Vanguard - From Brad to the catasses

[Simond]

IIRC, Brad has claimed that MS is very hands-off at the moment - thing is, he emphasises the 'hands-off' where he should be emphasising the 'at the moment'.

[Yegolev]

I won't play this.  I should not have to elaborate beyond saying that I have a full time corporate-type job, commute two hours a day, have a nongaming wife, and a sixteen-month-old boy.  There's your Fear raid right there.  One solid year of not sleeping -- because you can't take a break from having a child -- broke me of ever thinking I could enjoy something like EQ again.  Hell, I can't sneak upstairs to get a few minutes of GuildWars in without interruption.  I don't have a lifestyle which is conducive to unplanned multi-hour ass-sitting sessions anymore.  The planned ones are fucking hard, too.  I'm just not that guy anymore.

However, I don't hope that Brad's game tanks.  I'd just be acting out of bitterness and anger, and I have other things to occupy my mind besides McQuaid's fate.  The only way it will affect me is by sucking catasses out of whatever game I happen to be playing.  More power to him.  I even hope he names one of the major cities Svtfosorcim and holds back a race of furries for years.

I also won't make fun of anyone here who wants to play this.  It should be obvious to any of you exactly what you are getting into, however, so if you get all engorged "down there" thinking about this game and later come back to whine about it... I'll point and laugh.  Because that's just the kinda guy I am.

[HRose]

You're talking about gamers who enjoy a good game.  I'm talking catasses who need an e-peen.

That's true.

The point is that they want their e-peen to be POPULAR. They will never accept to play a catass-only game where they cannot show the e-peen to EVERYONE.

In order to really aim at this target audience the game must be mainstream AND the e-peen must be exclusive. That what was happening in EQ.

If Brad really aims for the exteme players but without being able to produce a mainstream game, he will just obtain deluded catasses.

[Jain Zar]

The thing was EQ was NEVER that fun.  Once the graphics and the lack of getting ganked every 5 minutes wore off you found a completely shitty time waster based around doing the same thing 100s of times so you could then go do it somewhere else 1000s of times.  It has always been a worthless game designed for obsessive compulsives.

Vanguard looks to be continuing that shit concept. 

[AcidCat]

Games are entertainment, not a lifestyle to me.  If you want them to be your lifestlye, yeah, VS will be a great game for you.  I'd rather hold on to reality because I don't need some place to escape anymore, which is all catassing and turning a game into your life is about anyway.  With that in mind, Onyxia being 'just a puzzle' is fineto me. It's entertaining, and proving the size of my e-peen to a bunch of other digital addicts in a game that will be gone in 10 or so years leavnig me with nothing isn't my idea of an admirable goal in life.

I don't really have to post here because many of you have expressed my own feelings so well.

But I will anyway.

[Glazius]

But I agree with McQuaid that there has to be something more to do than WoW currently offers. It lacks risky challenges like Fear and Hate. Raids like Onyxia are just risk-free puzzles with pretty lights.

Okay. Answer me this.

When you failed a Fear or Hate raid, why did you fail?

--GF

[Daydreamer]

But I agree with McQuaid that there has to be something more to do than WoW currently offers. It lacks risky challenges like Fear and Hate. Raids like Onyxia are just risk-free puzzles with pretty lights.

Okay. Answer me this.

When you failed a Fear or Hate raid, why did you fail?

--GF

Cleric going AFK
Mage pulling out his pet despite known pathing issues
Idiot Paladin who walked where told not to and agged too many monsters

In summary: other people.  The appeal of WoW isn't the lack of risk, its the lack of ASSUMED risk, i.e. the risks you take for grouping with players X, Y and Z.  But the side effect of not having serious consequences when others screw up is that there are no serious consequences when yous crew up, meaning little risk and little challenge.

[Trippy]

When you failed a Fear or Hate raid, why did you fail?

For the break ins it was:

Fear: almost always because of some dumbass going through the portal when he wasn't supposed to and running to the break in point with train on his tail instead of dying at the aggro spot.

Hate: people standing too close to the walls closest to the archway in the zone in room and pullers not paying attention to the number of mobs they aggro where some break off and take the scenic route and bring more friends along for the party (pathing was seriously screwy up there).

[Trippy]

WoW's success doesn't contradict what Brad is saying, it just means that WoW's formula has more mass appeal. I agree with Merusk that there are plenty of catasses out there that 250K is doable

Is it? Would those people rather play City of Heroes or Guild Wars? I mean, the playing field has a lot more competitors than it used too, and a number of them a good.

That's true but there are also a lot more MMO players than there were a few years ago and so while there is a lot of poaching going on the pie is only getting bigger. If it wasn't, WoW by itself would've closed down all the major NA MMOs. Though I don't see Vanguard bringing in many first-time MMO players it won't have to siphon off that many players from the competition to get close to 250K -- e.g. just making up some numbers: 100K from EQ & EQII, 50K from WoW, 50K from FFXI, and 50K from misc. other sources would get them to 250K.

[ajax34i]

Shrug, seems like he did a simple calculation:

"Can we expect to have 2 million subscribers?"  "No."  "Ok, how can we make the same money as WoW?"

"Well, let's take WoW, 2 million subscribers but they'll leave in a year" (he wishes) "that's like keeping 500k subscribers for 4 years.  So we'll do that."

[Simond]

I think Vanguard is going to get a whole bunch of EQ/EQ2 and ex-EQ players...for about three months, until the rose-tinted glasses come off and they are reminded how slow & tedious original 'EQ at launch' was.

[pants]

I think Vanguard is going to get a whole bunch of EQ/EQ2 and ex-EQ players...for about three months, until the rose-tinted glasses come off and they are reminded how slow & tedious original 'EQ at launch' was.

Is Vangard going to be North American only?  Because all this 'You will invest time into the game' stuff - isnt that the kind of stuff that makes the Koreans and Chinese get all warm and fuzzy in the pants?

[HRose]

From the other board.

I didn't check out the Vanguard demo, but one of my friends did. He reported that their crafting systems have some interesting quirks. For example, to harvest wood, you have to attack a tree, which is not odd in and of itself. However, the trees have levels. And stats. And if you fail the attack, you are penalized. Reportedly, when he asked the demo-er what one would do in this situation, the response was "You could group up with a friend and have him de-buff the tree."

[Azazel]

/ooc level 10 rogue LFG for Red Oak grp, PST

[Raven]

I find it amusing that BM took a few shots at Raph Koster, but I'm not surprised that Vanguard is positioning itself to be the anti-WOW, because it's highly unlikely that SG could compete with Blizzard for the casual gamer's market share.

I have mixed feelings about EQ, and about BM's opinions on why it was popular. I think it's unfair to say all success in EQ was built upon time investment. Well, obviously it was, but the game does (have not played in 2 years, so I don't know about now) require tactics and some degree of common sense to play. Idiots don't do well in EQ, unless the devote a lot of time to playing.

In the good old days before SOE turned the game in Everexpansion, it was great fun to take a single group deep into Lower Guk. To break a room and hold it took teamwork, and smart play. I guess that's what I miss about the Classic Pre SOL EQ, that need for teamwork and trust and common sense.

WOW is a blast to play, but I don't think it has that same intensity that EQ has (had). On the other hand, I don't miss exp debt, corpse runs, or the time investment. I certainly don't miss having to wake up at 5am on a Sun morning just so I could camp for J Boots, which were considered a must have item.

I don't think anyone is saying that mmorpgs shouldn't be a challenge, but that EQ was simply too Lord of the Flies extreme, and went way beyond being challenging, to simply being a stress inducing treadmill.

[Azazel]

I have to admit though, I've been reading through that thread on the FoH board for the last few days, and my god I'm glad that those people hate WoW and think Vanguard and Brad are going to be the place for them since even though I haven't bumped into these people in-game yet (since they were all 60 before I got WoW, a month after release) I really don't want to have to deal with them ingame at all.

The only thing they leave me wondering, is if they so much hate WoW and prefer EQ1, why are they playing WoW instead of having gone back to EQ1..?

[Trippy]

From the other board.

I didn't check out the Vanguard demo, but one of my friends did. He reported that their crafting systems have some interesting quirks. For example, to harvest wood, you have to attack a tree, which is not odd in and of itself. However, the trees have levels. And stats. And if you fail the attack, you are penalized. Reportedly, when he asked the demo-er what one would do in this situation, the response was "You could group up with a friend and have him de-buff the tree."

Wow that sounds almost as stupid as being able to kill yourself crafting in EQ II.

[schild]

Have him debuff a tree?

I don't buy it. No developer is that stupid. NO DEVELOPER. NOT EVEN DEREK MOTHERFUCKINGSMART.

[Dodger_]

I don't buy it. No developer is that stupid. NO DEVELOPER. NOT EVEN DEREK MOTHERFUCKINGSMART.

Seconded.  WTF do you need to harvest trees for in a futuristic MMOG?  Wooden bullets to shoot cybernetic vampires?

[schild]

Seconded.  WTF do you need to harvest trees for in a futuristic MMOG?  Wooden bullets to shoot cybernetic vampires?

Vanguard is medieval, afaik. But I like where you're going. Don't stop.

[Dodger_]

Vanguard is medieval, afaik. But I like where you're going. Don't stop.

Oh, heh, I'm confusing it with Sigil.

[schild]

Vanguard is medieval, afaik. But I like where you're going. Don't stop.

Oh, heh, I'm confusing it with Sigil.

Sigil being the company making Vanguard. Oh man, you're confused.

[Dodger_]

Sigil being the company making Vanguard. Oh man, you're confused.

Hahah, Tabula Rasa?

[schild]

YES. WE HAVE A WINNAR.

[MaceVanHoffen]

I hate grinds and I'm an employed professional with much less gaming time than people who can catass. But that's a different matter from wanting challenges that create opportunities for success AND tough penalties for failure, rather than just opportunities for success. So I think I'm one of the 250,000 losers who would play what you're all hating, and I don't think the other 249,999 are catasses. Gotta go to bed, it's 3:50am and I'm supposed to be driving a car at 7:30am.

Don't confuse "difficulty" with "pain in the ass for no other reason than to be a pain in the ass."  I'm a virtual-world nutjob too, but come on ... honestly.  It doesn't make a game more difficult to require you to spend inordinate amounts of time just travelling, to be able to lose your corpse, to require an hour or more of buffing up before taking on an ubermob with all the intelligence of a spastic child madly thwapping the keyboard, or any of the other things we all know and love about EQ 1.  All those things just make it a pain in the ass.

EQ 1 didn't take a huge amount of skill.  It just took a willingness to stare at a screen and a lot of time.  Lots and lots of time.  Time > all.  All those ubermobs that supposedly took "skill"?  They just took people willing to eat xp loss (time spent staring at the screen) to figure out which combination of zerglings (more time staring at the screen) were needed to win.  The goal was never to make the game require skill, since that would actually require design effort.  EQ 1 just took every task, big or small, and forced it to take so much time that you had to keep playing for years just to see any progress.

McQuaid is seriously off his rocker.  I doubt he'll even get the 250k subscriptions.  It's not that there aren't that many catasses out there, because there are.  It's that even catasses know how to optimize time.  Sure, they'll always play 8+ hours a day.  But which would Joe Catass choose:  8+ hours of going from level 1 to level 1.5, or 8+ hours of making real progress across possibly multiple characters?  Gee, tough choice there.

[TheWalrus]

StGabe going to weigh in on this one or what?

[Kageru]

In the good old days before SOE turned the game in Everexpansion, it was great fun to take a single group deep into Lower Guk. To break a room and hold it took teamwork, and smart play. I guess that's what I miss about the Classic Pre SOL EQ, that need for teamwork and trust and common sense.

WOW is a blast to play, but I don't think it has that same intensity that EQ has (had). On the other hand, I don't miss exp debt, corpse runs, or the time investment. I certainly don't miss having to wake up at 5am on a Sun morning just so I could camp for J Boots, which were considered a must have item.

Try doing a 5 man scholomance or strath run and get back to me. Especially because the vast majority of EQ dungeons were trivial if you had a half decent enchanter in your group. And once broken it became even easier. I'm also impressed that WoW has achieved one of the EQ dreams, crawl rather than camp, but no one noticed. They might well notice if they were forced back to it though.

WoW has a lot of issues, and I never dreamed blizzard could be so slow, but some of the foundation shows skill. For example WoW's travel system is excellent, without the immersion breaking instant teleportation of the PoK books but not too tedious.

That said I don't think it's really worth listening to a designer at this point, especially since he'd be bending his words to appeal to the FoH forums crowd. What actually comes out will probably be quite different. And since microsoft are using it to drive XBox++ sales I expect it to veer strongly towards a more realistic, mainstream friendly, goal as release nears.

[Tale]

But I agree with McQuaid that there has to be something more to do than WoW currently offers. It lacks risky challenges like Fear and Hate. Raids like Onyxia are just risk-free puzzles with pretty lights.

Okay. Answer me this.

When you failed a Fear or Hate raid, why did you fail?

Internet problems aside (which plague any online game), failure happened either because of human frailty or bad luck. Success was possible if you had good luck and worked well as a team. It was usually possible to overcome bad luck through skill and tactics, which separated dedicated guild raids from pickup raids and allowed players to really demonstrate some skill.

Failure on break-in meant the start of a seven-day rot timer on a chunk of XP for each corpse, plus the items on your equipped corpse (plus a smaller permanent XP loss on each corpse). A naked break-in attempt was far more difficult, so you could easily end up with multiple corpses and lots of XP loss if recovery attempts failed. If there was another planes-capable force, you might be saved in a few days by someone else's successful raid, but total failure and multiple corpse loss was possible. Success meant the chance of godlike upgrades to your belongings. For me, that kind of risk was appropriate and made the rewards more satisfying. I admit I never had to go the full seven days on my main character's equipment, but some close friends lost everything twice over, and after the initial devastation we had great fun re-equipping them. They shrugged and got on with it.

If losing is painful, and good judgement and luck lead to glory, I'd consider the game to be functioning well. It's possible to have too much pain and not enough glory, but I didn't think original EQ's challenges were that way (I'm referring to raid challenges, not the grind). I feel let down when systems are changed because of the argument that "I am a customer, I deserve to keep my winnings". As a customer you're buying the chance to spend time playing, winning and losing. No consideration should be given to those who put real-world value on their in-game wins and losses, other than to prevent them trading stuff for real world currency.

I don't support permadeath or anything like that, but I do support perma-loss of things as a worst-case penalty for failure. And these are idealistic principles, but I think that when developers start pandering to the message boards and easing the pain, you end up with dull and predictable games.

[Tale]

Don't confuse "difficulty" with "pain in the ass for no other reason than to be a pain in the ass."  I'm a virtual-world nutjob too, but come on ... honestly.  It doesn't make a game more difficult to require you to spend inordinate amounts of time just travelling, to be able to lose your corpse, to require an hour or more of buffing up before taking on an ubermob with all the intelligence of a spastic child madly thwapping the keyboard, or any of the other things we all know and love about EQ 1.  All those things just make it a pain in the ass.

All I can do is repeat that I liked having to travel. You had to be on your toes during the travel (e.g. getting through Siren's Grotto and crossing Western Wastes), and you saw things happening in the world on your travels (e.g. passing someone who was in trouble and helping them out). Electing to travel overland while everyone else used the PoK books wasn't an option once they were implemented.

EQ 1 didn't take a huge amount of skill.  It just took a willingness to stare at a screen and a lot of time.  Lots and lots of time.  Time > all.  All those ubermobs that supposedly took "skill"?  They just took people willing to eat xp loss (time spent staring at the screen) to figure out which combination of zerglings (more time staring at the screen) were needed to win.  The goal was never to make the game require skill, since that would actually require design effort.  EQ 1 just took every task, big or small, and forced it to take so much time that you had to keep playing for years just to see any progress.

I could not disagree more. The difference between a reliable guild group and a pickup group was always significant. Split-second decisions were required to manage trains, choose whom to heal, and select what to tank. Bad decisions made by unskilled people led to failure. If that's not the influence of skill, what is it? Skill only became irrelevant when people were fighting in areas that had become trivial for their level.

I may have had a different experience because I'm from a low-population time zone (GMT+10, Sydney Australia), but I also disagree that it was a case of "just get more zerglings to win". There are only about 26 million people in developed nations in my region, so the number of EQ players during our evenings was small, the number who actually played on our server was smaller, and the number of those who wanted to play the high-end game was tiny. So we were forced to try things with 30-50 people that others had done with 80, plan everything very carefully, and either fail or only just succeed. It really showed the difference between one tactic and another, and one skilled puller/enchanter/whatever compared with some guy we found LFG.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not disagreeing with everything you said, just the parts I mentioned above.

EQ 1 just took every task, big or small, and forced it to take so much time that you had to keep playing for years just to see any progress.

Time and grinding was a problem. It was hard to keep guilds together because people moved at different paces. As I said above, the bar was eventually raised too high for me and I dropped out rather than catass. It took me nearly a year to get from 51 to 60, but that never stopped me raiding, and then I spent half a year raiding at 60. But having to be 65 with 100+ AA (I had 6 AA) just to keep raiding was too much. And the quests for keys got too hard as well. I didn't mind the keys in Velious and Kunark, but Luclin keys and then PoP flagging was a nightmare.

That said, I wasn't really bothered by progress over time until they raised the bar that high. It seemed like a change from incremental to exponential raising of the bar.

[Trippy]

Is Vangard going to be North American only?  Because all this 'You will invest time into the game' stuff - isnt that the kind of stuff that makes the Koreans and Chinese get all warm and fuzzy in the pants?

The Koreans love PvP, though, so not having that initially is going to limit the appeal of the game in Korea (assuming it's released there).

[Daydreamer]

EQ 1 just took every task, big or small, and forced it to take so much time that you had to keep playing for years just to see any progress.

Time and grinding was a problem. It was hard to keep guilds together because people moved at different paces. As I said above, the bar was eventually raised too high for me and I dropped out rather than catass. It took me nearly a year to get from 51 to 60, but that never stopped me raiding, and then I spent half a year raiding at 60. But having to be 65 with 100+ AA (I had 6 AA) just to keep raiding was too much. And the quests for keys got too hard as well. I didn't mind the keys in Velious and Kunark, but Luclin keys and then PoP flagging was a nightmare.

That said, I wasn't really bothered by progress over time until they raised the bar that high. It seemed like a change from incremental to exponential raising of the bar.

I think that was a consequence of changes in their player base more than anything.  Dec-2000 to Dex-2001 saw Velious, Luclin, and DAoC come out, each of which causing EQ to lose a bunch of the less hardcore players.  As the EQ player base become more and more hardcore, the expansions had to become more hardcore to keep up. Ditto DAoC from ToA onwards it seems. 

Perhaps its a natural consequence of a maturing server in any MMO?

[Trippy]

From the other board.

I didn't check out the Vanguard demo, but one of my friends did. He reported that their crafting systems have some interesting quirks. For example, to harvest wood, you have to attack a tree, which is not odd in and of itself. However, the trees have levels. And stats. And if you fail the attack, you are penalized. Reportedly, when he asked the demo-er what one would do in this situation, the response was "You could group up with a friend and have him de-buff the tree."

I poked around a bit and found some more info about crafting here:

http://www.thesafehouse.org/viewtopic.php?t=20087
http://www.thesafehouse.org/viewtopic.php?t=20090

and here:

http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=13892

The SafeHouse ones are more interesting since they explain the "spheres" concept and examples of crafting and resource gathering gameplay. Basically with crafting Sigil is trying to do what SOE could not with EQ II which is make crafting its own standalone "career" path with its own gameplay style. There's also a "Diplomacy" sphere and Brad being Brad is making all three spheres (Adventurering, Crafting, Diplomacy) interdependent with each other -- in other words it's:

The Vision³

[HRose]

Perhaps its a natural consequence of a maturing server in any MMO?

No, it's a deliberate choice.

[Raven]

Perhaps its a natural consequence of a maturing server in any MMO?

It always begins with the first expansion. Do the devs release more content for the casuals, or do they release new content for those players who are already maxed out and bored. Sometimes you can do both, such as with Kunark, but with each expansion the gradual shift is towards keeping the hardcore power gamers happy, and that means content that becomes increasingly out of reach for casual players.

Until the gap becomes so huge that casuals simply stop buying expansions.

Then the devlopers have to throw in some sort of must have feature, so the casuals will have a reason to buy the expansion anyway.

POP is a perfect example of this.

[Tale]

POP is a perfect example of this.

That's why I have more time for the Sigil crew than most here. They were responsible for EQ1, Kunark and Velious. They were partially responsible for Luclin, but they were all gone before PoP, the expansion that ended EQ for me.

That's weird, because before I played EQ I had been a SubSpace addict since it was a one-zone alpha project in 1996. SubSpace was by Jeff Petersen and Rod Humble, and I still consider it one of the best games ever made. The Executive Producer/Director of Development of PoP was Rod Humble, while Jeff Petersen did some of the programming work.