f13.net

SOE sends Vanguard to the ignoble fate of having just one server. (http://www.massively.com/2010/06/08/sony-online-entertainment-announces-vanguard-server-merges/)

This may be den fodder, but SOE is obviously starting to wind things down in favour of the good games they will soon be releasing.  :awesome_for_real:

I would play Vanguard F2P. Sometimes.

At this point its all they can do outside of pulling the plug.  The remaining dedicated players wanted this and if it makes them happy then kudos. 

There are development costs to going F2P.  No way SOE is going to sink any more into Vangaurd.

F2P or bullet to the head, SOE. You decide.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it…

I think it is funny how long it took someone to give a shit enough to post this.

Vanguard was a zombie years ago.... potentially it could even be argued it was dead at launch.

SOE seems quite willing to maintain a MMO graveyard indefinitely though.

Obviously a single server still sees Vanguard make some money. This is about milking that money to the last drop.

Oh, and I missed that moving to one server apparently kills the open PvP option.

It also keeps a bullet point on the SOE All Access Pass.

I tried Vanguard last year. I really liked it and it didn't seem buggy or unpolished then. I think it's exactly in the stage that DDO was - too old to pick up new people, too bad a launch to have gained a sizable audience but actually a pretty good game.

I think F2P for Vanguard would make a lot of sense. The only reason I abandoned it was because it was pretty tough to solo grind and I like to break up the monotony of soloing quests with grouping for dungeons. At level 20 it was fairly clear I wouldn't be seeing a group before max level.

It could also do with a little work on the grouping mechanism. I'm not asking for a WoW style teleport to a dungeon. But I would like to be sitting in a queue while I solo, then join a group and carry on solo then move to the instance when the group is full. Instead it's an old school nightmare of watching channels and sending random strangers tells as well as not knowing the names of level appropriate instances (ie if someone puts a group up for The Old Mill, you have no idea whether that is a group you can join at level 20).

I really need to try this game before it disappears.

I thought the first 20 or so levels were pretty fun in a run-of-the-mill-diku sort of way.  After that, not so much.

If it were me, I would move it to F2P in a non-transactional manner to avoid the dev costs. Give away access to people with a netflix account of >$20/month, or who are willing to fill out a 15 minute survey once per week, or sacrifice their privacy by installing your tracking IE toolbar, or something. Partner with offerpal or superrewards to handle the frontend stuff. Just don't follow turbine and allow the really scammy offers through.

I think the Isle of Dawn section is very well done - shows off the three main progression types of combat, crafting and diplomacy clearly and also has a couple of quests that stand out (Diplomacy quests were at least different and the quest to ride a pegasus through the sky was a great way to show off the world) - up until the very final dungeon, where the game repeatedly kicks you in the balls while screaming "LERN2PLAY NOOOB!!!!1!".

The trial is pretty cool.  You level quickly enough to get into whatever class you're playing.  Then you enter the world and it's shitty.  Like someone said, up to level 20 the game is a pretty good Diku.

Drop the subscription price to the point where it barely maintains the existing playerbase and whatever support you are doing.

One would think that would generate some box sales/download sales and (as mentioned) it does make the all access pass look better.

Try the psionic class, whatever it is called. I had a lot of fun with my guy from 1 to 18.

I enjoyed the Diplomacy mini games from Vanguard. Has that system been done anywhere else?

I recall I really liked the Bard implementation. It's a nice class to try, nothing like the way other games have done Bards. Though I can't remember why :)

If I remember right it was basically taking EQ bards and making what happened as an accident into an actual system.  Instead of twisting three to four songs, you could compose a song with the specific effects you wanted.  I don't really know how well it turned out.

That's exactly the wrong thing to do. Nobody cares about a couple additional dollars per month, if they're enjoying themselves. If they're not having fun, the best you can hope for is that they forget to cancel.

This has come up in several threads here over the past year or two but clearly needs to be said once more. To wit, the mental gap between free and $0.01 is enormous. The gap between $9.99 and $14.99 is effectively nonexistent. Cheaper is not the answer. It just hurts your margins for no gain.

If sony wants new blood in vanguard without investing in a relaunch and developing a full fledged store, the game needs to appear absolutely free.

As I wrote the bard song composition code...

Bards in Vanguard have the ability to compose their own "songs" to sing/play made up of a large variety of song components.  There were 5 or 6 types of components, (melody, embelishment, etc), and you could have varying numbers of each (that generally increased each level).  At level 50, you'll be creating songs with around 18 to 20 components in them.  There were also special "rest" components which can go in any (non-melody) component slot, that reduce the per tick cost of the song, but each rest can only be used once per song (each other component could be used as many times as you had slots for it's component type).

Basically, a spell construction system. 

As for how it turned out?  For the most part, it met its goals.  The only complaint I ever heard is that while it's great there's all this customization, every bard generally ends up making the same songs, so it didn't really matter.    The other noteworthy point I've heard is that, for reasons I do not know, when they expanded the game to level 55, they decided NOT to continue bard song advancement.  No new component slots or components, from what I heard.

Basically, bards can do just about everything, just not as well as the other classes.  The goal at release was that they had the least dps of the melee dps classes, but had the most utility.  Massive run speed, invis, levitate, feather fall for travel, the ability to buff whatever your group needs with songs while fighting, including hp regen, if you're weak on healing.  Able to tank some fights by using a parrying dagger. 

Bard beat out Cleric as my favorite class in Vanguard. :)  I played a Bard to 50 at release.

If I remember, my bard used to have amazing DPS, until that got nerfed. I am pretty sure though that it took a long time for them to nerf bard dps down.

I remember that as being one of the stand-out pieces of game design in Vanguard. I'll admit I did min-max but it was still interesting to do and I constructed several different songs depending on how heavily I wanted to drain my resources (mana, was it?).

You can be proud of the job you did there.

I hope Vanguard turns the corner somehow. I'd rather like to give it another look but cba leveling in a game that might shut down just as I'm ready to raid.

From what I remember the bard song composition was quite cool but getting that song onto your tool bar was a big pain. You had to make a macro and know the command to play your named song. You then got to pick through thousands of icons for the tool bar by looking at 1 icon at a time.

When you do that sort of job and design what for all practical appearances seems to be a new and exciting system for a game, does it go through your mind that people will just all play the exact same song because there is only one combination to make it *best?*  I only ask because I have never designed anything, and yet as a gamer, I've just been trained there is a *best* way to do everything no matter how many variables are added, and its my job to go look it up and see what it is, even if I don't choose to use it. 

More importantly, if you did know that was going to happen, did you just decide screw it, I'll design it despite the nature of humanity, or do you actually try to implement counters and balances to that happening?

Good question.  At the time, we thought there was enough variety present that there simply wouldn't be a "best" song or small collection of songs.  There were systems in place to encourage different songs between different bards.  The simplest was the rest components.  Depending on how you built your character and what gear you had, you would have a different amount of mana regeneration, compared to another bard, and you might want more or fewer rests in your song, to keep the cost at a reasonable level (more important for in combat songs, as out of combat regen generally wasn't an issue).  I think here though that people people might be calling almost identical songs the same...  If two players have the same song, that does almost exactly the same thing, but one is slightly weaker on one of the minor bonuses, due to having an extra rest, is anyone going to notice / consider them truly different?  Probably not...

Beyond that, there were choices you could make based on the composition of the group you were with.  A caster heavy group, vs a melee heavy group, vs a mixed group should have wanted different songs.  In this case though, it may have come down to the fact that usually, you're dealing with a mixed group of some sort, and so the more specific songs aren't that useful / important to people.  It does give the exceptional player an opportunity to do better than the average one, however.

Resists played into that as well, to some extent.  Some areas of the game would focus on a particular resist, and using a song that had some components for that particular resist should have been attractive.  The difficulty involved in figuring out what resist was important for an area (if any was!) and the small gain it gave (since you'd give up some other bonus for it) may have also made people ignore it.  Or the bonus from resists may simply have not been enough to make it worthwhile in these cases.

In summary:  You try to add counters and balances, however people may decide that the bonuses gained by correctly taking advantage of the specific situation they're in are not great enough to justify the effort involved in identifying them and doing so.

That's one thing developers definitely need to learn about player psychology:  If they cannot see the numbers, letting them 'feel' the benefit is important, else they'll all gravitate to an area where they can.