SOE to Publish Vanguard

[WayAbvPar]

Breaking NDAs on anything is pretty much a no-no. Unless you do it as creatively as WUA did (which is to say, entirely make it up).

[HaemishM]

My wife got in the beta last night and began downloading the client. This was about 10 pm last night. At 8 am this morning when I left for work, the estimated time remaining on the download was wavering between 5 and 20 hours. Yeah, IT'S THAT FUCKING BAD.

More to come.

Not trying to be a jerk here, but does f13 endorse breaking Vanguard's NDA? Yes, you aren't playing. Your wife is, but anyone in the beta could make the same claim.

Just asking because  .

Nothing I said breaks NDA, or at least doesn't give anyone in this thread any new information that wasn't already widely known among those who gave a shit.

[WindupAtheist]

That's because you're a freak in a retro bubble. You and your ageing friends have nothing in common with the average WoW player. You also can't read. I used the phrase "among people who have heard of it". They are currently a minority of the gaming public because Vanguard isn't being advertised yet, but there's more of them than there are of us cynics.

Yeah, you're a fucking idiot.  Among the UO/WoW/DAoC players I know, nobody gives a fuck about Vanguard.  I mean I'm sure some of them have heard of it.  They keep up on upcoming games well enough to talk about Conan and Warhammer, but none of them have shit to say about Vanguard.  The only reason there's the least appearance of "buzz" is because there's a cadre of disaffected Everquest catasses that Brad has been peckerslapping into a frenzy this whole time.  Christ, this is the guy who posted on his own forums telling his minions to go vote in some random user-made FoH poll about the game.  He probably told them to go spam MMORPG.com too.

[Soln]

Vanguard does seem to have a really negative buzz about it.  No doubt about it.  Fair or not.

[Signe]

I don't know, either.  It's useless and people break it everywhere.  It doesn't even matter if they come up with something truly innovate and fun.  Next MMO will just include it or existing ones will add it in an expansion.  Some industries can barely work without them, such as entertainment, and with others they are simply a wasted effort, such as MMO development. 

[shiznitz]

My wife got in the beta last night and began downloading the client. This was about 10 pm last night. At 8 am this morning when I left for work, the estimated time remaining on the download was wavering between 5 and 20 hours. Yeah, IT'S THAT FUCKING BAD.

More to come.

Not trying to be a jerk here, but does f13 endorse breaking Vanguard's NDA? Yes, you aren't playing. Your wife is, but anyone in the beta could make the same claim.

Just asking because  .

Nothing I said breaks NDA, or at least doesn't give anyone in this thread any new information that wasn't already widely known among those who gave a shit.

It just seemed like you were teeing up the ball but hadn't swung yet. My PM to schild asking if there was a restricted VSoH discussion here went unanswered.

[Simond]

Also, Haemish didn't 'sign' the NDA...his wife did.  :-D

[Miasma]

It just seemed like you were teeing up the ball but hadn't swung yet. My PM to schild asking if there was a restricted VSoH discussion here went unanswered.

The Vanguard NDA is rather Draconian, even private message boards that can't be seen by the public aren't allowed.  They have apparently threatened to kick out entire guilds who have done this.

[Morat20]

Also, Haemish didn't 'sign' the NDA...his wife did.  :-D

I'm actually a bit curious about how that works. Surely a number of beta testers have roommates, spouses or friends. I'm sure they're not supposed to share their beta access or let others play it -- but how can they avoid a spouse or roommate seeing it? Occasionally wandering over, watching it for ten seconds, and saying "Jesus Christ, that looks like shit"?

Well, given the nature of NDA's -- maybe Haemish's wife is required (via the NDA) to kick his ass out of the house each time she plays. And probably sweep the house for hidden cameras and other spyware.

The whole NDA idea is stupid. Development time being what it is, there is no way that you can snoop some nifty feature from Beta and get it into your MMORPG before Vanguard releases. Anything that easy has already been done. Blizzard was right. Beta's for large scale balance testing, locating fairly obscure bugs, load testing....but mostly PR.

[HaemishM]

Let me just say about the NDA:

It's not going to matter what I see in it. I haven't seen anything yet, though I'm sure sometime in the next week when it finishes giving my bandwidth the prolapse I will. I'll go ahead and tell you with absolute certainty how the game is.

Vanguard sucks monkey balls. It is over polygonated used douche canisters. It is fecal matter given virtual wings. Playing it is the equivalent of hiring a really ugly she-man to come to your house and pound your testicles and other tender bits with a meat mallet. It is a bloated, steaming pile of shaders and bumpmapping loosely draped about the corpse of a dead gameplay design philosophy that's barely able to shamble its zombie-fied remains online.

And you can quote me on that.

[Morat20]

Let me just say about the NDA:

It's not going to matter what I see in it. I haven't seen anything yet, though I'm sure sometime in the next week when it finishes giving my bandwidth the prolapse I will. I'll go ahead and tell you with absolute certainty how the game is.

Vanguard sucks monkey balls. It is over polygonated used douche canisters. It is fecal matter given virtual wings. Playing it is the equivalent of hiring a really ugly she-man to come to your house and pound your testicles and other tender bits with a meat mallet. It is a bloated, steaming pile of shaders and bumpmapping loosely draped about the corpse of a dead gameplay design philosophy that's barely able to shamble its zombie-fied remains online.

And you can quote me on that.

I knew that when I saw the tiger-headed guy. Unibodies are for the lazy. Besides, Spore launches next year, and since I'm only allowed one burst of fanboi-ism a decade, that's it for me.

[Tale]

Vanguard does seem to have a really negative buzz about it.  No doubt about it.  Fair or not.

Really only on forums like this and FoH, which are unrepresentative veteran minorities. And even on FoH, the "will you try Vanguard?" poll is mostly "yes".

I don't mind being called a fucking idiot by WUA. That's normal. But you guys are wrong about this.

One of Australia's busiest websites, due to our overpriced volume-charged broadband, is a site about Internet access called http://whirlpool.net.au. Its busy forums are the centre of the Internet for people who shop around. Thousands of them play WoW and it's usually their first MMORPG - it's the kind of place where you get "wtf? i paid for the game, why is there a monthly fee?". I keep seeing Vanguard pop up on those forums as the great hope of the jaded WoW player.

I also see it on the official WoW forums - there's an element of "BLUE PLZ FIX OR iLL GO 2 VANGUARD", etc. A minority knows about Vanguard to date, but it's still the "Horizons is gonna be great" of the WoW era. Feel free to kick me when it doesn't happen.

P.S. Haemish, in line with their image here, Sigil is truly anal about enforcing the Vanguard NDA. Just saying, in case it matters for your marital harmony.

[Chenghiz]

Tale, I see people talking about WAR and AOC more than Vanguard. As far as I can tell, it was robot jesus last year, and then people heard from people who were in beta what it really was. Interest wanes. Yeah, you'll have the vocal minority who though EQ1 was just great but a majority.. no.

[WindupAtheist]

Really only on forums like this and FoH, which are unrepresentative veteran minorities.

Unrepresentative veteran minorites are Brad's target audience.  Core gamers, yo.

And even on FoH, the "will you try Vanguard?" poll is mostly "yes".

With the lead developer cheerleading it on the boards constantly, and linking to the poll on his own forums.

I also see it on the official WoW forums - there's an element of "BLUE PLZ FIX OR iLL GO 2 VANGUARD", etc. A minority knows about Vanguard to date, but it's still the "Horizons is gonna be great" of the WoW era. Feel free to kick me when it doesn't happen.

What are you, some kind of forum noob?  The MMO forum monkeys say that shit every single time any other MMO comes out.  Christ, if I had a dollar for everytime some asshole on a UO forum years ago threatened to go play Shadowbane, or Anarchy Online, or Asheron's Call 2, or Horizons, or Star Wars Galaxies...  Well, I'd have a lot of dollars.

[HaemishM]

P.S. Haemish, in line with their image here, Sigil is truly anal about enforcing the Vanguard NDA. Just saying, in case it matters for your marital harmony.

And again, I haven't broken the NDA. Everyone already knows the client is asstastically large. Everyone can see the screenshots and movies like I have and come to the same conclusion. I haven't even seen the game so couldn't tell you I'm right, except that I know that I'm right because I know the game will suck. When it comes to Vanguard, I can see the future with my mind.

[Raguel]

I'd be really surprised if Vanguard was a bad mmog (as opposed to a bad game  ).  What these new mmogs have to overcome in people like myself is apathy. At the risk of repeating myself I'm past "teh hate" phase and into 'teh meh" phase. I don't see anything to get excited about atm. That may change once  , but I doubt it. 


I'm mildly interested in WAR, only because it's pvp based like DaoC, and hopefully Mythic means it this time about not having to grind, but I remember the "you can rvr at 15!" line. 

[Venkman]

Feh, how many conventions has VG been at this year where people could publicly play it and watch? Sure that doesn't give you the necessary insights into how long is downtime, what's the average dungeon run length, what's there to do at the end game and so on. But basic questions about looks, performance and user interface have long been answered.

Really only on forums like this and FoH, which are unrepresentative veteran minorities. And even on FoH, the "will you try Vanguard?" poll is mostly "yes".
...
One of Australia's busiest websites, due to our overpriced volume-charged broadband, is a site about Internet access called http://whirlpool.net.au.

Two things of note:

• As WUA already pointed out, VG is for us (well, ok, not me specifically since I never liked EQ endgame). The core design philosophy was basede on targeting the folks that Brad originally targeted with EQ and who not been targeted since because other games would rather lower the barrier in a money grab. It's like Star Trek: the decline is because they lost their core audience. VG is the same way: if he's lost his core audience, he's got only "everyone else" to hope for. And everyone else have either gone onto games that are better and easier, or have just now come to the genre because the games became better and easier. VG may be better in some ways, but it is not easier, has quite a high barrier in many important ways, and that's all based on public information.
  
• In attempting to cast a wider net, make sure you don't rely too heavily on what the WoW forums and a single local market have to say. That way lies the same myopia that you rightly claim this place can suffer from on occasion. First, game forums, as you know, are never a den of objectivity. WoW's are least of all because as the game grows, its average age player has gone down. I have nothing to substantiate this except my own observations about who's there, who's talking and what they're saying. But even if the age grew, this is still their first MMO, with all of the trappings (exit statements, histrionics, etc).

People who are veterans of the genre really started to pan VG en masse just before E3, and not because SOE was identified as the new partner, but because of what eventually did come out at E3. This is/was their core. Brad's not posting liberally on MySpace. He's done most of his talking on FoH.

[Merusk]

Tale's just pissed because he's playing and enjoying it.  :-D

[LC]

I wonder why Aradune is avoiding this forum. He makes at least two dozen posts per day on every other mmo related forum in existence.

[WayAbvPar]

Because he knows we have heard all his bullshit before and can see though it.

Or because we are such a small and jaded group that we aren't worth the effort.

My money is on a mix of the two.

[Rasix]

Not enough "mouth-to-ball action" would be my guess.

[WayAbvPar]

Not enough "mouth-to-ball action" would be my guess.

That could be. I would never let him near my balls.

[Nebu]

That and all of those pesky "rational questions" anyone here might pose.

[Venkman]

Hey I'm actually glad Tale is defending a different perspective. It's more interesting to talk about who may or not care about VG than to try and care about VG itself.

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah, it's just that if you consider going to another game's forums and seeing a lot of "Fuck this, see you in _______" to be a valid indicator of anything, then every single game that ever came out had "a lot of buzz".

[Azazel]

I got so tired of trying to get my jboot via the SRo cyclops from all the uberguildcamps and kill-stealing, I finally set up shop in Ocean of Tears. I was running rotation with a couple guys, it reminded my of that old cartoon with the sheepdog punching the timeclock. At least it was a cool island zone with soothing atmosphere and an easily timed spawn, even if the AC was rare as hell. I read a book and also grabbed a few oracle robes for friends while I was down there.

I also camped the OOT AC twice, and got it once within 2 spawns and the other time within an hour (did one for my brother and one for a RL friend.)

Not sure why Engels would put people on ignore who did nothing to him but sit there in the zone not bothering him or even talking or acting like an ass. To be honest you're not painting a real good picture of yourself there.


Interestingly, that guy I know who was super-hard for Vanguard and had posted a few times on their board foaming at the knees seems to not think nearly as much about the game now. He's "heard that it might not be so good" which is a complete 180 on how he was going on and on about it this time last year and the six months before that. I do have to agree with WUA that posts of "I'm taking my balls and going to play the other game if you dont xxxxx" from forum 'tards is essentially meaningless noise that's common to all MMO games.

[Engels]

The period when I did this, I was just plain fed up with catasses. Sick of the asswhipe in my raiding association who would not shut up about his l33t g3@rz he'd camped twenty thousand hours to get. Some snotty assed fuck who lorded his 'achievements' over god and sundry 24/7. More generally, I got tired of people bolstering their sad and pathetic egos through the aquisition of pixels.

The meager advantages that having jboots or some other idiotic spawn camped item afforded them rarely, if ever, meant that they were better players. Most of the time they weren't, simply because someone so fixated on his own gain that he spends hours on end doing absolutely nothing isn't particularly aware of other's situations. In some situations in EQ where you needed your group mates alert, you just didn't want someone cared that much about his gear.

As such, I just decided that I was going to simply cull all of them off my social radar once and for all. Were there folks that weren't total catasses with no lives and fragile self-esteems that camped the AC? Probably. But why sift through the trash for it, when in one fell swoop, I could all but ensure that a good portion of morons were immediately taken off my screen for good?

[Azazel]

Projecting the moron who wouldn't STFU about his lootlinks to you (I had one of those too, I just ignored them) onto random people who you had no idea about at all makes you seem rather petty and clueless as far as judging people's characters. To be honest, you just sound like a self-righteously pre-judgemental person who made up a long list of bullshit to justify being self-righteously pre-judgemental.

There's a world of difference between the tossers in uberguilds who liked to rub their gear all over themselves and their wannabe fanbois who would drool over them (I avoided both) and normal people who might camp a rare drop now and then because you know what? It's something you can get for yourself solo or with a mate that's an upgrade to their character, without needing to raid for NODROP (BOP) gear, or something you could do while watching TV.

Most of the time they weren't, simply because someone so fixated on his own gain that he spends hours on end doing absolutely nothing isn't particularly aware of other's situations. In some situations in EQ where you needed your group mates alert, you just didn't want someone cared that much about his gear.

I mean, really?

Were you actually playing EQ? The whole game and grind is essentially spending hours on end doing nothing.

And in 80% (at least) of EQ's situations you didn't need to be especially alert anyway. The game was never exactly rocket surgery.

 

[Engels]

I don't have an original story here, Azazel. Remember the notorious scream fests going on in SRo and OOT over the stupid spawn? Is it so weird to just outright decide that you don't want to have anything to do with anyone engaged in that type of game play?

As to playing in situations where you have to be alert most of the time, I think you and I were probably playing different games. Sure, there were times when I played the 'casual' grind fest in Walls of Slaughter, but many other times, I preferred taking a tight-knit team deep into someplace dangerous for our level, Chardok or the revamped Cazic Thule temple for instance, where you did have to have your wits about you or you would spend twice the amount of time doing a CR.

Why put myself through that when I could easily advance and get phatter lewts from doing the PoT camp for hours? Well, because that wasn't a particularly thrilling activity for me. Sometimes I did it, but those hours of inglorious button punching are hardly my fondest memories of EQ and certainly not the reason I played the game for 5 years.

Now before you continue to call me a self-righteous and judgmental person, you may want to peruse your own snap judgements here.

[Simond]

I don't have an original story here, Azazel. Remember the notorious scream fests going on in SRo and OOT over the stupid spawn? Is it so weird to just outright decide that you don't want to have anything to do with anyone engaged in that type of game play?

So you cancelled your EQ account pretty quickly then? 

[Azazel]

Scream-fests? No, not on my server, not when I was playing.

Maybe playing Aussie hours my experience was vastly different to yours. Camping these things was something you might do on a night where you just feel like doing it, or something to do while hanging out with a friend when you can't be arsed grinding. You know, kick back, talk with your friends, whack the mole every so often, grab some cyclopses and kill them too and chill out. If I was camping something solo I'd be watching a DVD or watching TV or otherwise doing something else. If you got something cool you might tell/link (depending on the era) it to your friends who knew what you were up to and get a "hey grats mate, you got it!" in return.

And of course if you went to OOT to camp the AC and someone was there, you could either ask them if they were going to be there for long and play with Gornit, or just move along till next time. I don't remember nor did I ever participate in any notorious scream fests in OOT or SRo.

Maybe you liked living on the edge most of all, and if so, good for you. For me, playing with my (RL) friends was the most fun part of the game, so whether we were helping each other on quests, grinding cash, camping a spawn, grinding xp, or running LDoNs was irrelevent. Sometimes though, when feel like playing but your US guild are all asleep and your RL friends arent on you can solo or PUG. Playing the path of least resistance to the phattest l3wtz as quickly as possible was never a playstyle that appealed to me, and still doesn't in WoW.

Though, I think that if you were the type to put people on ignore for quietly sitting in a certain spot, obviously camping the AC and doing nothing else, then yeah you're self-righteous and judgemental. To suggest that people with good gear were in some way inherently bad players who you can't rely on to concentrate in a tight situation is also a pretty poor thing to say. Uberguilds and catasses and all the rest have the same spread of skilled individuals, dumb fucks and average shmoes that any other player type has. Stating that they're all shit players just comes across as clueless. In my dealings with people in uberguilds, I found a lot of fuckwits, but also a lot of skilled and considerate people who just happened to live to raid. Same shit everywhere, matey.

If you're putting loudmouth fuckwits on ignore, that's a very different situation to /ignore-ing someone sitting there minding their own business, but it's the latter that you seemed to be writing about initially at least as much as the former. So unless you're going to clarify, then I'll keep my own snap judgements for the moment.


edit - and after a certain point in time, there was no reason at all to ever go to OOT unless you were camping the AC, doing the Druid 1.0, camping Gornit or killing Godzilla.. it wasn't exactly a very "casual pass-through" friendly zone, and you'd have to be looking hard to see who was camping the AC while passing through on the boat (or asking in OOC) so it makes me think. SRo on the other hand could be a zone you'd zoom through, but there was no reason really to stick around besides the AC, Hate raids or later, LDoN.

[Sky]

Now before you continue to call me a self-righteous and judgmental person, you may want to peruse your own snap judgements here.

[Engels]

Azazel, I didn't run around OOT and SRo looking for people to put on my ignore list. I 'saw' them in chat with my druid or my friends' druids getting the epic piece on OOT off the corrupt cyclopse, or as you say, just running through SRo for LDoN or whatever. If I saw two people arguing in /shout or /ooc in those zones over the damned spawn, I put them on ignore.

I do not think myself so small minded as to have judged the entirety of the persons' existence based on the few lines of frustrated scrawl on my screen. I simply eliminated them from my game play experience. EQ had a fair number of absolute jackasses, and this was one, meager attempt to cut some out of the loop. You seem very hurt that you might have been included in such a broad-brush 'judgement', but you probably wouldn't have been. If you were merely sitting in the zone minding your own business,  you wouldn't have made it to my dear little black list. You would have actually have had to prove, through zone-wide arguments that you deserved the high honor.

As for good loot, that's not the issue. My peer group and I had very decent gear, achieved from raids and other quests that actually involved some form of conscious activity. After PoP, there were relatively few pieces of gear that warranted that type of prolonged camping. Furthermore, after the introduction of Alternate Advancement and the runspeed boosts, there were few excuses left to camp the AC other than hawking them on the market to some overrich twinklet who couldn't bear to level to 50 without them.

We will just have to agree to disagree about wether this type of player should be included in my social circles.

[AcidCat]

Really only on forums like this and FoH, which are unrepresentative veteran minorities.

In my experience with the other non-mmo-specific gaming boards I frequent, Vanguard has very little positive buzz .... very little buzz at all really, but when it is mentioned it is almost always followed by a variety of disparaging comments.

[Arthur_Parker]

I don't think the "buzz" matters that much, open beta will be the real test.