f13.net

Decided to start a new thread with some nice screens of a guildmate's brand new house:

(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/hghlndr827/Vanguard/ca1.jpg)

(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/hghlndr827/Vanguard/ca3.jpg)

(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/hghlndr827/Vanguard/ca5.jpg)

One has to admit this is pretty cool.

That is pretty neat. Though I wouldn't have gone for the lumberjack hunting cabin type of look. I assume you can buy/make furniture and put it inside?

So, is there some NPC agency that parcels out land, or did your guildmate just pick a spot?

Is he going to have frequent visits from the local fauna and/or marauding goblin-types, or does building a house create a sort of clear zone?

I admit this part of Vanguard should be interesting to watch play out, given the blight the last couple of open-housing-building type games have had.

"In the ghetto..."

There are plots scattered around the world. Some places have several plots. Some have one. There are no other plots within sight of this plot, for example. I do not know if there are mobs around his house. You can see a road in the background of one of the pics, though. The house is near New Targonor which is one of the Thestra continents port cities. He also has his own boat, so maybe he can anchor it right off his house.

I will ask him these questions.

That is pretty damned cool. I love the idea of having an isolated house with no others in sight; one of the many reasons I like huge game worlds (being a dirty explorer is another).

How do you know there's a lot?  There's a sign?  SWG lot placement still is pretty cool IMO.  There just needs to be something to kill houses when people leave, to avoid the inevitable sprawl and camping that happens.

Im wondering if you can take it down and build a better nhouse as you advance? Plot size determines house size?

How many houses/account/toon?

I remember the virtual real estate agents in UO and SWG....

"This is a beautiful lot, on an island in the middle of the lake......yours for only 1m gp"

Yes, there is a marker. No idea about how maintenance works. As far as plot size determining house size, I believe so. Certain plots cost a lot more than others.

My questions to my guildmate:



His answers:

At the very least, all the uberguilds and catasses will snap up all the decent plots post haste.

Actually, I'd think the uberguilds want to make sure all their houses are clustered together for maximum efficiency. With maybe a plot or two in other areas for quick access to whatever bonuses housing gives you.

Psst. You spelt 'gold farmers' wrong.  :wink:

Rang RANG!

Brad McQuaid: "Oops" (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27044-why-all-nerd-rage-against-vanguard-94.html#post689707)

Am I the only one who found it in poor taste for Brad to call out DDO like that?

Also, I don't buy the 150k he quotes.

I'm a bit of an apologist for Vanguard and I'm even still paying SOE to play basically twice a week while I let WoW rest XP accrue.  While I think there are some cool things in Vanguard, it's obvious from those pictures that housing aint it. 

That house looks like arse.  Dirt floor, the straw textures on the underside of the eaves, and no windows make it hard to get the least bit excited about.  The freebie room at the inn you get in EQ2 looks better.  Maybe if you were a Braveheart recreationist you might get a kick out of it but it doesn't get me thinking "ooooh need one of those". 

Especially since DDO didn't have a $30+ million budget nor did it likely have nearly as big a team working on it as Vanguard does.

Yup Station Pass makes all subscription numbers coming from Station Pass games virtually meaningless.

Indeed.  Just like it was in poor taste when he called AoC "not a real MMO" or something (not an exact quote).  There was also a post recently on the silky venom forums where he used WoW's peak concurrency record (something like 650,000) and the fact that previous MMOs generally get around 25% peak concurrency to imply that they only had ~2.6 million subscribers and were apparently lying about their actual numbers, either oblivious to or ignoring the fact that spreading your customers around the world will ALWAYS lower peak concurrency percentage.

The guy is routinely unprofessional and frankly comes off as extremely bitter and jealous a lot of the time.  I think it's reasonable to assume that these comments are due to the fact that he's angry that he's been one-upped by Blizzard and will, I'd bet, be out-sold by both Turbine and Funcom this year.


Considering there are fewer than 150k characters (not players, mind you) above level 10 that have been created since VG's release, including cancelled accounts, alts, buddy accounts, etc?  Yeah, I have trouble believing it too.

660,000 (if that was the number Brad was quoting) is China-only.

Every time he opens his yap he sucks just a little bit more of my will to play his game. Here and there some bit of art and ingenuity shine through nontheless, enough to keep me active with my guild. Brad, if, for some reaons you're reading this, please stop talking. You're not people person. You never were. They hired Absor to replace you for a reason.

To go back to the OP, am I the only one who thinks that that house really sucks?  The textures in particular look like amateur hour, especially where surfaces meet: the breaks on the stones on the corner, for instance, don't match those next to them or above them.  The underside of the thatch is wierd, but the texture on the top looks like they've scaled it up by about 10 times, so that it's just over-large and blurry.  The inside is certainly a bit better, but the whole thing is almost identical to the quality of the freebie art set that comes with the multiverse demo world.

The location is nice, though: definitely appeals to the explorer in me. But, with the possible exception of the tree bark, is it any better than SWG?  I honestly don't think so, and the SWG graphics engine must be six or more years old, now.

Edit: Spotted Lt. Dan, so i am not alone.  "Looks a bit arse", funnily enough, was the exact phrase I was originally thinking of when I saw it.

That's got to be galling - "We hired Abashi because he's a better 'people person' than you"

Brad's still posting to that thread, by the way - one of his latest was basically "Even though VG is at half the subs we need and even through the concept of a large world with slow travel isn't working and even though people need to have parallel-chained Crays to run our game, even though - in short - pretty much every design decision I made was wrong...I wouldn't change any of the design decisions I made."

The hubris of the man is astonishing. Wonder how much longer he'll be running things at Sigil?

I don' t get the house thing at all.  What can you do with it?

side note:  People on this and other forums are always complaining that developers don't say what they think on all they get from developers is marketing speak.  Now Brad comes along and says what he thinks and people call him "unprofessional."

By far I prefer the straight talk from Brad over the spin that I normally hear from most developers.

The house looks ok to me. Especially in a MMO-context, as opposed, to, say the Sims.

As for McQuaid, candor is one thing, but dribbling absolute stupidity is another thing. I spent 10 minutes laughing my way through the link above reading about the costs of his suggested gaming rigs (and their prices!) to run Vanguard at decent settings. He's a little divorced from reality.

I think the consensus here is that "what he thinks" doesn't quite match reality.  He may fully believe what he says (I don't think he does), but that doesn't make it the truth, or fact.

Besides, I also think that, for these boards, the game's been judged as "crap", interest has passed, and now there's the wish that he'd just shut up and stop hogging the microphone.  We're a little bit like forum whores; we should stop reading boards and messages that we're not interested in.

Here is a more expensive model that our guild shipwright recently placed:

(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/hghlndr827/Vanguard/HH5.jpg)

His comments:


I asked for inside screenshots.

Furniture recipes just entered the game Chests are not in yet either.

I'm interested.  Watching McQuaid go slowly mad cooped up in his Führerbunker is at least as amusing as the Neverending SWG Thread.

I found it not in poor taste, but just lacking in perspective, to refer to Sigil as a "start-up", and in the same sentence mention their $30M budget.


You're not getting straight talk from Brad. Everything he posts on the boards is intended to influence people into either buying a box and/or continuing their subscription. He's walking market-speak. Which is fine, in and of itself, even when he's ham-fisted and inept about it. Taking shots at other games (WoW, DDO, etc) is what makes him unprofessional.

Of everything he said, this is likely the closest to the mark and reveals a small remaining hint of sanity.

If they can survive for a few years, this might pay off.

These housing screenshots are actually making me less interested in Vanguard. I didn't think that was possible.  :hello_kitty:

Opposite for me.

I went from snowball's chance in hell of ever buying it to 1% chance of purchase. I mean, I will never buy it but I want more housing in other games and something about the plot system takes me back to UO. And everyone knows how crazy I get about old UO :)

I am not trying to beat the house issue to death, but since it is one way that VG differs significantly from EQ2 and WoW I thought it was worth pointing out. The grind to collect resources for a house is significant, though. These two guildmates play every night for several hours and the second one spends 80% of his time crafting while the former does a lot of gathering while he adventures.

You cannot recall to your house. So, the more remote it is, the less likely you will actually be there.  Both guys admit they did it more just to do it then actually expecting to hang out there.

Another thing I never understand, why do mmog developers *always* get lfg tools wrong.

I mean, it's not hard or anything.

It's just a window with /who queries matched up with a status of ...

out of group - lfg flag on
out of group - lfg flag off
in group
in group and leading

THAT IS ALL YOU HAVE TO DO.

Shit like being able to flag 'looking for members - priests' is gravy.

How hard is it to have a window from where you can run /who queries.

CoH and EQ2 are the only mmogs I can remember that got it entirely right.

DAoC came close, but narrowly missed out on cigars.

SWG was classic. I could search for groupmates according to the type of music they like, but not on whether they are flagged lfg, or whether they can shoot a rifle. wtf?

So for all that work, you get to have a house that looks like Johnny Appleseed died there and you can't even recall to the house?

What... the... fuck?

What's up with the windows, or lack there of.  Eventually that crampy little place will smell like feet and whatever that is that died on the table.  I do like building things though, and decorating.  I just don't like Vanguard.  Oh well.

Don't forget blood type!

Seriously.  That was an option.

Indoor screenies of the second house:

(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/hghlndr827/Vanguard/HH7.jpg)

(http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/hghlndr827/Vanguard/HH6.jpg)

This thread makes me miss AC1 more than it makes me want to try Vanguard.

Especially since my machine is from around the same time as the AC1 graphics engine.

I love housing in games.  After playing Vanguard for 3 weeks, the best housing ever created could not drag me back to the game.  What I'm hearing from those still enduring the game (yes, I said enduring) this housing is no better than housing implemented years ago in other games. 

 

What is the crafting like in Vanguard?  Can someone please provide or point me to an overview?

Here is the warcry review on crafting. (http://vs.warcry.com/news/view/69204)  I consider it to be a rosy picture of what I encountered, but admitedly I didn't stay with it long.

Crafted items are a lot better than most drops. That can be a positive and a negative. It makes it hard for a pure adventurer to sell his excess loot for much but it gives crafters a raison d'etre.  The work order systme also gets good reviews from crafter-enthusiasts because you can advance without having to harvest. The work order provides you with most - if not all - of the components.

Okay the no windows thing is really lame.

I still don't see the point of in-game houses... other than hideously expensive limited resources to have e-peen competitions over.

Listening to a guild crafter explain the grind of making bricks, one of the pinnacles of the crafting art, and the intense faction grind to be able to grind bricks of other nations, pretty much sank any interest that remained.

l33t brickmaker of WTFpwnage!

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/Xhosa_brickmaker_at_kiln_near_Ngcobo.jpg/800px-Xhosa_brickmaker_at_kiln_near_Ngcobo.jpg)

That just screams adventure, doesn't it?

The plot system and building a house one brick at a time is straight out of Horizons. In fact a lot things about Vanguard remind me of Horizons.

I'm not aware of any mmorpg on the market with any other sort of pve endgame.

One of the Vanguard threads on the FoH boards has taken a nasty (nastier?) turn - Brad was defending the VG engine, system requirements, artistic designs, etc. (the usual 'Come back in three years and look at the graphics then!' crap SOE tried with EQ2)...and someone started posting (hi-res) LOTRO screenshots.

The current theme is therefore "Hey Brad - why does LOTRO have lower system requirements than Vanguard, run smoother, and look better?"

After reading various posts in that thread I picture Brad being honestly confused as to why there has not been a mad rush on E6700 machines with dual 8800GTXs just so people could play Vanguard at 30FPS. There is a huge difference between buying a $150.00 Voodoo card in 1999 so that you could play EQ1 and dumping a thousand or more into your box with all of the competition that is out there today. There is just not enough game there for the buck for me to justify even upgrading my present video card for. If Vanguard was bug free and complete I really do not think all that many players today are really into the forced group play style and long grinds. Some do enjoy that sort of thing however I can never see VSoH being more than a minor player in SOE's station lineup.

To save trawling through various threads on FoH, any chance of a link?  It's not imediately obvious fro teh thread titles I saw.  Ie there is no "Brad gets bewildred by the reaction to his game's meh graphics" thread.

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27044-why-all-nerd-rage-against-vanguard.html

Heh, 100+ pages of "discussion"...  There's a Brad response on p. 43 and the screenshots from other games start on p. 85 and 89.

After page 100 or so is when the LOTRO stuff really starts to take off.

This quote is almost siggable. If it made any sense out of context I'd do it.

Brad says:


It's painful to read his delusion about the (not so) over crowded areas...

Thats great.  Their biggest problems are that people can't make groups in a group centric game, that the game runs like crap, that PVP sucks and no one is playing.

So, in other words the whole thing is broken?

I must have cataracts or something because I've yet to see anything in a Vanguard screenshot that I thought was better than SWG or EQ2. (I would say WOW looks better than Vanguard too, but it's not a fair comparison.) And SWG/EQ2 I can run with the bells and whistles turned on and Vanguard wouldn't run acceptably with everything turned down to nothing.

This has been one of the big things I have just never understood about the Vanguard discussions. It looks like butt.

You forgot: the game looks like liquid monkey ass, the PvE content pas L40 is sparse (at best), there's pretty much no endgame raiding, and that Sigil seem to be 'fixing' the wrong problems.
No, it's worse than that - it's working as intended.

I have to agree.  Vanguard uses kind of a dull landscape palette which was something SWG also did, but I liked SWG's landscape art more.  EQ2 and WoW are brighter and more interesting to look at, overall.  LOTRO looks better than all of them, in my opinion.  Nearly everything runs better than Vanguard on high settings but even running it on the highest, I didn't find it particularly special looking.  I think Vanguard's character models and animations stink.  Not that it matters.  I don't really want to play any of the above named games any more.  I'm waiting for something else.  Holodecks, maybe.

It's the usual mismatch of tech and style. The power of the engine is irrelevant if the players are disinterested in the aesthetics.

Poking at DDO is about all he can do. No other high-profile MMO is below 150k (there's a few sub-<150k ones, but they're all niche. And he can't even poke at Eve because as a niche title it's growth pattern indicates even it will outpace VG).

The housing is cool, mostly because it's the first game since SWG that allows for house placement in the persistent world. Every other game (afaik) before and since only allow instantiated apartments (AO, EQ2 noob, CoH, etc), the buying of pre-placed houses (EQ2), or placing houses on pre-placed hooks or in dedicated zones (AC1, DAoC I think). So really, VG is still fairly unique in this regard, I think only the fourth game ever to allow houses to be placed anywhere in the persistent enviroment, among the ranks of UO, SB and SWG. I could be wrong though.

The no windows thing is a shame but I'm sure a nod to resource overhead on screen. Rendering all the internal customizations with everything outside could maybe require too much server work? Or maybe the architecture doesn't allow for it?

The previous page of this thread says VG housing can only be built on specific developer-defined plots, a la DAoC.

The previous page could be wrong ofc. I'm not crazy enough to buy this shit.

The housing is like DAoC in that it can only be built on predetermined housing plots.  The only difference being that in VG the plots exist in adventure zones.  It creates the illusion of being able to live wherever you wish, but doesn't actually allow for that.  Since housing plots are limited and have costs varying with exclusivity, it also creates yet another heirarchy that most achievers love. 

Wow, they reanimated Van Gogh so he could do interior design!

Bold move.

--GF

...what?

You have to learn how some completely foreign power makes bricks before you can even build a house?

How did any of the pre-existing architecture even go up if that was the case?

--GF

Each of the three continents have their own styles for everything craftable (weapons, armor, boats, houses, etc.) If you start on Thestra and want to make Qalian items, you have to go to Qalia and grind crafter faction through workorders before the Qalian recipes become available to you. This faction grind is completely unrelated to any racial faction grinding (i.e. killing mobs) that might be necessary. I haven't heard of any crafter having to do that though.

It. Is. Fucking. Retarded.

Yet, people are doing it and defending it. If Sigil wants to cockblock players from cross-continental recipes, I would have just made it a moneysink, e.g. pay 20g to join the Qalian crafter guild or something.

But that doesn't provide the cockblock to 'lessor players' that  hardcore tradeskillers (Yes they do exsist.) get their own e-peen all stiff about.   The same people defending it are the ones you would have found exploiting the SWG factory bug the first week or two, then applauding that it got patched-out when they were one of the only Grand Master Tailors on their server.

The combination of a shiznitz thread and this post made me remember that when he had 1337 posts a little while ago it got filtered into "leet" under his name, I assume this happens for everyone.  I just want to say that I think that is awesome.

While there's historical relevance for the cross-nation faction grind, it's really just more proof of the type of player VG was designed for.

And thank's for clarifying how houses are placed. So then the only difference is it can be placed in adventure zones.

Loving that. I have read a lot of "meh" about LotRO gameplay but those screens make me want to buy it. Almost.

I didn't believe there existed worse than the WoW or VN forums until I went to that FoH forum.  Oooof. 

LoTRO is what VG really should have been, except the latter started as an attempt to crib the "winning" strategy SOE was developing for EQ2... through payoffs from nVidiai :P

Intelligent design, obviously.  :rimshot:

I like how he puts all these gameplay elements in the list, then snuck in at the end is the minor fact that there are in fact no players to enjoy all the preceding.

While I'm not interested in playing Vanguard, the threads and discussions (and Brad's posts) provide an endless source of cheap entertainment. It's a slow-mo trainwreck in progress..

Last time I was there, EQ1 of all games, actually had an excellent system in place. WoW's is shit-tastic by comparison.

Yeah, I never understood why WoW, after stealing so much else from EQ, didn't just rip off their current LFG system wholesale.

Anyway - ETA on server mergers for Vanguard?

I wanted to do this since a couple of weeks. I stopped playing Vanguard. And I have to admit that I was wrong about lots of things.

So yes, I was wrong, you all (not you Geldon) were right and yeah I'll stay grounded for the rest of the week.

I think it would be too long to list them all and explain why Vanguard ended up boring me to death, especially because many of the reasons already came up on these boards million of times turned out to be true.
I just want to point out what really killed me: the world.
Again, I was wrong: this game is NOT the explorer heaven I thought and preached it was. Because yes, as many of you said back in the days, it looks too much of the same wherever you go. It's huge, and there are for sure Points of Interests, but what really lacks is a "change of pace". I mean, you know in other games when you are bored of a certain zone/theme and you decide to go elsewhere just to have a completely different colour palette, theme, mobs, atmosphere? This basically can't happen in Vanguard. If you are in Thestra, that is the largest continent and it is VERY large, you will be in Thestra for the rest of your life! It doesn't matter if you'll go to the elven city or the dwarf/human/whatever city... it'll be more of the same! Don't get me wrong, New Targonor has beautiful buildings and architecture and I still thinks it's a beautiful world after all, but it completely lacks variations.
The game has slow progression so you are forced to stay in a single place for a long time anyway, but as soon as you learn that in 10 or 20 levels it will be basically more of the same, than your will to live starts crumbling to pieces.

Hiding and going into dungeons is the only way to save yourself from the attack of the too-real world but of course you can't go in there unless you have a good group (crappy group means endless Corpse Runs and usually some delevelling is involved too), so you are stuck to live in the usual green/brown hills killing the same old mobs for days hoping that maybe one day they'll patch in I don't know what maybe an alien world with some different colour or theme.

But I already wrote too much, and I'll sum it up:

- The seamless world idea turned out to be bad to me. I enjoyed gazing to the horizon but in the end it's best to have more foggy shortsighted old kind of worlds and more different places to visit. And I mean really different. The EQ2, EQ1, WoW.. well.. every other game's way.

- The graphics are bad in a not-fascinating way. So after 6 weeks of playing you are not so curious anymore about what will come, because apparently nothing will come. Not in a human sized time-frame. Mobs are just awful, seriously awful. Some of them are uglier than EQ1 ones. It's just uncanny.

- The dungeons that should give that "different theme" feeling are just, in most cases, pretty ugly. I tried all the dungeon I could try hoping that the next one could refresh my will to play and expectations of good things to come, but it basically never happened. Dungeons are ugly. To understand what I am saying just consider Befallen in EQ1 and you'll have a dungeon that is 10 times better of any of the dungeons I visited in Vanguard in 6 weeks. Not to mention places like Unrest or Mistmoore, and I am talking about the original EQ, not EQ2 (that has incredibly good dungeons too, especially compared to VG ones). *sigh*

- It completely fails to recreate the EQ1 kind of magic in all aspects. I remember a Freeport where you could be slain by a NPC in an inn just because of some nasty ill faction stuff or just being the follower of the "wrong" god, or amazing "secret" places like the sewers with high level sunken corpses. Nothing like that is here apparently. I know it wasn't fun to be killed at level 5 in your city by a crazy NPC, but it made for a creepy gaming experience. So far, Vanguard couldn't surprise me save for a couple of starter quests (showing that they gave their best for the first introductory quests, and the rests is plain dull, and duller as you progress).

- The supposedly neat stuff like Diplomacy and Crafting is actually there, houses, boats.. it's all good, but it's not even remotely close to the "worldly" feeling of Ultima Online (an example that I guess will be fixed is the lack of a function to recall to your house. I am sure they'll add it later, but it's not in now) so part of their appeal is missing and the funnever really kicks in. Plus, if the world is boring you are not compelled to "live" in it.

My final note:

The game is good for a diku, and I am sure it will be even better in a couple of years thanks to improvements in all areas and especially addition of features on an already pretty solid base. But unless they put in some new ZONES with COMPLETELY DIFFERENT themes I doubt it'll be ever able to lure me back. I don't care how good are the special moves or combat animations in a MMO if it is unable to give me the illusion of visiting many different places or have me interested in exploring its dungeons.

I want to conclude with something I scavenged from my memory and my hard disk and I feel this is very important given that I am now convinced that it's the "seamless" world that killed it for me, especially thinking about all the goodness you can still have in zone-based games, even better when zones borders are of the soft kind like in WoW. It's a 2002 interview to Brad McQuaid (http://www.google.it/search?q=brad+mcquaid+criticized+about+zones+everquest+look&hl=it&start=20&sa=N) mostly about EverQuest 1 where he said something that makes me want to kill him with a 9-iron. It's 2002 so I guess the design documents for VG were already inked on paper and preproduction was supposedly already started:



WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU BRAD? ARE YOU DISCONNECTED FROM YOURSELF?! YOU TWO GO SEE A FUCKING DOCTOR, NOW!

But it's too late I guess. I am stuck with my mistakes and the time I wasted saying stupid good things about Vanguard, a game that, as for now, is about 5 times less interesting than its predecessor.
Once again I was wrong, you were right and I am sorry. Just thought it was fair to let you know about it.

WoW is seamless as well (for the non-instanced parts). They just took the time and had the art talent to make each area look different and they put in transitions from one "style" to the next so you don't get that abrupt scenery change like you do in some games with separate zones. In other words there's nothing about "seamlessness" that says you have to make everything look the same.

Seamless-world was a short-lived selling point. It just doesn't matter nearly as much as truly important things like core game play, appeal of the graphics/audio, social tools and so on. As such, it should never be used if the game can't also support those things. Very few have been able to combine seamless with the proper density of engaging content. Even WoW, which is technically seamless, very much is a zone-based experience by how the content is laid out, in the public and instantiated spaces.

Content is king. Zone it if you need to, make it seamless only if you can do it well.

Edit: Trippy said it better

Falconeer, I can't speak for anyone else here, but the only reason I ever came down on you for the VG fanboi stuff is because I knew where you'd eventually net out. Geldon will too, though he may not have the courage to come here and admit it like you have.

It's not that I know better or anything. It's that VG is not the sort of experience that can survive the veterans experience in the genre well. At best it's something experienced MMOs can accept and apologize to others for, sorta like early SWG. But someone who both has played a lot of these games, a lot of diku-based games, and who spends enough time in places like this talking about them can't help but be affected by what becomes obvious as fundamental flaws with an experience.

VG is broken for most people in enough ways to keep them from flocking to it. Maybe it'll be fixed in time, but it's not worth funding that advancement.

The funny thing is that WoW's landscape does abruptly change from one type of terrain to the other, but something about the "soft" message in your face saying you've just changed zones makes it OK.  In three years of playing, the abrupt transition has never been more than a minor curiousity for me.

BTW, I think Falconeer wins the thread for having the guts to come clean about his changing opinion of VG.

He used too many words. 

(http://mfrost.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/beeeeeagull_1.jpg)

would have sufficed.

Yeah, fair play to Falconeer for owning up to buying into the hype.
Meanwhile: http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=088&section=News

Lolz.

(http://www.clisham.com-a.googlepages.com/2003561830841215793_rs.jpg)

See.  Now I would have thought that the opposite was true.  Having a seamless world means that pretty much every corner, nook and cranny needs to have something interesting there.  In a zone based world you can do one major POI for a zone and move o as that's it's reason for being.  If the world is contiguous there then has to be continuous reasons to advance in any one direction.

Uhm yeah, but I used the term "soft" as I don't think (but I am not sure) you can look across the soft zone borders in WoW. Can you? From that point of view, I think there' s some kind of zoning involved, although managed 1000 better than the crappy VG one.. so I am not sure it can be called seamless technically. Yeah, there are no loading times but the zones are tightly separated.

This is somehow not true in Vanguard where adjacent zones are fully loaded to the point that you can see "inside" them even while staying on a different one (This is what allows to see 4 and more kilometers of horizon in every direction). Or let's just say that mobs can follow you in a different zone, and I am not sure if that can happen in WoW. Anyway just correct me if I am wrong.

But if I am wrong the whole thing is even worst! The "no loading at all" zones of WoW beats the "you can see for miles at 360 ° inside other zones while just standing in the one in the center cause they are preloaded, but unfortunately they will look almost the same as we don't know a way to load different assets without a loading screen, and still we have a 3 seconds loading hiccup when you cross the zoneline".

In fact, this is the thing that amazes me:

Game A (WoW) has a world that doesn't need zone-loading-pauses and it manages to look so widely different from place to place. It has the variety of the EQ1 zones without the loading. Impressive.

Game B (Vanguard) still make some kind of very quick load when you cross a zone border AND the zones all look the same BECAUSE of it being seamless? What's even more scarier is that Brad said something on the FoH boards about the fact that PS2 games can access the dvd in a way that's not doable for windows/PCs, and this is way you can't have the same kind of variety of a certain game he was talking about. Still, what's with WoW then? Did I played it on the PS2 and didn't notice?
Just top class programmers vs. c-grade ones? Just different poly counts? What's Sigili excuse for that?

And what's with the things he said in 2002 and I quoted? Did he thought just a month after that interview that the technology needed (and he said was missing at the time) to add variety without zoning was suddenly available?! If so, then why did he sell it to Blizzard?

Yea Vanguard sucks.  Now on to more important things....

Oban, have you found anything that is close to Oban that doesn't cost elevenitybillion dollars?  Dalwhinnie is the norm around here but every once in awhile Oban surfaces.

I think he meant "requires" as in: "if you go seamless you can't technically do all that stuff (cause there's no way to load it all and blah blah as he said elsewhere), so we went the zone way as we liked more details, texture variation, and variety of objects and other points of interest...". At least this is how I read it.

I don't know if mobs in WoW cross zone lines, because in most cases the mobs are far away from the zoneline, and even their aggro range doesn't extend into the next zone...  you try to pull one and it will de-aggro long before you reach the zone line.  The only place to check would probably be the area where Dalaran is, trying to pull stuff into the mountains.  Oh, actually, nevermind, I remember pulling NPC's from the Plaguelands across the bridge right up to the Stratholme gates, and you get the zonechange message before you reach the gates.

As far as what happened with Vanguard, my theory is that not all devs are equal, and you judge who's good and who's "c grade" by the products, just like with any other industry, sorry.  Although it's possible that a dev team can shine at some aspect of a game and utterly suck at others (example:  CCP, nice graphics for the time when they released EVE, horrible UI and horrible bugfixing methods).

A lot of WoW's zone bondaries are carefully managed, especially when going into old world cities (the statue-lined walk into Stormwind, the corridors into Org & IF, the lifts to UC & TB, the boat+teleport to Darnassus). Even some zone changes are similar to this (i.e. any of them with narrow, winding canyons or tunnels seperating the zones).

However, there are also a bunch of zones where the 'zone boundary' is fairly wide open - Goldshire/Duskwood/Westfall are all 'clear' boundaries, as is Durotar/The Barrens and a quite a few more.

As has been mentioned the seamlessness of WoW is very controlled. Draw-distances in WoW are small enough you usually can't see into the next zone anyway.  The biggest exception to this, however, is the zoneline between Elwynn Forest and Duskwood.  If I remember, tonight I'll go there with the wife and see if we can see each other on the opposite bank.

Also, mobs CAN and do chase you across zone lines, if you try for it.  As ajax mentioned, they're usually far enough from the entrance that you don't see them.. BUT there have been many famous occasions where Raid-Level bosses were taken from high-level zones into newbie zones for the mass carnage 'fun' to be had.

Mobs can cross zone lines, and you can see across them.  They're not really "zone lines" at all, except to your map.

Well, so as I said it's even worst.

I'll quote him once again:


And still he made his new game seamless.
And it even managed to do it as badly as he said it could be.
He basically said: "I don't like to go from New York to Boston delivering gremlins in a rainy day with a bicycle, as I'd get wet and the gremlins would multiply and things would get nasty, no... I'd take my armored van, so I'll stay dry and should the gremlins decide to do anything funky they'd stay locked in. I used the van already in the past and it went very well, while the bicycle would be a shot in the foot...", and still on delivery day he went in the garage looking for the bicycle.
The two battling guys in Brad's head are funny.

Oh, and on top of that, couple of years later, Blizzard managed to do the Great New York - Boston Gremlin Delivery just by attaching a large umbrella over the bicycle. And poor Brad thought it was impossible. Duh...

IIRC, the in-game draw distance control slider for WoW is actually limited & controlled by a config file...so if your computer is powerful enough, you could set the max draw distance to, say, 400% of the normal limit via editing that file.

If one were so inclined.

This has got to be the most bizzare analogy I've ever read.

BTW, AC1 did seamless world with distinctive areas in 1999.

I initially thought that being Scottish would help me here, but I still have no idea what you're on about Dalwhinnie for.

Edit:  Ooooohhh, I get it.

If the twenty year old is too expensive in your area, try the fourteen year old.

Also, try to hit a duty free store.  LHR & CDG usually have good prices.

You can see each other across the river.  Same for places like Loch Modan to the Wetlands (waterfall) or Felwood/Ashenvale/Azshara

There are quest mobs in the Blasted Lands, that once they get to a certain amount of health, stop taking damage.  You can drag those from the Blasted Lands, all the way to Stormwind, or if you're really motivated, Ironforge.  Droves of guards and players will beat on them till a GM shows up and despawns it.

The videos I remember, were players dragging Kazzak to Lakeshire or Goldshire.  He becomes essentially unkillable because he gains health, everytime a player dies near him (maybe NPCs too).  With all the newbies around, its crazy amounts of healing.

I clicked the "last post" link and read backwards to this, and yeah... I didn't know wtf you were going on about but it sounded about as wrong as you can get.

 :?

Especially since he has Brad taking the gremlins out on a rainy DAY, in which case they'll all melt into slop and die.

 :-D

/nitpick

I agree, no one should ever drink a single-malt Scotch that is less than eighteen years old.

I love the fact that it took me literally 3 hours of playing Vanguard to come to the same conclusions. Experience pays off, I guess. Don't look at all your VG time spent as wasted. You've learned some valuable criticism skills, and the next time you approach a burning paper bag on your porch you'll at least have a strategy.

Pfft. That was just to see if you were paying enough attention. (fuck Brad and stupid deliveries he can't even do right)

Honestly, I had great fun for 3 weeks. Seriously.
Too bad the other 3 weeks were painful. I guess there's something wrong with your game when people are supposed to start paying for AFTER 4 weeks, but they get bored to death in a time frame between 2 seconds and 20 days.

You're going to break your arm patting yourself on the back.  

I saw many flaws in VG as well, but I still spent about 3 weeks taking a look at a larger amount of content.  I could see the shortcomings of the game immediately, but sometimes a study can give you more detailed insight into things.  I can see what Brad was "trying" to do more clearly after the time spent.  He just hasn't quite figured out the implementation end of game making.  I never enjoyed the game for the reasons that they intended people to enjoy it, yet still managed to appreciate aspects of it.  If that even makes any sense.

Eerie.

L-C and I were telling you it was a shitbird as well, Nebu.

What amazing discoveries did you find beyond the 3 hour point? I don't need to see the end game in VG to know that it's a diseased vagina.

That is a good way to describe it. I still have a desire to log in and check things out, but when I think about what I would do in the game the desire fades.  I still cannot say for sure that my short fascination with the game came from the game or just playing a caster for the first time ever in an MMOG.

Now that the file is archived, let's all make peace and found a Bat Country Motor Club in Test Drive Unlimited. It's already out in Europe and apparently will be out in North America in about 4 days.
Oh, you'll need a steering wheel to fully enjoy it, but it's cheaper than the computer Brad wants you to buy.

I know.  I'm a failure at life because I wanted to see for myself.  The only way I was ever going to get an objective view of the game was to pay my $50 and play.  Not to disappoint you, but I got my $50 out of it.  

Vanguard was an interesting experience and I would have never known had I not given it an open-minded look.  It started out as a mindless mmog and turned into an academic study of sorts.  I've been around computer gaming since there was a gaming industry to be around (at least a commercialized one).  I enjoy seeing the developments over time and as an ex-developer of MUDs, I enjoy taking an academic approach to each new mmog that comes out.  I don't expect you to understand nor appreciate that.  Had I been in the beta, I could have done the same for free.  I don't feel that my time was wasted.  How you feel is entirely up to you.  You can save your "I told you so's", though.

Draw distance is probably an issue.

If you have a seamless world and a very large draw distance it does limit texture variety. But even then you should be able to use low-res textures or even flat-shaded polys for stuff far away.

A seamless world probably means that the borders between areas can't very lush as you need two sets of graphics side by side. But in the middle of an area that isn't true. There is no reason you can't have a huge desert followed by a jungle followed by a swamp. It is only an issue when you can see both areas at once.

Vanguard is apparently a large world but there is nothing to do in it and it doesn't look interesting.
---

Anyway I predicted this years ago. Brad is simply not that competent. It isn't any surprise at all that VG sucked. Some people have real talent and some people get lucky once. Brad obviously was the latter.

No one should ever be blamed for trying a game nobody else liked, as long as that person doesn't continually try and convert people to their thinking before they themselves have had time to digest, and from a comparable level of experience.

My wife loved the Happy Cat shot :)

I agree.  I have tried all sorts of goofy stuff.  Some of it free, some of it I paid for.  Sure, most of it is crap but some things kept me amused for a while.  I don't consider that to be a waste of money.  Look at Horizons.  I played that nightmare for several months even after being in the beta.  That's probably why I didn't buy Vanguard's promises of a better game at release.  I don't seriously mock anyone for enjoying things I don't enjoy, either.  I mean, look at all the people here who play poker.  I bet there's some who like to fish, too.  Not all of them are even dumbasses!

(I don't know what a Happy Cat shot is.   :oops:)

Previous page, the screenshot with the cat... (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9635.msg283839#msg283839)

I have two happy cat shirts.

Thanks!   :-)  I have a cruddy memory.

Aww, good on you Falc.

Though you could have saved yourself a lot of time just by saying:  :sad_panda:

hey the game might not be worth a shit but the forums are priceless

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27044-why-all-nerd-rage-against-vanguard-131.html#post691941

Read some of the posts by Utnayan, seems a bit  a lot on the tinfoil hat paranoid side to me but wtf it's entertainment

By the way Falconeer my software shelf is lined with 50 dollar turds so never feel like you're the only one, Like Signe I even gave Horizons  3 months to strighten out,  just knowing it would turn out to be a good game given enough time.

While looking for an old Nero disc I happened across my DX2 box, with the CDs still inside. They are pristine.

I don't know what to do with them. I thought I had trashed them years ago out of spite.

Of course you can but the draw distances aren't like what they are in Vanguard.

I think you can even see NPCs and PCs further in WoW than VG... you could see the mountain 10km away, but not the bandits 100m away.

WoW is funny about when it draws spawn. Mount speed, connection quality, and video settings also affect this. I've sometimes been attacked by stuff who's shadows I haven't even seen put into the graphics yet (generally the first telltale sign of a spawn, when people start spamming the TAB key :) ).

VG didn't seem much different. That it could draw stuff further away, wonderful. That you could go there, same as WoW (unless you were in an outdoor instance where the distance was just a backdrop). It's of third order of importance after the quality of game play and the dynamics of the interactive content, and certainly not something to be used as an excuse to drive up minimum spec or justify lower sales.

Looks like a Dev is getting into trouble based on private messages to a player and what that player has done with that information.   On the FOH boards:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard? F I R E S    O F    H E A V E N
Today, 02:40 PM - by Nino 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Utnayan 
Grand Standing.


Since I wrote that snippet, allow me to respond.

That partial list, does not show, "What's missing from Vanguard". I was asked privately to identify where a higher level player, could adventure so I rattled off, as best I could, the areas that were currently AVAILABLE, or COMING in the near future. That message was written on Feb 25, one month from today.

I will update the list, which is not by any means comprehensive:

Thestra
Vol Tuniel - Open at Launch
Thelaseen - Lair of the Drake Riders - Open at Launch
Dargun's Tomb - Open at Launch
Old Targonor - needs tweaks - Open at Launch, tweaks completed on 2/27
Greystone - soon - Open as of mid March - and yes it is GREYSTONE with an 'E'
Beranid Downs - in progress, soon - The final parts get completed by this Friday and pushed the following week
Southwatch - in testing now, coming next week - Open since early March
Gorgoluk - huge Sebilis style dungeon in the deadland swamps; next on schedule for the team finishing SouthwatchWrapping up now, will be completed by this Friday and pushed the following week
Ancient Port Warehouse - Art is almost complete and getting patched in next Wed; content is a few weeks away.This MAY get postponed. It is level 50+; maybe mid April
Basically the terrain and content on western thestra is getting a huge facelift - Done and in since early March

Qalia
Xennumet - top left corner of Qalia is almost done; massive underwater and dungeon realm. - Done and in since mid March
Citadel of the Vanquished - in progress along with the arena that ties content in from all over the world; due in a week or so. - The arena has been in since early March, the Citadel is complete and opens next week
Petra - in progress; stone spires and caves on western qalia, inland a bit, goes live next wed. - Open since early March
Ruined Mordebi Empire - the huge egyptian section on western qalia is next for the team finishing Petra; should be a few weeks though, but has one of the coolest dungeons we have in the Nusibe Necropolis.Open since mid March
City of Brass - I ran through this place on Friday and it should be going live in the next week or so. EQ style outdoor adventure area with Djinn, and Sand Giants; there is also an alternate universe section but not sure if this is opening at the same time.This is called Rahz Inkur, and has been open since early March; the 'alternate' part has been locked.


Again, this was to answer the question, "Where can I go post lvl 35?" There have been, and there are now, plenty of areas, with even more coming. I am sorry that not everything on this list is complete. However, there is nothing stopping anyone from playing the game and having many different places to go.

Now, threatening to post someone's private message is pathetic enough, but promising not to do so, lie about it, and then do it anyway paints a sad picture. The person I sent that to plays the game and has been active in identifying issues and letting me know. So, I let him know in confidence what was 'likely' coming down the pipe and when. It certainly wasn't meant for public viewing and was not intended to outline a schedule that we were absolutely going to adhere to.

And yes, mid April. It has been said on numerous occasions by numerous people that we launched early. This isn't some amazing new revelation. There is no secret agenda.

What should really trouble some people, is the fact that I have done more than anyone to try and be as upfront as possible. I've 'fought the system' to the point where I've had my job threatened on more than one occasion. But that is hardly the point right? It isn't about formulating change, it is ONLY about defaming, insulting, and grandstanding. This becomes more and more transparent.

I know people would love to emulate Furor, but they all lack the most BASIC element of what made his 'rants' pertinent. Furor PLAYED the game and sought improvement. His goal, in the end, was to make the game better, the company stronger, and by proxy advance the genre. Today's pathetic proteges exist only to tear down, admonish, and insult. That is not the legacy of this board. Today's dissenters are a shallow reflection of what this board used to be.

I've been strongly encouraged to stop posting here and will likely get lectured or have disciplinary action taken against me on Monday for this. Does this mean you win? Congratulations.
__________________
Nino McHammer
Fires of Heaven
Veeshan 
 

Oops.

Its pretty sad that Nino is going to get his arse kicked over being open with the public - his commentary on VG from the inside has been very interesting, the fact that someone chose to betray his trust is unfortunately pretty standard practice.  I guess it means even less Dev-public communication, and more 'community managers'

I wonder if this situation would have happened if they had official forums.

So essentially, only Brad is allowed to walk around chewing his foot?   :roll:

About par for the course for Sigil/Verant - threaten the person generating half-decent PR but let Brad keep posting his rambling, borderline delusional passive-aggressive novellas.

Maybe Nino should ask his guildmate if there's any jobs going in Irvine.

That thread was epic.  I'm sad it's over.  I think I'll go bump our current SWG thread.

Developers should never be allowed to talk to players like that.  It always ends poorly.

AKA "This is why we can't have nice things" :D

I hate to be critical, but the whole Vanguard communications effort thus far has seemed to be something of a train wreck.  Where is their Community Relations person? 

The Executive Producer using a guild forum as a primary communication outlet?  A developer who also belongs to that guild giving out game-specific information in private messages?

The whole thing seems rather "old school".  And by "old school" I mean "bad".  This type of stuff needs to be reigned in and they need to let their CM do his/her job.

Some of us thought it was cool that Sigil was given so much independence when they moved from MS to Sony. Boy have I done a 180 on that.

I believe that Smedley is sitting quietly in a corner, feeding Brad more and more rope while keeping SOE officially uninvolved except for publisher/server host.

Who knows - maybe the current EQ2 Live Team could turn VG around as well?

Grandstanding indeed.  I think grandstanding pretty much sums up the whole 'mmo community thing' perfectly.  Everyone wants to be 'LtM'. Everyone wants to have some dev somewhere reply to one of their posts.  Everyone wants to stand up on their soapbox and scream at the top of their lungs. 

The whole "Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard? " thread is pure entertainment, yet like a million other threads  throughout the mmoverse, it serves no  purpose.  The number of people that actually post in these threads is so statistically  miniscule when you compare to the number of people that play, why  attune your ear to this drivel and give it credence by having your comments linked to various other sites like this one?    It always amazes me why devs would care to get down in the muck there and reply to these sad, basement dwelling individuals with ulimitied time on their hands, yet Brad and gang have been quite willing to continually be slapped around by them  looking absolutely foolish.

According to Brad, Sigil didn't have control over the release of their game,  and it seems they don't have any control over the message  they are sending to current and potential subscribers.

It is bad enough that Brad keeps flip flopping on design which contributes to this, but there is so much misinformation out there in the community  (like the 40 gig install size) that potential subscribers have no idea what kind of game to expect and current and former subscribers have no clear idea where the game is going. 

Official, heavily moderated forums would be a start. Aw hell, just shitcan the whole thing.

He's doing it because appearances must be upheld.  If he gives the slightest impression of giving up, funding will stop.  If he admits that he's not a genius, the best of the best, he'll never get another cent of funding, for any possible future projects.  The more everyone says that VG sucks, the more he has to boast and claim otherwise, and the more he has to lay the blame on someone else.

All the verbiage isn't for our, or his game's fans', benefit, it's for his own personal future.

Official boards certainly help, but I don't think they are the root cause for the communication errors going on here. Not having official boards is making it worse though.

If you're not going to have official boards, then you need a very, very strong communication strategy. Something that takes into account the fact that your employees are on multiple forums for which you have little to no control over. And to have that strategy, you need a very strong Community Representative. Mythic always did just fine without official boards - but that's because Sanya runs a tight ship. Their entire communication strategy supported the lack of official boards and it was obvious that her developers bought into what she was trying to do.

When you don't have that, what you get is what we see here. A very ad hoc, reactive environment where mistakes are made that simply shouldn't be happening. It's a commonly known fact in Community Relations that you never send private messages to a player if that information contains stuff you don't want to be public. In fact, you should avoid PMs with players as much as possible. You also can't send a list of upcoming work and not expect it to be taken as a schedule.

It's not like any of this is new and it's disappointing to see it happen.

Weird.  I had no idea that tongue wrestling with geeks on a board not even affiliated with the game was a requirement to keep one's job.  Does the 'Fires of Heaven' guild have that much sway on the mmo community?  Do these losers really have that much power that the money is keeping track of what is said and who replies(scary if true)?  I've been playing mmo's for years and have only heard the FOH name in passing.

Christ,  I mean one guy's forum handle is 'FuckYou '.

A good point, if FOH was the only board where Brad was pulling these spin stunts.
But he did it on the official Vanguard SOH forums, when they still existed.
He also did it in various interviews that I've read.
Can't say if he's spewed on any other forums, but the trend is clear.

Not that I think it will make any difference anyway. We've now seen what happens when Brad is left to head up an MMOG development effort without any adult supervision. The VCdiots for his next game will have to have been paying exactly zero attention to the train wreck that is the past 12 months of Vanguard development and release.

Heh, thanks for clearing that up.  Personally I try ignore all the hype and/or negativitey on game specific forums except when there's entertainment value (like in the FOH instance).

I'm suprised that more mmo companies haven't made more of a push to collect feedback via other means.  Some have exit interviews, but by then it's too late or  the occasional focus group (but then you have small sample unrepresentative of your customer base).  There are tons of ways to gather data and analyze it that   are more meaniful and efficient  that listening to the vocal few on your average mmo forum.

[EDIT]  Given the amount of times Sigil has raised/nerfed/raised/raised/nerfed experience (as only one of many examples)  it kind of looks like they listen to who yells the loudest on any given day.

For the same reason Kunark got tuned for the most vocal, hardcore minority, the same reason Rogues went broken for a year in EQ, the same reason alchemy was "working as intended" for so long in EQ1. Because it's a competition, an ego dick-measuring contest with the loudmouth hardcore people like Furor and everyone else on the FOH boards. Brad has always tried to compete with this sack of mouthbreathers.

These are also the only people who will treat him like the rockstar he thinks he deserves to be.

Thanks for the little bit of history. Puts a lot of things in perspective.

Well we do. I think there is a bit of a misconception that all we do is listen to message boards when we take feedback because that's where you see us directly reacting to the feedback. At Turbine we used the boards, surveys, e-mail focus groups, live gameplay focus groups, market research studies, and a bunch of other things including of course the developer's own knowledge. The key though is you have to do all of this stuff early enough and often enough to actually digest and use the feedback. You can't just have a focus group 3-4 weeks before the new design goes live or just do one survey and not do any follow-ups, and expect the feedback to be useful. Sadly, I see that too often.

I have been an SOE customer since 1999. My email has not changed. I have never received anything but promotional emails from them.

I have. The two survey's I filled out for SOE had one thing in common: They were designed to elicit a certain response -- they were biased, so to speak. They were very obviously designed to get numbers that would allow someone to show someone else that he/she was right.

I never saw one that actually seemed to be after information.

Do they even have a CM?

I re-rolled a human Psionicist this weekend. He is level 6 after about 2 hours. My Station Pass ends 4/1. Some tick keeps me wanting to log into VG every now and then. Bouncing between EQ2 and VG just makes VG's world look like an ass omelet, but I like having something different to do.

I've been paying for EQ for eight years and the only survey I remember taking was related to how EQ2 was to be sold (to DVD or not to DVD). I think there was another minor survey related to the test server but that's about it.

Well their CM was Cindy Bowens, but she left nearly a year ago. After that Nick Parkinson took the reins. Unfortunately despite having previously been an admin at the Safehouse, his apparent success as a CM is borderline catastrophic. Management and marketing, along with issues with SOE have doomed that community IMO. With that, it's basically running on itself atm. The community is the one manning the community with a few vocal developers striving to bring a point across in the absence of any real voice.

Strange, for a CM, I've never heard anyone link to a post by him.  That doesn't bode well for his job security, methinks.

--
Alkiera

His job security is his surname.
As in "Son of the late Keith..." :roll:

I remember that one now that you mentioned it.

I was getting surveys pretty regularly when I was playing EQ.  They would pop up between log in and character selection.  I remember them being frequent enough to be annoying.

Actually, I feel that is the very best way to do a survey. No message board drama, no players who aren't playing. Just the folks logging in, one survey per account. Even though that might give a slight edge to the multiboxers and folks with 6 max-level accounts...bah. MMO....it's fucked up. I once wanted to work in the industry...until I began reading LtM back in 99 or whenever....anyone working in MMO is nucking futz, man. Seek help.

Fixed; gamemarketmetrics.com

*scratches Sky off his "Community Managers" list for that powerball-win project*  :-P :-D

I've long been a proponent of ingame-only polls, or at least polls relegated to ingame-only when they talk about specific game things. General community-management stuff can be public and whatever, but the only people affecting the game itself should be those booting the stupid thing up periodically.

One vote per account per month, server-side. It'll certainly be a lot more accurate than the forums. And if you do one question per week in a dialog box, with 4-option answers and a 256-character comment field, you could probably keep it from being intrusive.

It's just hard. As far as I know, the only time tools like that are built into games is in beta. After that they get turned off. This I never quite understood. How do you so separate the very person you want the MOST data on from opinion-collecting tools? This always felt more procedural ("because Live is different from Beta/dev") than justifiable.

Actually the current CM is an individual who goes by the name Elrar. Nick Parkinson is now a producer. :)

Elrar has about as much community management experiance as I do, only less. He used to be a volunteer on a (mine) Vanguard fansite some years ago and then was hired on as a forum moderator. But this isn't Elrar's fault. After CB left Sigil, a lot of plans were left to rot. The resistance from one or two key mangement and some folks from SOE ensured that some of the best laid plans never came true. In absense of a strong CM, the community begins to flounder. Meanwhile, the game launches early. The Community is left without any clear community management. Any messaging from Sigil is lost in the haze of message board posts. Nino, who was orginally the sound guy for the game, steps up and puts his arse on the line, picking up where Sigil and SOE dropped the ball. He puts his arse on the line, trying to bring the message out to the community. Unfortunately he violates some of the very first rules of community management. Gets his butt handed to him, due to CM rookie moves.

Ultimately the game is solid at it's core. Just needs more development time. It's going to mature probably a lot like AO did.

FIFY

What?
The CM is a guy who was a volunteer on your Vanguard fansite until a year ago?
WTF?! Was he especially good, or he just lived in Austin?

Note, some YEARS ago, more than 2, less than 3. Was he especially good? Not particularly, but he was a good guy. Honestly though he's a smart guy, but smart guys with little experiance don't do well in situations where there are folks working agianst you to push their own community agenda. Then of course you're working with SOE, who already pushed the game out the door for money reasons. You can better belive they're breathing hard on the CM, to do things their way in order to bring the community back in line. Honestly I feel bad for the guy. He needs a lot more support, a lot more resources.

What would you have them do? Hemmorage money for another year for Le Art?

People make it sound like SOE pushed the game out early. The fact is they pushed it out on or after when it was supposed to be done, and it is clear to everyone that even 6 more months would not have made a big dfference. When you rely on a publisher for funding those are the risks. MS dumped Vanguard entirely! SOE had no obligation to pick it up at all, let alone continue funding it for a number of years.

As far as community agenda goes - what they hell *IS* their community agenda? Can anyone explain that? No official communication at all? Why even have a CM guy? Anyway it does suck to be a CM guy because community problems stem directly from game problems and all the crap Brad has spewed over the years. They made a game for people who see tolerating bugs, grinding and boredom as a badge of honor, then act surprised when the game isn't very popular and people badmouth it - lol.

The community is only as toxic as the game - or put another way the community is very fitting.

The only reasons VG won't go down as a SWG-sized clusterfuck is because most smart people knew it was going to suck years ago, and because SWG at least did some interesting things. VG is predictable in both what it delivered and how badly it delivered it.

That's so funny, a community manager nobody ever heard about. Together with a lack of official boards, thats the worst communication I've ever seen. The unofficial boards are either little used, impossible to use - or totally ignored. And the most dev response is actually on the FOH boards - which are not even an official fansite.
DAoC is the only game I remember not having their own boards, but they did very well with the semi-official vault forums and  a great CM.

On the plus side, there's actually a bunch of devs that are much more responsive then I'm used to from other games, just check the silkyvenom dev tracker. But seeing them bluster around just shows how unprofessional the whole game is managed.
Some highlights:
I just itemized the only lvl 50+ zone on my spare time - but don't ask my about the npc's immunities in this zone, not my job. I just added this quest, the reward sucks right now but thats just temporary. This quest is working right. Oh, its not. Should be fixed soon - but I dont know if this patch or next. Oh, I accidently removed the graphics for all your weapons, should be fixed next week.

Wasn't a CM's job as well to stop the devs from talking to much ? Guess he's not doing that either ...

Ya know, I keep hearing it was pushed out "for money reasons" in a number of places. But given everything about it (lack of readiness, lack of community management, BC launch, January altogether), at this point I side with the folks that think VG could have launched at any point and done no better nor worse.

Figure they're not going to sell a lot of boxes in general (hardcore, old-school, quality, high-barrier, too many forward-looking games coming this year). So maybe they calculated out and realized that far and away most of their accounts were going to come Station Pass anyway. Under that scenario, it actually doesn't matter when they launch, whether January-WoW/BC, April-LoTRO, Summer-AoC/PoTBS because the people coming are already in the system.

Nothing new here of course.

Oh look another idiotic "I FIXED YOUR POST FOR YOU ME SO FUNNY"

It looked for a short while yesterday that SOE had opened official Vanguard forums by porting the old beta forums into the SOE framework, but today the only topics available are tech help related.

My new Psi is level 8 now. I saw two new areas last night, both meant for small groups (3dot mobs were rare.) Both were around the Tursh (Thestran human) newbie area.  The first, Rindol Storehouse, was just awful looking. I play on low settings but this "zone" looked about the same as something from launchday EQ1. Yes, it is a just food storehouse filled with angry brownie mobs but still. Later I went through the teleporter in Riftseeker's Torrent and saw the kind of area one expected - detailed and interesting, if a bit linear.

Just more anecdotes about the un-polish. I do find the Psi significantly different from my druid, though both are the same archetype.

If ever a game needed a communications upgrade, this it the one.  It was clear by launch that due to the state of the game the affilate program was not going to work, too much bad news to manage.  DAOC was able to pull it off because it came very close to delivering a solid/complete product *and* had a strong community relations team,  VGSOH has neither of those factors.

I am going to install this game tonight and play it for a bit tonight/tomorrow.  :)

 :sad_panda:

You've got low standards, mang.

1) Nice picture.
2) Why is your name pink?
3) Writing this post was more fun than playing Vanguard.

"The community is only as toxic as the game - or put another way the community is very fitting."

I usually agree with much of what you post, but, I have to disagree with this Margalis.

Community is a function of the values embedded into the community at the start, theres a huge difference between people who value their community (customers) as collaborative partners and those who do not, or rather those who view their community as an income stream to be exploited for maximized profit.

Therefore if the organization takes a broadcaster model:
WE are the GAME COMPANY, and the ALMIGHTY developers, and YOU are dumbass gamers who PAY US for the PRIVLEDGE of PLAYING OUR game. WE will tell you what WILL and WONT  happen in OUR Game.

This is much much different than:

WE value your input as our customers, as co-owners of this community and hope you will collaborate with us to make the product better by providing us with constructive input, which we will vet against our organizational goals, we will be transparent about our decision making process so you know why we do or do not adopt new features.

There is an entirely different tone and tenor to the latter. The former sets an adversarial hierarchical structure to community relations, with no opprotunity for transparency, the latter co-ops the population and brings them into the collaborative process. Big difference, and different eventual outcomes.

One is a monologue one is a dialogue

I think this is a great point DataGod, yet another point missed by the old-school mentality from the days of Whineplay.

See, I favor this philosophy. No matter how much people bitched about the "Go To Jail" space on the monopoly board, it was never changed.

Game designers design games. Players play games. MMO has created a niche of amateur wanna-be designers who should probably shut the fuck up or get a job in the industry.

Community relations is a waste of money. Want to know what new changes are coming? Read the news on the website. Want to report a problem? Make a bug report. Then shut the fuck up and play the game. I was thinking about this in the LotRO thread where Nyght said something about GMs being swamped with support calls. I think I've made a single support call once, ever, back in UO when some guy was looting my house through the wall. That's it. Why the hell are so many people swamping the GMs? Wasteful and makes people feel like they are entitled to personal interaction with the game company.

Who do you think updates that website? ;)

Community Relations isn't just about posting on message boards. In fact, I've argued it's only about 25% of the job.

Edit: and I agree you should never let your community dictate your designs and if you disagree with the playerbase it's perfectly okay to say "no, we don't agree". But to say its not important to solicit ongoing customer feedback is setting yourself up for trouble - in any industry.

If your game is solid state (ala Monopoly), you don't need to leverage your community. But MMOs rules change all the time because of your players. Consider the players the game pawns, sometimes controlling themselves. If you dictate to them everything, you end up with a contrived experience that allows for no user creativity, like EQ2 at launch, and you drive them away.

You can't just talk to them in one way though. You need a talented staff to know what information should be elevated to development and what should simply be "managed" :)

I admit I did consider EQ2 while I was writing that, but I left it off because it's the only example I can think of where a game improved over time due to community feedback, and I'd lay more credit to the excellent team working on it.

And totally wtfpwned by Cal. Ok, running official forums is a waste, and having an ingame forum (GM paging) for bitching, RTFM moments, and calling mom on people is On Notice.

If the developers want to establish that attitude, then fine, I'll play the game, but I won't feel the least bit enticed to improve the game in any way (for example, reporting bugs, reporting exploits, reporting macro players).  After all, I'm completely disconnected from the "development" process and they've made it clear that they want me to only pay and play.


I've just quit EVE over a couple bugs.  I just had enough of that piece of shit game, and quit.  The bugs were minor, and I guess CCP (correctly) decided to indefinitely postpone fixing them, because there was always a more important bug requiring their attention.  For 3 years.

The whining on the forums provides (a little) feedback about which "minor" features are more important to the players than one would think.  Without some sort of feedback like that, the option is "shut the fuck up, and play the game or quit."  Smaller playerbase.  Actually, it's probably a business question:  what percentage of your profit is eaten by maintaining boards and community relations people, vs. what percentage of your playerbase you'll theoretically lose if you don't have said features.

EQ1 was the same thing.  Players provided feedback that the developers used to help figure things out.  A post was made over at FOH yesterday it was a discussion from a EQ1 dev who outlined how valuable the players insight into the game really was.  Much of the balancing in EQ1 was done by "feel" for many reasons.  One being the teams work schedule, players soon played more and knew how things felt and worked better than the designers.

At the risk of invoking a bunch of Trammel hate, I can name a ton of stuff that was improved or added to UO because of player feedback. Runebooks, Potion Kegs, House lockdown system, most of the veteran rewards and holiday gifts, etc. And that's just off the top of my head.

At the end of the day it's the development team's job to improve the game as a whole. But the players can certainly play a vital role in helping to improve the aspects of the game they care about if the team does a good job sifting through the feedback. The trick is to have people who know how to push through the noise to get to the signal - because the signal, once you find it, is invaluable. The problem occurs when teams don't do that and start listening to the noise or ignore everything all together. Niether one of those things is good for the community or the game.

Edit: oh and Sky, I'm with you on the in-game help button. It's like giving people a button on their remote control that summons someone from the cable company so they can tell them they don't like the show they are watching. I don't have the answer, and I am a huge proponent of providing quality support for players, but I've never liked the in-game support model.

BTW, Even Monopoly changed, the original game didn't include pieces for players to use, they were instructed to use common household objects. 

After little jimmy's  mom complained how difficult it was to play using marbles they decided to include pieces.

Oh well, that explains it. Fucking Trammlite Carebear Monopoly Moms.

 :-D

The most amusing part is that brad seems to believe the "viral marketing" effects of him pontificating, and getting shot down, on message boards will work in the games favor. I'm not sure a skilled CM could really do much more, other than damage control and confirm that the game really doesn't have any idea of what it wants to grow up to be. The really scary thing is that even if the game were up to launch spec, lands fully populated, bugs removed and performance decent, it would still be a pretty boring game. A random collection of gameplay mechanics with the fun to be patched in later.

The bottom line is they are incompetent. Incompetent programmers, incompetent designers, incompetent communicators, incompetent artists.

It's like people with the proficiency of the SWG team tried to make a really boring game - VG is the result. A bad idea done badly.

Thanks for the sig :)

I thought it was spelled Callandryl.  as in 1 l.  Hrmph.

Also, my desire to try out VG ran out this morning; I estimate it was sometime between when I took a shit and when I shaved.  Maybe around the time I wiped my ass?

I said /improved/. I feel EQ1 got shittier as time went on and they developed for the hardcore. EQ2 has developed for the hardcore /and/ casuals.
Trammel! Seriously, can't be discussed without saying it. It began the downward slide that led to ninjas, itemization and all the garbage UO devolved into. While some improvements were made, the overall game suffered.
So if you don't get a little pat on the head, it's not worth your time? Your bug reports are still valid and improve your own gaming experience. Your face will sure be spited once you lop off your nose.

I'm not sure where you get the idea developers would be 'establishing' that attitude. That's been the dominant attitude in game development going back to chess. Maybe in your playground games where you make up rules on the fly, but in professional game development, the amount of player feedback engendered by mmo is unprecedented.

Back to VG, recall to house plot was patched in yesterday. If you buy a plot, the ability appears in your General Abilities tab. You do not need ot have a house built to use it. It is on a separate 1 hour timer from the recall to bind ability (1 hour timer) which is on a separate timer from the evac spells Arcane casters get.

On the adventuring front, last night my 9 psionicist (damage+CC) grouped with a 11 pally and a 11 ranger. We fought level 9-11 mobs in Riftseeker's Torrent. We took down a few 11**** mobs. I was impressed how well we did without a healer although we could not have beaten the 4-dots without the pally who kept himself healed in battle which generated enough aggro for me to mana dump with impunity. Each 4-dot fight was close (pally and ranger down to 25% or less health) but fun. The group broke up when the pally died 10 seconds after the fight from a DoT since only the healer archetype can rezz. I don't know if the pally got careless (likeliest scenario since he had mana) or was timed out on his heals.

So, the holy trinity - while still optimal in VG - is not mandated. I won a yellow drop!

That is remarkably non-cockblock-ish. Although the fact that it wasn't introduced at the same time as housing is equally remarkable.

That's good news.

Also getting back to the original topic, here is an official housing video (http://vs.warcry.com/news/view/70074).

I wonder if actual players can ride around on winged mounts yet.

The houses in that video looked a little more expensive than the ones in this thread. They had windows, for one thing.

Well if you mean wether the mechanics are there, then the answer is yes, since everyone in Beta got a chance to do so. As to anyone high enough level to do what's needed for it, I've no clue.

I seem to recall some people in my guild at lvl 30 or so telling me that they were about to get their gryphon mounts. This was before I quit, so about a month ago. And since this was on the FFA PVP server, I'd bet there were dozens more on the PVE servers who got them. If I recall, it was something like +600% movement speed in flight, and ~+200% ground speed on the gryphons.

Don't believe the hype. I play every day and I have yet to see a single solitary one.

Vanguard Team Discovers the Secret of Fighting RMT! (http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=092&section=News)

The secret? Have a small subscription base. Easier to police a smaller group. :rimshot:

I kid, I kid. My favorite quote though:
It's hard to tell whether 7 00 is supposed to represent 700, 7000, or $7.00.

On Test: no more corpse recovery. Instead, EQ2's initial essence system. You leave a ghost corpse with some exp on it but you keep all your items when you respawn.

Next month (just speculating): item attunement.

Looks like the EQ2 team is already bandaging VG, either in spirit or in person.

Any one of those numbers would be a major blow to Vanguard.

Speaking from a position of total ignorance, all this looks like an NGE-like thing to me.  Sacrifice the core values of your game (no easy mode travel, corpse recovery included, etc) to make it more like everyone else in the hopes that it draws in more people from everywhere else.

What ends up happening is people who never liked your game still don't like it, and the ones that did like it at one point no longer like it because it's too much like that other game that they never liked.

That's the new metrics, I think. Are you going to NGE it or EQ2 it? One way lies heartache, the other lies a sustainable and improved game. I think they are good moves, once they finally give up on the stupid essence half-assed measure. Remove some of the group dependencies and I'll start warming up to VG.

Of course, no game designer wanting to make BIG MONEY should ever listen to me. I'm a dirty soloer.

It's sounding more and more EQ2-like all the time.

But why would you play VG as it becomes more and more EQ2-like, when you could just play EQ2 instead?

Neither strategy has worked for SOE so I wouldn't say that the EQ2 method is any better. If you look at the server list for EQ2 (http://eq2players.station.sony.com/servers/index.vm) in the US you can see that they have not added *any* new PvE servers since launch and in fact had to merge some servers a while back and the number of PvP servers that they've added is fewer than the number of PvE server that they shut down, so the game is treading water at best. In other words all the good work they've put into the game since launch still has not overcome the incredibly crappy first impression people got with the game. Vanguard has exactly the same problem.

Despite the overly wise things said in response to this, an MMO where I clicked on the "customer service" tab and got a flashing message to Shut the Fuck up and play the game would have a strangely warm place in my heart.

Guess that is why I am waiting for Conan.

I'm not so sure. If only we had a SOE poster ;) Seems to me EQ2 is stable, rather than treading water. I wonder how much the Station Pass helps their portfolio, and conversely, how much the price hike is going to destroy their base. Using PvP servers as a metric for ANYTHING in a game designed for PvE is kinda ridiculous. I wish companies would stop wasting their time and lots of resources (not to mention fucking with the PvE balancing to 'fix' PvP balancing) catering PvP, but at least I can ignore it because it's on an entirely seperate server. Hey...maybe we need SOLO SERVERS with NO elite/^^^x2/whatever mobs. That would rock my world, and you'd get at least as much response as PvP servers get...

Remember, I really couldn't stand EQ2 at launch, and I gave it another shot because I knew there was a good game in there somewhere. It's still not what I would call my ideal game (^^^x2), but I think it's the best mmo out there right now. Seriously (and yeah, I like WoW ok, too (except that Elite nonsense).

I think VG misunderestimated how many 'hardcore' players are out there, or maybe just how sticky they are with their guilds in a game where they can have the support of a massive cadre of casuals.

Well, I have been sucked back into Vanguard and actually re-subbed to Station Pass. I am probablyt kidding myself that I will play Planetside but I intend to.

What changed with VG? I moved my character from the empty land of eastern Thestra to central Thestra. There are actually people around and while it is hard to get a full group, it isn't hard to find one or two people. That is enough to do 90% of quests so far. The spell/skill trainers are also never more than 5-10 minutes of travel away, either.

I also must admit that my guildmates with multiple characters in the 30s are being generous with gear so I haven't had equipment upgrade issues.

Yeah because PvE doesn't get enough catering to.  :roll: If you are going to 'tack on' PVP should you not try to balance the game accordingly? Mobs dont bitch when classes are overpowered in PvE. Poor schmuck with underpowered class #1 does in PvP.

Elite nonsense? You claim to be a PvEr and you cant get one friend to help you kill elites? Or would you like to be able to solo everything, get equal XP and items as those that have to coordinate and beat encounters?

If only, indeed!

EQ2 definitely averages around stability, with the standard live MMO caveats: As other games launch stuff, or as showstopper single player games come out, some of your people stop playing to check it out.  Lots of them come back.  Occasionally they bring more friends with them when they do. (We like when people do that.)

We have two growth triggers:  A) new expansions and B) adding new live content.  The first one is the bigger impact, though PvP was a great growth trigger as well.  EoF (exp3) was a good one in that it caused a lot of returns to the game and also had the added advantage of putting an all-in-one box (base + expansions) on the shelves for a reasonable price for the first time.  This is something the team fought hard to convince people was a good idea, and will continue to fight to keep on doing with future releases.  It's too good an idea to not do, and it cleans up the retail presence nicely. (No scatterings of 10 different SKUs in the stores, and no confusion what people need to buy to play.  Buy "The Box" and you're set.)

The PvE merges that we did in the one pass happened for reasons I've posted about in the past:  Yes, there were absolutely some losses of people whose expectations of an "EQ" game weren't met.  (Hello, archetypes, rigidly structured gameplay with a single success path, full groups required before leaving town, et al.) 

However, the bigger one was that with the accelerated release schedule (2 expansions + 2 adventure packs in approximately 1 year), the growth of the world's playspace significantly outpaced the growth of the audience.  The audience size was "mostly stable," after the falloff of disappointed initial adopters, but the world kept getting bigger.  The merges were as much about correcting population density as they were about anything else.  That period of EQ2 may have been the most rapid world-size expansion for any MMO for a given 14 months on a calendar.  Definitely the largest I've been involved with.


Re: ^ ^^ ^^^ x2 x3 x4 HEROIC EPIC WTF

If there was one thing that a lot of us wish we could change, it would be that.  There's really no reason that any game system needs twelve gradiations of anything inside each level, all having different meanings.  Unfortunately, that one's always been too deep in the system and too involved to address reasonably.  Whenever you launch a game, you have some things that will most likely be around forever because the cost of fixing them is so high.  (e.g. invent new system, repopulate and replaytest whole world, which keeps growing while you're doing it.) 

Yes, a number of us who joined the team late in the dev cycle knew the issues this would cause, but we had a fixed release date to meet.  If you do get extra time on games, you tend to get it in chunks measured in weeks/months, which means that retooling of the type that really needs to get done, tends not to based on the consecutive time commitment required to even take the first step.  (e.g. 6 more months is harder to get than 8 weeks, 3 times).   When you're faced with that, you make your choices.  This would have had to change, ideally, before population began. 

Given that, we at least started using it a bit more smartly in that not all 12 distinctions are used.  You tend to see 4 or 5 used commonly, which is more in line with what we felt at the time people might be familiar with given that there were other games using similar mechanic (only using word descriptions) that had a similar number of strengths-per-level-of-NPC in the world.

All that said, the upside with this system is that it let us do more interesting things with varying #'s of NPCs in single encounters.  Sometimes one enemy is tuned to be a challenge for a soloist, but we can very easily make packs of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc NPCs that are also solo content, so solo combat isn't just "single creature after single creature" ad infinitum, which is still a valuable tool to have available, it just needs to be used carefully to avoid causing more confusion than it's worth.

- Scott

Nothing is more fun than those encounters of 6 or 8 double down arrow mobs. One thing dikus really need to work on is larger encounters. It just feels more heroic to beat 10 weak mobs instead of 1 strong one.

I'm glad you said that -- That's really what a lot of the population changes came down to.   There were lots of cries of "Wowification" early on, but it's funny in that WoW in particular wasn't the drive.  It was us asking the question "How can we make people feel more heroic?"   

Killing 10 skeletons charging at you in a solo-content instance (of which WoW doesn't even have an analogue, still) just feels a hell of a lot cooler than walking outside Freeport and getting wtfpwned by a 6-man-required beetle.

Hey man, I love pvp. While I was in a guild way back in EQ 2000, the last clan I was with was for BF1942, and I totally loved it. PvP rocks. PvP in MMO tends to suck outside Planetside. Because diku is good for PvE. I just don't think it should be tacked on, thus necessitating the balancing issues get addressed. Of course if they tack it on, balance needs to be addressed. But there was a decent discussion about this somewhere else around here, with a split between the pve and pvp code so you wouldn't need to put pvp changes into the pve game and vice-versa.
It's not a Wowification, it's a Cohification :) CoH is hands-down the most heroic feeling game, still. And I think you meant 'wtfpwned by that (*&^#@ orc outside Freeport'. I hate that goddamned orc, finally killed him with my lvl 27 SK when he was -very- grey to me. Bah.

Backing up a bit, I wasn't really referring to the convoluted system of ^^^x2 (my shorthand for it), I just dislike the Elite mob idea in general. It's the reason I have teflon levels of stickiness for WoW, they shut my playstyle out of dungeons almost completely. I can see having Epic mobs like Vox or Innoruuk that require groups to raids. I can live without the tippy-top gear they drop (and the hellish game experience to get it). But being restricted to a few mobs in Blackburrow's front yard because I prefer to solo (for valid reasons)...that sucks. Same thing in WoW, I did one dungeon once (the newbie dungeon), because I had time and grouped. And it totally sucked (PUG hell). Just because a mob has a name and drops cool gear doesn't mean he should also get the ^^^x2WTF treatment.

Especially when melee is your preference.  Now and then, fighting some big old boss like baddie can make you feel great.  But too much of the I smack you, you smack me stuff just makes the game feel slow and grindy.  Battling 10 skellies and winning gives the game a quick and action-y feel, as long as the downtime after is minimal.  The one on one fights are good when you come to a bit in the story where it makes sense.  I enjoy when something leads up to that sort of confrontation.

I didn't like EQ2 a bit in beta.  It dragged.  Some time later, after the tidy up, I gave it another go and, to be honest, I couldn't believe the changes.  I had good fun in that game for quite a while and even went back for a bit after the last expansion and had some more fun.  I'll probably even play it again now and then.  I have nothing but good feelings towards the EQ2 crew.  (not pervy feelings!)  Vanguard, on the other hand....   :|

The EQ2 live team is a case study in how to unfuck a totally fucked game. EQ2 in beta was ass-poundingly awful. EQ2 a year later was night and day better. It's not perfect, but it does a lot of things well (for a diku).

Agree on the mob swarm encounters. One of my favorite MOG mob encounters were the pygmy goblins from DAoC's Albion; a massive swarm camp of mobs,  you could pull a bunch of them and use crowd control or AE damage or kiting etc. on them, high risk-reward, hectic action.

Eq2.... I would be tempted to resub if some others are going to play.  Unfortunetely it will need to be after I get a new CPU fan; mine gasped and died over the weekend and my system overheats if I run anything exciting.

Hartsman is one of the good ones; I am surprised no one has stolen him from Smedleys stable.







edit.  Spelling still eludes me.

Hopefully EQ2 will take this to the next level in the next expansion. No reason why an X2 or X4 encounter cannot consist of 40 mobs. I htink the game engine and most PCs these days could handle it.

It's too late you already admited developers shoulded listen to you if they want to make money. :)

Henchmen, EQ2 needs henchmen.

I tried eq2 in beta and hated it. I fired it up again at the opening of the PVP servers and it was alright for the first month or so, until the crazy unbalances started to show.

I can't stand PVE-only games, and the PVP was so mind-bendingly broken that I couldn't stand that either.

I know that a lot of people would like EQ2 today, but most of them can't get past that TRIAL ISLE stuff when it was first released and the immeasurable pain that it inflicted.

It's hard to admit, but my favourite bit of EQ2 were the shiny question marks on the ground.  It didn't matter what it was or if I already had a dozen of the same thing, once I saw it there, it HAD TO BE MINE!  I was obsessed.   :oops:  I still miss those little shiny suprises.  They were like crack to me.

My favorite quest in any game is in EQ2, the city betrayal quest.  Hmmm, maybe once I get my CPU fan replaced I will start gathering the masses and do another invasion.  I imagine many would enjoy it!

Seconded.  I don't even have to know what it is, I just want it.

Loot is good.  It's like finding a chest in WoW.  I'm sad they didn't put any in except newbie areas and instances in TBC.

I loved/hated (but played for real) EQ2 for 18 months. And yes, my favourite quest in any game is from EQ2 too. There are two actually, one is the small quest related to Dancer, the ranger in Antonica with a sad and mysterious past, which the reward hints without actually telling. Great.
The other is a very obscure one but it's about betrayal again. In the Crypt of Betrayal you meet the ghost of a soldier that (with an unbelievably good voiceover) tells you the story of his and his comrades death. You have to track down these 3 ghosts to put the pieces of the story together and have the first soldier's ghost recall what actually happened that he forgot. Its tragic and intense. Too bad it's so well hidden, I bet just 2% of the players completed (or just stumbled upon) that quest.

EQ2 had some qualities and content I doubt will ever be matched in future MMORPG. If only combat could be a little more compelling (and fun)...

Re upped EQ II after dumping Vanguard last month.   With my recent upgrade can now run the game on high settings @ 1600 x 1050 and it looks absolutely amazing.

I know SOE got heat for designing the engine for future hardware, but now I can see at 'least' see  the rationale for it now that there is hardware commonly and cheaply available to take advantage of it.  No so much though, when the game was released.  If WoW didn't have such great art style, it would look crude in comparison.

The only 2 things that really bothered me about EQ II were  1, the multi-tiered spell/skill system (adept, etc); it was a pita to constantly be buying upgrades to them, and 2, some of the skill/spell effects were so overdone  that they completely obscured what was going on the screen, especially for melee.  If I am doing some special sword attack, I would like to see some real cool ninja type animation, as opposed to flames shooting out of my ass and stars out of my pecker.

Other than that EQ II has become a fine game and it's good to be back.  I will be playing this along with LoTRo.

In EoF there is a super duper shiny collection quest that gives you magic goggles, which allow you to see super seekrit blue hidden shinies.

They changed betrayal, haven't tried it yet but I do want to see the new exile city Haven at some point.

Yay derail.

Exile city? Didn't know about the one! Hmm...I still have a couple guys under lvl 20...but then again, Station Pass goes up and I lose half my characters. Hrm.

It was added during the change to make betrayal possible at any level (and multiple times per character, even).

Oh man, this gives me an enormous hard on.

I think Haven was added to give the PVP server a 3rd side, since it was pretty shitty with just two. Qeynos was outnumbered 2:1 in pretty much every zone. Even Antonica, hah.

Put me on the "swarms of weak mobs for the win" list as well.  When I say WoW needed to be more Diablo 2 and less Everquest, half of what I'm talking about are those huge waves of monsters you needed to hack through in D2.  The other half is the loot system, but that's another story.

And as I recall, that quest requires you to actually read and remember the story the three ghosts tell you, rather than simply clking through the text boxes, because the soldier asks you questions at the end of it all. That did me in, as I never expected to need to pay attention to what I was told :|

That is treading water to me. I.e. you aren't sinking (a constant net loss of subscribers) nor are you actually swimming anywhere (a constant net gain of subscribers).

Most others see treading water as barely staying in business, hence why some might take offense at the term. 

How about "running in place"? Does that work better? :-D

To me, treading water and running in place indicate that you are likely to fail soon and are just managing to stave it off at present. Stable sounds more like you're just not advancing. So I'd say stable is more appropriate. :P

Sure it sounds better but that's missing my point. SOE has expended a lot of effort fixing EQ2 from its original broken state. What has that done for subscriber growth? Absolutely nothing (guesstimating from server numbers). In other words they are working really hard just to keep what subscribers they have left. Ergo they are running in place or treading water.

Early in the promotion of WOW they stated that the gameplay would be like that, with your character going up against large groups.

I can see how this might seem to be the case from the outside.  I'll explain a bit further.

I'm going to make a sweeping generalization that isn't always correct, but is frequently enough to where it's a useful rule of thumb in describing subscriber counts when viewed over long periods of time, and the kinds of actions that it takes to make them swing in either direction.


In online games beyond the boutique scale, you are #1 or you are Everyone Else.

"#1" obeys certain rules that I won't get into, but stability-to-growth becomes easier and you're far more protected from loss, barring extreme triggers.

For "Everyone Else," the converse is true: You are generally in a net state of subtraction over time.  It's just a matter of the rate.  It takes extreme triggers to cause stability or gain.

For an MMO in the Everyone Else category, overall stability is actually a significant victory.


Therefore, saying that "EQ2's investment isn't paying off," is most definitely incorrect -- It's paying off in that "stability" means we have a large percentage more subscribers right now than we would have had otherwise. 

I can't get into specifics, of course, but subscription/uniques/sales modelling is a "hobby" of mine, and has been since even before I started working at SOE.  (I'm an unapologetic stats geek when it comes to MMOs.)  I've spent quite a bit of time projecting out models of what would have happened in the game in different states, and under every sane model it's netted out very well relative to what would have happened had we not.

- Scott

Edited to add:  Addressing a mention of observing server counts as a way of determining growth.  That's not an accurate gauge without knowing all the internals.  What isn't seen on the outside is the expansions to the worlds' hardware over time.  They all currentlly run signfiicantly more hardware then they have in the time since launch - Their capacities have gotten bigger to match the landmass growth.  They can currently hold almost twice the users as they could back then.

If that weren't the case, that simple observation would be meaningful, but with everything changing on the backend including the means by which we dynamically load areas on-demand, and a few other changes, I wouldn't rely on it.  For a game where these kinds of things aren't occurring, and that being a known fact, it would be.   In our case, there are too many other variables in play for it to be correct.

Everyone knows that "Once you earn enough money to pay for initial production and development of a MMO, it doesn't cost so much to keep it living" or something like that. Those are not the exact words a couple of devs used here on these boards to say it, but that concept was used more than once to justify the stubborn existance of some failed massive worlds (SWG was the one which that phrase was used for IIRC).
If that is true, treading water or running in place should be applied to subscription numbers alone, as I think they are still making shitloads of money with EQ2.
Maybe not shitloads but "a lot" should be a good guess. The fact that those money are way less than originally expected from SOE it's important too, but a few millions of dollars of subscription income every month, and a stable present and future, are probably a slightly more important fact than any kind of delusion.

I'm not saying that SOE shouldn't be expending resources improving EQ2. Thanks to the precedence set by EQ, subscribers in MMORPGs expect that the game will continually get new content and new features and if that stops you expect that the game that's at "equilibrium" will start to lose subscribers.

The original discussion that started this subthread was what should SOE/Sigil do to fix Vanguard and Sky made the comparison between NGE and EQ2 and my point was that even though the route EQ2 took did result in a better game it didn't result in increased subscribers. Therefore, if Sigil doesn't want Vanguard to go the route of EQ2, something more drastic may be necessary to increase subscription numbers.

I actually think something NGE-like, without the horrible implementation obviously, would actually be a better solution than the small continually improvement path of EQ2. E.g. take a small "skunkworks" team and move them somewhere off by themselves and have them work on something bold and radically different for a fantasy MMORPG. The Live team meanwhile will be fixing bugs, tuning, and adding missing promised features but not adding in major new stuff (cause now the resources are split so they don't necessarily have the manpower to do that). After a year the skunkworks team comes back, reintegrates what they've worked on into the rest of the game and "version 2.0" of the game is born as an expansion pack, or something.

The way instancing works in EQ2, wouldn't it be possible to merge all pve servers into one ?

People don't actually play instances all that much EQ2. Most of the play is static spawn 'world pve' whack a mole, or questing.

Raids are played in instances, but non-raid instances are too much of a ball ache to get going for most people.

I'd prefer the JtL approach to the NGE debacle personally.

Add whole new ways to play by all means. But don't wreck the existing game, because however limited it's appeal may be, all your existing players are paying for it.

No, what she meant is that any zone can be "instanced" if it becomes overpopulated, even places like Karana, and hence in theory you could squish everybody into one server. They had it running like this in Beta, for example. Think CoH back when lots of people were playing or Pocket D during the special events.

I always felt EQII was under rated. At release it kind of sucked , mostly due to the friends and family and EQ1 Legends fanboys they used in the early beta testing. I think it was the February after release they "unfucked"  it with a big patch that opened a lot of solo content, did away with the interdependence on crafting, instigated offline craft sales, added more character slots, did away with corpse "essence" runs and a slew of other shit. Most of which was suggested in beta but got shouted down in beta by the jackass ex EQ1 test base who wanted EQ1 with high res graphics. Damn Sam! Sounds just like the Vanguard fanboys doesn't it? SOE needs to learn to never never allow anyone in their betas who subscribed to EQ1 for more than a month.

I seriously think that the only thing really wrong with EQ2 was... World of Warcraft.
Without that flesh-eating virus, EQ2 would have scored huge numbers even in crapfuck launch state back in 2004 (they launched 12 days apart from each other).

The hype did the rest, and we all know such hype is still alive and well today.

So true.

One of the things I hated the most in EQ2 (and other games) is the overuse of particle effects. It also turned me off right at the first impact when I noticed on the noob island that even a BEAR casted "spells" and fireworks. It just feels lame and spoils the fun and uniqueness of magic. Even the most standard swordfight felt like a circus. Swords are metal, not particle effects.

That's something that completely breaks the immersion for me and feels really, really cheap as magic gets so overused to lose any kind of taste and special feel.

The use of fancy spell effects in EQ2 is definitely excessive, and it was already a problem in SWG.

Well, compared to Everquest's pretty standard "pull one, kill it, rinse, repeat with maybe a mezzed mob or two if you were really hardcore" then WoW is like that. Think of UBRS runs, or even any of the new instances where a 3-5 pull is standard. Hell, my wife and I playing around with out mages in Terrokar tonight ran into a mess and ended up taking on 5 level-appropriate mobs at once and living. In EQ1, that just doesn't (didn't) happen.

Not that it's strictly related, but talking about flesh-eating viruses (virii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus)?) Burning Crusade is down to 15 euros (9.99 punds) P&P included through all Europe thanks to play.com

Impressive, morbid. I.. must.. not... purchase....  (I didn't)

I'm sure Hartsman is a swell guy and that EQ2 is a much improved game in terms of mechanics, but in business terms the game is basically a failure.  I mean, let's just be real here.  It took Blizzard's boot deep up it's ass at launch, and now plugs away with somewhat more subscribers than billion year old UO, and somewhat fewer subscribers than nine-hundred million year old EQ1.

Nobody set out to make the game thinking "Oh boy, I bet we can tie with City of Heroes!"

I mean it wasn't a total AC2 "Jesus Christ just shut it down!" disaster, no, but it still supports my personal opinion that MMO "sequels" are just a Bad Idea.  They would have been better off if it were called something else entirely.

EQ2 has potential and several nice features, but the expectations carried from EQ really shot it down.  EQ had a large and varied world with lots of interesting cultures to see.  EQ2 had... Good City and Evul City.  Coming from a game where I had a grand time exploring Neriak, getting thoroughly lost in Ak-anon, never once falling to my death from the wood elf trees, winding up in a place with just two generic cities bored me to tears almost instantly.  Sure, they were big generic cities, and if they'd been just replacements of the old Freeport and Qeynos, they'd've been fantastic.  But they were replacements for ALL of the cities, and couldn't begin to compete.  And that's EQ2 in a nutshell.

They only managed to sell 200,000? (http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?p=229867#post229867)  If so I can't imagine what the active subscription number is.  His low churn statement is either delusional or he defines churn as someone leaving and then coming back.

The other thing is....everyone remembers their first.

Many MMO player's have fond memories of UO and EQ no matter what flaws each of them had. Hell, just the UO treasure chest opening up and hearing 'stones' play and remembering my anticipation to log into UO. I never saw the flaws in the game because I enjoyed it for what it was...amazingly allowing me to interact in one of my favorite game environments and socialize, compete, and achieve like never before.

If the same game came out now I'd probably bash it. Well, probably not cause it owned but besides that you get the point :)

WoW is doing what UO did 10 years ago for me. For whatever reason, EQ2 did not. MMO noobs around the world are going to look back and remember their first experiences in this game and will, no matter what, fight and say it was the greatest game ever. Just like me and UO :) Turn wheel, turn. And spin out a fun fuckin game again.

UO was fun for me because I could play with my brothers (them LA, me NY) but it wasn't until EQ that I got into the whole MMOG culture of making friends with people I only knew through a game.

Heh, gotta love the UO treasure chest.  Day one memories of UO included lag so bad it took forever to cross one screens worth of landscape, getting killed by a bird , getting pickpocked  for a cool pair of boots, getting killed by a deer.

No hand holding kicks ass.

"Hey, here's a rusty dagger...think you can kill that wolf? Give it a shot!!!". Whoa cool, I gained a strength point and .2 in fencing!!! Sure, Im a ghost now...but....

I agree, but those days are long gone.  Now we have mobs with big "GET A QUEST HERE" signs, linear play, and Drive-Thru leveling.  MMORPG's are no longer RPG's, hence the new MMOG title change.  They lost my love when the genre decided that "challenging gameplay" = grinding LOTS of mobs and running LOTS of FedEx quests.  I want the challenge to be in the risk/reward not in the number of hours I'm expected to give up. 

Linked thread in summary:

Most rational post--

Biggest douche--

WoW was a fun ride and LotRO reminds me a LOT of WoW (A LOT), which could be good and bad. For me personally, I'll stick to EQ2 and maybe check out Vanguard in a year or so.

Hartsman seems to validating my theory that most MMOs enter retention mode in a matter of weeks.

Just buy it, play it, love it, get bored of it, unsub.

If you have fun for a month or two, your purchase was worthwhile and you've had a month or three of fun.

Where's the loss?

No Az, I already played it for a good forty levels. I know what to expect from the game and I am not intersted in it anymore, at all.
I was just pointing out how easy is to get into WoW:

1) It's the most accessible and easy to learn
2) It works (well) on 6 years old computers.
3) Everyone talks about it. It's almost socially accepted to play WoW. You are part of something big!
4) Lots of merchandise everywhere (I just stumbled upon the comic this morning) push it even more. The card game is nice too, btw.
5) You can get it everywhere, stores, magazines... wonder how long it will take to have it in McDonald for free with every Happy Meal
6) And finally it's cheap... Burning Crusade for 15 euros 2 months after launch is the deal of the year.

I don't know if this is the viral marketing Brad keeps yapping about, but it's definitely viral. It's fucking Stephen King's The Stand.
I am not tempted to play WoW, but the point is that it's hard not to be compelled to at least try (or even re-try with Burning Crusade, especially at 15€).

If you were to get it -- I suggest trying out the new races and their starting areas. It's quickly obvious how much Blizzard has learned. The new starting areas are really slick. I've found outland fun, but I'm in crunch time at work and school, so if I play at all it's to nose around with my level 20 Shaman and not my level 61 Hunter. The bombadier missions in Outland are a blast, though. :)

Definitely! I was thrilled to get to Nagrand and find that I can bomb PvE AND PvP targets sometimes. Too much fun. Too bad most of the rewards for Halaa suck, but at least they are easy to get...

The fun part is that the only thing I know about BC is that there is this ultra-fun Bombardier Quest, as a friend of mine emphatically told me about it a hundred of times.
Now THAT is viral marketing (or viral whatever), not everyone with an internet connection from Greenwich to the dark corner s of earth spreading the news that your game has more bugs than pixels and less content than 1985's Gauntlet.

My most memorable quest was from WoW, and I'm not a -huge- fan of the game, though I think it's ok.

The one where you slide a book under the door of an outhouse in the middle of nowhere. That was some funny stuff, I like creativity.

The 8 pieces of silk were funny too. Talk about a fussy wiper.

Back to VG, the latest patch has a bunch of itemization changes and some class tweaks but no major bug fixes - at least nothing acknowledged in the patch notes. The various group bugs are still there, for example. DRU, PSI, NEC DoTs got a damage boost!

Mr crafter in my guild - the guy who did the boats and some houses - is giving up. The crafting grind burned him out and he cannot find exp groups reliably.

I have now experienced several quest bugs where killing the target mob is not recognized or only recognized the first few times and then stops updating. Deleting and starting over does not fix it.

When I get a group that wants to do 4-dot dungeons, I have a great time but that isn't a relaible occurrence and usually takes 30 minutes of cajoling people in /tells. Still hate the fact that one cannot buy spells ahead of time and carry them. Running back to the nearest trainer (longer and longer run as I level) is fucking stupid. Even worse, some places with trainers don't have all the trainers. What the hell is the point of that? Renton Keep - a major hub for levels 16-25 - only has 3 class trainers.

Elevators are still buggy as shit and if you die on one, your tombstone is invisible. You have to wait for the elevator to stop at a terminus point and /corpse from off the elevator to get it. For those that don't know, the only way to get from the top of New Targonor on Thestra to the docks is via an elevator.

Lastly, after 15 minutes of tweaking various settings I have gotten the game to look quite good and be playable (25 fps in a full group in a dungeon with other players passing by occasionally) on my system (3.4 P4, 2GB ram, 7950 vid card). Of course, any time I disconnect the game resets to default settings (Balanced for my machine) and I have to redo the tweaks all over again. I need to save a dummy .ini somewhere.

Which tells us this lesson: an unfinished game is still unfinished even three months later ;)

Yesterday I was browsing through the content of the special collector edition (kindly provided by Cheddar  :heart: ) and spent a good hour on the Art Book, filled with Parkinson's great arts. It make me want to come back playing immediately, seriously. I can see where the game *could have gone*.. but it didn't.
Not only the world Parkinson envisioned was beatuful and inspired, but the mobs, the monsters and the NPC were beatiful. This is the kind of world that, I think, a Korean game developer could have done justice to (strictly aesthetically speaking).

Sadly, we all know where Sigil fell short so far. Details, lack of "life" in it (whereas EverQuest 2 for example was full of it, with wandering NPCs, animals, voices and such) and.. this is painful, HORRIBLE models for mobs. Even the basic "Giant Spider" looks great on the art book while 1999-ish in game. Again, painful.
So, for a moment I felt like I so wanted to play that game again... and then memories of the embarassing red giant ants came to my mind in a rush, and I almost vomited.

One last random note: there's a full picture of the whole (I guess) Vanguard staff on the last page. There are these roughly 95 (I counted them) guys and gals on a river bank smiling to the camera. But uh, hey.. I think I spotted 90 caucasians, and just a couple of black guys. Whassup with the videogame industry? Not to mention that I can't recall a single game (massive or not) with a female lead designer. Not that this stuff matters or is on topic, but it got me thinking.

Well, I think it does have consequences when you culturally homogenize a creative team too much. From the smithing dwarf task master in Southwatch stating "If it ain't dwarven, its crap!" repeatedly to the swedish accent on many of the african/arab races in Qalia, one starts to see that if you have too much upper middle class waspiness, your world gets a wee bit small.

That is how the industry has been. :-(

There have only been a few 'named' female devs (named devs are like boss encounters!) and some of them took a... more traditional route... getting started in games.  I cannot imagine things being easy afterwards though as I have seen countless stories about most places being very much a man's world.  I don't know much about other minorities in the industry, since it is much easier to determine sex from a name in an article or credits than background.  I can make assumptions I fear would be fairly accurate, although it would be nice if someone was able to prove those thoughts false.

Hopefully the newer crops of devs are better balanced.  I don't follow the industry closely enough to know for quite some time afterwards, unfortunately.

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,1374/

There ya go.  But I'm not sure I can think of any female Lead Designers on a triple-A, major title.

How many high school girls want to make video games for their career?

And then take into account that only one in a (huge number) that wants to be a game designer actually becomes a game designer.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a cowboy.  I still kind of do. 

...you meant cowgirl, right?

...no WINGER LINKS.

...

I don't know about other colleges but my engineering class was mostly white and male.  Next was Asian and male.  There were only a few females (except Industrial Engineering for some reason) and even fewer blacks of either sex.

The only requirements to enter the department were an automated check of your grades and previous classes.  Sometimes it's just the way it is.

I have only read part of the first page.  My shanty in Oblivion outside the Imperial City looks better than that house.  It should at least look as good as a house in Horizons.

Did they announce server consolidations yet?

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,60/

Right Roberta Williams for sure (how could I forget her?)! And then I recalled one of my former goddesses: Rieko Kodama (http://www.smspower.org/translations/phantasystar-en/videofenky_interview_translation/), the Lady behind Phantasy Star.


Oh, thank you so much, Rieko-sama!

Conjuring the Williams name just makes me weep inside at how far Sierra has fallen.

Although I love adventure games, I think people like Williams aren't around because they were never really game designers at all. At least not of the type that the game industry was evolving towards. Their skills were along the lines of puzzle making, illustration, and storywriting. Very few of them had any idea about the nitty grittys of game development. All of them were just using premade engines or stuff like HyperCard. And once adventure games dwindled down, these people were left in the dust.

I still think they could make good games though, even if they had a somewhat superficial approach to the technicalities. But it's sad that designers with an overall vision like a Roberta Williams or Tim Schafer can't be hired or funded, begged even, on just their creative skills alone. They could still be better game designers than most.


As for female designers, lets not forget her:

(http://www.elecplay.com/screenshots/features/e32006/e3d2_04.JPG)

Did I mention that CGW gave Vanguard a 3/10?

Just thought I'd mention it.

3/10

Lock if old.

I kid, I kid.

3 out of 10.

Edit: Stray. She's a producer. Watch Grandma's Boy if you need more information. Some games they make design decisions. Others, not so much. Given the studio behind Assassin's Creed, I highly doubt she does as much. That said, it's not to slight her, but rather that the studio is made up of piles and piles of awesome.

Ah yes, you're right.

She supposedly has a CS degree though. I doubt Williams had even that.

The playerbase is starting to ask for server mergers now. Unfortunately, there's a significant obstacle in the way - Brad McQuaid's ego.

Server mergers would mean that he was wrong about, well, pretty much everything therefore don't expect to see them until SOE buys Sigil out and fires Brad (again).

He was never fired if I remeber correctly. Although I am starting to think he should be, this time.

Well, McQuaid did say they were out of money, so I am guessing the check to CGW bounced.

Zing!

Dude, like, that doesn't count, cuz she's like, someone's mom I bet. No hawtness, just free-floating feelings of guilt during innappropriate sexual arousal.

Wasn't she and another female lead dev at E3 last year?  I'm recalling some pictures of them in camo now that you've brought them up.

My fav:

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,2199/ (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,2199/)

No he wasn't fired. He was "promoted" to Chief Creative Officer before eventually leaving to form Sigil, which by the way was the same position Raph held after Brad left, so the cynical minded might think that's where SOE puts its best known designers out to pasture.

Exactly. Being moved away from hands-on development to a token general management role means that Smed doesn't want you fucking up the game designs any more, kthx. Please feel free to resign any time you like.

This game is still around?

Lollers. This is what happens when your battle cry is "oh yeah! Go back to WOW!" That's what everybody did. Oops.

Look what I just found about female Lead Designers. Warcry on Hero's Journey. (http://hj.warcry.com/news/view/70548-Exclusive-Interview-Debuts-Site)
Boo to SimuKaren for not even telling us this. (/jk)

By the way, here's her (old) bio (http://www.sff.net/people/lark/aboutme.htp) from her site, and her wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Shaver).

We are all losing our touch if we missed this so far.

Restraining orders incoming in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

I have a different spin on it.

I don't actually give a fuck.

Latest hubbub: Sigil UI dev quit a few weeks ago and the UI mod community is annoyed that no one is helping them any more. While reading the rants, I discovered my issue with having to click on spell icons twice to actually fire the spell was not my issue but a long known bug. Wonderful.

Devs, your UI is the first and last thing your customers see when they log in and log out. It should work and not suck. Looking like WoW's isn't enough.

A friend of mine uses a custom UI (DuskUI) for Vanguard and he swears his frames per second jumped from 20 to 40. I've seen no such improvement for my game when using DuskUI, but then again, I'm using a 7950 card, which isn't a very good card for Vanguard. To be honest, the Vanguard UI isn't that bad. I mean, it is a Sony product, not a Blizzard or NC Soft product, so you sorta know what to expect.

Ya, I'm still playing Vanguard. Probably the sole F13 poster that's doing so. I can kvetch and moan with the best of them, but at this stage, I can't help but simply feel sorry for the project (calling it a game at this stage is still a bit premature). Its obvious that some people put in a lot of work into the game. Some of the art is really good. My favorite so far are all the varieties of weapons players can craft. Many are taken from RL (the upgraded iron short sword from Qalia is a faithful rendition of a South East Asian Kris sword, for example) and reproduced with a level of detail that I don't think most MMOs have. Its clear that in patches, the game was a labor of love for some developers and designers at Sigil. Other places are plauged by what can only be called shoddy work.

I'm playing as well, because some of my RL but in another state friends are.

From the game it is obvious that the art team invested a lot of time. The maps tend to be huge and full of "insert content here" spaces. Someone had a lot of fun, the major cities are stupidly immense, but it was an insane waste to build these huge continents and cities without actually considering what gameplay they would bring. And the scale has made the minimal content, and player population, look very sparse.

Meanwhile I have no idea what happened with the game coding. The code seems to already have reached an unmaintainable state where bugs just can't be fixed. I can't imagine how else the act of forming a group, or not falling through the world, can still be so flawed. Meanwhile the rate of introduction for new bugs is scarily high.

I honestly can't see the game holding enough subscriptions to fund the development it needs to be decent.

I am also still playing but I have gon back to EQ2 lately. Our small VG guild has lost some of the few 40-hour a week players. Also, even though I will never ever get a character to 50 in VG, the changes they are still making to classes keeps me guessing as to which character I want to actually invest some time in.

Logged in last night. It has been about 2 weeks. My main has 15 people on his friends list. These are mostly people I grouped with as little as once, but who seemed capable and friendly. They range from 11-25th level. My main is 17th. The "last played" dates ranged from 03/03/07 to 04/11/07. Not a healthy anecdote.

Also, Nino seems to have left Sigil as well as Zowch, the UI dev. I smell survival mode layoffs.

Wow, Nino left? Or was fired? He did cross the line with that, "I'll tell you inside info if you promise not to post it" fiasco.

Continental teleporters on test server:


Those cities in the last bullet are the major port cities so I guess you will be able to teleport to any port from any Riftway Stone. The next question is how much the money sink will be. My level 17 druid, twinked a bit by guildies, only has 50s to his name.

edit: Warriors getting some much needed love, too.

In other words "Oops... forcing people to play certain classes and races in order to play together from creation may have been a design blunder."

Its something like 60 copper per stone usage. I'd compare that to buying Runes of Teleportation in WoW for Mage ports. Basically, cheap as hell.

LOL EZMODE GO BACK TO WOW N00B!!1!

Just saying, is all. The various boards must be alight with the h4rdc0r3 catasses...

A couple years worth of trickling patches and Vanguard might be worth playing on free shards.

There was some theory that the rush to launch was so that the dev team could be moved onto other projects, in typical SOE fashion of switching devs with a lighter Live team to bang out content in predictable fashion. I'm beginning to wonder if that has been what happened.

What else could Sigil be working on though? They aren't owned by SOE so it's not like they would be working on SOE projects and they aren't working on the Marvel project as they were rumored to have been back when they were still being published by Microsoft.

X-packs!

Treading Water.

I imagine any devs there with much of a brain would be looking for new jobs before the ship totally sinks.

Jean-Guy Drouin: Yeah. Yeah, I want to echanger. Bernard, call Detroit, tell them bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, something. Wait. Ned, what's echanger in English?
Ned Braden: Trade me right fucking now.
Jean-Guy Drouin: Trade me right fucking now!
Ned Braden: Now hang up.
Jean-Guy Drouin: Hello?


Sigil looks so much like the Charlestown Chiefs. Too bad Brad McQuaid is no Reggie Dunlop (or Paul Newman).


(http://www.harnmaster.it/forum/uploads/post-8-1177418090.jpg) (http://www.harnmaster.it/forum/uploads/post-8-1177418124.jpg)

"Who hones the Chiefs?"

That was probably meant as a joke but is probably accurate. Yeah. Telon needs more landmass. Definitely.

Actually, I was serious.  Brad & SOE are the crew who developed the "x-pac every 9-months" schedule. If VS is supposed to be the true EQ sequel, I can't imagine them not following the same model. 

The expansions, if they aren't raging idiots (cue the laughter), should include filling in the empty landmass they already have.

The base for the game is pretty good, as they have very good combat mechanics (unlike say, EQ2), alongside a very big world which I think could be a good thing for expansion and content.

I'll almost certainly play this game again at some point.  Just to see if it's any better performance and bugwise, if nothing else.  It's too bad they went the WoW with more grind model though (add the worst part of EQ to stuff derivitive of WoW, brilliant), instead of bigger-better EQ mode (which would be big world, diverse group centric  gameplay, without the shitty combat).

Expansion packs?  Why? How many do they realistically think that they can sell? 

If you could make an expansion with some new gear, new mounts, new housing models, and maybe a new race it may be cheap enough to put out that you could possibly generate a profit.  If they expect to do anything more ambitious, they're throwing good money after bad.

That's the motto on the Sigil Crest of Glory.

I'm sure Brad hasn't exactly stopped regularly paying himself a shitton of the VC's money at any stage over the last 5(?) years. So I imagine that makes VG a raging success to date. To Brad, at least.

For all my long career I have tried to find projects that didn't actually have to function when I finished. Gawd knows I have seen plenty  done by other folks.

Guess I was in the wrong industry all along.  :?

Sigil has not received any VC funding to my knowledge. I know for a fact that they went looking for VC money after MS dumped them and AFAIK were turned down. This is also why they were forced to release the game when SOE told them to. They had no other funding source backing them that they could turn to get some more money.

I stand corrected then. MS's money and Sony's money.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. (http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1361)  :roflcopter:

Many of you predicted this (all of it, the trainwreck, the server merge, and especially the buyout), I have to say. Grats to those.

EDIT: Wondering if they'll lower the Station Pass price now that Vanguard is about to become a bonus game in the like of Infantry and Tanarus.

Link blocked by overactive censorship at work.  requesting a cut and paste plz!!!

HERE (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9853.0)

Your new avatar looks seriously like baby Zod.

So Kneel.

Ah, always.

I think the kid seems to ba halfway through a wry look and a "yeah right."  Still, dibs on doing the mini-Zod's first Christmas hat avatar at the end of the year...

At least we know she really is Ironwood's. :-D

Red nose, too. They sure start 'em young over there.

I think she looks a bit Irish, maybe it's the red nose?

I dunno, looks like a baby Bill Maher to me.

Well that blows me out of the "guess the subs" competition, now doesn't it.   Though I didn't think they'd be in such a buggy, shittastic state when they released the game.

haha, oarsome!

Wasn't Geldon predicting about a half-million subs by this point, as WoW slowly starts to burn?

 :roll:

Geldon also didn't make it past the first week of release despite how much he talked the game up, so there you go...

And then he ran away. :D

Bear in mind that Geldon is pretty much the Anti-Nostradamus of MMOG's.

I hear companies are paying him to doomcast their games.

Oh why doesn't he get back here and take his lumps like a man!

So I ran between two teleporters to try it out. They are clearly placed so that unless you are high level and have already traversed much of Thestra you really won't use them much. Yes, you can quickly travel to any of the port cities and that is good but the system doesn't really help a level 20 in Renton Keep join his friends in Misthaven (about a 20 minute tier 1 horse ride.)  The system does not help anyone go back to their trainer and then return to their group in a time efficient way at all. Each use costs 62cp. At least it is cheap.

So I "attuned" the one outside Renton and then crossed a quarter of Thestra to the Vault of Heroes one and attuned there. Then ported back to Renton. I really have no reason to ever go back to Vault of Heroes but whatever.

This may seem like a stupid question, but exactly how much do you suffer if you're out rocking faces with your group, you ding, and then you don't go back to train until the night's over?

--GF

Assuming you ding a new spell level, then it could be important. After about the mid 20s, you don't get new spell lines so you can make due with Mental Blast III even if your level means you could be using Mental Blast IV. IV does more damage and costs more mana so it would be better to have it but not critical. However, if you ding a level that opens up a new spell line/skill then your "productivity" usually increases a lot. For example, a psi with charm vs a psi without charm. Both have other CC abilities, but charm is a big DPS boost as well.

All this would be moot if you could just carry your damn spells. Visiting the trainer is nothing but a time cockblock.

I like the way EQ2 handles that, now that crafting is better there. You get the basic spell (Apprentice I), you can buy the App II version from a vendor, a player can make the App IV version, or the rare Adept III version. Adept I versions are mob drops. (And you can Master a couple spells throughout your career)

A nice touch is that the Adept Pets look cooler than Apprentice pets. My newbie necro replaced his black bat with an Adept-class fiery bat.

Just FYI, in EQ2 you do not automatically get your new spells from level 50-70. There is also no in game source that I am aware of that tells you what your post-50 spells are. I believe there are vendors that will sell you App1 or App2 versions of the 50+ spells but I alsways just bought the adept1 from the broker a level or two ahead. They are plentiful at this stage of the game.

Yeah, I'll worry about that in about four years when I get a lvl 50 character. I shut combat exp off my SK because he's levelling too fast, I hit lvl 31 by mistake the other day.

More Information From Brad
Arrakiv posted on 30 Apr 2007, 01:12 AMSo here's the first topic, starting with the current official statement from SOE:

"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."

What does that mean? It means that right now Vanguard is doing decently but not as well as we hoped. If you haven't read my last long post that outlined some of the things that went wrong during development, etc., please do. So the bottom line is that SOE is going to be getting more involved with Sigil and Vanguard - our relationship is going to become even tighter - much tighter. At this point I can't say much more than that.

Does this mean an acquisition? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean more or less people at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean management changes at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

What it does mean at this point is that both companies agree that we need more of SOE's involvement if Vanguard is going to continue to get the support it needs to both continue to be worked on and improved and debugged and optimized. When people start getting burned out of the Warcraft expansion (pardon the pun), we need to make sure that the game is more polished and will play on lower end machines. As people continue to level up, it means that we need additional higher level content, including raid content. If we are going to change our marketing message effectively to target those who played a lot of EverQuest but who have 'grown up' such that they have jobs, families, etc. that they cannot and will not play another EverQuest even though they enjoyed they game years ago. We've done studies and it's not atypical of an old EQ player, when they hear about Vanguard, to assume that because many of the people involved in Vanguard's development worked on EQ as well, that Vanguard must simply be an EQ 3. From that point they don't even give Vanguard another look. They don't do any more research on the game. They don't go to the official sites. They don't go to the affiliate sites. Instead they think to themselves, "ah well, were I younger and had my life not changed, I'd give it a shot, but I just don't have the time for another EQ with better graphics right now."

And that's it - they don't give Vanguard another thought EQ peaked in late 2001 at almost 500k subscribers. In its lifetime it's sold over 2 million units. Putting EQ in a vacuum and that's a lot of people who played and who aren't playing anymore. And the total number of subscribers didn't start going down until sometime 2002. I'm also pretty sure up until its peak that the average lifespan of a player was nearing 9-12 months. And as I mentioned in my last lengthy post, this group of people who played but don't anymore could arguably be put into two sub-groups - those who look back fondly at those months and even years and those who don't. I have read posts and received emails from people who claim to have played to max level and then quit very angry - the "I just played your game for 2 years and now I hate you" emails. But realistically how big is that group? Even if it was half (boggle) the other group is still pretty big. So ignoring all of the people who have quit or who are growing bored of their current MMOG (WoW, FFXI, DAoC, etc) that need to be reached (and in a very different way, especially the WoW player), both a word of mouth and a formal marketing campaign targeting these people clearly needs to launched. These people need to know that Vanguard does have the 'EQ feel' in many ways but that it is much more soloable than EQ was, especially the early EQ days. They need to know that you can play for short periods of time and advance. They need to know that the 'end game' is not all about raiding into the wee hours of the night. Some subset of these people will still feel burnt out of MMOGs period, but I think there's a lot of people who haven't been reached and our and others research supports that. False assumptions are being made by a lot of people. The reality is that Vanguard *is* the game most of these people are looking for - it has the good they remember, but has eliminated a lot of the tedium and necessary long hours that don't fit into their lifestyle anymore.

Then there are the people who are growing weary of their current MMOG. Given how much larger the MMOG gamespace has grown since EQ's zenith in 2001 (arguably 7 times as large worldwide, and at least 2-3 time as large in North America alone), we have to take advantage of this. At some point these people are going to want to start a new MMOG (especially after the WoW expansion newness has worn out, which for most of the non-hard-core would be when you really have to start raiding in the expansion). LoTR Online is an x-factor - reviews from beta testers seem to indicate that the game is more casual like WoW, a small game, and that it looks really good but can run on a lower end system much better than Vanguard (just as WoW can). So at least for a time the more casual bored WoW player may migrate to LoTR Online. How sticky (e.g. how long that game will hold onto players) is unknown, but I think it's safe to say that a significant percentage of the more casual bored WoW player will head to LoTR - at least first, given the franchise around it. Conservatively this leaves the more hard core WoW player (which in Vanguard or EQ terms would be considered either a hard core or, more likely, a core gamer). That number, even just taking the North American and European gamer is still potentially a large one and needs to be targeted (given Vanguard's high system specs, the time it will take to localize, and Blizzard's name recognition and pre-existing proven marketing ability in Asia, I wouldn't count that group, although a very significant one, until 2008 or so. Targeting that group is for a future discussion).

Lastly, there's the very real issue of Vanguard's system specs, even for the core and hard core gamer in North America and Europe. For a variety of reasons and mistakes on our part that I won't get into right now, Vanguard was released with system spec requirements that were too high for January 2007. Continued optimization will help to a degree, but the game's big hope here is simply Moore's Law and that by the second half of 2007, and certainly by the end of the year, the system spec issue will have been greatly diminished. The big problem that remains is that you still pretty much need a new system as opposed to, say, simply a new graphics card. But eventually, gamers do replace their systems. Given what Vista (especially the Ultimate edition) takes to really run, combined with other games that come out by the end of the year that really push technology, many people will be compelled to buy new systems. Unlike EQ, which was one of the first hardware only games, Vanguard needs not only a fast graphics card, but also a system with pci-express, fast memory, a fast FSB, etc. With EQ, you just needed to buy a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2 - the rest of your system is fine. With Vanguard, however, just plugging the fastest AGP card into your 2-3 year old system doesn't cut it. In fact, Vanguard runs pretty well on a 2 GB system with a decent pci-express video card and fast memory in a 2.6 GHz Pentium; conversely, run the game on an older AGP system, the fastest AGP card you can buy, and a 3.2 GHz CPU and you'll have framerate issues. The game is simply not CPU bound, nor just graphics card bound, but rather mostly bound by the data that it needs to constantly move from the CPU to main memory to the graphics card, and then all the way back again. It's all about the various bus speeds and caches - moving data around efficiently is arguably more important than processing that data on the CPU or GPU. The only fix here, again, is time. Vista (especially the Ultimate edition, which is what's being pushed to gamers) wants fast components. Direct X 10 hardware and software will help a lot, especially when there is a DX10 version of Vanguard. A native 64bit client of Vanguard will eventually help a lot too. Bottom line: by the end of 2007, a lot more people should have upgraded, especially if Microsoft succeeds with Vista and native DX 10 games. And if they really push Gaming for Windows like they did, say, the Xbox 360, the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 should be a very different landscape for PC games in general and Vanguard specifically. Was the Vanguard tech ahead of its time? Yes, and there has been a price to pay for that short term (although many people are able to play with older machines - why? Different configurations, different settings, different thresholds for lower framerates, etc.). But MMOGs ideally never end and if you've architected your engine to both push the limits of existing and near future technology as well as easily employ future technologies, then you have a game that doesn't look dated one, two, even three plus years down the road. And that's what we did with Vanguard - so we feel some pain now, but if we can keep the momentum going, this decision pays off in the long run (big time).

In summary, there are arguably a lot of people who by mid to end of this year in the MMOG gamespace for whom Vanguard could potentially be very attractive. What the game needs is a re-launch of sorts, including targeted marketing campaigns, an all-around successful move by gamers to the next generation of hardware, continued good word of mouth 'viral' marketing by those who are already playing, enjoying, and re-subscribing. And all of this could and should ramp up by the end of the year, all the while the Vanguard team is putting in more content, the live team filling out high level content as well as adding to areas of the game's vast seamless world which are a bit empty. Then a re-launch towards the end of the year plus the first expansion (which is looking like first quarter 200SMILEY8), one that would add RTS style city building, ship to ship combat, jousting, and a second 'half' of the Kojanese Archipelago that makes ship travel meaningful - and by meaningful I mean not tedious, rewarding exploration, with lots of new areas (both in the existing world and in the extension of the archipelago). And I'm talking about some re-use of existing art, combined with new art that fits into the existing continents, and then finally some all out new stuff - different styles of terrain (islands) and ocean to look at while making your journey to found a new player city while constantly being attacked by exotic sea creatures, leviathans, and other traditional members of fantasy and crypto-zoology. Not to mention pirates with canons, or other players and their ships on the PvP servers. And who knows, could be first expansion or second, but eventually you need to pull from Mesoamerican mythology, encounter empires based on Greco-roman architecture... it goes on and on, it's all planned out, and Vanguard can do all of it given sufficient time. The tools have matured, both in terms of art and design, and the art process orders of magnitude more efficient because of years of Maya scripting, an in-house terrain generator that creates what you want as opposed to spitting out algorithmically generated hills and valleys, and an art team that has this process down pat - for example, they were able to re-create Tursh and Leth Nurae in a fraction of time it took them to create the original, smaller, and much less interesting 'versions'.

"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."

So what does that mean again? Again, I apologize for not being able to go into details and it's the details that need to be worked out. But I think it's safe to say that both Sigil and SOE see the potential of a mind blowing game by the end of the year. What's needed, bottom line, is some time, and how to get that time is what's being worked out. And so I still see a 500k+ game, I was just off by a year for a variety of reasons, some under my control, many not. And I think SOE sees this as well. To pull it off however, requires a funded and supported Sigil and a well marketed Vanguard with these different target audiences identified and solid plan on how to reach them all, and then a solid execution of said plan, hitting them hard, pushing these 'WoW everywhere' point of purchase materials from the front to the very back.. In the meantime, the Vanguard that was launched in early 2007 continues to move forward, with much of what I've talked about patched in over time, and the rest in the first expansion (or re-launch, or whatever we all agree upon in terms of product and service placement). Bottom line, Vanguard continues to march forward, a solid and fun game today, and an even better one tomorrow. More 'state of the game' posts by me, a regularly updated 'In the Works' http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/inTheWorks.vm. And whatever kind of increased partnership between Sigil and SOE is necessary to make this vision a reality. And again, as for what that means exactly, more on that later TM.

- Brad, don't quit your day job to become an analyst.

- When you are fired part ways amicably with SOE, still don't become an analyst.

- Burned out WoW players are not going to flood to Vanguard.

- Worry about making Vanguard its own game, not WoW.

Lantyssa, I respectfully disagree with your last statement; if Sigil had worried even a little bit about the customer expectations set up by WoW, CoX and EQ2, as a top of my head list of 'working games', they would not be in the fix they're in. Their 'crime', if any, is the complete hubris of utterly forgetting what a customer will put up with while playing a modern MMO.

Some guy:  I bet you can't write a 2,455-word essay that says nothing.
Brad: Fuck you, watch this.

The next time this man's fingers touch a keyboard, it had better be to write a want ad for an editor.

Being one of those people who played lots of EQ when I was younger and have since got a familly, I can say that he's 100% right that I dismiss Vanguard without a second thought.  Any game that was targeted for the Hardcore like VG was isn't for me.

And I'm certainly not going to install that piece of shit Vista and get a new system in order to Catass my through Vanguard.

 

Brad's Wall of text critically hits you for 4352 chaos damage.
You are dead.
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Seriously, this is Serek Dmart material. Worst, actually. He is beyond imagination, he is a total joke.

I wonder.

I mean, you're right, they should have known that the market has evolved. Players have more choices now. Blizzard et. al. have spoiled us all by finishing their MMOs before going retail. And Sigil should have taken all of this into account years ago, when they were designing their game, and not waiting till last year, when they were "beta testing" their game.

But I still wonder. At some point in the past year or two, they switched gears from "we will make the game we want" mode, to "we will make a game that will attract more subscribers" mode. And the result has been an unfinished, buggy, underperforming mess.

But what if they hadn't switched gears? What if they'd gone ahead with the game as it was originally envisioned? They would have spent the past year working on that game, making it work, finding and killing the bugs, maybe even optimizing it, and possibly adding in some more content.

I wonder if a catass cockblock game that was working, and free of bugs, and had finished content all the way to max level, wouldn't have more subscribers than the bug-ridden half-finished mess that went retail? Maybe a lot more?

Obviously we can't see how that would have turned out. But it's interesting to contemplate.

slog, as one of those who also played EQ1 pretty much every night for 18 months and then got married and had 3 kids I can report that VG is nothing like that now. Exp has been increased twice since launch and now is tolerable. If you are brand new to VG but not new to MMOGs, level 1-10 should take 10-15 hours. Level 11-20 will take 25-35 hours. These are rough guesses only and probably err on the slow side for levelling speed.

Brad's post is obviously just hope spilling from his fingers onto the keyboard. Sigil willfully (or ignorantly, hard to know which) ignored how the market had changed and built a game that would break on 90% of their target customers' machines. That decision was made 3 years ago. Then, they frittered away time that could have gone to polish the game (another lesson ignored) by adding scope, but not real scope. Just the skeletal framework for scope. Lastly, the UI is total crap.

I still play VG at all because of the grouping. Whether it is 3 vs 3/4dots or 6 vs 4/5dots, grouping is fun in VG. The problems are 1) the dungeons are quite far apart, 2) LFG tools suck, 3) population (on Hilsbury at least) is sparse. My guild has all but quit and/or taking a break from crafting burnout. The good part is that I haven't had PUG quality issues because 99% of players are from another MMOG and that CC is nice to have but not required so all you really need for a group is a melee and a healer. An offensive melee can tank if he has a few levels on the mobs.

So I am still giving the game some /play. I am not recommending it to anyone, though. I am not an endgame guy and the minute I hit 70 in EQ2 I found it harder to log in. VG fills the need to see a new world and learn my way around all over again.

Maybe it's better now, but I don't give second chances very often (or even first chances.)  I will always prefer a game that was designed from day 1 to meet my playstyle over one that was targetted at the catass and then retrofitted when the powers that be realized no one wanted their shitty game.

The defenses of this game make it seem worse than my prejudiced views of it (a first!).  Please, someone hit me with another Brad text-wall. 

I think that is the perfect one-sentence review.  I enjoyed trying a few classes, looking around, and dabbling with crafting.  Then I left.  It was worht the box cost to play a month, but anyone expecting anything deeper is in for a disappointment. 

In a word: "No".

What changed, a year or so back, was the fact that Sigil was resorting to begging Beta testers to keep playing. It turns out that their original catass game's market was so minisucle that they couldn't find enough catass beta testers to keep logging on.

They had to keep removing cockblocks just to get enough people to properly Beta the game -- it totally lacked anything that apparently anyone found "fun".

That's kind of how I felt. Ironically, even though I cancelled my account I got charged for another month anyways  :|

Though I bet that there's a large amount of people (myself included) that would have stuck around for a few more months if the world had a spark of life to it. And I'm talking purely art direction at this point. Wandering around through a world where small animals, fish, insects, and aquatic plants such as seaweed are mysteriously absent isn't appealing enough to make me spend time traveling to all the areas.

He's such a fucking dumbass. I love it.

He's talking about how high tech Vanguard is, trying to play it down as much as possible but his GLEAMING SUNLIGHT just shines through.

Meanwhile he's got idiots running around with wolf and tiger heads on human bodies. HIGH FUCKING TECH GUYS.


Hire some new coders.

I said nothing about expectations.  Having a polished, working game with fun mechanics should be something every company strives for.

Trying to be WoW is not.  CoX and WoW are very different, but both are well done.

Instead they tried to be their own game, then tried to be another, and because of it didn't even get the "working" part started.  His x-factor of LoTR is far closer to WoW, and is pretty well done.  People who want the WoW experience in a new package are going to trickle there and not Vanguard.  They never will, and the harder they try to be it, the worse their game is going to get.

Being a part of SOE they would do well to remember to make the game for the customers you have and not the customers you want.  Apparently he couldn't even learn that from SWG, and it's the best lesson out there in "what not to do".

I totally agree.  The game's biggest failing aside from the bugginess and lack of polish is that it tried to emulate WoW too much.

Fair enough. I thought that they started making changes, and then the beta testers started leaving. But, I wasn't taking notes :)

SOE happened.

VG could have been a hard-mode MMO for veteran Sleeper raiders. But then:

• It could not have demanded the development budget it had;
• It would have been dropped even sooner by Microsoft; and,
• It would not have been picked up by SOE at all.

The result would either have been a game not delivered at all. The hype of what this game could have been commanded too much of a development budget dumped into art and world stuff to survive the reality of just how many people (read: not) were really interested in it. The core problem is that I don't think they ever truly evaluated just how many people bothered with hardcore-EQ1. It's like making a game all about WoW: BC raiding and expecting 25% of the players to come. No friggin' way.

VG had some pretty good ideas, and the areas that were polished were interesting and different. But it's an aggregate of completing ideas in an era of expected polish and playability without a learning curve. There's not enough people who want to put up with unplayable buggy crap to support an expensive AAA MMO anymore. Even those that used to have moved on.

/raises hand

I'm not sure about that.  They had to beg testers to play because the game was an un-fun pile of shit.  I can't find the link to Potus' rant about it, but he was dead on.  The core game was just really, really unfun.  Crafting was just like EQ2's "mash the flashing icon" crafting.  Combat was also just like EQ2's "mash the flashing icon" crafting.  You had to stare at the UI 80% of the time you played, waiting to play this Simon minigame that was, in fact, the whole game.

I think there might be a decent market out there for a well-made (i.e. relatively bug free, engaging setting, no actively horrible game mechanics) catass game (by which I mean group-required, slow advancement, endgame of large, non-instanced raids).  Not huge by any means, but I think there might be a market.  Beta2-Vanguard isn't a good test for that because it was so eye-gougingly horrible.

I think there's probably a bigger market for a slower-paced, group-oriented but still instanced WoW, of course.  And even that market is a joke compared to the WoW market.

Is everything that isn't WoWsized in terms of sub numbers now a joke?  Or am I reading too much into what you're saying?

Is 250K or 500K now considered a failure?

That game is called FFXI. The whole point of that game is basically to be a better EQ and it delivers that pretty well.

I think you are reading too much in, I only meant in relative terms.  My annual salary is a joke compared to, say, Barry Bonds' salary, but I don't think I'm a failure.  At least not for that reason  :cry:

Depends on how much money was spent developing it, among other things.

Anyone have a link to the proposed rogue content that didn't make it to release? IIRC it sounded like something I suggested to some dev team but I don't recall posting it on the VG boards. I'm curious to find out how far they got, and what issues they ran into.

Depends on the needs of the business, how adequately it was scaled to its actual audience size, relationship variables, and so on. It's the Eve vs SWG thing: numbers that CCP could (at the time) only wish for Eve were not nearly enough for SOE to stay the course on SWG.

Almost nobody thinks in terms of WoW because almost nobody has the resources to compete in the same way. So some do a more honest assessment of their true audience size while others build completely different business models.

And none of this is new thinking. It's just that the numbers being measured have an extra zero or two from the days of EQ1 being on top.

I have to echo those who say the game was changed due large scale rejection during beta.  I was in beta 2 when the entire testing population would consist of myself and 30-50 other people on a typical night.  I didn't keep notes but right around beta 2.5 they started making changes just to get people to log into test.   The issue for early testers was that they could not find any reason to log in, other than their commitment to test.   I continued to test because I felt a responsibility to at least try.  The early combat was an ambitious attempt to break the mold but had a problem, in order to play you could not look at the game you could only watch the UI. 

The idea that they changed the game and then testers left is not accurate, if they had not changed the game even fewer people would have played, it was that bad. 

I'm not posting to bash the team, I find no joy in kicking someone while they are down but they had no choice but to change the game between Beta 2 and 3.

Not that it would have made the game better but with the condition of the game the affiliate only community program was an awful business decision.   

I think many of us felt that if they had stuck with the original 'Vision' of a hardcore game and actually finished it, they could have had a solid niche at 100k+ or so. Apparently Brad's dick was bigger then his pants and the sight of it out in the open scared many away. Happens to a lot of people and businesses that think they are somehow the source of a trend when in reality, they are just riding the wave.

He isn't one of us! Get him!

Yes, there is some revisionist history going on already. Vanguard moved more towards WOW because it had to. Nobody liked the game in the original incarnation. Had they stuck to their guns it would have been an even bigger disaster.


There is no reason to believe that. Regardless of vision, the implementation has been a huge problem. Really no matter what the vision the implementation would have dragged it down. FFXI is already a better EQ, and Lineage 2 is already an uber-catass game. The fact that Vanguard won't run on a lot of systems doesn't help matter either. Both FFXI and Lineage 2 have better character models and run a lot better, and both are years old now.

Let's say there is room for a better FFXI then.
Too bad they screwed it up.

Well yeah, but because most of us hate grinds.  I think the point that was being made was that FFXI was already targeted at the hardcore catass that Vanguard was originally trying to appeal to, and did that job much better than Vanguard does.  I'm sure among Square's other MMO projects though, it's likely they're at least in the early planning stages of FFXI's eventual successor.

I appreciate your opinion but I think you are over simplifying the issue.  Most important, no one would purposely spend $30,000,000+ to create a 100k player niche game, that's like building the space shuttle to fly from Columbus to Chicago.  Why spend such an obscene amount of money on that project when others have done more spending a fraction of the money?  As a simple business reality they had no choice but change course hoping to expand their audience.  The failure of VGSOH is not a hardcore vs. easy issue, it's a design that was not fun.  Im going to assume that some number of the beta testers considered themselves hardcore mmorpg players, yet even they rejected the gameplay.  The biggest thread I remember during beta was one when all 50 players who actually logged into beta (joking) described the game as a game of Whack-A-Mole.  Only in the dreams of the development team would corpse runs, fast travel, death penalty and equipment damage be the issues which kept them awake at night.  They faced the dreaded nightmare of throwing a  $30,000,000 party and having no one come.   If after spending $30M dollars they could not get more than 50 of the thousands of players who were invited into beta to test/play the game for free, how were they going to get 200-400k to play they needed to pay down the enormous debt?

I don't know if Vangard had a niche.  Want hardcore grinds?  Try any Korean MMO.  Want casual fun?  WoW is king.  LoTR makes it in because they have the IP.  Maybe Vanguard would be moderately successful if at least it worked on older computers.  They could have at least sold more boxes before everyone detected the stank inside.

I would pay for a group-focused non-WoWalike-solo-quest-oriented its-about-the-journey-not-the-destination diku. 

Minus the fruityness of squaresoft (although, I admit I haven't tried FFXI, I've heard enough horror stories to want to avoid it, any game that deletes my characters is not one I'm going to play).

Basically an EQ without excessively punitive gameplay and without really boring combat.  A little mystery about the world, a community that is fairly close-knit due to group-focused gameplay, and maybe some form of PvP.

And I always assume that if I would pay for it, I imagine many people would.  I'm not that unique.  (well, considering WoW's sub-base, maybe I am).

My point is EQ2 came out in 1998. Then 4 years later the formula got really cloned (long griind included) and aesthetically revamped with FFXi and it still went (and is going) strong. In 2007 you are one year late on the expected and deserved new iteration of the same product, but Vanguard failed while trying to be different (not a true clone) and no new FF Online coming. As I said, a real new EQ clone could have scored big, while the ambition of capturing the magic *while* changing and *improving* it screwed Vanguard. From what I heard, should they have sticked to the original Vanguard design they'd had failed anyway, while if they have tried to simply clone EverQuest and Final Fintasy XI with better graphics they'd had scored. Hubris (ὕβρις), as someone said. Brad's full of that.

The point of Lineage 2 and the long grind is moot, cause that's not what made EverQuest interesting. It was the lots of very different zones, the dungeons, the itemization and the lore. Lineage 2 has NONE of that stuff.

Mark my words, we are watching the fall of the DIKU-empire.

Don't get me wrong, WoW will continue to outperform most of Africa financially and anything they might do *cough*W.o.Starcraft*cough* will bring them up to Italy's GDP. And niche Diku's will continue to be profitable enough to exist, in some cases wildly profitable - yes I'm looking at you Korea.

But I really believe that WoW is the late roman empire of the DIKU model. Warhammer will do ok imo and LoTRO deserves to return a positive ROI, but looking at the overall gaming market DIKU as an approach is on the decline. How do I know? Because it's a commodity product  now that's attracting a gazillion copycats, and the barrier to enter has been lowered significantly. Additionally the significant fantasy IP's are accounted for, and they are the most appropriate wrappings for DIKU gameplay. Saturated market anyone? Not to say there will be no further successful DIKU's, but it's not the wild west of opportunity it was. There is no WoW II from anyone but Blizzard. And money will follow money.

So where's the money at? Consoles. Specifically, console/PC hybrid titles allowing cross-pollination of consumers. Which means that the hardcore grind to win crowd that PWNT the game when there was 400,000 players world-wide become a rounding error when assessing a market of 10 - 14 million potential consumers. Not that any title will do that - but that's the installed base they are now evaluating.

Every fantasy DIKU MMORPG released after WoW is a 'me too' effort regardless of the creative effort or inventiveness of the team involved (attributes VG didn't have in execution, hard to win that way). Even Warhammer, which I am really looking forward to, can only be viewed as the swan song of the genre. DIKU's are bound by the basic mechanics, and as many people I've spoken to about LoTRO say: "Yeah it's all-right, but why would I play that when I could play WoW if I wanted to?" (anecdotal and simplified but accurate.)

WoW has essentially achieved a network economy effect in that if you're going to play a class based DIKU casually or for PvE you just might as well play WoW, even if you don't particularly like it! Why? Because it is the safest haven for your MMORPG commitment in regards to time and return. Why do people avidly defend their MMORPG of choice, even when it's obviously crap? Because they are vested in its success through their personal commitment of resources.

WHO will be fun. LoTRO was ok in beta and I hope they get a sustainable profitable base. But overall? Times have changes - the gorilla isn't just a gorilla, it's a Caesar, and it's playing a violin.

EDIT: Spleeling

EDIT: Clarification: when I say the barrier to entry in the DIKU world has been lowered I don't mean capital costs. I mean in terms of scarcity in design and development ideas. Arguably WoW has raised the capital requirement for a DIKU MMORPG to unreasonable levels. Which is contradictory. Sue me.

Actually, I agree with you. My only doubt is about Warhammer, as I am not sure it can be qualified as a DIKU after all. I consider Conan and Warhammer as the first two major attempts at slowly moving away from the DIKU model.

I question whether that is really true. When EQ came out it was the only game in town, and FFXI, while not the only game in town, was still well before WOW. It is quite possible that EQ and FFXI did well because there was no real alternative that was significantly different and also stable, polished, etc.

Disco used to be popular but a new disco record today isn't going to set the world on fire. Maybe the market has just moved on. Tapes and vinyl records were popular at one point - try releasing one today.

I don't see any reason to believe that a new EQ variation would be any more than a minor success. Just because it worked at one point doesn't mean it is going to continue to work.

Talking about EQ-alike games is kind of misleading because that means a couple of different things. What the Vanguard team focused on originally was the "difficulty." No travel options, bad death penalties, etc. Interesting, varied zones is something else entirely.

None of the people I know who play FFXI are ever going to play another FFXI. It simply takes too much investment. They'll stick with FFXI until it peters out but they are never going to play another game where meeting up with your buddies is an hour-long ordeal. These people are not repeat customers - not for that style of game anyway.

That said, there is plenty of middle ground between a game like WOW and a game like FFXI for developers to explore.

Yeah Margalis, I correct myself. It couldn't have scored big (for the reasons you mention). But it could have scored OK, like say half of FFXI numbers. That is still way better than scoring trainwreck.

I've been hearing about the "Death of the DIKU" since 1999.  I'm still waiting....

I get it now. Brad McQuaid is HIRO, only he's present day Hiro who thinks he can save New York by traveling to the Vanguard of the future.

What a Raging Douchebag.

You were WRONG, Brad. Just say it. You were wrong about how many people would give a shit to play your game. You were wrong about WoW. You were wrong about computing power, you were wrong about art design, you were FUCKING WRONG. Just say it, then shut the fuck up and never darken computer gaming again.

Fuckhead.

The second he says he failed in the most blatant terms is the second his career is over, and I don't think Brad is going to do that, because people who make lots of money just don't do that.

Edit: I backtracked through the thread and read Brad's long and boring analysis of Vanguard as it is right now and what they need to do to draw customers, and it turns out it's everything except making a game that can be played by a large variety of PCs that's fun to play.  But I eventually stopped reading when the point was "We've targeted a very small market segment that's still big even when you take keep subtracting the type of people that wouldn't play our game, and we're proud of that, and we have something to share.  Please play our game when you're not busy with WoW or LotRO or any of the other better MMOGs out there."

If someone's a hardcore game player, the type Brad wants, then I seriously doubt they are going to confuse Vanguard as EQ3.  I'd like to think that a hardcore gamer tends to be more educated on his gaming choices.

I think people keep confusing DIKU style games with dice-roll combat mechanics. If there's going to be the death of anything, it's going to be the latter.

There's nothing wrong with core DIKU. It's carrot/stick modelling that appears in just about every RPG-like experience out there.

Nah, what's really dated is this separation between choice and action by dice. That shit's gotta stop. Look at every other genre where, by the way, most of the video game industry money goes. "Immersive" isn't graphic quality and photorealism. It's how connected a player feels to their character and the ingame world at all, through actions, through UI.

I never felt connected to the world of WoW. I had to read the books to deepen my immersion. But the game is on rails. When I'm focused on foozles, I don't care. When I get bored and leave though, it's for that exact reason. *I* don't bring anything to WoW except maybe PvP, itself a complete contrivance, another tech tree, with no persistent relevance. I don't mind that they're making it a sport. I just don't give a shit either though.

To me, UI makes all the difference. This is why I look so forward to Huxley and AoC. Big budget games with completely different UIs.

If AoC doesn't completely suck and Funcom doesn't bork the launch (it's been six years, I'm ready to give them another chance), then THAT is going to be the death of dice-roll-combat mechanics. Still DIKU and that's fine because it works. But a different UI, something more console-y, something borrowing from the metric fuckton of money THOSE things bring to "video games" as compared to the house that Brad built.

?? Um no. DIKU is the Class/Level method of progression and the interdependency of those classes (the holy trinity). Fallout was not DIKU in any sense of the term. Any. DIKU!=RPG. DIKU comes from DIKU MUD the base system that Everquest was inspired by. I don't know how you can say it appears in every RPG experience, that's completely false.

DIKU
DAoC
EQ/II
WoW
LOTRO
VG

NOT DIKU
Shadowbane
AC
UO

Are you suggesting the latter aren't RPG's (or at least less RPG than the former?)

EDIT: I agree with you by the way in regards to combat mechanisms. But I don't think DIKU means what you think it does. It's not an RPG reward convention at all. It's about the structure of character progression and forced interdependency. And I'm completely unconvinced that it's "good".

/snicker.  He is depending on Vista, worse piece of shit out there.

This is a good way to highlight a problem. There is what DIKU is, and there is how people use it. I suffer from the latter problem. Gven that DIKU itself was inspired by earlier systems, and that there's a lot of systems that have been inspired by it since, it's very hard to find clear definition of what DIKU "is". I have long interpreted it as mostly a character progression (what I called "carrot/stick") system only, with the other stuff (class/level, triniy and interdependency) coming from D&D. But I really wasn't paying attention to this stuff as it was evolving. My first "MUD" was Diablo 2 online :) So I definitely could be wrong, and invite correction.

But whether DIKU is more than just something strapped around D&D, I think it's been "good" in the sense that people seem to enjoy the system, with more coming every year due to how it has been wrapped experiencially.

What I think will be replaced in time is part of that wrapping, the combat system, with something more immersive, more immediate. I know this would risk losing a chunk of the base that is here now. So I'm thinking what'll happen is the genre will splinter between current WoW combat and something more along the lines of console-y type experiences (without the Jolt-required carpal tunnel inducing controller), kinda like the difference between virtual lifestyle-y things like Eve/SL and directed-play experiences like WoW/GW. I don't know which one will be more successful of course, but I foresee that much of a gap in relative playerbase.

See, the problem with seeing DIKU as carrot-stick is that most MUDs didn't actually do that.  They had loot that was easily accessible and doable in much smaller groups than MMOs.  Hell, they were closer to CRPGS than todays MMOs, becuse you knew exactly what to kill to get what drop.  It was just a straight % chance on how often it dropped... and none of the MUDs I played ever did this asinine ".002% chance" thing that MMOs do to 'preserve the economy.' 

See, 'economy' in GAMES is dumb.  DIKU is a game, not a world, but most devs keep forgetting that, having some grander idea in place.

I disagree completely.  I play these games for two reasons - exploration and economy.  Now, they aren't real world economic models, but these games do have economies of sorts.

If DIKU is not a world, then please define world.

What? No it isn't.

ftp://ftp.game.org/pub/mud/diku/ (http://ftp://ftp.game.org/pub/mud/diku/)

Download the source code.

Err, right. Source code = insights.


Not to quibble, but, well, I'm going to quibble :)

In essence, the only difference between "straight & chance" and ".002% chance" is the time it takes to win. You STILL know what to kill to get what drop and you STILL don't have a guaranteed chance to get it the first or 12th time you try. There's a world of difference experientially of course, just not at the system level.

So is it that MUDs felt different at the system level, or simply because it was easier to achieve the same character progression (XP, level, “skills”, gear) we’ve been achieving since EQ1 (or earlier)?

No, that's what DIKU is. It's like asking "where is France" and someone replying with map image, pointing at France. There's the answer. Take it or leave it.

You can high-brow about what it REALLY is with people like Raph, but you'll just end up with people laughing at you in the long run.

Since your first game was D2, you should compile the base DIKU source and see what it's all about. There's your insights.

Oh, wait, I think I get it now. This is source code I could grab, compile, and play. Somehow I didn't get that from your first post, thinking you were expecting me to a) learn the language it was programmed in; and, b) get the picture of the forest from it.

So, yea, I'll actually be doing that. Thanks!

(and I'm used to the laughing part ;) )

That's like saying the only difference between pong and video tennis is the graphics quality.   It's a HUGE difference, and you're trying to make the differences more subtle than they are.

Part of it was experiential, part of it was mechanics, part of it was simply people realized it was a game and didn't try to bring a lot more into it - even the 'worldly' ones.

   MUDS were free to the users, and even though people played them for huge chunks of time, it was about socializing more than loot grinding.  When I say mobs had a 'chance' to drop something, I mean a 25% chance if you were screwing around on a rarer mob. (at least on the ones I played.)  That meant you'd take an hour, tops, to get that 'sweet rare item.'  Bit of a difference there, hey?

Then the "economy" was laughable at best.  Most muds I played on had 'donation pits' near the starting point.  Look in the pit, find free equipement (quantity depended on playerbase size.)  Gold was used for restrings (Having an Immortal (dev) change the description on an item so it was unique for you.) repairs, food or whatever else the IMPs (implementors) put in.   Tradeskills, as such, didn't exsist because there was no point to it.  The closest thing you could get to tradeskills was to become a Builder, and create your own zones for players to mess around in.

Now, that's not to say ALL muds were like that, but that was my DIKU/ Circle/ ROM experience.  Raph had his own MUD which - as I understand - went more in the "world" direction, and implemented things like tradeskills and economies.  These muds weren't anywhere near as prevelant in my experience.   

All that's just the first layer, however.  Because the source code is freely available, plenty of folks added-in their own twists and flavors and coding such as you're NEVER going to see in a MMO, because they're for cash, as well as 3-d.  Can you imagine implementing a restring/ remodel feature in a modern MMO?  Or a MMO without tradeskills, where equipment was passed-around willy-nilly because it didn't matter, as that was the 4th time you'd gotten that "uber sword" in today's play session?

Really.. and I do mean REALLY.. before you toss DIKU around you need to play around on one.  Get zMud or check out Mudconnector.com and pop on a few to play a bit. 

Alternatively, Go To MudConnector (http://www.mudconnector.com/) and do a search for dikumud.  Look for things that say dikumud, Merc, ROM, Circle, or Ember, and don't say too much about being customized or 'heavily modded'.  Then again, those claims generally only apply to the login screen, so heavily modified might work.  Saves having to build the source...

I agree that DIKU is an overall system thing, nothing to do with carrots or sticks.  Darniaq, you might say it's the D&D influence, or whatever.  It's classes with (lots of) levels, it's the classic 6 stats, level/classbased-hp/mana, with equipment that provides bonuses to both those stats, and to damage.  It's autoattack with specials.  It's the whole ding-grats model, which I was doing in 1996(well before EQ), and was certainly around before then.  It's static spawns, static areas, and static equipment drops.

Honestly, the only thing that is different between the DikuMUDs from the mid 90's and WoW are graphics, scale, and quality of world/area/mob/class design.  And perhaps the Diablo-esque random loot drops.

As far as your discussion of 'diceroll' mechanics going away, I doubt it.  I believe that autoattack mechanics may go away soon, and good riddance.  That was one of the things I liked most about CoX's combat... every swing mattered, because every swing was initiated by the user.

--
Alkiera

A world is exactly that... a world.  It focuses itself on replicating or simulating 'real life' mechanics in some sort of setting.  How often something comes into the world matters, because it affects the game economy.  How often something enters a game doesn't matter economically as much as it does to the gameplay itself.  Worlds try to abstract certain things for the sake of replication - such as merchants and trade skills.  Games either don't generally bother, or do it in a manner that it's just a means to an end of other game features.

 Worlds tend to be a lot deeper than games as a result, but that depth comes at the price of fun for some segment.  Depth requires a top and a bottom, and it's generally no damn fun to be on the bottom.

checkz this out

Vanguard Newsletter Apr 07 (http://newsletters.station.sony.com/images/vanguard/vg_april07.jpg)

note if you read the last part of it, they have banned over 1000 accounts already, so how many does that leave playing?

Counting Brad? 

Or did he go back to WoW?

Once again I renewed my sub. A guildmate helped me get my quarrying up from 1 to 85 (it is all about finding the right place which, of course, involves traveling 15-20mins out of your way...) and I had minor UO mining flashbacks. I also witnessed how more than one person can harvest the same node and dramatically boost the number of resources as a result. The helper doesn't even need the skill, just the right tool. Instead of 12-15 per node, I was getting 32-35 per node with a helper. I also had no idea I had to buy books (not expensive, just inconvenient) to access the next tier.

c 'locate object'

Even a 0.002% chance does not equate to grinding endlessly in a MUD.  If the object isn't loaded, there is no need to go after it.  Future iterations and other flavors may have changed this, but base DIKU gave items a chance to load with resets and each zone update, not upon creature death.

On the MUD I coded for I considered creating a random object drop, but that would have changed a lot of dynamics.  Additionally, if I had wanted to do it justice then we needed a loot system more akin to Diablo's, and that would be a pain to create and balance when the entire world was already designed around the current static items.

Edit: Spelling

Y'know, I forgot all about "locate object."   Man, I've played so many MMOs I've forgotten some of the good, fun stuff that was out there.

(S)(I)(F)(L) *Merusk Leaves West

Back in Telon, a dupe bug is apparently quite widespread. VG gold on the site that will go unnamed is down to $20 for 1200 gold from $50 for about 75 gold a month ago. To put that in perspective, my mid-teens characters have yet to see 1g from adventuring and selling low tier harvestables. The forums of the usual affiliate websites are going nuts. That plus the unanswered rumors of Sigil getting folded into SOE is making things interesting.

Is the drop in price due to a dupe bug or the general lack of demand?  I'd be inclined to guess the latter having the greater effect.

Last I heard, there were at least three really easy dupe bugs floating around. Apparently including at least one of the old zone-exploit type that any modern MMORPG should ensure is impossible.

I cannot know which impact is greater, although I suspect demand has always been more muted in VG than other games due to a rather intensive public effort by Sigil to stop RMT.

It pretty much must be a dupe bug. The amounts being offered by these sellers would not make economic sense if they had to pay someone to actually earn it in game. 1200 gold represents a monstrous amount of time because the game is very stingy in how much coin drops and what merchants will pay for items.

Well, my guild just gave up on it wholesale. There's 3 or 4 people left playing Vanguard, after a heated debate on Ventrilo one night. The system crashes, the bugs and the grind all did my guild in. They're back in WoW after this week's 10 day pass to try out Burning Crusade. I joined them too for now, but I'm not sure I'll stay, in either game.

FYI, there's at least one widely-known dupe bug in VG - the old "X hands item to Y in zone A, Y moves to zone B, X crashes zone A" trick.

I thought I saw a dupe bug outlined somewhere which basically went:

Step 1: Mail someone an item.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!

where Step 2 is "sometimes, the mail gets sent twice".

--GF

Can you mail yourself an item?

Better! You can mail yourself 2!

Hell, I reported that one back in beta 3.

You send the mail, chunk crashes, log back in with items/money intact, and recipient still receives the mail.

This game is retro all the way, even with bugs.

I learned that Vanguard has an even better way to make money.  Their sub cancellation software is buggy. I cancelled my sub twice the first month and 3 months later I'm still being charged.  I called SOE and they said "Sorry Charlie". 

They did that to me, too. Tricksy, aren't they?

Your credit card company won't block the charge?  That would've been my first call after the first month cancellation didn't work.

Every month I subscribe and then cancel and then re-sub and immeditealy cancel again when my login fails due to lack of subscritpion. Never had an issue with SOE billing.

You have to travel to the Sigil offices to cancel.  Its on another continent.  Bring a group of at least five.

I actually found it less annoying to pay the $45 than to listen one more minute to the customer service guy on the other end of the phone.  What's wrong with this picture?

Well played, nerd. Well played.

Yup, there's a 6 page thread on the FoH board bitching and moaning about being billed after cancelling Vanguard. I had to cancel my credit card to stop SOE from billing my *expired* CC for my EQ accounts.

Wow if FoH leaves then the game is surely doomed.

Let me ask though.  Was Brad right?  Is there a market for a hardcore mmo out there?  I mean if Vanguard had turned out good, do you think they would be wearing money hats right now?  I just have to think someone will 'counterprogram' a mmo away from the current quest-centric, easy levelling ones.  This market is just begging for a revolutionary title.

I think there is a small market for a hardcore MMO.  The problem is that "hardcore" doesn't mean "extreme grind" which is sadly what MMOs seem to be best at.  By "hardcore" I envision a game with encounters that a minority will succeed at.  These could be solo, group, or small raid based.  Since a game like this would cost a significant amount to make while attracting such a small audience, I doubt it would ever be made.  It's not smart business.

There's already a market for hardcore MMOs. It's just that "hardcore" is a label to some, maybe there's even a psychographic profile worked up. It's a specific audience which, by that nature alone, means narrower. So being narrower, you have to be more specific in what you give them, which means a smaller experience. Which in turn means fewer players.

Eve is a good example of a successful hardcore game. And I expect one or three people to say "you can play Eve casually!11!", but Eve-casual and WoW casual are radically different things. And different people.

He is right only in the sense that such a market could exist for hardcore. But he was wrong is what he delivered to them. He can blame SOE, but he knew what he was signing on for when he went back to the place he left to make the spiritual successor to the game he created. If he didn't know they'd force him to launch in Jan, he maybe didn't ask the hard enough questions. And he could blame the size of the "hardcore" playerbase when in reality it's more that folks aren't willing to play unplayable buggy bloated clients in an age where other companies are capable of launching fully playable games. And he could blame Microsoft dumping the project, but then he'd have to explain the vision for the game he sold them on in the first place, which I'd bet is a fair departure from what he started saying right around last October about uber hardcore rar rar.

Here's the question phrased a bit differently. At least I'll try, it's late, I'm tired, but for some reason I can't fall asleep.

Could a 'hardcore' MMO work if done correctly? Is Vanguard to hardcore MMOs as Shadowbane is to PVP MMOs?

A lot of people said that PVP MMO games couldn't work, obviously, because look at how Shadowbane failed (When SB failed) - yet, I don't think it was the PVP part that failed. The problems were much deeper.

Is Vanguard the same way? Honestly I couldn't stomach the game long enough to figure out just how deep the troubles go.

As I said before, FFXI is a hardcore MMO that does well enough and works.

Very few people have accomplished all there is to accomplish in FFXI. The majority have not beaten the Chains of Promethea expansion missions, which are an expansion pack behind. The best equipment is rare. FFXI has a bunch of the hallmarks of a "hardcore" MMO - long levelling times, gameplay that is not quest-centric, group-centric play, etc.

The hardcore aspect of it is appealing to some people but really it is the other things it does well which make it just as appealing if not more so:

There are a lot of classes to play.
There are a lot of different end-game activities.
The community is mature, friendly and helpful.
Good graphics, animations and models.
A great sense of world and zone design.

The problem with Vanguard is that it took all the negatives of the "hardcore" MMO, added a bunch of bugs, and neglected the traditional positives. The world is big but boring. There are no endgame activities. The zones are not interesting. The graphics, animation and models are bad.

It was a game designed for people who want a frustrating shitty experience. Oddly enough, there aren't many people looking for that.

I don't know why people keep saying VG is 'hardcore'. Nothing in my experience of VG suggests its anything but grindy at times. Nothing in it represents any sort of tactical challenge whatsoever. Content that is described as requireing full groups often only require 3 people. There's an inane amount of travelling, and genocidal numbers of mobs to kill for certain quests or advancements, but that's not really hardcore, that's just content stuffing.

I am now under the assumption that given the size of the hardcore potential market, the budget of your hardcore game MUST NOT be too big.
Plus, the hardcore audience by definition is not easily amused by visuals and FMV. You have to invest your money on gameplay and core mechanics, design!
That way you can focus on what your audience really care for without lingering on "teh shinies", which a hardcore gamer by definition is not too much interested in.

Vanguard did it all wrong when, trying to appeal to the hardcore gamers, went the way of the 25 mil. budget.

EVE is the usual example, great ideas, great mechanics, enough "braveness" without the need to spend billions.

Talent goes a long way, Brad. And you can't buy it. Even for 25 million dollars.

Just a quick note, but I popped into EQ2 where I'm a member of two different guilds. Both of them have been devastated by Vanguard. The larger of the two lost over half our members to Vanguard. One of them had a large EQ1 chapter, which was also hit very hard by Vanguard.

But those people didn't like Vanguard. They liked the game, but the bugs and population got to them. But a good number if not a majority are not coming back to EQ1/2, after being refuseniks for years at this point, they're moving to WOW.

I think a hardcore MMO would be one where all the things that are supposed to make a MMO addictive are taken to the extreme.   Random drop chances requiring sustained effort to get, heavy competition, punishment for failure (death penalty).  Whereas a casual MMO aims to minimize these things by requiring little effort, giving consistent predictable rewards, and making things easy and accessbile.

Both types need to have good-looking graphics, be bug-free, have lots of content that's balanced, etc.  In a word, both need quality in order to bring in whatever number of players is interested in playing that type of game, hardcore or casual.

It seems like a hardcore game would be at odd's with what many companies are doing currently, which is to code for the lowest common denominator of player. In it's own way, ATitD is a hardcore game too, but for crafters. I'd certainly play a game where there was a real challenge to it, and the kind of consequences that make you sit back in your chair and say "shit!" if you mess up (or get killed).

I'd agree with that.

Only thing hardcore about it got was the time investment.  I wouldn't mind a time investment if there was something to do besides routine quests.  The problem I ran into (other than crappy performance) was that there was so little 'content' at my level +/- 2 dings.  Couldn't tell you how many times I dozed off playing Vanguard. 

Probably because they spent the last year of beta removing most of the hard-core.

I mean, you should have read the shit they were actually planning. Brad's fucking "You'll need saddle bags to hold your spare gear so you have a fucking chance in hell at wading through ultra-fast respawns to get your good gear off your damn corpse" was the nice shit.

See, Brad's problem is that he's both too perceptive and too damn obtuse. He rightly realized that what his 'hardcore audience' wants is a fucking kick to the nuts. What he didn't realize is they wanted that nut kick to other people, with just a slight graze to themselves. :)

Heh, awesome.

Lets refine things a bit here.

I'm not in agreement with ajax4i when he states:



That's not the definition of hardcore for me.

On the other hand, he's spot on when he states:


The success of VG was contingent on the latter, not the former. It wouldn't have mattered one iota if VG had retained the catassery you describe, Morat. A poorly performing game is a poorly performing game, no matter what.

That said, I think there are intelligent varieties of 'hardcore' games out there that I recognise as well developed and appealing to a certain audience, of which I'm not a part of. I'm thinking in particular of FFXI and EvE. Both require advanced understanding of tactics and group dynamics to accomplish higher end goals. I'm not the type of player who has either the time or the brain space for that type of game, but I respect the audience that wants that.

Its akin to a WWII fighter plane PVP MMO I once played. I played it for weeks, but then realised that the target audience was for, you know, actual pilots who knew how to fly, understood the subtle difference in engine torque and high elevation turn rates between a BF-109 and a Mustang. I dinked about, got shot down hundreds of times, scored one or two lack luster kills against a few fellow newbs, and then parted ways with the game with nothing but admiration for the company and the gamers it attracted. That was a hardcore game, designed for them.

Hardcore doesn't mean insane ononastic grinding, repetitive stress injuries or obsessive focus on a particular set of pixellated rewards. That's the excuse of the lazy coder taking advantage of the mentally infirm.

EQ's death penalty made it hardcore. Lack of travel abilities for most classes. Needing 70 people to take out a mob. Slow leveling pace. HELL LEVELS! Rare drops on rare spawns. Needed a cleric, an enchanter and a warrior in every group.

Shadowbane did not fail because it was a PVP game. Indeed, it's original (first month) success showed me that PVP was popular and desired by a profitable segment of the population. Shadowbane's absolute piss poor quailty assurance, followed by some nasty "sting in the tail" design decisions is what made it a failure. The fact that it lasted long enough to make it to be a free game IN SPITE of how eye-gougingly bad the polish on the game shows that PVP wasn't what drove people away from SB, it was retarded shit like sb.exe.

Vanguard is much the same way. Despite my hatred of it, I can see where it would have attracted a profitable audience. It would never have gotten 500k no matter how good it was, but it could certainly have reached 150k. Instead, like Shadowbane, it was buggy, unfinished and with "sting in the tail" design decisions like insane travel times that have doomed it. Gamers don't like buggy, unfinished turds on their computer no matter how hardcore the gamer is.

Got to ask -- what's the story behind "sb.exe"? I wasn't really paying attention to Shadowbane at the time -- or, well, ever -- but I keep seeing this brought up. Is it just an established way of saying "the game's problem wasn't the idea, but the entire code and execution" or is there more to it?

There's a shitmetricton of hate for sb.exe around here....

Always wondered why as well

SB.exe was basically when shadowbane would crash for no reason , other times because you had more than 10 people on your screen, usually...for no reason though. Some days were worse than others.


EDIT: So basically when your game is such shit that it does a General Protection Fault at SB.exe so often it is ingrained into anyone who played it.Ruined so many experiences that could have been VERY freaking cool....thats basically the source of the hatred, the 'what could have been"s.

sb.exe was the name of the executable for Shadowbane. It was also the name of the error you got when the program just up and shit itself. Now seeing it once was ok. You just log back into the game and keep going. But it was never just one time. It could happen at the drop of a hat, and happened most often when there were lots of people on screen (or about to be onscreen but really just offscreen). You know, like in sieges when you are trying to take down a city, or defend the city it took you 3 weeks to build to this level. It's even more infuriating when you are trying to lead a raid of some 60 odd people across 3 continents to siege some other asshole's city.

I had this happen to me one night... 15 fucking times. Needless to say, I become a raging fucking douchebag about sb.exe.

Shadowbane had severe problems beyond its technical issues.  But its hard talk about those problems when the core game play didn't function.

Shadowbane MIGHT have had core issues.

Nobody was able to play long enough (without crashing!) to actually find out!

(http://www.tconl.com/~bcwhite/Slayerik.jpg)

This is me, shitting on Shadowbane.

WOW has made people crazy. They've lost their minds. WOW isn't the leader in the MMPORPG industry. WoW is a bizarre phenomenon like Myst or The Sims. People need to forget it when thinking about how many people their game will attract. Go back to EQ being the market high point at 460k.

On Shadowbane, I'm still not convinced that the market is there for a PVP game. The market is there to sell such a game, but I'm not sure the market is there for its long term survival. The cries of the hardcore PVPers who found themselves on the short end of being played to crush and crying it was unfair certainly sounded like the stereotypes of weeping trammelite carebears as depicted by disaffected UO vets. And they reacted the same way we did: they quit.

I remember that night! I was torn between being annoyed/pissed for you and LMAO at your comments in between crashes.

The stability isn't what drove me away from SB- it was the absolute inability to come back from a defeat for a guild. If you lost a big city, you were proper fucked. The world was too small to hide somewhere and rebuild without your enemies coming back for a Number 6 dance at your tree.

"Winning" sucked too. 

Come now, it was a challenge that when you lost your city the game disbanded your guild and scattered your membership to random ruins across the world as they logged back in - thus eliminating any common channel of communication or location from which to rally. 

As one side got stronger it got easier for them to continue winning, having to defend less land did not convey any advantage over having to defend the entire map.  And the sb.exe error message popping up on your screen when the client crashed 5-20 times a night made sure you quit each night in frustration. 

The 'hardcore' aspect with PvP was that you could down anyone (i.e. your mates via friendly fire).  That was fun, if someone was being an ass you could kill them even if you were "on the same side."  That made for much fun, if you were into that sort of gameplay.   The insane portion of 'hardcore' was the need to sleep with your character logged in and the volume cranked high - to serve as a dead-man switch to catch the asshat(s) who decides it is fun to burn down your city at 4am.

Why did I think SB was fun?  It was nerve wracking.  The best part of the game was when Baka sunk it.

What about the hats?

The best thing about Shadowbane for me was eBay sales.... Traveller runes for 50 a pop, Commander for 75-100, more common ones around 20 bucks. I probably made 2500 bucks tax free off it... Anyone that could summon me to other areas at the times I needed I had on the payroll :)

My most memorable PVP moment was at a commander rune spawn. Basically for those that don't know the game, it was THE spawn. It was on like an 18 hour spawn, was ALWAYS camped, usually thieves were there and could steal the rune and be gone before the fight was done. One time I got a summon over to that area, and checked it out. There was a lone R5 warrior there, and I was an R5 barbarian. He happened to be at war with my guild at the time, but they were a large ARAC (all race, all classes) guild called Denied and didn't realize our diplomatic situation. I start up a conversation with him, with my plan being to avoid conflict due to there being others in the area.

BAM, the spawn pops. The warrior decides to immediately attack it. First mistake. I just wait, smiling, for the mob to get to about half health before I pounce on the guy. The funny part was, right before attacking the warrior called out "Morals" as if asking a giant, warred, minotaur Barbarian to show mercy or morals in this situation is going to work. A few swings of my 2 handed hammer and a few specials later, I had my rune, got the hell outta dodge, and listed my rune for 100 bucks :) I almost felt bad after the guy sent me a tell saying he'd been camping it for like 14 hours. Almost.   

"Hardcore" is really a poor term. It means too many things.

A "hardcore" game like EQ actually had a bunch of disparate components:

Content blocks.
Difficulty.
Group-centric play.

All of these are grouped into the "hardcore" term but they are all different. When Brad talked about "hardcore" he meant #1 - content blocks. Imposed difficulty, not in the encounters or battles but in the systems themselves - travel time, death penalties, lack of item space, etc.

Didn't we once settle on separating the player by "dedicated" versus "casually interested" or something along those lines?

Hardcore is not grind. Grind just sucks all around, and only serves to separate those who are interested in investing more time than others. Time here equates achievement with some skill whereas in other genres it's achievement plus a great deal of skill. Your clan won't win top brackets just because you successfully logged in and didn't screw up three times a week for two hours at a time.

Dedicated is the real separation, something that spans all genres. Some just care all around more than others. Can the game adequately provide for them? There are some that can. Can a game adequately provide for them AND others? Some can.

In my mind, a perfectly functioning Shadowbane would have proven the size of the PvP++ crowd. It would not have been that much. I'd guess no more than what Eve has today. It's not really about skill or time or sb.exe though. Those are just all results of the core tenet of dedication. SB is about as immersive as they come, in ways that most gamers don't not want to be immersed. Losing that much effort is not universally appealing, even to the winners because eventually either there's no one to fight or they themselves have lost.

Are WOW players really not dedicated though?

I'd wager that the majority is not dedicated. I play on an RP PVP server, so my perspective on WoW as a whole is a little off, but I'm sure you'll find that on all servers the ratio of people who have even been to the top dungeons to those who have not is pretty darn low.

Edit: And really, is there anything else than the top instances that requires dedication?

I have to admit that I do miss the hats.  Le sigh.   :cry:

I don't think it could.  I believe the Hardcore demand just as much content as everyone else.   It might not have to have as much as WoW but it's gotta be in the same Ballpark.

This would require more investment than the resulting hardcore playerbase could ever support.

"Hardcore" MMOs already work. FFXI has 500k users and was released 5 years ago. It also has as much if not more content than WOW and a huge variety of end game activities.

One reason FFXI has done well is that it is played in the US, Japan and Europe. I'm not sure what the exact numbers are but without the Japanese market it would probably be only half the size.

The Japanese market accounts for 250,000 users? Unless people are still connecting with the PS2 (or 360... lol), I find that hard to believe.

Coming back to this, once I saw it on page 14...

I always wonder if the lessons learned from SWG are 'sandbox skill set based games don't sell' rather than 'poorly done sandbox-ish skill set games don't sell'.
Same thing for Vanguard:  'hardcore MMOs don't sell' rather than 'poorly done hardcore MMOs don't sell'.

Nobody in Japan uses PCs for gamings. Nearly every Japanese player is on a PS2. Remember that it came out first in Japan as well. I'm not sure what the exact breakdown is but the Japanese market is a very large part of the player base. The Japanese are also the first to accomplish everything major in-game.

Erm, yes. FF. PS2. Japan.

It's not exactly a stretch, after all.

FFXI is also a hard one to gauge because if it had been westernized with a little less grind, US servers to cater to the xenophobic US population, and a standard MMPORPG interface, it probably would have done much better in the west.

I'd guess 2/3rds Japanese on the population.

Those are the lessons the money people learned. They are of course, the WRONG lessons. WoW just happens to teach that polish and content matter more than innovation.

Casual-friendly gameplay. Unfortunately, you could probably take the lesson that once you hook people socially into casual gameplay, you can push them into raid engame stuff, and they'll lap it up just to keep playing their characters after they're 'done' with the game.

... for a while.

If "a while" = a 6-month subscription, as a business that's really what you want anyway. Everything after that is gravy, if your business plan is right.

(http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/3060/screenshot00005fo4.th.jpg) (http://img215.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot00005fo4.jpg) is an example of how I don't think Vanguard is too bad in the art department.

I take umbrage at folks criticizing Vanguard, or any other game for that matter, by making comparisons to WoW. In the end, its all in the eye of the beholder, but making blanket statements about Vanguard, simply because its the whipping boy du jour, is feeble and just adds you to the 'me too!' crowd.

Don't get me wrong; Vanguard is insanely bad for any number of other reasons, including the performance of said graphics on a middle of the line gaming rig. But there's bad coding, and there's bad artwork. Vanguard suffers from the former, not the latter.

And I'm playing WoW at the moment, and the Vanguard account will be cancelled shortly.

I don't know, the character models qualify as "bad artwork" and character/enemy models are probably the most important graphical element of a MMORPG.

Well that screenshot it too dark to see much of anything. The bridge looks kind of cool, ignoring the fact that the radius of the arches looks wrong. However the grass looks like crap and your horse's shadow or the light source is on the wrong side -- your right side of your head is lit but your horse's shadow is on the right side as well. Or maybe that's not a shadow and just a splotch on the ground.

Gosh, the art in VG is very random. There are some areas that are just amazing, and there are some areas that have zero life. I've noticed their swampy/marsh/bog areas have great art, but their mountain top pine tree forest areas are a prime example of bump mapping gone wrong. Desert areas complete with palms and joshua trees look very nice, but the sandy desert islands look like snowy islands with succulents awkwardly sticking out of it. And so forth.

To say its all completely bad is a stretch, though.

I think EQ2 looks (http://www.darniaq.com/EQ2/2007/EQ2_LightsShadows.jpg) way (http://www.darniaq.com/EQ2/2007/EQ2_Kin.jpg) better (http://www.darniaq.com/EQ2/2007/EQ2_Natives.jpg) at max settings personally (including flora and water displacement), but that too has some of the randomness of VG. Like, the textures for the rocks are amateurish and the ground is inconsistent. And this is from the latest expansion, so technically looks "the best" (I was traveling for the remainder of my 7-day Play the Fae trial, so didn't get to Qeynos).

The true lesson learned for all is that sandbox skill-based games are harder to do right. So don't strap upon it a license that cedes critical points of control to an non-expert external partner, and don't try and build one for a company that doesn't get it in the first place.

I'd like to point out that the level of dedication needed to be hardcore in WoW less less than pretty much any other game. Sure, there's tiers to the hardcoreness (what with scheduled raids) - but I think the moment you hit 70 and don't quit, you really should be considered hardcore.

I agree with Darniaq here, I've recently been swapping around from MMO to MMO in an effort to find anything engaging at all and EQ2 is certainly the best looking one out there at the moment.  They are doing a lot with dynamic lighting and shadows and textures in the new areas that I haven't really seen anywhere else.

Extreme quality graphics still makes my x1600 Pro cry but I can get most of the bells and whistles and still be at a solid 25-30 fps with several players and mobs and spells and crap going on.  The Blood Elf areas in WoW looked like amateur hour in comparison to the newbie Fae areas.

EQ2/EOF has what I think are probably the nicest visuals in any game and from the type of effects and what they do to my system, I'd say it has the best engine. It's a shame they didn't do more with it until EOF. I can't wait to see neon colored Neriak in it's full glory.

Vanguard seemed really mediocre compared to almost anything else.

FPS: 9

 (http://www.imagehosting.com/out.php/i605600_falls.jpg) (http://www.imagehosting.com)

Neriak still has a few recognizable landmarks.

The FPS is really cruddy in that screenshot because its a dual monitor set up, one 7950 GPU each per monitor, in windowed mode. Also, I have a 939 AMD 64 chip, which doesn't help. However, that's not to come to the defense of Vanguard; Even EQ2 would run like a dream with a dual monitor set up and the system I currently have. Vanguard, not so much.

The point is that art and performance have little to do with each other. I can simultaneously dislike WoW's artistic style yet acknowledge that for what it is, its well executed, and well optimised. I play WoW.

I can adore Vanguard's take on art, from its detailed Moorish cities to the fine attention to weapon hilt inlays (http://farm1.static.flickr.com/218/495007090_cea8d1ccf7_b.jpg) yet find the game's overall performance pitiable, which I do.

One thing I remember from my time through VG was that interior textures looked good, particularly the tooled ones for buildings. They have that over EQ2, in which I found even the EOF textures wanting.

LoTRO should not be discounted either, at max settings (though they should score points for making the game look good on lower end systems than EQ2 and VG would). I don't find the lighting all that great, but most objects and textures look awesome. And the water... oh, the water. Sure EQ2 has that geometry collision detection thing going. But aesthetically, LoTRO water wins by miles unmeasurable. Not sure how it looks at below-max settings.

I only play on one 20.1" widescreen with a single nVidia 8800 on a C2D 6600, but there's nothing I haven't set in LoTRO nor EQ2 that does anything to the FPS. I did the dual monitor thing a long time ago. Today I just run two PCs.

Ya, to be honest, LoTR has the best recent graphics and art solutions. It runs well on mid range systems, even at higher settings, has a good attention to toon detail, and has fair animations for its toons. You've gotta tip your hat to Turbine for this one.

I'd love to see the comparative staffing and art development salaries between Turbine and Sigil. I have a sneaking suspicion that Sigil art devs are overpayed and arrogant in their dismissal of useablility criticisms, whereas Turbine art devs probably have a healthy relationship with the implimentation devs.

You industry folks probably know the right terms for the positions I'm describing, but you get the idea.

I was wondering how you got that resolution, i.e. very wide compared to the height.

That ss looks fine to me. I have to admit that I started reaching for my mouse so I could spin the camera, to take a better look at that bridge ;)

Of course, you never got to 70, so you don't really know what you're talking about....

And that stops Schild....when ?

You don't need to hit the last level to know what lies beyond it. Raids and BGs if you want to continue improving your gear, gold if you craft, cash if you RMT. It's not rocket scientry :)

But I disagree hitting 70 (or 60 before it) and not quiting means you're hardcore. Hardcore is a state of mind, something that someone is throughout all levels of play. The way I look at, if a person has a playstyle that others would perceive as "work", they're pretty hardcore. But that implies there's something casual here too, and I think that also needs differentiation. "MMO Casual" and "Bejeweled Casual" are very different things.

Touche'

I'm sorry, I was waiting for someone to tell me how I was wrong.


But that's my point really. Hitting max level in a diku MMOG = Work in my book. It's a series of repetitive acts for a common goal. And I don't just mean repetitive like games of Street Fighter. I mean repetitive like every single skin in the game can be swapped and the EXP can be fucked with and icons can be switched between skills and you'd still be doing the exact same thing. That's Work to me. Hence, maxing out, well, that makes you hardcore in my book.

We agree. I do think it's a question of motivation (are you there to hit 70, or do you hit 70 as the result of a long series of quests), but asking that is purely theoretical. No MMORPG has done what RPGs were known for: advancement as a result of storyline and decisions made throughout. Maybe LoTRO will be that at some point. They've certainly done a bang-up job with the early levels. But it's going to take years of free and for-pay content expansions before they flesh out every level to the cap with storylines as interesting as what is there pre mid-game. And that assumes they don't into the EQ1 trap of always having to focus on keeping the late/end-gamers occupied.

So yea, at present, hitting that level cap is eventually going to be work. And yea, therefore maybe by and large the people that hit it are comparatively "hardcore".

The problem with arguing with you, schild, on pretty much any topic, is that you basically refuse to listen to any opposing viewpoint and simply do the "lalalalalalala I'mnotlisteningIamrightandyouarewrong lalalalalalalalala" thing.

So I'll reply in kind.

You don't know what you're talking about. Other people play differently to the way you imagine they must. And you are, simply, wrong.

Hey man, all I'm saying is that even if you are uber casual by uberguild standards, when you cap out in an MMOG, it means you've spent more time with it that any other game in that same time period. And it means you've been paying the same amount each months for probably more months than it took one of the labeled "Hardcore" folks to max out. I'm not contesting the fun or playstyle at all so much as the label.

wrote a long post, fucking board shit itself when I submitted.

short version:

My wife plays more guitar hero than wow, took 8-10 months to get to 60, plays a couple hours per week, hasnt played in 3-4 weeks now. She will hit 70, continue to play exclusively with me and will still be causal by any thinking person's definition.

I am 70, play a few hours per week atm. I dont raid, I much around with tradeskills and my mates and slowly work my way through the quests. That's pretty casual as well.

Right, but the point is, you made it to 70. You paid $15 a month, and while it took you longer, you still got there. Having only maxed out in a few MMOGs but having beaten more games than most folks beat in their lifetime, I see maxing out as hardcore. Being able to put up with the bullshit, and negative changes, and monthly fee in the face of countless other interesting games coming out a year, let alone the absolute flood we end up with during the early summer/fourth quarter - ignoring them or even playing them in addition to WoW or any MMOG and making it to 70 just seems pretty fucking hardcore.

I think the definition of hardcore - because of how many people play Bejeweled and such exclusively just needs to change. Yea, sure, there's the fanatical end of the spectrum where people are uberguild competing raider types. But what about the other end. Real People (as in adults, not college kids on summer break of high schoolers) have only X amount of hours to play each day. Now, say, you take 3 of those days a week and play WoW with friends. Those other 2 days of the week (yes, I'm purposefully throwing out weekends), you play new releases or a backlog of Whatever Else Is On The Shelf. Now, when that backlog keeps building up because you're spending 3 hours a day doing the same senseless bullshit in an online game with no end in sight - doesn't that cross into hardcore territory?

I'm sure someone snappier than I could have made a simple bit of math to explain that, but it pretty much sums up why I dropped out of MMORPGs. If I so much as spent 1 or 2 nights in an MMOG, the Other Game backlog simply got too big to deal with - and more often than not, those other games are about 900x more bang for the buck. Now, that parts just me, but the label of hardcore I'm having a pretty big "issue" with.

See, it's all in the way you play. I play WoW as essentially, a social single-player game. I group with people in the guild from time to time, and the main reason I play at all is because it's something I can do socially with my wife, and that couple of RL friends. So the whole class nerfs/whinefest/nerf/buff thing washes over me because simply put, I don't give enough of a fuck.

I did for a time play quite a lot, but that hasn't been for quite some time. The point you make about all the other good games that don't get played is a good one, but I'm one of those people with game ADD anyway, I can afford to buy way more games than I will ever sit down and fully play. It's possibly a trickle-down effect from back when I was an amiga-playing kid and games were "free" /cough. I've always had more than I can play, and even now that I've been buying the things for years and years, it's just the same. That's why I lack any tolerance (now, especially) for any single-player game that wants to waste my fucking time with backstory and long-winded bullshit before letting me play. Hence my comments several months ago about Red Steel and Zelda for the Wii.

But the fact is, I start playing something, then more often than not, lose interest and never get around to (or anywhere near) finishing them. I even play games on easy mode so I can play through them and see what the game has to offer and actually finish them and move onto the next. I've got a pile of never-installed, unplayed shooters in my bookshelf behind me thats probably 2foot high, so fuck "hard mode" and being the h4rdc0r3 fragger.

The attraction of MMOs for me has been that I've played RPGs in some form since I was 5 (sure, it was my brother storytelling me through a made-up-as-he-went-along adventure, but I was rolling dice, and I thought I was playing "real" D&D). I've always been into the genre, and the Warhammer stuff has the same kind of origin from those games of "D&D with miniatures). I've also always liked being able to save my game. And of course, we all enjoy playing with our friends. if my wife wasn't also playing WoW, I doubt I would be anymore.

At any given time, I tend to be playing one MMO, one PC FPS/3PS, and one "other" PC game, and bounce between the three during my game times. Maybe with a side order of one console game and muck-abouts (Guitar Hero/Mario Party/Wii anything). If I'm particularly enjoying any one of the three at any time, I tend to play that one a lot more than the other two. I try to finish the shooters. but the "other game" tends to fluctuate as my attention level decides.

As far as time goes, I wrote this bit up in the post that got eaten, but I log on a few nights per week, but I very rarely spend 3 hours on in one sitting. The closest is when my RL friends suck me into a group or instance etc, but I tend to log off right afterwards, so even then it's a shorter session than that. Weeknights I tend to play sessions lasting between 20 minutes and 90 minutes. I don't usually get on at all on after work (I'm on call atm, usually working 3 days a week). I actually spend (way) more time on f13 than in WoW. As for weekends, they follow my weekdays-when-I'm-not-at-work schedule. Sunday I didnt play at all. Saturday I played for about 2 hours.

As for the money thing, you kind of have a point, but aside from my tight-assery in other aspects of life, we both make enough so that 2x WoW game cards every 2 months is insignificant.


But really, it's just how you choose to spend your time. Watching TV, playing console games, MMOs, PC games. It's easy to label any of those as hardcore.

Pretty serious derail, but where are these countless other interesting games if you're PC-only?  I'm just hitting the bored-with-WoW stage, and looking around for other PC games appears pretty thin on the ground.  The pursestrings don't allow me to stump up for a console, but non-MMO PC gaming seems a bit scanty these days.  Hell, I may have to spend time with my wife and child!  Thats crazy talk!

I was PC Only for a few years.

Seems... futile.

While I'm not a big fan of Vista just yet, the looming integration with Xbox Live is going to open up a lot of possibilities. I very much want to check out Shadowrun, pWn the console ubers with my slacker PC mouse/keyboard. But really, just being able to have that cross-platform experience is going to be quite enough for some time. I like the Xbox 360. I have no intention of buying one myself. Just no point with my PC.

Azazel, please don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds more like you're justifying your enjoyment of MMOs than countering schild's assertion. To me, everything you said boils down to something I think many of us accepted long ago: MMOGs are not "games" per se, but rather, hobbies.

To play them to the endgame is "hardcore" in the sense that we are more into our hobby than others are. That's not something to be proud nor ashamed of. Some people just care more than others, and/or are in a position to be more dedicated than others. And some do so to the exclusion of other things. So? "MMOGs" span everything from Webkinz (close enough) to Eve (as massive as they come). I may be missing out on some uber physics tweak in a new Basketball game, but even without MMOGs, I didn't care about organized sports anyway.

I personally find every console game a good temporary experience. No single console game has ever come close to capturing me as any MMO has. It took the entire aggregate of features that is Xbox Live to even make me take notice. And that's not a slight on Xbox nor fans of consoles. It's just how I'm wired.

Long ago I stopped calling myself a gamer. I'm a hobbiest and fine with that.

Out of boredom (waiting for a Dark Wind race to start) I checked latest patch notes for Vanguard. They are still patching like mad, still massively re-balancing (nerfing) classes and items and still putting out illogic patch messages, but hey.. they finally put in chat bubbles!

What genre(s) are you interested in, and have you played much of the stuff from the last few years?

Nothing bad about playing games that are a year or three old, as long as they're good.


Gamier, Hobbyist, whatever label you want to use doesn't matter since everyone has their own pet definition anyway. Justifying my enjoyment? Nah, just explaining that other perspectives are out there, and correcting several of Schildy's assumptions that are, you know. Incorrect.

Aside from the details about my own gaming habits and playtime, anyone who would call my wife "hardcore" because she hit 60 in WoW when it was the cap and didn't quit seriously needs to touch base with reality. Other games she didn't play in that time, and $15/month is an insignificant amount of money to her. Yes, it's an extreme example, but it still proves the point.

It is a page old by now, but I wanted to chirp in my VG/EQ2 visuals impressions: A level 15 melee in VG looks badass. Melees in EQ2 look like they are wearing clay molds. I have one EQ2 character, a 70 zerk, and while he looks fine his armor is motley - some blue, some grey, some brown. He is wearing a treasured BP, legendary arms (class set) and fabled legs. EQ2 weapons have a distinct and interesting fantasy style to them. VG weapons look like weapons. I have my VG settings so that the PCs look good but the world - not so much. In EQ2, I have it so up to 6 PCs have high detail (there is a slider for this) and the worlds looks good.

You do realize, Schild, that not everyone out there goes around compulsively buying every single video game in the universe?  That not everyone has a "backlog" of games that MUST be played or else it will "build up" under the next load of compulsive purchases until it fills the room and drowns them?

"You guys who spend two hours a night watching television series are fucking hardcore man.  I wish I had the time to waste watching the same characters over and over again, but it interferes with my habit of BUYING AND WATCHING EVERY SINGLE MOVIE RELEASED EVERYWHERE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.  OMFG BACKLOG."

Different type of hardcore. Hardcore experience seeker, hardcore trend watcher, hardcore sports fanatic, who cares?

The only time people get in trouble is when they use labels about things of which they have no understanding. That is not the case here, but is the biggest problem in general. Often there lacks that common frame of reference. For example, to me, anyone who can rattle off RBIs is a hardcore Baseball fan. But that's just from my point of view of not knowing a damned thing about it.

I'm not proud of that, nor ashamed of it, nor really in any way care. And that's what I wish would happen more often. If you (not WUA, the general "you") don't care about something, or don't care about it anymore, shut the f up about it. You have not moved on. You have not evolved. You have not transcended to some higher level of understanding. You simply changed, without any valuation. Be happy about it while you dive into the new/experience experience and leave the rest of the folks that didn't come with you to their happiness.

Life would be much easier :)

Interesting discovery about Vanguard's performance today.

In a last ditch effort to see if VG was going to be salvageable, I installed VG on my laptop. I thought it would be a complete waste of time, since my laptop has a very low hertz CPU and an even lower end GPU. But it ran comparably! Here's a comparison between my desktop system and my laptop.

Desktop:

3 gigs of DDR ram with tweaked timings for high end Corsair ram. 2.3.3.4 I think it is. (200 bus speed)
2.6 gig dual core AMD 64 FX San Diego CPU (1 MB L2 cach)
Gforce 7950 GX2 video card

Laptop:

2 gig DDR2-667 (333 bus speed)
1.7 gig Centrino Mobile Pentium M (2 MB L2 cache)
Gforce Go 6200 (!!!) GPU

The laptop worked poorly, but only slightly less poorly than on my desktop PC. They were equivalent in performance at low graphical settings.

What this seems to tell me is that more than CPU gigs, more than GPU pixel pipelines, more than anything else, what matters for Vanguard is memory type and speed and the effective clock speed of the memory bus, which in both systems are just about the same.

This explains why my girlfriend's DELL XPS Dual Core 3.2 Pentium D absolutely smokes my machine playing Vanguard, despite having a 7200 graphics card.

I think your findings confirm what Brad was saying  is his last long post (the one where he hints at the 'new' relationship between SOE and Sigi)l.

True enough, but I didn't realise the extent to which it was the case. We're talking an early version of the 6000 series GPU keeping pace with the last of the 7000 series GPUs.

I'm wondering if future games will also follow this formula, or if this type of game programing focus on bus speeds is unique to Vanguard.

And this is not a good thing for VG. PLayers who want to improve their FPS are going to add RAM and a new GPU but all that really matters is bus speed which generally only gets improved with a new system (or mobo/cpu replacement if one is able).

What the fuck are they doing to get that bound to the bus? Shouldn't that little issue have come up damn early in prototyping? Did they just not care? That's a very inflexible bottleneck for most PCs -- people will buy more RAM, upgrade a videocard, but popping out for a new MB and processor is a much bigger step and means "A whole new computer" to most folks, rather than a upgrade -- and it should have been caught and dealt with.

I know Brad had that whole "Computers will catch up" shit going on, but that's not a real excuse -- just because high-end machines can brute force past the problem doesn't mean the problem isn't there. Lazy-ass fucks.

Well, that's the question; is it bad coding, or a 'feature' that requires high bus speeds? I've heard it mentioned somewhere that Brad was very insistent about his world using no tiles, and that every little pixel was unique. That requires a lot of stuff that can't be preloaded and has to be done on the fly between hard drive, ram, cpu and gpu. It explains the bloated ram 'memory leaks', since there has to be a high turnover of information within ram. Windows has never been particularly good with ram management, and having an application constantly shuffling stuff in and out of it has to cause a performance hit. The slower that bandwidth, the worse the game's performance. In my case, Vanguard crashes every 6th chunk travelled through due to memory congestion/leak.

I suspect it wasn't exactly possible for the engine and architecture guys to sit Brad down and introduce him to "Mister Reality". If that's what Brad wanted, he shouldn't have licensed an engine -- but paid out the nose to have one developed from scratch. If he was really fighting against tiling -- with that huge a world, his seamless zone philosophy (the chunks) -- you have to design from the ground up to support that. You can't really expect to alter an existing engine to support it.

Can this thread die now? (http://www.f13.net/?itemid=560)

If we strike it down, it shall become more powerful than we ever imagined.

Bah, the article should link to this thread. Does VG deserve two?

Also, I feel bad for the Sigil folks who hung around. I gotta imagine most saw the writing on the wall though, so hopefully they were all prepared.

And no, I doubt this'll kill the thread. Quite the opposite in fact :)

I'm tempted to lock this thread because of the other one actually. So uhm, yes, deserves it.

As one of the 2 or 3 active Vanguard players on f13, I consent to have this thread put down. Its a sad thread. Posters see it every day and look away, averting their eyes, a bit ashamed at their own lack of pity for the babling homeless person this thread has become.

So Sigil is owned SOE but SOE didn't fire them.  So they must fired themselves.

Did you read the post? Sigil is NOT owned by SOE.

The game itself is though.

Hey, Rasix, that's a good stealth edit. Well played.

At this point, they should just merge VG's world and art assets into EQ2.  :-P

Hell no - EQ2 is just starting to get decent art in it and run well on modern machines.

Is this the thread where we sit in a circle and get to tell Schild what we really think about him without getting banned?


Edit: pronouns add something to a sentence.

This thread was originally for people playing VG to talk about it so those that aren't playing it can keep up. Don't lock it because people derailed it a dozen times. It always came back. Maybe on the bitching about it will move to the news thread now and this thread can remain an occasionally updated gameplay discussion.

Sigil deflating is just an event, and an inevitable one at that.... There's still lots of entertainment left in watching the wreckage settle.

Heck, look how durable the SWG thread has been.

Yeah, but to be fair -- I think there were a lot more Wookie hairdressers alone in SWG than played Vanguard.

Inevitable is right, I feel bad for the laid-off people.  It's not as if there was another course for them to choose; there's only one road to follow with Vanguard: finish the game.  If Sigil had enough money to pull it off, they would've finished the game.  Now, instead, they're all canned and Sony's going to finish the game.  Either way the end result will likely be identical from the players' perspectives.  If Sigil just had the capital to stay in operation to the holiday season, I think there would be good odds that Vanguard would've been finished enough to be a decent game that makes money.

But, down the hatch.  So, has Brad posted anything amazing and insightful about sinking his company over on the FoH forum?

And you think he cares what you think about him because...???

Shockeye was the one who used to ban people and the only person I remember schild banning was Shockeye.

He eventually, mercifully, banned tele/hyu.  I think you would have to reach that astonishingly high level of raging asshole before Schild would ban you.  It seems to be extraordinarily difficult to truly piss him off, he lets almost everything just roll off his back.  Even with tele I think he mostly did it because he was making everyone else on the site miserable, not because he personally cared about tele one way or the other.

I thought Schild also banned "The poster that will not be named" and maybe Boog.  Of course, I could be wrong.

Most of schild's permanent bans are of people who repeatedly proved that they can't play nice with adults. He is always extremely reticent to do anything that drastic; it is usually the mods screaming for blood that get him to take action (Rasix and I in particular  :evil: ). He likes to give people lots of rope with which to hang themselves.

That being said- repeatedly pissing in his face to try to evoke a reaction probably isn't the most prudent course of action.

I agree 100%.  I was just pointing out that Shockeye wasn't the only one to wave the ban stick around here.

Looks like this is totally SOE's now:

Hello Everyone,

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

We are also officially opening up forums. In the past, our deal with Sigil didn't allow for this, but as with our other games we feel this is an important part of communicating with the playerbase. You can expect a strong presence from our community team as well as the development team members. While we realize that Sigil had said they wouldn't open up general forums, at SOE we feel this hampers our efforts to communicate effectively with the players. We will continue to support the fansites in a big way, and will be contacting many of them directly to discuss what this change means. By no means do we want to lose the strong fansite support by making this change, but we do think it's important to have a forum for players to communicate directly with SOE.

A few other items I wanted to mention

1. Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard. Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard.

2. We do not plan on making any major changes to Vanguard. Any changes are going to come from the team itself. We aren't mandating any big changes to the game. We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.

3. We do plan on spending a lot of time cleaning up legacy issues with Vanguard and making sure the game's performance improves.

By way of comparison, this team is approx. the same size as the EQ2 team and I feel like that team has done an amazing job improving EQ2 since it's launch. We intend to do the same thing for Vanguard and it is our hope that the players feel like we're doing right by them.

Smed


http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=9105

SOE is in ur game
killing ur Vizion.

Classic.

Good. The game has always smelt of hobby. Now a real business running it may do things different.

This still competes with EQ2 though, and EQ2 is largely a better game. Maybe that's the point. All Access let's people experience both, and I can seriously see VG dipping below that "bother keeping up" breaking point. And unlike SWG, SOE can pull this one's plug.

I wonder what Brad is going to do now though. I don't expect him to tell us of course. It's not like we're not curious, it's just that I can't imagine we're necessarily on his good side anymore.

Just read the GrouchyGamer thing someone linked to. All of it interesting, and already discussed. The part that therefore stuck out for me was different:

I always find it interesting when new fans learn old lessons. VG was never worth getting that worked up about, for a zillion different reasons.

I always suspect fansite operators of secondary motives.  Those being, getting bought-out if they've become a popular, central site for information. Lord knows it's happened enough to feed my cynicism.   So I read it not so much as a fanboi crushed, but a gambler pissed he lost.

Looks like history is repeating itself. He never did any work, and his ego got the better of him, again!  Unfortunately I don't know anyone working at Sigil for the inside scoop, and all of those fired were probably given incentives to keep quiet. I guess in this case there probably is no inside scoop; the game faced significant problems in development, was dropped by MS, picked up by SOE for a song, released unfinished with insanely high system requirements, cannibalized for the station pass, and Brad put back out to pasture. Where he belongs.

(forgive the censorship, I don't have the original post, a link to a copy was forwarded to me)

*runs to silkyvenom to bathe in fanboy tears*

Some really do it out of a love of the game.  At least the site I had the most experience with was that way.  Maybe the owner secretly harbored that hope, but the enjoyment was real enough.

Or the owners of said sites were trying to get a gig as a Customer Relations/Thunderheart/Bloodguard type thing.

I love that stuff. Thanks for posting! People who lament the "commercialization" that has come to the genre need only review the darker side of the garage-band origins of some of these companies. I don't know Brad at all, but I work with someone who sounds very much like this.

In any case, some people change. Others don't.

I used to have this theory.  It went, never post on the atranet if you be DRUNK.

However, given recent events I feel the need to REVERSE said theory to ONLY post on the atranet if you be DRUNK!

So...

Brad made some bank there.  It was a sale.  And foregoing any information on debt, I'm gathering SOE (apologies i am a citizen from the land of norrath) is bidding a pretty penny for that pretty artwork.  That's stock for cash.  Who is the majority shareholder of Sigil? 

Smed says Vanguard ain't gonna be a Carebear game.  Well, halahfuckinyulah to that, brother.  Can I resub EQ2 now, or should I wait for the next expansion?

Sad that half the people lost their gigs.  Unnecessary.  But chalk it up to the irony of SOE CCO (er, um, creative consultants) alumni figuring out x8 and x16 raiding "is clown shoes".  But have they figured it out?

A rising tide floats all boats but I didn't notice Blizzard exclaiming any 10 million subs for that ABOMINATION OF THE GENRE *I* ACTUALLY LIKED AND AM GOOD AT bullshit.

They say put out to pasture.  Can the stud eat forever on this sale?

On to workin' the WoWbois.  Cause there is only a "radian of difference, from without".

Don't MAKE me break out the Beyonce lyrics.  Viva, baby.  Just fucking viva.

I find that even now, I still don't much care and am still only watching this go down as popcorn entertainment.

Viva la suck!

Post Mortem you say? (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more)

I'm locking this thread, because I'm pretty sure with the above link, we just took it outside and shot it in the head.