Vanguard chatter

[Kageru]

The absolutely idiotic vanboys have moved onto the official boards thus making silky venom a ghost town. You can see this by the incredibly long threads in which the gnashed their teeth and burned effigies of Thom over his suggestion that maybe the XP curve could do with a bit of examination. These guys, who are almost certainly level 50 by now, detest the idea of anyone else having it easier.... conveniently ignoring the fact that when they started finding groups was a more realistic expectation, and that soloing in vanguard truly is a tedious grind.

I think Thom has an angle they miss, that the game must attract new gamers. He knows that with the lack of development resources and inherited issues the game will continue to lose people at the high end. Sure, they'll eventually release the raid content they've been working on which may help but raiders have always been a subset of the community. And given how they have to make the raid content fairly brutal, to keep the powergamers busy while they work on more content, I don't see it keeping the numbers the game needs.

And that's assuming APW is brilliant. If it goes badly then that could kill the game right there.

[Fabnusen]

Just a quick question:

Has any of the verifiable train wreaks *ever* attracted new players above their launch numbers? Meaning; once a shitbox of a game is verified to be a shitbox of a game and all but the most diehard of fanbois have left, has an MMO ever been able to re attract pre-shitbox numbers? Further, have any actually grown?

How few subs can a game like Vanguard truly have before even SOE (with it's "stable" of really, really bad games) says no more? Is there a case to be made for carefully examining a game after launch and if to be found of the shitbox variety, just kill it?

[BigBlack]

Just a quick question:

Has any of the verifiable train wreaks *ever* attracted new players above their launch numbers? Meaning; once a shitbox of a game is verified to be a shitbox of a game and all but the most diehard of fanbois have left, has an MMO ever been able to re attract pre-shitbox numbers? Further, have any actually grown?

AO is the prime (only?) example that pops to mind.

[Fordel]

EVE started off pretty abysmal.

[shiznitz]

I believe that EQ2 is above launch levels. It is definitely above where it was 1 year after launch. It clearly went down before it went up. I have no hard numbers, though.

[Venkman]

Extending the question further, I can't think of any MMO that has enjoyed a peak, lost it significantly and then regained it, much less surpassed it. The cycle seems to either be a bell curve to some post-launch plateau where you can't kick the players off, or a peak-at-launch followed by a steady decline to plateau or closure.

[UnSub]

MMOGData.com has picked up where MMOGchart.com left off.

EVE is the best example of a game that launched weakly but has grown over time.

[Nebu]

MMOGData.com has picked up where MMOGchart.com left off.

This line should generate some fun conversation. 

[HaemishM]

MMOGData.com has picked up where MMOGchart.com left off.

They've gone farther up SirBruce's ass than a proctologist dressed as a giant-cocked squirrel?

[geldonyetich2]

SirBruce is apparently not returning his calls.

I get the feeling that MMOGdata doesn't have any new numbers, he just transposed what they found on MMOGchart and are suddenly confronted with the stark reality that they have no idea where he got those numbers in the first place.

[Afropuff]

That, and the fact that they were word for word plagiarizing huge volumes of SirBruce text should have been a giveaway.

Pulled out the ass indeed.

[UnSub]

MMOGData.com has picked up where MMOGchart.com left off.

This line should generate some fun conversation. 

I aim to please.

[Venkman]

MMOGData.com has picked up where MMOGchart.com left off.

Actually, no. They took SB's data, created prettier new charts for it, and managed to get some at-least-2007 numbers. And they "launched" this site seemingly to be picked up by VOIG. This is just the last gasp of an old reporting model. Most don't publish their numbers anymore, because they realized there was no benefit to themselves for doing so.

[geldonyetich2]

I'm not entirely sure the numbers reported were ever particularly accurate.

 

At the very least, they don't tell the whole story.  World of Warcraft, the super success story of MMORPGs, has 8M subscribers and that's a pretty big deal.  Well, I've read some things that establish that less than half are Western (US and Europe rolled together) and most of the subscribers pay something like six cents an hour for access.  Then we hear about awful games that apparently have 25 million subscribers.

Bottom line: Popularity does not breed quality.

[Fordel]

Quality often causes popularity though.

[geldonyetich2]

You must have missed that line about awful games with 25 million subscribers.

I'll go so far as to say that if a game is genuinely painful or unfun to play it'll repel people.  However, the truly discerning gamer remains in the minority.

[Abelian75]

Quality often causes popularity though.

You must have missed that line about awful games with 25 million subscribers.

learn2logic, yo.

[BigBlack]

Quality often causes popularity though.

Truth!

[CharlieMopps]

er... eve didn't cost $30 million to make niether.

[geldonyetich2]

Infinite plausibility of the "often" clause beside, I'm just not nearly as confident that quality has nearly as much correlation with popularity as logic dictates it should.  There's just too many examples to the contrary.

[Valmorian]

Infinite plausibility of the "often" clause beside, I'm just not nearly as confident that quality has nearly as much correlation with popularity as logic dictates it should.  There's just too many examples to the contrary.

The other possibility is that in many cases the "popularity" side of the report may be somewhat overstated. 

[Abelian75]

My learn2logic statement had nothing to do with the "often" part of his statement.  Even if he said quality always causes popularity, that does not in any way imply that there would not be popular things out there with shitty quality, because the statement does not imply that popularity REQUIRES quality (or put another way, that popularity causes quality).

That said, I am admittedly in the camp that believes there's no real reason to come up with a definition of quality for entertainment products other than potential for popularity.  There can still be some dissonance with their eventual, actual popularity for reasons like atrocious box art, or some random meme that makes your terrible product somehow popular, but in the end entertainment is meant to entertain, so it's sort of nonsense in my opinion to judge something's quality in any other way than determining how many people it will entertain, for how long, and how much.

[Joey]

All VG these days .. is stange, I don't know where they  heading.

If you look at "news" at VanguardSOH.com, you really must laugh, what sort of news/ propaganda is that. I have not played it for months, but certainly I would be more interested in game development, rather then screenshots contests(http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=144&section=News), or "new" team management and bug teams (that article is a laugh http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=142&section=News) or interviews with players about their characters (http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=143&section=News, very exciting).

Looks to me they are deciding what to do next with this "healthy game" , as one manager said, and feed peple with this childly bullshit.

All your links now direct to a page on the Vanguard site that mentions nothing but the Pirates of the Burning Sea stress test -- complete with a link to discuss PotBS on the Vanguard forums.  (Obviously Vanguard is so shitty that it can't even produce its own news.)

[shiznitz]

To be fair, VG isn't shitty any more. The game is definitely playable on lower end rigs than it was at launch. It is still a "solo to 20 then group" game as far as I can tell, though. It is good enough to have a stable customer base but who is going to go back and check it out at this point? That's their problem.

I last played the game in June (Station Pass) and when I logged in last week on my new PC, the game view was now defaulted to first person and it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to get out of it. Rolling the mouse wheel did nothing. Strike 1. Then after asking some questions in the general channel I got a tell from an old guildmate. I could not answer him. /r and /t were not working. I was stuck in the general channel somehow. Strike 2. I walked before the next pitch.

[Venkman]

There's a lot of games that aren't shitty anymore. But they were shitty for just long enough to ensure their place in the also-ran side of the genre. As long as the companies are making money, great! There's just no comeback trail for these games though. They merely persist, and because of that, whatever good ideas get added to the game go largely unnoticed by people making the next wave of them.

[Azazel]

Despite never having played it, I'm going to call shenanigans on that statement.

I am 100% sure that Vanguard is indeed still really really shitty shitty shit shit.

"Slightly less shitty" doesn't = not shitty anymore.

[geldonyetich2]

What's shit remains ever in the bowels of the beholder.

[Venkman]

I am 100% sure that Vanguard is indeed still really really shitty shitty shit shit.

People are paying for it. Someone therefore thinks they're doing something right. That it's survived and is generating some amount of revenue is a shocker of course, but there it is.

[geldonyetich2]

It seeks my meek 100k subscription prediction proved too bold for the harsh realities of life, but there you have it: Vanguard is being played by people who can still stomach what amounts to a meatier EverQuest.

[Azazel]

I am 100% sure that Vanguard is indeed still really really shitty shitty shit shit.

People are paying for it. Someone therefore thinks they're doing something right. That it's survived and is generating some amount of revenue is a shocker of course, but there it is.

People pay for all kinds of things. Someone else's poor taste doesn't pre-empt a product or concept from being shit.

To Wit:

[Oban]

I'll see your CGI Jar Jar and raise you:

[cmlancas]

If there were enough people to readily play with me, I'd probably still be subbed to VG because I liked their priest/sk combo. We were broken, and it played more like a Diablo type game because of it.

They had some good ideas; diplomacy really made me care about the lore of VG. Unfortunately, quite a bit of the rest was 

[Strazos]

I have 2 RL friends who actually play this.

I don't understand them sometimes. They actually think all of the stuff in this game is actually awesome.

Is someone able to explain this shitpile to me? Oooo, healers can also do damage, big deal.

[Venkman]

I've got a buddy who went from FFXI to Lineage 2 and considered them both Robot Jesus, going to so far as to rant about the rest of the genre. That he's never played anything but these two titles just means he fits right in.

It's all a frame of reference. There are people laughing at our contemporary enjoyments because they were board of this shit before they got all graphical.

[Tale]

I don't understand them sometimes. They actually think all of the stuff in this game is actually awesome.

Vanguard boxes are back on the shelves at full price in my local EB. Earlier this year, they were trying to flog them off at half-price.

Is someone able to explain this shitpile to me? Oooo, healers can also do damage, big deal.

It's high fantasy (AD&D nerdity as opposed to WoW's pulp fiction), with an ambitious attempt at "next generation" systems. You don't just talk to quest NPCs, you manipulate their reactions in a subgame. You don't just do special moves, you do combos that can lead to other combos. You don't just craft, you chop down trees, work the wood, make the glue, and your chair assembly fails. The chair was for the house you crafted on the land you bought on the island you sailed to in your crafted boat.

It was all done in an expensively licensed, modded Unreal engine from a couple of generations ago, which wasn't really suited to the purpose. They manually built an immense world, with the largest cities ever, bigger than anyone could ever hope to populate. Then they tried to manually populate every corner.

Most of the original ideas ended up flawed/broken, so beta was a constant series of revamps - mainly in a WoW direction. It was dropped by Microsoft and picked up by SOE in the final year of beta. There were fractures in the team. The art director died IRL.

Then somehow it became a game.