Seems Wildstar ain't faring as well as some said...

Because of the general herd mentality of MMO gamers these days.

Basically it's a matter of "ooh, new shiny!" and everyone flocks there, consumes the content at an alarming rate, and then get bored and go back to whatever their fall-back MMO is.
Sure, some stay and make that game their fall-back MMO, but that's mostly how it works nowadays.

On a personal note, I can say that I had tons of fun in the ESO beta, but when it launched I couldn't play it since it kept kicking me out to the login-screen every 2-3 minutes.
And they still expected me to pay for it, so I just refused to pay.

Well, to be fair, if I remember correctly they did give some free time to subs to compensate for the initial issues.
I think I got an e-mail from them saying that my subscription (the 30 days you get with the game) had been extended or something.

(not that it convinced me to go back, but I'm just saying)

Well the problem was that they wanted me to pay a sub before that. You don't get your 30 days free unless you pay for a sub, despite paying for the game.

So I chose to not pay for a subscription I couldn't use.

Yep. I remember that fiasco. Man I wanted to like ESO. REALLY.

Just as TOR was not a LotRO killer, despite many such claims in the LotRO forums when TOR came out.

my guess is that wildstar being original IP, didn't have preconceptions about it, while ESO is Elder Scrolls and people expected openness of Skyrim etc... and didn't get it.

funny thing is, I actualy enjoyed ESO a lot on Beta its why I bought the game i na first place... but somehow in live it just... and it wasn't just gold sellers, though they were incredibly annoying (even with addon blocking them, they STILL managed to get through constantly).

to be honest, I'm hoping for GW2 effect (on a personal level) becasue it was the same story for me. love Beta, started playing live and just... didn't last all that long, but recently started playing again, and I'm really enjoying myself. so who knows, might also happen with ESO for me.

and Wildstar? I always said it was a niche game. surprise surprise - its a niche game! I wish it all the best and hopefully developers will get it to hit its stride.

In all likeliness WS already had a F2P contingency planned well before launch, just in case. Most MMOs these days do. It's like having a backup chute in skydiving. I say 'likeliness' because it's not a certainty given the absoluteness, and some would say arrogance, of the W* devs prior to launch.

The problem with Wildstar's current situation lies with several massive problems that clearly weren't even noticed till it was too late.

First off, the game had horrible marketing - and I mean literally the worst I've seen for an MMO in a long time. At last years' Gamescom in Germany Cologne I remember passing the Wildstar booth a few times and seeing barely anyone waiting to try the game whilst massive crowd bringers like League Of Legends were 20 meters away. Any other good marketing team would have used this advantage to its fullest, but since it wasn't even marketed before no one bothered to look at it. This should have been a massive slap to the face to the marketing team to wake up and realize that something was horribly wrong.

Unfortunately they didn't learn their lesson until it was too late. They relied on word of mouth to do the marketing for them. This led to fanboys exaggerating the games' endgame. It wasn't until 1 month before the game launched that they started to do some real advertising (and it was done poorly).

The game also suffered from a horrible release date. ESO had just launched a few months prior and left a sour taste in most players' mouth due to it's colossal problems ranging from game breaking bugs such as item duping to broken combat. Therefor people just went back to the games they felt comfortable with - WOW, SWTOR, GW2 etc.

Another issue that also ties in with the games' marketing problems are it's graphics. The game looks like it was made for 10 year olds. Every corner has something that screams "I'm a Disney game" - Massive weapons, Fairy tail creatures, Starships that look like something out of the looney tunes and the list goes on. And to add insult to injury it has the same texture quality of World of Warcraft, a game that came out 10 years ago. These graphics alone made several of my friends not even bother giving it a chance. ( And yet this game is aimed at hardcore players? )

It's combat also leaves much to be desired. The limited amount of abilities that you can have at any one time leads to you having to spam your basic attacks several times while the other 5 abilities go off cooldown. And it also suffered from massive class imbalances such as medics being un-killable in a 1v1 fight or spellslingers being able to 1v3 without any problem whatsoever. Let us also not forget the massive vegetable soup that is PVP, having everyone pointing at a direction and using their abilities hoping to hit something.

Finally, they targeted the wrong audience. Hardcore players are a dying breed - most of the targeted hardcore players are now adults with families and jobs. This leaves them with very little time to dedicate to a hardcore game so they end up playing a normal MMO like SWTOR / WOW or not even play MMOs anymore.

-Side note : One thing that personally effected me was the bad customer service and extremely defensive and angry community the game has. I had a problem were the game retailer I got my key from accidentally gave me an EU key instead of a US one and unfortunately couldn't change it. So I went to submit a support ticket to try and swap my account region only to find that they can't swap it unless you buy a brand new copy of the game and give them the key. At the time I didn't know if I should laugh or cry so I went to the sub-reddit for the game to see if anyone was having the same issue, only to be greeted by a mob with pitchforks and torches saying it was somehow my fault that I entered an incorrect key and downvoting me for criticizing the customer support.

Anyone else find they just cannot get invested in MMOs that have an original IP?

I guess for me a big part of the appeal of the genre is getting to play in such an expansive world set in a universe I already know and enjoy. Every MMO I've ever actually gotten into has been based on an existing IP (World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, and SWTOR) and every MMO I've ever tried that wasn't set in an existing universe just didn't hold my attention at all (Everquest, Rift, Guild Wars).

I was interested in seeing how Wildstar fared since it was kind of a big deal in the realm of MMOs, but I never even seriously considered playing it myself, and I think that was a big part of why.

That's why I had such hopes for ESO.
I love the IP but Zos have made some crucial errors in delivery. The whole dupe thing that last for weeks instead of hours. The lack of balance and how they nerf class skills/passives when it is indeed the armor passives that are the real problem, and eveil VR grind that totally killed it for me as an immersive verse. 1-50 was great (not a scratch on SWTOR story telling though) and VR1-12 had nothing to do with my prior experiences. By the time I got my DK/NB to VR12 I didn't care anymore.

I was part of a PvP competitive guild that actively sought out/discussed with other like minded EU guilds from past MMOs before choosing a campaign and sooooooooooooooo many of those guys left within 6 weeks.

The MMO crowd are indded a fickle bunch and perhaps I'm as much to blame as anyone - constantly seeking the holy grail. It's why I'm back in SWTOR and I plan to stay. The IP here is so much worth it, warts and all.