaniacal galactic authority looking to subjugate all of the cosmos? The Dominion's methodology and Luminai-centered caste system makes them an unrepentant totalitarian dictatorship steeped in nepotism and classism, but those who do live under the Dominion are taken care of and provided for (for the most part), Education is coveted, climbing the ranks by merit and hard work is possible, and most officials within the government operate in the people's best interest so long as they're loyal and obedient to the empire.
  • The Exiles: Refugees and war casualties seeking a home? Or mere criminal scum that has long lost its right to settle on any planet? Most Exiles bar Granok do have a good reason to stand against the Dominion, being victims of attempted planetary genocide (Aurin), run off from their home planet for rebelling against an unfair class system (Exile Humans), and blockaded and denied aid against a deadly global disease (Mordesh). However, many Exiles themselves are not above resorting to terrorism and committing war crimes to get a leg up on the "filthy Dommies", whether it's by torturing captive civilians, biological and chemical warfare against non-combatants, or killing defenseless prisoners of war. In addition, the Exiles have a tendency to leave a ton of collateral damage in their wake when battling the Dominion, as evidenced by the zone stories of Galeras and Whitevale.
  • The Player Character also counts too, no matter what factions they are, especially if Ish'mael's statement of them as "Psychopathic Killer" is either Unreliable Narrator or Awful Truth? The latter trope being supported by allowing the players can partake in Moral Event Horizon (namely genocide and crimes) along with implication of body mutilation with body parts as loots.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Dairy products can be brewed into alcohol.
• Broken Base:
  • The Free-to-Play announcement has the community divided between those who think it's a much-needed change, and those who'd prefer to have the game remain subscription-based. Although NC Soft, Carbine's publisher, had good records on Free-2-Play transitioned games like Aion and Lineage 2, NCSoft's record isn't perfect.
  • The Grey-and-Gray Morality of WildStar. One side says that it's an Informed Attribute, while others have said that the beginning areas and the extra-game lore tend to create bias towards the Exiles and created a Tainted by the Preview situation.
  • The sprint system for F2P was adjusted, no longer requiring that the player hold down Shift- now it's permanent except in battle, and the player toggles a movement mode. Many RPers disliked the change.
• Creator Worship: Not to cult-like levels, but the dev team has been very, very open and communicative about the game's development, including going into the rational behind potentially unpopular stuff such as Money Sinks, and actually listening and responding to suggestions and concerns. The fan base has reciprocated with appropriate levels of adoration for this unexpected honesty.
  • However this has changed with WildStar's continuing decline, with most of the fandom of the opinion that Carbine Studios mismanaged the game very badly. As of writing (August 2016), Quarterly Revenue posted for WildStar shows that it only made a profit of $2 Million USD. Keep in mind, this is an AAA MMO on the scale of Guild Wars 2.
• Creepy Awesome: The Mordesh, to their fans. Just creepy to most everyone else.
• Evil Is Cool: Whether you think their "Evil" or not, The Dominion still have a sizeable fanbase who wholly embraced their stick. It helps that their playable races consist of The Aristocratic Cassians, The Warlike Draken, The Cybernetic Mechari, and The Insane Chua.
• Hype Aversion:
  • Given that the game was called "WoW killer number seventeen", and very few games of this genre maintained a consistent playerbase above a couple thousand after the first year (sometimes even within a few months.) it's only inevitable that some players are waiting a few months to see if the number of players logged in simply aren't simply playing WildStar as a "One Night Stand". To be fair, this happens with a lot of online games, and has happened so much people are feeling apprehensive.
  • Also happened with the endgame- the plan was to have 40 man raids that would ensure that only the best of the best would get in, but the fact that attunements were really luck based, people could buy runes, and the fact that the playerbase did indeed taper off meant that there was a lack of numbers, exacerbating the issue and driving off even more players. Another issue is the cruel, agonizing difficulty of said content. When one of World of Warcraft's top raiding guilds who jumped ship thinks your content is too exclusive and hard, there may be something wrong. A lot of players who retired did so after realizing that the endgame was a "Return to Vanilla WoW" as was promised by the Devs... except that was mostly nostalgia filler and the "Difficulty" was because of contrivances and bad game design that most MMOs have moved past.
    • A lot of people also quit because these contrivances were made to inflate the time spent playing. It turns out players in 2015 didn't have as much free time as they did in 2006....
  • The difficulty-ridden release of the F2P game. Many people excitedly downloaded the game, only to find that there was a queue for merely logging in to the character selection screen- amongst other things. It's since died down, but the initial hiccups drove away a lot of potential players.
• Moral Event Horizon: Neither side is above some very, very awful acts.
  • The Dominion:
    • Enacting a series of oppressive policies on their own people, that resulted protests on the streets to Brightland's Rebellion.
    • Attempting and failing to exterminate the Granok after their refusal to join the empire.
    • Turning lush, verdant Arboria into a barren wasteland because the Aurin, who couldn't have possibly known the risks, traded with the human Exiles.
    • Blowing up a Nexus-bound Exile ship full of innocent refugees, then blowing up the ship that was to rescue the survivors.
    • The death of Elderroot. It's understandable, as Elderroot is a repository of valuable knowledge in the hands of the enemy, but it's a living, sentient being who can feel pain.
  • The Exiles:
    • An Enclave in Ellevar poisoning local swamps and possibly would have devastated that area in search of their cure, which their effort was implied to be not working.
    • The Aurorian Plague, targeting innocent farmers and Lowborn to cripple Dominion operations.
    • The Dominion captive being tortured in Avra's Lair. He has been completely broken, and no one is even asking him any questions.
      Dominion Captive: *Sob* W-what do you w-want from m-me?
      Black Hoods Researcher: I just want you to do what Cassians do best... Bleeding and dying!
    • Being responsible for the horrific Squirg apocalypse in Whitevale, after an attempt to turn the Terraformer as a weapon Went Horribly Wrong.
• Player Punch:
  • The Stormseeker Pell. You unintentionally deliver poisoned supplies to them, killing them all. You played with their children. You helped them with their chores. You earned their trust. It's one of the first missions in Ellevar, so pretty much any new, uninformed player will do this quest arc.
  • On the Exile side, there's the fate of Deadeye Brightland's family, wiped out by a dominion artillery barrage moments from getting away to safety. They were going to name the kid after you, too.
  • Drusera's village of critters. After help construct it, the Entity proceeds to destroy all of it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Mashing F to escape stuns was considered very irritating, and was eventually replaced with a different quick-time event where the player has to hold down a specific movement key for a period of time instead. The newer system was much better received.
  • The F2P's new sprinting system, which became default movement toggle instead of holding shift to sprint, receiving scorns from older players.
• Squick:
  • Mordesh are still physically attractive, but the whole "suffering from a horrible disease, flesh rotting off" thing tends to be a real turn-off for most people.
  • You regularly loot and sell the body parts of your enemies. And, if you're starting in Bloodfire Village as a Dominion player, you can collect the skulls of your enemies and place them on a giant skull pyre.
• Tainted by the Preview: The presentation of Dominion in negative tone without sympathetic moment drew the players' attention to the game's Grey-and-Gray Morality, along with starting zone.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The major criticism on Sadie Brightland's Death in Northern Wilds, which her Informed Ability stated that she was a Judge (Exiles' law enforcement) but her death being used to characterize "Deadeye" Brightland.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some older WildStar players have this opinion on F2P's new tutorial: in spite of its attempt to make Dominion less vicious, the majority of the lore content in the area was cut due to the lack of Artemis Zin's museum, the Vigilant Church, Belle Walker's laboratory, and the Rockin' Rowsdower.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Despite the game operating on Gray-and-Grey Morality and both factions having done horrid things with neither meant to be better than the other, the Dominion definitely got hit hardest with this. While they want Nexus for legitimate reasons - namely to discover the fate of their Eldan progenitors - and have a justified reason for hunting the Exiled humans (attempted sedition) and Granok (armed rebellion), most citizens and government entities are shown to be ruthless, unrepentant, and near-fanatical in their devotion to the Dominion and the war against the Exiles. In addition, the Dominion has a rigidly-structured and highly stratified society based on eugenics, bureaucracy and brutal efficacy, with those deemed unworthy or lacking in ambition to be relegated to the lowest rungs of society. Add on the fact that the game and the lore doesn't particularly shy away from showing just how brutal and ruthless the Dominion can be against it's enemies, what with them having no qualms about engaging in planet-wide genocide and environmental degradation, and you get a recipe for an extremely unflattering image to most casual players, ranging from being considered Card-Carrying Villains and Anti-Villains at best to Villain Protagonists and Complete Monsters at worst. Of course, the Dominion does still have a sizable fanbase among those who once played the game, but most of that is chalked up to Evil Is Cool rather than any genuine belief that the Dominion are the heroes of the story.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: As said by IGN, "Sure, on the surface WildStar may look like it's overflowing with cutesy characters but dig a little deeper and you'll find a comic world bursting with crude jokes and filthy language."
• The Woobie: Victor Lazarin's unlife suuuucccks. It all started when he accidentally turned his entire race into zombies. About the only people he cares about who HAVEN'T died yet, including Elderroot, are the Aurin Queen, a player character who advances the quest lines, his daughter, Lucy, and his Chua adversary, Mondo Zax. And then later his daughter is infected with the Strain and has to be put down, comfortably putting Victor Lazarin on a list of people the universe just plain hates.
  • To make it even worse, at an Exile meeting Avra Darkos flat-out tells Victor that she only "suffers him to live" in order to find a cure for the Contagion. Ouch.