Vanguard: Round 1 - FIGHT!

[shiznitz]

Turning this back to VG again, then evidence continues to mount (at least in my experience) that Vanguard is a very attractive game for small groups. I have now had three really good experience as part of a duo (druid + melee) fighting the 3-dot mobs and co-ordinating quests. The exp is better than all the 6-man groups so far (although I have yet to do a PURE 4-dot area as they aren't really available until 15+) and the loot is good (the occasional blue drops from any 3-dot and greens are plentiful).

Maybe my class, druid, is better fo this than others but I don't think so. Last night I was with a level 11 rogue fighting level 12 and 13 3-dots. Single mobs were cake. The only heal I had to throw was my low level HoT. If we got an add, it only got sticky if I got aggro and couldn't root park due to surrounding spawns.

All in all an enjoyable gamming experience.

[Venkman]

Are you talking about dedicated social-circle based groups (possible in any MMO) or general pickup groups (indicative of the general playerbase)?

[shiznitz]

Are you talking about dedicated social-circle based groups (possible in any MMO) or general pickup groups (indicative of the general playerbase)?

Is that to me? All I am saying is that the conventional wisdom that progressing in VG requires 6-man grouping does not match my experience so far. Everyone should be able to find one or two people where the schedules match, and thus enjoy more than the 20% Sigil says is for soloers.

[Nebu]

Is that to me? All I am saying is that the conventional wisdom that progressing in VG requires 6-man grouping does not match my experience so far. Everyone should be able to find one or two people where the schedules match, and thus enjoy more than the 20% Sigil says is for soloers.

I think you're being generous.  The 4 dot mobs are the ones that drop the better loot (yellow items) and can only be killed by groups or duo when the gear is now too low to be significantly helpful. 

I play a dread knight and only log on now if I can group with a RL friend that has a druid.  We do very well and are able to explore and complete group quests.  We're just not able to handle 4 dot mobs unless they are a few levels below us.  I imagine this will get even more difficult when we approach the endgame... though I doubt I'll last that long.

[shiznitz]

I agree with you, but think it is fine. It doesn't bother me that certain mobs require a full group (or more). More than 80% of the content I have seen so far is doable with 3 or less players. That is much more casual friendly than I expected.

[Morfiend]

If I cant log on and level my character by myself, if I want to, then the game is not for me. I dont mind grouping, but I dont want my playtime to be dependant on other people. Thats one of the many reasons why I play WoW and not VG.

[Azazel]

I fully intend on checking out BC...when it's not the price of a full game for an expansion.

Interesting.. it's priced slightly higher than a typical expansion here in Aust, but then on reflection, we pay about 50%+ over what you guys do for new games (adjusted for exchange rate).

Can SoW be cast on people not in the same group? Do you have SoW beggars?

[Falconeer]

Yes you can cast SoW and Cloudwalk (levitation) outside group. But there are no beggars so far, despite the huge size of the world. Could be cause crapy horses are ultracheap and just slightly slower than SoW (actually I purchased some nice horseshoes for my mount and it runs a bit faster than SoW apparently)?
Big difference between the two is that you can be dismounted when attacked, while SoW sticks with you, but still didn't see a single beggar yet.

[Falconeer]

I made my homework for the team.

Here are some snippets from the latest Brad's post on Silky Venom, that is one of the most popular unofficial-but-you-know-there-is-no-official boards.
Please consider that these posts are fresh stuff, as the oldest one is just from yesterday.


On launch date, Burning Crusade, you know.. (we knew Brad):

We (Sigil & SOE) are doing our best with marketing, but the reality is that we launched close enough to Burning Crusade that it has been very hard to get the presence, point of purchase materials, etc. displayed. And I certainly don't blame the stores for that. This is the price that has to be paid, at least short term, for launching so close to the WoW expansion. Wasn't our desire, but as I've said, at some point, financial realities are just that: reality.

That said, by no means has the marketing campaign ended and we have months ahead of us to re-gain ground. That, and viral marketing will help, as existing players tell others they are enjoying the game.

On player cities:

Player cities will allow group ownership of property, guild houses, intersphere dependence, and an RTS element where after the city starts building, you will need to build certain buildings first to unlock others. Also, the owners of the city will likely need the business of other players to continue to advance so that the cities are of use to all players and not just a few.

Again on player cities and a little digression about UO, SWG, dikus and stuff. Raph?

Originally Posted by A guy
SWG was like this, before it was turned into a ghost town by macro-grinding wannabe Jedi. The player cities offered useful resources to all players and thrived if players visited them.

Indeed. Many of our core ideas when planning player housing and then player cities came from SWG. We do plan on taking the player city aspect of it a lot farther than SWG did, and we have zoning and some other mechanics in there to avoid some of the SWG problems.

If fact, you could go farther than that. While Vanguard is a diku/EQ/etc style game at it's core, we did our best to incorporate new ideas (like Diplomacy) as well as to take the best from previous games and integrate them into Vanguard. While the guys behind SWG and UO I don't always agree with, or their approach (usually make a broader game and then a deeper game, where I think you need to go deeper first and then broad), and while they are friends of mine, we did put a lot of effort into crafting, player housing, player customization, user controlled boats (not really seen since UO, a tile based game), etc. to reach out to those players who like that aspect of a virtual world and, quite frankly, because we think they are cool and should be included in any modern MMOG.

On how things didn't go as easily as planned:

Originally Posted by Some Random Board Guy
I have my theory on this. Based on the things Brad said years ago during early developement, they expected to be able to churn out massive amounts of solid content efficiently by
1) having a team of experienced MMO developers
2) making heavy use of middle ware and existing tools (Unreal Engine with its mature content developement tools etc.)

I think it simply didn't work out that way. It prolly took a whole lot longer to make good content than initially planned, there's probably also a lot more hand-tuning and bug-fixing. Maybe the tools they bought with the middle ware didn't work all that well for MMO developement. Maybe the loss of several key developers (Burke and that guy with the Italian name) hampered developement. Maybe it was all of this.

So I guess it boils down to poor planning, unrealistic expectations, insufficient risk management and maybe even a lack of competence in some areas. I've seen this happen far too often with IT projects that were of much smaller scale than the development of a MMO. With a project the size of Vanguard, such errors can have a cascading effect that pretty much screws up everything and sometimes you don't even notice what's happening before it's too late.

Brad says:
It has been a struggle getting such a large company working together, but we've accomplished that in beta 4 (really before that, but I'd say we've been a more well oiled machine since the beginning of beta 5). It has taken longer than we'd hoped to get content in, but it's going in fast now. I take full responsibility here and it's nobody's fault at Sigil -- the team are working their asses off and being efficient at it now. I can only humbly ask that you guys have some patience and stick with us. We are quashing bugs, getting more content in, tweaking and balancing, etc. The latest patch, while it introduced some issues which we will jump right on, I think was full of content and fixes overall.

On why the world is empty (actually it isn't on myserver and continent, but I guess it is if he felt the urge to address the problem)

Originally Posted by Random Board guy #2
If i wanted to play a mmorpg by myself id play Oblivion (with much better performance I might add) but I love Vanguard and the potential it has. But where is everyone else, so much hype pre-release but it seems like nobody took the bait. Grouping is even more of a hassle than it was in EQ 5 years in, after much of the population had migrated to other games. THIS GAME JUST CAME OUT! It's so frustrating to think how hard its going to be to find a group in the 30's and 40's.

The only time i ever really get a group up is with guildies, and dont get me wrong, it really helps build guild community. But everyone likes to pug once in a while. This world is so massive it needs very high server populations to experience all of the content it has to offer. I hate having to solo outside dungeons and end up out leveling them before i can get a solid group together. Telon feels so empty and it saddens me...

Brad says:
The game continues to sell well so there will be a lot more people coming online. Also, we kept the server population down at first until players dispersed more (leveled up, moved out of the starting areas). Now, however, we can allow the servers to build up with more players because this is beginning to happen. The sucky part is the transition, now that people are moving about and leveling up, we need to wait for server populations to increase. I totally understand the frustration (I've experienced it myself personally), but it will resolve itself. Thank you for your patience.

On Fellowships (yes, they will be in the game soon)

Fellowships are very important to us and we're very excited about them. We implemented them in beta 4/5, but there were exploits associated with them, so some of the system has to be revamped. I don't have a solid ETA (I apologize) but it is a high priority as I think it's a very important component of the game.

[Hound]

So is anyone really playing? I just went over to the Vangaurd Players  site and played with the database a bit and there are only 27K players level 15 to level 50. Considering that a portion of those are on the free buddy keys that does not seem like a hell of a lot for a game that is been out for over two weeks unless leveling is really snails pace above 10 which is the highest I ever went in beta. Dropping back to 10 - 50 the numbers jump to around 90K but how many of those are alts?

[Morat20]

So is anyone really playing? I just went over to the Vangaurd Players  site and played with the database a bit and there are only 27K players level 15 to level 50. Considering that a portion of those are on the free buddy keys that does not seem like a hell of a lot for a game that is been out for over two weeks unless leveling is really snails pace above 10 which is the highest I ever went in beta. Dropping back to 10 - 50 the numbers jump to around 90K but how many of those are alts?

Brad claimed they had a 100k subs over on the FOH boards today. I suspect, given it's quick fall down the games lists, that they're close to topping out, and will probably end up in the 80k range once it stabilizes.

[Falconeer]

VGplayers is a mess, but free pass or not it says there are 360k characters created so far. Meaning at worst (I mean, dividing the whole thing by 8 character slots), there are  about 45k single accounts. I would go the middle roads dividing it by 4 and saying there are 90k single accounts. I wouldn't consider trial accounts as there are very few collector edition players apparently (they are easiliy recognizable by the cloak, as the only cloak in game so far is the collector edition one) so maybe not so many collector-spawned accounts.
How many already stopped playing? Can't tell.

Varking is definitely an healthy server so far, at least in the Thestra continent. But it's the only Team PvP one, so maybe that's why.

[Hound]

VGplayers is a mess, but free pass or not it says there are 360k characters created so far. Meaning at worst (I mean, dividing the whole thing by 8 character slots), there are  about 45k single accounts. I would go the middle roads dividing it by 4 and saying there are 90k single accounts. I wouldn't consider trial accounts as there are very few collector edition players apparently (they are easiliy recognizable by the cloak, as the only cloak in game so far is the collector edition one) so maybe not so many collector-spawned accounts.
How many already stopped playing? Can't tell.

Varking is definitely an healthy server so far, at least in the Thestra continent. But it's the only Team PvP one, so maybe that's why.

so you are saying only one in three players have a character up to level 15? With 27K lvl 15 and above that would be about what it works out to be. That is some slow ass leveling considering in beta 3 I could hit 10 in about 4 to 6 hours of play and the box has been out 2 weeks now.

heres the complete breakdown

level 1 to 50- 344851
level 1 to 5- 186133
level 6 to 10- 89276
level 11 to 15- 47903
level 16 to 50- 21569

[Venkman]

Good stuff from Brad. The dev team he's got now though seems sized for a game doing much better than VG is currently though. Hopefully the game is efficient to maintain and scale with new features, so that he can build his ideas with a team scaled to an 80k-100k game.

Is that to me? All I am saying is that the conventional wisdom that progressing in VG requires 6-man grouping does not match my experience so far. Everyone should be able to find one or two people where the schedules match, and thus enjoy more than the 20% Sigil says is for soloers.

Yea, it was to you, as I was wondering about the player society. Are they generally receptive to PUGs and therefore less asshat-ism? What's the general playerbase like compared to other titles? Same? Different?

(as an aside, I generally don't run into jerks in WoW. They're either all playing somewhere else or I've got Charisma++)

[Azazel]

Time for a cheap shot:

So.. will it be hitting Geldon's 1m subs anytime soon, ya think? 


More seriously though, even though this game is seemingly not for me, I think niche games are cool. I guess they were after more than that with the second-largest MMO budget EVAR, and probably were hoping to at least top EQ1/2, but meh, them's the breaks.

I am disappointed in the lack of "old-skool EQ" instances of "SOW PLZ" though. So very disappointing.. 

[Azazel]

From the "Schild reviews Vanguard" thread, I present these links.

/Cartman voice on


Dude!

That's Awesome!


 

[Margalis]

Thing is, nearly everyone here said it was going to be a niche game.

The only person who didn't think it was going to be niche was Brad and his dot-bomb style numbers fudging.

[Falconeer]

so you are saying only one in three players have a character up to level 15? With 27K lvl 15 and above that would be about what it works out to be. That is some slow ass leveling considering in beta 3 I could hit 10 in about 4 to 6 hours of play and the box has been out 2 weeks now.

I am saying that VGplayers is not reliable, but yes leveling is THAT slow.
They slowed it down 3 days into release, as they stealth nerfed XP by one third, apparently to slow down powerlevelers that was about level 35 already and the content for those levels is still locked. Boards are still screaming for that. In my guild of 64 members (48 single accounts, 18 alts), only 19 members are over level 14 and the highest player of the bunch is the only one in our Guild that is 20. The other 18 are crammed between level 15 and 19. And we are dedicated players, although not hardcore (meaning we have a real life). I am level 18 myself and I played everyday since January 26th (20 days ago) for a /played of 4 days and 11 hours, netting an average of 5.35 hours/day (seems a bit off to me... mmh).
 
To be fair, I did some Diplomacy wich took away two full days of adeventuring XP, but yes: leveling is THAT slow.

[Hound]

Just guessing here but I would bet a beer or beverage of choice that the 100K figure is number of accounts created between buddy keys and boxes sold. Of ocurse that would be growing unless they are deleting accounts for some reason.

[Azazel]

I don't think it's in numbers significant enough to make a bigimpact on sub numbers yet, but check out my links just up the page for an answer to that, Hound.

[ajax34i]

You'd think that if you look at credit-card information and who owns the account, transfers to a mule would become visibly different than giving gold to strangers.  And by looking at who's in the same guild as the character, a guild bank's transactions would be different than a gold seller's.

[Rodivar]

You'd think that if you look at credit-card information and who owns the account, transfers to a mule would become visibly different than giving gold to strangers.  And by looking at who's in the same guild as the character, a guild bank's transactions would be different than a gold seller's.

SOE Game Card's make that an unreliable method.

[ajax34i]

Ah, allright, didn't know.

[Azazel]

You'd think that if you look at credit-card information and who owns the account, transfers to a mule would become visibly different than giving gold to strangers.  And by looking at who's in the same guild as the character, a guild bank's transactions would be different than a gold seller's.

They also do not appear to have bothered doing that. Instead, it appears that they have just said "You have too much money on that level 1. Or level whatever. You are suspended till you explain yourself! (And we check out your story, and get back to you. However long that will take.) Have a nice day."

[Engels]

The irony is that this is Vanguard's own doing. If their banking system had actually been implimented correctly, and after implementation hadn't been buggy as crap, people wouldn't be forced to transfer their coin to placeholder toons.

Also, the sum of 7 gold isn't that high. A crafter guildmate of mine, who, admittedly is grinding like a starved peasant in an internet cafe, has made 3 gold on his own in the last 2 weeks. Considering Vanguard catered to catasses in organized uberguilds specifically 7 gold is a meaningless sum.

[Arthur_Parker]

The game continues to sell well so there will be a lot more people coming online. Also, we kept the server population down at first until players dispersed more (leveled up, moved out of the starting areas). Now, however, we can allow the servers to build up with more players because this is beginning to happen. The sucky part is the transition, now that people are moving about and leveling up, we need to wait for server populations to increase. I totally understand the frustration (I've experienced it myself personally), but it will resolve itself. Thank you for your patience.

WTF does that mean?  How could they limit the population while still allowing people to log in?

[tazelbain]

Add more servers?

[Falconeer]

Yeah I forgot to underline that too, Arthur. I thought exactly the same while I was cut 'n pasting it.
I still have no idea what kind of magic trick he thinks he pulled out.

[ajax34i]

Sounds like he's talking about logon queues, and servers being at capacity because the playerbase just got too big.  He probably had the code and limitations in place; question is did the playerbase get big enough to even approach those limitations.  Was there ever a login queue, a la WoW?

[Ixxit]

Sounds like he's talking about logon queues, and servers being at capacity because the playerbase just got too big.  He probably had the code and limitations in place; question is did the playerbase get big enough to even approach those limitations.  Was there ever a login queue, a la WoW?

Never experienced any queue.  Been playing since launch, and a couple NA  servers are at heavy with the rest at medium.  I am enjoying Vanguard, and the areas I have been to have been well populated,  but Brad's statement  is just spin and/or obfuscation. 

[Falconeer]

Never heard about queues in Vg. Lost accounts, yes, and other login technical issues, but no queues.
I think he is making up things. Pathetic..

[Hellinar]

They slowed it down 3 days into release, as they stealth nerfed XP by one third, apparently to slow down powerlevelers that was about level 35 already and the content for those levels is still locked.

I just don't get the thinking behind this. If the designers have a max rate of experience gain in mind, why not just softcap the rate of experience gain? Call it tiredness or whatever, it certianly makes sense that your character would have a limit on how fast they can learn stuff.

Axing the experience gain for the entire player base to slow down a couple of percent of the players is assinine. If experience gain was balanced to be "fun" before, now the average player is having fun two-thirds of the time, and grinding to pay tribute to the powerlevelers for a third of the time. How is this a good plan?

[Morat20]

Never heard about queues in Vg. Lost accounts, yes, and other login technical issues, but no queues.
I think he is making up things. Pathetic..

To give Brad the benefit of the doubt -- I suspect he's talking about the "Full/Heavy/Medium/Light" flags. (Or whatever their relevent labels are on Vanguard servers).

They might have decided it was a good idea to originally claim "Full" was, say, 1500 players -- even though the server was designed for, say, 3000. The idea being that the server was designed for 3000 players scattered across the entire world, and would choke and die if you put 1000 of them in the same area. Once people moved on and started scattering out, you could raise it to the correct level.

I suspect Blizzard, should they ever launch a new MMORPG, would try something similar.

Hellinar: That's always bugged me to. Fucking with XP rates screws the casuals, not the catasses.

[Afropuff]

. . . yes leveling is THAT slow.
They slowed it down 3 days into release, as they stealth nerfed XP by one third, apparently to slow down powerlevelers that was about level 35 already and the content for those levels is still locked. Boards are still screaming for that.

I was actually feeling tempted to jump back into the Japanese ball massage world of MMORPGs with Vanguard, until you rescued me with this bit of typical MMORPG customer fuckage. 

-edit-
-hellinar apparently beat me to it.  But yeah, basically this crap can blow me.

[shiznitz]

Is that to me? All I am saying is that the conventional wisdom that progressing in VG requires 6-man grouping does not match my experience so far. Everyone should be able to find one or two people where the schedules match, and thus enjoy more than the 20% Sigil says is for soloers.

Yea, it was to you, as I was wondering about the player society. Are they generally receptive to PUGs and therefore less asshat-ism? What's the general playerbase like compared to other titles? Same? Different?

(as an aside, I generally don't run into jerks in WoW. They're either all playing somewhere else or I've got Charisma++)

I do see other players but I generally have poor luck with PUGs and I am one of those (rare, apparently) guys who takes the initiative on forming groups. If I want to group, it usually means a guild duo or trio.

The travel grind is starting to get to me a bit. I dinged level 13 last night. No spells at level 13 but a guildie had emailed me a nice loot item so I had to recall back to newbie town (Halgard) and then horse back to my hunting groud. 30 minutes of time burned to check my email. The outpost near my hunting ground - Veskal's, a major quest hub for 10-15 - has neither mailboxes nor broker/AH NPC. My bags fill up fast with harvesting and monster fragments that I cannot get to the crafters without a 30 minute detour.

I logged in frustration (well, the game crashed and I took it as a sign). Opened up EQ2. Got invited into an instance within 10 minutes and had a blast ripping through the place making more progress in level 66 in 90 minutes than I get in 1 hour at level 13 in VG thanks to the travel timesink. If you can kill mobs without a detour, advancement in VG isn't bad at all.

VG needs 5 times as many brokers, bankers and mailboxes. I don't mind having to return to my trainer so much, but even that is going to get annoying. Let us carry our spells a la EQ/EQ2.