f13.net forums - Vanguard chatter

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July 19, 2025, 04:08:41 PM

we're back, baby

You still are missing it. :) I know who it is too, sir.

From the Vanguard forums:

Quote

The Vanguard development team is relocating its offices to SOE's San Diego campus effective Monday, October 15, 2007. As part of the integration into the SOE family, the developers will benefit from having access to shared resources and the combined experience of SOE's other game development teams. As a result, not every Carlsbad employee has been invited to stay with the development team.

Under the new leadership of Thom Terrazas, an eight-year SOE veteran, SOE will continue its commitment to Vanguard and its players. The remaining Vanguard team members are going to continue to deliver on an exceptional product. They are a creative force in the online games space and we look forward to continuing the vision for Vanguard and to continue to deliver groundbreaking game play. SOE remains committed to seeing Vanguard grow and prosper.

I guess "not every Carlsbad employee has been invited to stay" is a new euphimism for 'laid off'.

Quote from: Ixxit on October 17, 2007, 11:42:37 AM

I guess "not every....invited to say" is a euphimism for 'laid off'.

Which in turn is a euphemism for "fired".

This thread should have died long ago. Which is a euphemism for nothing at all.

Quote from: cmlancas on October 17, 2007, 11:45:03 AM

This thread should have died long ago. Which is a euphemism for nothing at all.

Heh, I agree but I see on September 09, 2007, 08:31:14 PM you weren't willing to call the time of death and applied the paddles one more time :-D

No patch since September 12th. My admittedly small guild merged with two other guilds. I haven't logged in since June but it costs me nothing (Station Pass.)

GU 3 pt 1 went live yesterday. Fixed some things, supposedly. Broke some things as well.

Only real change I saw out of the whole deal was that I no longer get spammed to hell and back by the gaggle of gold sellers. Oddly, my performance seems worse now, than it did back in April.

My guild on Xeth got invited to help test the new raid content, which should be... interesting. More so, since we're the only non-Hardcore type guild to get an invite.

There were gold sellers there!?

A plague of gold sellers strangely, possibly because they're desperate to offload all the duped gold that is distorting the in-game economy.

The new patch has noticeably improved performance, but not without introducing a number of exciting new bugs. It does make it clear that the original engine was so demanding mostly because of poor implementation / testing.

They've started doing some nerfing / balancing for the raid game, which may lose them some subscribers if they are not extremely careful. The vast majority of people are casual raiders at best, and aren't interested in being nerfed to improve someone elses fun. There's still no actual raid content though... that comes later.

And at this point anyone who believes Vanguard is not headed for a spot next to Matrix-Online in the mothball cupboard is rather hopelessly optimistic.

Quote from: Kageru on October 17, 2007, 05:38:19 PM

Thats a shame. The once titled "WoW killer" is still nothing more than a shoddy game.

Quote from: Kageru on October 17, 2007, 05:38:19 PM

The new patch has noticeably improved performance, but not without introducing a number of exciting new bugs. It does make it clear that the original engine was so demanding mostly because of poor implementation / testing.

I logged in last night and it was basically unplayable. I used to be able to eek out 20fps in most situations but now anytime there's a structure within rendering distance to game grinds down to 6fps and lags to the point of a half second delay on key presses. I'll have another poke around and see if there's some new setting which fixes it (tree rendering distance did it for me last time - evidently the engine renders trees to leaf level at distances where you shouldn't see a leaf).

Quote from: Kageru on October 17, 2007, 05:38:19 PM

IF any MMO were able to find MMO devs that actually cared and wanted to change public image of all game MMO developers this one had a chance if what you say about gold duping is true, simply be honest and upfront and ask the public on the vanguard forums and take a proactive role by telling your customers your going to do a gold wipe on every server because of this problem and start over.

Stop fighting to keep the scraps you have now and try something different, you know your MMO is fucked up so do some rather unpractical moves to combat things to actualy show an attempt at making things different rather than simply staying the course with simple fare as always.

I always applauded Planetside for merging servers back in 2003 or 2004 I even liked the idea of them appending the -J or whatever at the end of yoru name to prevent duplicates and to show which server you came from. That form of a server merge didn't offend me or change my opnion of the game (such how people think zomg servers merging game dying). I had actual fun after that server merge! with Full enough population servers for me at the time that I played back then. I quit Planetside for other reasons, lack of developer support.

The minute World of Warcraft says they are merging servers, Onyxia(lvl34 horde rogue), Anu'brak(Lvl 50 Alliance Rogue), Coilfang(Lvl 67 Human Paladin), Darrowmere(lvl32 Night ElfDruid), means I will open my account back up otherwise its simply playing on dead servers with no population because Blizzard isn't proactive enough to show they care more about betting gaming enviroments than $25 transfer fees, which I fully realize they have earned more from transfer fees than people like me who quit wow because of their inaction.
Its been 6 weeks for me since my account was turned off for the third time, I'm have been feeling the itch to resub to WoW all along but have resisted well.
I quit WoW had my remaining time on my account transffered to a friend of mine, his account and they promply locked my account for that remaining time existing on my paid month. Its been about 2 weeks since I could resub to wow but have not.

Fof fuck's sake, please review the Bad Boys of Punctuation again. Your post made my lab rats sterile.

Quote from: AngryGumball on October 18, 2007, 10:41:43 PM

Its been about 2 weeks since I could resub to wow but have not.

I think you should.

Will you people quit playing this game already? Are you proud that you rode the Titanic all the way to the bottom or something? Now you're just lurking around the wreck like Ghost pirates or something... There's nothing they can do to resurrect this game.

Quote from: Ixxit on October 17, 2007, 11:42:37 AM

From the Vanguard forums:

Quote

I guess "not every Carlsbad employee has been invited to stay" is a new euphimism for 'laid off'.

Apparently Aruspex, designer of the Diplomacy system, was one of they guys who got the boot. One of the last Devs who really worked with the fanbase and communicated well.. That poor guy damn near killed himself for that PoS game.

The decision to tank VG for DDO/WoW just keeps looking better and better.

Jerrith, Faelor says hey (the vanguardranger.com guy)

You guys know who Thom Terrazas is right?

Hes the last lead Dev for Planetside. He is quite an active (at least in PS) dev, as well as most of the more recent burst of development was him.

Quote from: Kageru on October 17, 2007, 05:38:19 PM

They've started doing some nerfing / balancing for the raid game...There's still no actual raid content though... that comes later.

I've got nothing of substance to add, only that I think this bit was amusing.

Quote from: Muggi on October 19, 2007, 11:22:35 AM

Jerrith, Faelor says hey (the vanguardranger.com guy)

Hi Faelor. :)

I haven't talked to anyone still there about it, but it sounds like this change makes sense. While not close, the main SOE offices aren't that far away, and keeping a big office (remember, Sigil was 100+ pre-release) open for a small number of people (I heard it was ~37 before this change, ~23 after), isn't really reasonable.

Still, it's disappointing to hear the office I spent so much time in is now closed. :(

Quote from: Mrbloodworth on October 19, 2007, 11:29:30 AM

You guys know who Thom Terrazas is right?

Hes the last lead Dev for Planetside. He is quite an active (at least in PS) dev, as well as most of the more recent burst of development was him.

Heh, Thom Terrazas.. He started as a CS person in the first gasps of breath for the original Everquest (and someplace I might still have the email I got from him about a CS issue).

Him being a lead dev for Planetside wasn't what I considered a promising development, excepting his background in having reasonable CS skills. Leading the Vanguard team? I'm not impressed. Then again Smed (EQ1's CS lead) is leading the whole of SOE now, and we all can see the obvious benefits of that.

Oooooh, Customer Service. I thought you meant Counter Strike. I was like, wtf is that idiot talking about, having been a Counter Strike dev would be the best choice for a Planet Side position. Took me a while.

But look at it this way, V:SoH has been reduced to 300 people screaming on a board. If that's the sum total of your game, customer service is your main thrust :-D

What are you talking about? Smed entered the industry as a developer twenty years ago and was an executive at 989 for a couple of years before EQ1's release. He isn't a hanger-on, he's a real guy.

Quote from: Jerrith on October 20, 2007, 10:29:32 PM

Quote from: Muggi on October 19, 2007, 11:22:35 AM

Jerrith, Faelor says hey (the vanguardranger.com guy)

I'll pass the Hi along to him :D

I would have sworn I read somewhere that the crew post-move and layoffs was ~14...damn wish I could find that link.

Quote from: taolurker on October 21, 2007, 01:58:52 AM

Quote from: Mrbloodworth on October 19, 2007, 11:29:30 AM

You guys know who Thom Terrazas is right?

Hes the last lead Dev for Planetside. He is quite an active (at least in PS) dev, as well as most of the more recent burst of development was him.

Consider my point of reference. The two years before him the game had NO updates. So, in that perspective, hes a god. That, and if he can be LIKED by the planet side community, he will have no trouble dealing with the Vanguard forums.

He is interactive, straight froward, and does get stuff done, and is battle tested.

oops, quoted the wrong quote... ignore my post. lol

Is there still an active public Vanguard board around anywhere? I used to anoint myself with fanboy tears as the game was crashing and burning. I'd like to go peer at the ashes and see what the mood is like among those still clinging to the corpse.

There's still some activity at SOE's boards, and www.silkyvenom.com still has VG forums..but there's not many fanboi's left there.

Thanks for the link, I had forgotten about Silkyvenom. The Vanguard forum there has gone positively sane, what with reality having crashed home and everything.

Oh, I can't believe they used the word vision, again.

Especially when the new producer letter promises just more WoWiness everywhere.

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Vanguard Producer’s Letter

Let Yourself Free and Make This Game Great!

These are pretty exciting times for Vanguard right now. The team is currently putting the finishing touches on Phase 2 and 3 of Update 3 after having launched an astounding performance update in Phase 1. We received a lot of great feedback from you on Phase 1, and we're going to continue our focus in delivering consistently high quality, engaging and in-demand content in each update.

I'd like to introduce myself to many of you that do not know me. My name is Thom Terrazas, Producer for Vanguard. In a few words, I've been with Sony Online Entertainment over 9 years (unofficially). During that time, I have and still do work, with some of the greatest people in the MMO world of whom I intend to solicit feedback from and use to my advantage. One of the best things that I have learned in this industry is to work closely with your team, while at the same time allow them to do their jobs and show off their talents – and we have some amazingly passionate and talented developers working on Vanguard. I give them a lot of credit for launching an MMO of this caliber, and you'll continue to see their talents shining through in our future updates.

The Team's Current Focus

In the past few weeks, the team has been examining all of the fundamental game mechanics and discussing what we think it is fun to play and what is not. The great thing is we are not holding anything back – everything is fair game!. So something that may have been perceived as off limits in the past, is now an open for debate and is able to be measured on the fun-factor-scale. At the end of the day, we all want to say we created a great game that is fun to play – and of course, we want you to be the measuring stick of whether or not and to what extent we meet that goal. Without you, we wouldn't be here.

One of our current priority tasks is setting the Vision for Vanguard. We've come up with dozens upon dozens of elements that we believe will factor into determining the future path of Vanguard but it will take a few more weeks of fine tuning within our internal departments before we distill it down to the vision and have an agreed on list of critical success factors by which to measure all new development against. I'm not able to share the details at the moment but what I can say is that the desired end result of this exercise is to ensure that we produce high-quality game content and features that first and foremost fun to play.

Areas that we're going to make changes to

Optimizations; stability; optimizations; stability; optimizations; stability. I may be wrong but I think I see a pattern here. J Hey let's face it, Vanguard had some performance issues but we've made huge leaps since launch. If you've played since beta, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you had problems at launch and you haven't been back recently, you've got to give Vanguard another try. See for yourself how much has improved.

This bone is connected to that bone…Well, not any more!

Future optimization work you'll be seeing from us is focused on enhancing and optimizing our Player Character models. If you have a weak stomach, you may want to look away for a minute if you are closely attached to your character. (just kidding J ) Seriously though, we're going through our first phase of character model improvements that will eliminate unnecessary bones. What does this mean for you? This means that your computer will not have to work as hard to render each character which means faster performance all around.

We're bringing sexy back…

After phase one is complete, we'll be moving onto phase two where we'll be increasing the visual quality of our character models. Not only will we be delivering you a character that is more appealing to the eye, but we'll also be delivering a model that utilizes less resources and is easier on your computer. Again, win-win for everyone! A brief update on this is that we're almost complete on our visual improvements with human characters and we'll be moving onto adjustments to animations and to the different body types.

Grouping! Traveling! "Dude, where's my car mount?"

Holy smokes ~ the world of Telon is huge! And we recognize this. There are some fundamental challenges with a world of this size. It's difficult to meet up with other players on opposite sides of the world (especially if you haven't been there before); there are large areas between points of interest; the Riftway system doesn't display where and how you can use it ahead of time and you have to have a mount fairly early in order to explore and travel, etc… If you and your buddy log in to play together and you find yourselves spending more time trying to connect with each other than actually playing, there is something missing. It should be easy to group up in Vanguard. We know there are problems and we're discussing how to fix them right now. (Details coming soon!)

Feel rewarded

We're looking into the loot drop percentages and realize we've been a little cheap when it comes to loot rewards. We're going to tune this upward particularly at the lower levels and examine the mid and higher levels as well. At the end of your play session, we want you to feel like you accomplished something and were rewarded for the time you invested while playing.

Feel accomplished

Whether you log in and play for 30 minutes or for 3 hours, you should see and feel that you advanced your character. Now don't get me wrong. We don't want to create an "easy button" when it comes to leveling up but we definitely need to expedite the experience gain cycle to increase fun factor. We've made some steps already by adding Rest Experience and the ability to share experience within your Brotherhood, so we'll keep those in mind when discussing the percentage increase that we should take it up to in the near future.

Tactics

Vanguard doesn't have enough tactics. We want to make changes in our combat tactics and one tactic or ability that comes to mind is Stun. Stunning an NPC while they are in the middle of casting a spell needs to be available during battle. This is an essential part of warfare tactics and we're going to fix items similar to this.

Death Penalties, do we need them to be so severe?

We're talking about this now and we think that there are enough penalties to dieing that we don't need to sock it to you with a loss of experience. I know there may be some purists or hard-core gamers out there that may disagree, but we think that we can offset the experience loss with item degradation combined with the hurdles of traveling back to the location where you died.

What else is coming?

In no particular order, here are a number of topics we are evaluating for change and improvement:

* Additional player housing
* Improved map; map icons that distinctly show points of interest
* City and Dungeon maps
* Readily available information showing you where you can adventure at your level
* Factions in towns
* Consistency - Streamlining hand off quests that lead you in the proper direction for character progression
* Changing some buff spells to group based
* Combat Visual Timing – Improve the timing on combat responsiveness (when you click on an ability, the action performed is in sync)
* Player power curve versus NPC power curve
* The ease of obtaining bags (especially at lower levels)
* Additional high-end content – Raid and Non-Raid content
* Increasing the Quest Journal size – Also adding organizational tabs to distinguish Adventuring quests from Diplomacy and Crafting quests
* Regional banks – remove them!
* UI improvements
* Alternate form of currency – Special "coins" to redeem at certain Vendors for obtaining items such as adventuring, diplomacy cards, titles, potions, etc.
* Alternate advancement or specialization for your character

How do you get a say in all of this?

I think I've exposed many topics that we'll be working on in the near future. I hope that you will find some of these issues at the top of your list of desired changes as well. However, if they are not at the top of your list, please feel free to post your comments regarding this newsletter in the discussion thread on our Vanguard forums.

Also, we're going to be posting more frequently on the forums to keep you informed and to answer questions that are on topic with our development focus. We understand that you have valuable feedback and when you do not hear a response back on a topic, it can be very frustrating. We're responsible for keeping you informed and we'll make changes in that area.

If I was in charge….

As an added bonus to you, we will be opening up a new Forum that is dedicated to you as a player and as our future developer. Essentially, we want to know what you would do with Vanguard if you were in the driver seat. It will be really cool for us to see the ideas and changes that you would make to the game if given the opportunity. So stay tuned to a Vanguard Forum near you!

As always, thank you for your continued support. We look forward to providing you with our continuing commitment to making this game great!

Sincerely,

Thom Terrazas
-Vanguard Team

Squee!!!

Well, not really. I'll might give it a try when some Ultra-Super-Mega-Patch rolls that I simply have to check out, but right now I'm living vicariously in a castle of Richard Garriott's creation.

Quote from: WindupAtheist on October 23, 2007, 02:05:07 AM

Thanks for the link, I had forgotten about Silkyvenom. The Vanguard forum there has gone positively sane, what with reality having crashed home and everything.

Yep, the fanbois have all moved on to TR/HG:L/AoC/WAR/whatever as their "WoW-killer" of choice now. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

I think "making it more WoW" is a bit of a misnomer. The impression I get is they want to do what any developer should be doing:

Reward players more per session of play. Long term rewards are only going to be achieved if there's some short term rewards along the way. VG didn't have enough of the latter. Loot drops and game mechanics.
Make it work on more computers. Epic fail here initially, like EQ2. This genre does not force the purchase of new computers. Everything from models to textures seem to be under review. It could be just talk of course. And even if it's not, we're still talking years of effort for the size of the team and budget they have now.
Make it easy to get around. The size of your world is irrelevant if it sucks to hook up with friends.

This is one of those never-need-to-experience-again titles to me. But, the thing I am interested in about VG at this point is whether, unlike SWG, they create a longterm vision, actually deliver against it, and don't change it 100 times.

It does sound more like their EQ2-ifying it, actually. It doesn't make me want to buy it (the beta still has me alienated) but it's a good move, just as it was a good move for EQ2. There are some things, such as meeting up with friends and being able to run the the damn thing, that should be easy.

Well yeah, but the changes to EQ2 were pretty much seen as "WoWifying it" - especially by those people who view that as a bad thing.

Why is WoW successful? Because its fun most of the time to most people, and because it runs on a wide variety of computer specs. Therefore improving game engine performance and removing 'teh suck' from a MMOG is WoWifying it.

From a certain point of view. Ohhhhh, I see.

WoW is successful from a great many perspectives. From my own perspective, WoW was Doomed... but that didn't seem to stop it.

Some day... some day... Heartbreak

These days, I'm learning to accept that tried and true game mechanics modified by people who know how to make games and then branded with the name of The Company That Can Do No Wrong will sell, and sell well, largely to an audience that would otherwise have never have tried an MMORPG in their lives.