VG now in SOE hands. Talk about how the game will/should change.

[shiznitz]

The reason I started a new one is that it seems the gold dupe is gone.

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.

1200 gold is $98 again.

I just don't see this post as relevent to the SOE/Sigil drama thread.

[Lantyssa]

Page 10 here we come!

[Sir Fodder]

Spend as little money as possible just to keep it going.
Do lots of community interaction (polling?) to at least give the fans the feeling that they matter and are being listened to. Offer choice in different ways, people like that.
Make the world smaller and more accessible (more teleportation?).
Embrace the c0re, don't step on EQII's feet, the SOE guy interview seemed to allude that they are aware of this.

[Yegolev]

Maybe not smaller but more interesting.  I really would not mind a huge world as long as I was not compelled to traverse it or if doing so was actually entertaining.  No more OoT.  But!  Squash bugs first, if you ask me.

[Simond]

My guess is that of the 50 people rehired:
5 go to 'Secret Projekt Omega-1' (Jeff Butler, Nino, etc).
25 go to EQ, EQ2, etc. (Hell, some of them probably helped write EQ & EQ2)
20 are on a VG 'Live Team' which spends the next year fixing bugs and killing as much of The Vision(tm) as they can.

Brad waits by a 'phone in his study at home, hoping that someone asks for his advice.

[Yegolev]

Brad waits by a 'phone in his study at home, hoping that someone asks for his advice.

Ah yes, that's going to be awkward.  As if it isn't already.  Maybe they will just pay for the DSL to his house and let him call that an office.

[Nebu]

Slap a band-aid on this one and try to keep the blood loss to a minimum.  They're likely to make more money keeping the buggy subscription cancellation problem than they are by fixing the game. 

[Venkman]

Let it slowly diminish until it falls below the point where it's worth keeping active, then do what they can't do with their IP-based titles and pull the plug. They can use this as catharsis. "You mean I can't close MxO or SWG? Oh yea?! Well, we can at least close this!!"

[Yegolev]

If we are being funny in here:

Replace the 3D client with a 2D one, send "Fuck you" letter to Mark Jacobs.

Use VG as detention for griefers and exploiters from other SOE games, from EQ2 through Tanarus.

Implement new avatar models but have the old ones load first, then the new ones fifteen seconds later.

Hire Peter S. Beagle to write a scorching saga of lust and woe.  Throw it away and do a combat revamp instead.

Seasonal texture changes in the world.  Aggressive five-dot Christmas trees.  Exploding pumpkins.  Non-ordinary rabbits.

Let all the races ruin all the other races' lands for a change.

Allow players to use in-game money to pay for their subs.

Replace the WoW UI with the EVE UI.  Make fonts smaller.

[Furiously]

Add in "SB.exe" failures.

[Sky]

25 go to EQ, EQ2, etc. (Hell, some of them probably helped write EQ & EQ2)

Nooooooo!!! Don't send them to EQ2, their dev team is Just Fine Thxvrymch!

[Morat20]

1) Rename all EQ2 landmarks, classes, NPCs, and abilities to Vanguard-appropriate terms.
2) Call it the "Vanguard New Game Experience".
3) Launch it, and giggle a lot.

[Miasma]

I wonder if Brad will keep his monthly subscription to Vanguard now that he has to start paying for it...

I also wonder if Garriott is sitting at his desk right now thinking "Oh shit, I hope I don't go down the 'old guru, new game, long delayed, pushed out early, total clusterfuck' road too".

[Merusk]

I wonder if Brad will keep his monthly subscription to Vanguard now that he has to start paying for it...

I also wonder if Garriott is sitting at his desk right now thinking "Oh shit, I hope I don't go down the 'old guru, new game, long delayed, pushed out early, total clusterfuck' road too".

No, he's pondering when he should put out the summer tapestries in his castle.  Provided those damned kids didn't steal them again.

[SnakeCharmer]

Did someone say twitch?

[schild]

Why does this thread even exist? Does it matter? Are you going to resub? For any reason? Is it worth the install space?

[Miasma]

Why does this thread even exist?

Because nature abhors a vacuum.

[trias_e]

Fix all the bugs, consolidate the servers, and I'd play it.  It's not a horrible game by any means.  Half of it is charming and interesting.  The other half is an unfinished buggy grindfest.  But at least one side of the game is redeemable.

[Xerapis]

I was actually fascinated by the diplomacy concept (even in card-game status) and was really interested to see what their crafting was like.

But then I tried actually playing the beta to get to those points...

And I just couldn't slog through the muck to even get there.  Seriously.  Worst. Beta. Ever.  And I beta'd Saga of Ryzom.

Maybe after about 6 months of SOE polish I would consider a free trial.  But definitely not any sooner than that.  Not even for free.

[Xanthippe]

I'd give it a try despite it being hardcore and me not being hardcore (at least not in terms of enjoying the sort of punishing play a la death penalties and such) if it wasn't so unstable.  I won't abide buggy games.

[krohm]

Well I’m new here at the site but as a long time gamer and IT guy myself, I really think as a Vanguard player it’s going to be months before we see any significant changes.

I’m not a coder by trade (I work on routers, bridges, brouters, IDNX etc) so I have no idea if what I read from some poster on MMORPG.com is true about the coding for Vanguard really being Single Threaded Application, anyone have any light to shed on this? I guess I just sat and looked at this and thought, wouldn’t you want your so called 3rd gen MMO to take advantage of today’s processors? I don’t know, maybe some of you coders can enlighten me hehe.

As for the game play itself. The 40 - 50 content is about nonexistent unless you’re going to grind out some group armor quests with friends/guildies. You can level up easily enough on your own till about 38 - 40 just doing solo quests. It almost like they can’t make up there mind on how they want you to level up to max level. They made it like WOW to a good extent to where they took the grind out of leveling by doing quests and then bam you just hit a wall cause every thing else is group based. Allot of people I know are sitting 40+ and board. Hell I’m 43 and like ummm, why am I leveling, there’s no raid content in game yet. And now with SOE acquisition of Sigil I think allot of players are sitting wondering were the future of the game is going to go now.

[WindupAtheist]

Why does this thread even exist? Does it matter? Are you going to resub? For any reason? Is it worth the install space?

This is a forum where we're at about 749 total pages of SWG discussion, where there are people who would do nothing but argue over the merits of old-time UO if you let them, and where we were already up to about half a dozen threads worth of Vanguard vulturing even before this one was created.

Calling us on our fondness for beating dead horses is, in fact, a dead horse itself.

[bhodi]

Just a little preemptive pic:

[Trippy]

I’m not a coder by trade (I work on routers, bridges, brouters, IDNX etc) so I have no idea if what I read from some poster on MMORPG.com is true about the coding for Vanguard really being Single Threaded Application, anyone have any light to shed on this? I guess I just sat and looked at this and thought, wouldn’t you want your so called 3rd gen MMO to take advantage of today’s processors? I don’t know, maybe some of you coders can enlighten me hehe.

It is almost certainly true since the graphics engine is Unreal Engine 2 which is single-threaded so they would've needed a stellar graphics engine coder to hack it into being multi-threaded. However even if it isn't it's not unusual since 99.9% of even newer PC games right now can not take advantage of more than one CPU/core. City of Heroes/City of Villians is the only NA/Euro MMORPG I know of that does, at the moment.

[krohm]

I’m not a coder by trade (I work on routers, bridges, brouters, IDNX etc) so I have no idea if what I read from some poster on MMORPG.com is true about the coding for Vanguard really being Single Threaded Application, anyone have any light to shed on this? I guess I just sat and looked at this and thought, wouldn’t you want your so called 3rd gen MMO to take advantage of today’s processors? I don’t know, maybe some of you coders can enlighten me hehe.

It is almost certainly true since the graphics engine is Unreal Engine 2 which is single-threaded so they would've needed a stellar graphics engine coder to hack it into being multi-threaded. However even if it isn't it's not unusual since 99.9% of even newer PC games right now can not take advantage of more than one CPU/core. City of Heroes/City of Villians is the only NA/Euro MMORPG I know of that does, at the moment.

Thanks for the info Trippy. Another question through, can anyone break it down tech wise why the game runs so dam crappy on even the best of computers? I just see people post up, o bad game design on the coding side of the house but no one ever goes into details and I'm curious yea know. Sorry for probably a stupide question and if the info is posted some were else just point me in the direction.

[Trippy]

Thanks for the info Trippy. Another question through, can anyone break it down tech wise why the game runs so dam crappy on even the best of computers? I just see people post up, o bad game design on the coding side of the house but no one ever goes into details and I'm curious yea know. Sorry for probably a stupide question and if the info is posted some were else just point me in the direction.

I haven't played the game so I couldn't tell you specifically but the two most common problems are too many polygons on screen and too much texture "swapping".

Too many polygons is pretty self-explanatory and even relatively low-poly games like WoW can suffer from this problem when you stick too many players in one place (aka Lagforge). There are lots of techniques you can use to work around this problem but those require either artistic skill or programming skill, neither of which Sigil apparently had much of, or if they did they weren't utilized well.

Texture "swapping" occurs when the GPU needs a texture that it doesn't currently have in memory. The graphics engine then asks the main program if it has the texture in system RAM and if not it has to be fetched from disc. This is why in many 3D games you hear your hard drive thrashing as you move around --it's loading textures it needs from disc. This is also why many 3D games use oodles and oodles of system RAM -- much or most of that is being used to cache textures.

The GPU can cache a certainly amount of these textures in its memory but when its full it has to delete something to make room for the new one but then when you go back to a place that used the deleted texture it has to fetch it again from system RAM or disc and the cycle repeats. This is why Brad said Vanguard would run a lot better if it was running on a 64-bit system and you had 4 GB+ of RAM. Then more of the textures could be cached in system RAM rather than needing to be fetched from disc which is really really slow.

There are other factors as well that will slow things down like pixel and vertex shaders, pathing AIs, physics simulations and so on but polygons and textures are keys. If you can't get a handle on those two things your game isn't going to run well.

Edit: edits and typos

[krohm]

Thanks for breaking it down for me....

[Trippy]

Basically the problem as I see it (not having played the game) is that they took an engine that was originally designed for a level-based shooter and tried to extend it in complicated ways (extensive draw distances and flora, orders of magnitude more textures, etc.) but didn't have the skills to do it well. The fact that it could render things at all was probably a minor miracle itself :-D

[HRose]

No, he's pondering when he should put out the summer tapestries in his castle.  Provided those damned kids didn't steal them again.

I seriously doubt Garriott has passed in the office more time than McQuaid.

[Ironwood]

Did someone say twitch?

hahhah.  That's awesome, you made me laugh.  Out Loud, in fact.

Good Job.

[Ixxit]

Basically the problem as I see it (not having played the game) is that they took an engine that was originally designed for a level-based shooter and tried to extend it in complicated ways (extensive draw distances and flora, orders of magnitude more textures, etc.) but didn't have the skills to do it well. The fact that it could render things at all was probably a minor miracle itself :-D

It's the latest iteration of the Unreal Engine is it not?  If it is, doesn't Lineage II use the same engine or an earlier version of it.  Lineage II ran really smooth, even on older systems, and despite being a weak game, looked pretty damn good and I am pretty sure the world was seamless as well.  I know that the character models and armor didn't have much variation, and customization was limited, but using the poly texture thing you discussed, could that really explain the horrendous difference in performance.  While the view distances are long in Vanguard, there is very little variation in textures.  Landscapes are pretty much the same uniform texture.  Moving the distance slider has a miniscule effect on framrate which lead me to conclude that the view disantance isn't really the problem.

As you say, I think lack of skill definately had a factor and the lack of action for whatever reason to make appropriate adjustments in the team.  You would think though that with a 30 milllion dollar budget, that they could have afforded the best of the best.

[schild]

Just shot this one in the head also, stop making these fucking threads til I'm done with my work you eager bastards.