SOE to Publish Vanguard

[Merusk]

I've seen one positive spewing about Vanguard so far, (Other than the folks who go there and get the pampered-ass treatment, so it's not like they'd say anything bad.)   That'd be Zen, over at Corpnews.  He speaks of 'a friend' who is in VS, loves it, and says it's going to blow WoW away.

I got a giggle, at least.

[WayAbvPar]

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

Not necessarily. I can see them exponentially lengthening leveling time with the Gold patch just to satisfy all the catasses. In that case, no one will know until they buy a box and see the bait and switch.

[Miasma]

An open beta would be interesting but I don't know if there will be one due to the technical problems of having a hundred thousand people try to download a 25 Gigabyte game all at once.

Edit: I just found some thread and they were saying that there won't be an open beta, apparently you can get in early if you buy the pre-order box but that's about it.

[Flood]

The thread that will not die.  Well, besides the NGE thread that is. 

[hal]

It's on page 20 so we can talk about anything now. It's all cool.

[Endie]

It's on page 20 so we can talk about anything now. It's all cool.

Rollback to pre-CU, plz

[Simond]

Edit: I just found some thread and they were saying that there won't be an open beta, apparently you can get in early if you buy the pre-order box but that's about it.

Insert witty variation of "open beta starts after you buy the game" comment here.

[Venkman]

An open beta would be interesting but I don't know if there will be one due to the technical problems of having a hundred thousand people try to download a 25 Gigabyte game all at once.

Edit: I just found some thread and they were saying that there won't be an open beta, apparently you can get in early if you buy the pre-order box but that's about it.

Glad you found that thread. It would be the absolute pinnacle of stupid to push an open beta for VG. No better way exists to turn off people who don't have their exact impossible expectation matched perfectly. Open betas are stupid and I'm glad the industry has fnally begun waking up to that.

[Simond]

Open betas are stupid...

If the devs have promised people the Moon on a stick and are actually rush-delivering an EQ2-clone then yes, they are stupid.

If the devs have made a decent game and not made claims about it being the 'next generation of MMOGS' then no, they are not stupid (See: WoW). ;)

[Yegolev]

Open betas are stupid and I'm glad the industry has fnally begun waking up to that.

Did you just refer to Sigil's fear of people finding out Vanguard blows before they fork over their $50 as "the industry"?

[Tale]

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

I am not.

Also, my comments were about the potential for box sales resulting from high expectations for Vanguard. Not ongoing subscriptions.

[LC]

I've seen one positive spewing about Vanguard so far, (Other than the folks who go there and get the pampered-ass treatment, so it's not like they'd say anything bad.)   That'd be Zen, over at Corpnews.  He speaks of 'a friend' who is in VS, loves it, and says it's going to blow WoW away.

I got a giggle, at least.

I'm sure crapnews will have an official aradune ass kissing thread as soon as the NDA is lifted.

[Venkman]

If the devs have made a decent game and not made claims about it being the 'next generation of MMOGS' then no, they are not stupid (See: WoW).

Yea, but the ability to pull that off is pretty much restricted to Blizzard :)

Seriously though, even they are not having an open beta for Burning Crusade. And that may as well be considered a new game purchase for as much as they've stuffed into it.

Did you just refer to Sigil's fear of people finding out Vanguard blows before they fork over their $50 as "the industry"?

Yes. Not just Sigil's though, but rather, everyone-except-Blizzard. Nobody should offer an open beta. It just doesn't make good business sense, particularly in this age of existing IP looking to get their cut. A bunch of neophytes coming to the genre looking delivering against established movie and TV IP are not nearly as guaranteed to generate an actual complete game experience as a company like Blizz with a game-based IP and a decade+ of delivering both offline and realtime-online game experiences.

The primary attraction to these existing-IP games is that IP. The baggage that comes with is people who don't see their vision of the IP iterated to their exacting detail. Or it matches their vision but is a crappy bug riddled unforgivably unplayable mess. In both cases, an open beta where people can find this out for free will do way more damage than any benefit gained from the freebie marketing promotion. I know it's all wonderful and stuff for gamers to jump from freebie to freebie, but that's just not good business.

Or, put another way: when has an open beta actually benefitted an MMORPG on the business side? Guild Wars doesn't count becuase its real beta was months prior to US launch. Same with FFXI. WoW doesn't count (purely in my opinion) because Blizzard could have been silent until boxes hit the store shelves and still sold as many copies ("Blizzzard" and "Warcraft" are pure advertisement by sheer utterance of the words).

Darwin's going to take over once the game goes live anyway. But that should happen with the exchange of money. Nobody purposely sets out to make a bad game and there's never just one person to blame for it. Therefore, even if it flops, the people who made it should still be able to eat.

*queue the radical hardline gamer response* (not targeting anyone specifically)

[Trouble]

Seriously though, even they are not having an open beta for Burning Crusade. And that may as well be considered a new game purchase for as much as they've stuffed into it.

I just figured that was because they have so many seething fans/customers waiting to see it that there'd be no way they could even remotely have enough beta servers to handle the load. When I first heard of TBC I envisioned servers going nuclear under the load of 7 million raving customers and I knew there was no way there'd be an open beta. Their "closed" beta has about as many people as another MMO's open beta though if that counts for anything.

[Rhonstet]

Or, put another way: when has an open beta actually benefitted an MMORPG on the business side?

Anyone who thinks an open beta is anything more then a stress test coupled with a marketing stunt needs to seek help.  But I'd argue that an open beta does carry an indirect benefit to any MMORPG in terms of free press and attention, as long as the game is 'complete' enough to come off as a product people are willing to pay for. 

Given the level of marketing ethics in the industry though, that's a very short list.

And TBC is not going to have an open beta, because the primary target for the new content are endgame people who already play WoW like it's a religion.  Everyone who is going to buy it already knows about it.

[Venkman]

But I'd argue that an open beta does carry an indirect benefit to any MMORPG in terms of free press and attention, as long as the game is 'complete' enough to come off as a product people are willing to pay for. 

Which is why it's a bad idea. When the benefits of free press outweigh the negativity of having a buggy unplayable experience, then I'll reconsider.

[Simond]

Then the problem isn't with the free beta but with the developers.

[Venkman]

Then the problem isn't with the free beta but with the developers.

Uh, yea! That's the point. Test driving only became viable when cars started breaking down less. Same with MMOGs. When it's assumed that a new MMOG is going to work fine, open beta can help. However, even then, I'd say only have open beta for three to four weeks. Think of it like a casual online game. You want people to get a taste, not get bored before the timer expires.

Of course, I wouldn't necessarily say casual online games as they exist right now are any wonderful business model. 1% conversion sucks no matter how it's measured. Works for aggregators because it's not their money. Talk to developers though. Things are moving away on that single strict reliance though (particularly with Microsoft offering shared ad-revenue with developers through their game center built by Real, Oberon and Skilljam). But anyway, that's another thread (and in another forum here probably).

[Azazel]

OK so now you've clarified that you were putting people who were being fuckwits arguing in the zonewide channels onto your ignore list, which is markedly different to "/ooc camp check?" "/ooc AC" and then back to quiet or maybe a discussion in ooc amongst people camping this and that. I actually have to agree with you about putting loud fucktards on ignore, and I've been doing the same in WoW, though I lost most of my 'tard list when they wiped the lists recently.

My group and I also had the same. A mix of quested, raided and, say LDoN pieces with zone drops and whatnot mixed in (particularly in OOW). The only real use for jboots at that point was for an instacast junk buff, for those encounters that needed more than one (after all, everyone should have had a coldain ring and maybe a gobbo earring by then). I admit, I never came across anyone camping the AC by the end of the game as you seem to have though again that might be because of the times we played. I did actually get them for my druid towards the last year or so, purely by accident running through the zone and running over the AC.

Though now that we mention it, I do remember camping the fabled ones in Najena for some alts and a few friends characters, though those camps were always very friendly with lists and people cooperating with one another to help them get theirs, no KSing or other BS in sight. Brad's "community building" I guess.. sad part is it was more a community than I find in WoW...

By the time I stopped playing, there were still a few items that were worth camping, but they were more of a "nice to have" kind of item like the shrink device from The Deep (never camped that one, but I would have if I'd continued playing), or well, toys like camping the reets for the quest piece for the Wood Elf Crown (funny how so many quests involved camping the rare drops, I'm glad that's over and done with. At least in WoW.

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.

[Azazel]

Glad you found that thread. It would be the absolute pinnacle of stupid to push an open beta for VG. No better way exists to turn off people who don't have their exact impossible expectation matched perfectly. Open betas are stupid and I'm glad the industry has fnally begun waking up to that.

Yes, WoW's open beta/stress test/free trial of a half-million people did so much damage to their game...

Well, excepting all the people that bought the game based on the open beta. And their friends, etc.


As others have said, BC doesn't need an open beta. It's an exp pack, not a whole new game, and WoW already has a pretty devoted playerbase, to put it mildly.

[Venkman]

Not to repeat myself, but fuggit: open betas work if the developers can push out a quality product that basically treats open beta as the marketing exercise it is supposed to be. Who but Blizzard has the ability to pull that off?

And there's a big difference between Blizz benefitting from an open beta and Blizz not getting porked by one. Like BC, I don't think they needed an open beta anyway. Box on shelf with words "Warcraft" and "from Blizzard" have velocity by default. Would millions less have bought it sans open beta? I don't believe so. Ymmv.

[Azazel]

I certainly think that positive word-of-mouth from a near half-million people certainly helped them a lot in the initial months.

For all the "Warcraft/Blizzard fanboi-love" that gets spouted around here, Battle.net players were not as a whole used to the pay-to-play business model or the EQ style of diku-play. The OB helped to breach that for a lot of them, I believe, and then the positive word-of-mouth followed on.

As for other games, well, if your game is shit then no, an open beta isn't going to help you very much at all. But then, if your game is shit then it won't be doing all that well anyway once it releases and the initial couple of weeks of box sales calm down.

[Venkman]

Until CoH did nothing but decline, most MMOGs that were being measured all continued their growth after launch, warts and all. This is why having stable playable marketable games during open beta is such a new shiny thing. Everything that preceded only showed just how freakin' whacked we all were to accept the crap we did.

[hal]

WOW open beta, we have all said how unified and polished WOW's graphics are. But the beta wasn't an finished product. There was one herb node by the tower of azoria that would leave you stoped over until you logged. Locked in looting position but never able to loot. Now I will be the first to say that 99.99% of WOW beta worked. But it didn't all. But we shrugged our shoulders and said "well gee, its beta". The collective we on this site are trying to make blizzard into robot Jesus. There not, they are a company committed to making computer games and they are very good, but thats not infallable. I was talking open beta here, its all I particapted in.

[Nija]

Well, my 2 gigs of memory came in and Vanguard runs like a champ now.

Crushing lag though, pretty much like every beta every. The server has 3x as many people on it now as it did ... 3(?) weeks ago, that's probably why.

I'm trying to just explore zones now but with the 2100 ms ping monsters pop on top of me and have hit me 2-3 times before I even see them.

As for open betas being a good thing/bad thing ...

Good: wow
Bad: AC2


If you've got it, flaunt it.

[Engels]

Crushing lag though, pretty much like every beta ever.

I'm in  (major title) and there's no lag. There was little lag in DAoC's beta, or SWG's beta. Those betas had many other problems, but no actual network congestion issues. What I suspect is happening is that Sigil/SoE is too cheap to turn on the real 'pipes' for beta testers.

[schild]

There are very few net pipes that can handle the amount of awesome Vanguard can push.

[WindupAtheist]

[Oban]

I was about to post a link to goatse.cx, but WUA beat me to it...

[LC]

I'm in  (major title) and there's no lag. There was little lag in DAoC's beta, or SWG's beta. Those betas had many other problems, but no actual network congestion issues. What I suspect is happening is that Sigil/SoE is too cheap to turn on the real 'pipes' for beta testers.

I suppose Turbine had to do well at something other than failure.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

[Venkman]

WOW open beta, we have all said how unified and polished WOW's graphics are. But the beta wasn't an finished product. There was one herb node by the tower of azoria that would leave you stoped over until you logged. Locked in looting position but never able to loot. Now I will be the first to say that 99.99% of WOW beta worked. But it didn't all. But we shrugged our shoulders and said "well gee, its beta". The collective we on this site are trying to make blizzard into robot Jesus. There not, they are a company committed to making computer games and they are very good, but thats not infallable. I was talking open beta here, its all I particapted in.

Polished is not supposed to be perfect; otherwise we'd be using it. Take your 99.99% and compare it to any other MMORPG that preceded it. But also keep in mind that to achieve this required costs and time no other developer has ever really had either.

Experientially WoW was the superior beta and launch. That was a foregone conclusion though given all of the other factors involved. Even SWG only had I think 25% of Blizzard's budget, and SOE was attempting an infinitely more complex player experience.

Having said that, the other game I thought tested well enough to not damage the game due to buggy brokenness was EQ2. It was not as good at achieving its objectives as WoW was, but once they instantiated the outdoor adventure zones, I thought the game was at least playable and ok for a month or three of enjoyment.

Best overall beta I've been in though was Guild Wars. But as I mentioned earlier, that isn't a fair comparison either because they fixed a lot of stuff from launch in other territories before it arrived on my computer.

[Yoru]

Polished is not supposed to be perfect; otherwise we'd be using it. Take your 99.99% and compare it to any other MMORPG that preceded it. But also keep in mind that to achieve this required costs and time no other developer has ever really had either.

Experientially WoW was the superior beta and launch. That was a foregone conclusion though given all of the other factors involved. Even SWG only had I think 25% of Blizzard's budget, and SOE was attempting an infinitely more complex player experience.

Having said that, the other game I thought tested well enough to not damage the game due to buggy brokenness was EQ2. It was not as good at achieving its objectives as WoW was, but once they instantiated the outdoor adventure zones, I thought the game was at least playable and ok for a month or three of enjoyment.

Might want to polish the rose-colored specs a bit. The WoW launch was above average for its time, but it was nowhere near smooth. I recall grousing about horrific lag, the stuck-looting bugs, queues, and unstable servers. The City of Heroes launch is the model you're looking for; all other factors aside, it's still the gold standard for smooth launches.

[Venkman]

Again (third time in this thread), I know it was not perfect. I was there along with most of the rest of us. And, just like most of the rest of us, I've been through just about every other beta since EQ1 (though I wasn't in EQ1 beta). Compare WoW to almost all of those. No game has had a perfect beta. CoH (and Guild Wars) is why I say "almost all of those", because I was in those too and they were great. But just remember how many people went to CoH beta versus WoW. Numbers count for stress tests.

In the last two years, the bar has been raised for all games when they get their first public viewing. That even means playable and fun alphas if you invite players in. Whoever comes first is telling the world your story from their point of view. This changes how much a developer has to finish before public viewing, both in terms of raw content and testing. WoW could do more becaue they had more money for the former and time for the latter.

This has been my entire point.

And, just to close out this point (from now on I just link back to this post): I've been on Icecrown since launch. Our horrific lags, queues and server downtimes started a month after launch and lasted through March 2005 when they started replacing the Pacific/Mountain timezone servers (as it was both US and Australian players on those).

[Oban]

I agree with the comments about Co...

<Disconnected from Mapserver>

[Azazel]

WOW open beta, we have all said how unified and polished WOW's graphics are. But the beta wasn't an finished product. There was one herb node by the tower of azoria that would leave you stoped over until you logged. Locked in looting position but never able to loot. Now I will be the first to say that 99.99% of WOW beta worked. But it didn't all. But we shrugged our shoulders and said "well gee, its beta". The collective we on this site are trying to make blizzard into robot Jesus. There not, they are a company committed to making computer games and they are very good, but thats not infallable. I was talking open beta here, its all I particapted in.

Yoru is correct. Anyone remember this?
http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance.html

There were several nodes like that, that left you hunched over and unable to do anything outside of Ironforge, and this persisted for some months after launch, along with crushing lag. It was hardly a perfect release, but the point is that the OB/stress test was a fun enough experience that it no doubt worked really well for Blizz as an advertisement and contributed to the word-of-mouth-sales and picking up of a whole bunch of b.net players, which in turn brought along their friends.

Helping it to become the online sensation that it is today, Butters.