Vanguard: Round 1 - FIGHT!

[HaemishM]

2 hours to make one fucking ship?

Surely that's a fucking typo. It surely cannot take 2 hours. Seriously, you're pulling my fucking leg.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

Honestly, I don't have an issue with that.  yeah, it sucks for the guy making one by himself, but hey.... You go chop down a few trees, and then I'll start a timer and see how long it takes you to turn felled trees into a ship. 

This is supposed to be a game, not real life. Bringing real life into a game with elves, magic and Brad McQuaid is a really, really bad idea.

[KallDrexx]

This is supposed to be a game, not real life. Bringing real life into a game with elves, magic and Brad McQuaid is a really, really bad idea.

I don't think his point was that it emulates real life.  The point is that it's a mechanism that gives a good incentive for groups of players to work together to create something.  That helps build community.  As long as most of it can be parraellized well, I think it is a fine mechanism.

[HaemishM]

If the point of making it take that long is to bring people together, why allow one person to do it all? Force a group to do it. They already do that with raiding, why not crafting?

No, it's really just another e-peen achiever grind.

[raydeen]

Oh, I forgot one thing -- my EQ1 junkie of a friend did have one positive thing to say about Vanguard. He apparently got turned into a Vampire, and thought that was cool. He also indicated he had no interest in curing his Vampire-like nature.

Got turned into a vampire? As in like happens in Oblivion and dynamically "caught" vampirism in play? Interesting. And the ship looks cool. How much control does it have I wonder?

So he said. There's a longish-quest chain to cure it, but he has no interest in it. Likes it -- pluses and minuses. I think he's doing his usual Evil Dark Elf thing. I think I would have noticed if he'd started talking about another game, but there was a lot of cross-talk.

Ok, curiosity meter getting higher....what can one do as a vampire? Can one infect another player providing there is consensual PVP (or fuck 'em, just gank 'em on a PVP server!)? Probably not,  but how frigging cool would that be? Get a whole army of infected players and go out and start adding to the ranks! Ooooo...I'm getting goosebumps...always wanted to be a vampire. I remember having fun with that in Daggerfall. Might have been werewolf though, it's been a while.

[KallDrexx]

If the point of making it take that long is to bring people together, why allow one person to do it all? Force a group to do it. They already do that with raiding, why not crafting?

No, it's really just another e-peen achiever grind.

Whynot allow the possibility of one person doing it by himself?  Whats wrong with taking a passive stance about wanting people to build a community?  If you force too much than those who want to do things their own way tend cause resistance.  If someone likes to do things solo, give them the ability to do it by himself, but give him incentives to do it with a community if he chooses.  This way he can do things his way, and start looking towards the community slowly for accomplishing that goal.  That will ease him into it much faster than putting a giant sign that sasy "NOT FOR YOU!"  He will most likely quit instead of finding other players.

[Margalis]

I'm a bigger fan of crafting where you log out and log back in 3 days later and the thing is done.

How long it takes is less an issue of how long you have to sit there clicking on shit. If you would throw all the ingredients into some machine and it took a month that might be ok, but 1.5-2 hours of clicking through screens is just annoying.

[Gutboy Barrelhouse]

Not many machines in the VSOH world I would think, SWG has factorys though 

[Lantyssa]

Not that I disagree, but how long does it take to scrape up the 90 gold you'd need in WoW to get a level 40 mount?
Assuming of course that you don't cheat, don't buy your gold from RMT, and don't have a high level toon twinking you.

It's not a perfect analogy, of course. But, on my first WoW toon, I recall spending several hours grinding away from level 37-40, selling everything I could find, including Iron and Mithril bars, to make it to 90G before I hit 40. And even then I was broke for the next two levels b/c I hadn't left myself anything to pay for training.

You do it in WoW to alleviate the pain (tedium, call it what you will) of moving around the world at the default run speed. I dunno what (if any) content is opened up by making boats in Vanguard. Or if boats in Vanguard serve the same purpose that the free ones do in WoW, i.e. intercontinental travel.

It depends upon the character.  My level 35 paid for my ex's mount and training with enough for her own (and then some) left over.  My Druid had enough.  My Warlock would have been in trouble if it hadn't of cost only 7 silver to learn the spell (assuming my Druid couldn't bankroll her).

[Venkman]

The FIRST time you need to collect 90gold for a horse, unless you played the AH or had friends, you could be level 42 before have the 90g needed, and that was if you grinded it. Cumulative time in hours, yes. Funnily enough, I'm not doing anything special in post-BC WoW and I know I'll have well in excess of the gold I'll need for the lowbie flying mount when I hit 70. They REALLY wanted people flying if I can afford it when I get there.

The boat in VG sounds similar, but it's not. 90g in WoW is possible to get even as a rank newb any number of ways. The VG boat was definitely a collective effort with the actual crafting process itself being 2 hours (it sounds like). So, way more than two hours.

What does suck in my mind is that, if I recall, only one person can use it at a time.

That is actually close-ish to building, say, a complete starship in SWG, assuming you're building a bunch of schematics and then running one of each. And at least here, there's a number of ships where multiple players can be in it at the same time. Some of my favorite times were in my buddy's Y8 or YT-1300 blowing shit up while he flew.

And yes Haemish, people like this shit. Even when it's work. Because achieving in these games is less risky than it would be to achieve similar in life (and hella faster, particularly boat building...)

[Hound]

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/683139-post179.html

I think Sigil just realized that there are not as many of the hard core crowd out there as they might have thought. Looks like the wet trout of low subscriptions has struck. Seems as if most of this was brought up in beta and got shouted down as too WoW ish.

[Simond]

VG may not have many machines, but I'd imagine it has NPC artisans, craftmen, etc.
Gather raw materials, hand to boatbuilder NPC, wait X hours, ding grats boat.

Mechanics are the same as (say) EVE's factories, but the dressing still fits generic_high_fantasy_world_4867485674. Hell, run both in parallel and have NPC boatbuilders less efficient than PCs.

And yes, there's multiple threads about VG on the FoH boards, and at best they're around 50% positive (and the vanbois are getting more and more frantic as time passes). Hell, the "EQ nostalgia/let's play on FV and twink up our newbies with raid gear" one is doing better than the VG threads there - seems that the old EQers would rather just play EQ.

Brad still thinks he's going to get 500K subs eventually, though.

[Trippy]

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/683139-post179.html

1. Removing the need to repair items. This is a controversial one at Sigil as there are some people who really like the system and worked hard on it. With all due respect to them, I don't care for the system and I don't think I've ever seen someone say they like it in-game or in a post. There are other ways to create money sinks.

Umm...who the hell is running things over there if Brad hates this and everybody he has talked to that plays the game except for Sigil people hate this and yet it was put into the game?

3. Reduce the amount of exp lost when you summon a corpse at an altar. We need to not just make sure people know you can do this (and there are still people who don't know and think they always have to CR no matter what). But I also think people who do know about this often avoid it because of the amount of exp lost.

I predict this will eventually reach zero exp loss.

5. Implement the Fellowship system. A person can create a Fellowship and then people can join it (assuming he/she allows it). Then when you are offline, a percentage of the experience they earn when playing doesn't go to them but to you. This would allow players who can't play as much to stay relatively in the same level range as their friends who can play more often. There will be limitations like you can't join a fellowship if the people in the fellowship are too far ahead of you in level. We want this so you don't have noobs powerleveled up by high level buddies.

Way to gimp the sysytem so that there's no incentive for high-level people to bring their would-be newbie friends into the game.

[eldaec]

One day someone will explain why devs ever think a fellowship system could ever work.

At it's best, when it's used 'to keep people in the same level range', the xp earning player will still always be getting further and further ahead of the non-earning player.

They could only even work in theory with players who all play broadly the same amount - but at different times. In which case, you have to ask why they even need to be the same level.

This entire 'playing with friends' problem was solved in 2004. It's called sidekicking.

I'm a bigger fan of crafting where you log out and log back in 3 days later and the thing is done.

How long it takes is less an issue of how long you have to sit there clicking on shit. If you would throw all the ingredients into some machine and it took a month that might be ok, but 1.5-2 hours of clicking through screens is just annoying.

You are right of course; not least because the only way crafting has ever really been made interesting in any game is through the economic/social interactions of finding suppliers and customers. Clicking buttons doesn't do that, but SWG-factory style crafting supports that playstyle perfectly.

[Nebu]

I see MMOG's as a continuum with "keeping players busy" on one end and "entertaining gameplay" on the other. 

Something like: Busy <---> Fun

You can envision something like: < -- ATitD -- Vanguard -- EQ2 -- LOTRO -- WoW -- CoH -- >   with varying degrees of spacing.

What has been the most interesting in watching the evolution of these games is that they all move more to the right with time.  EQ2 started left and has shifted right as is the case with the changes slowly occurring in VG.  For all of my misgivings with WoW, Blizzard has made it clear that people want to have fun while being kept busy and that fun requires more than just a nice shiny (though the shiny certainly helps).  It still amazes me the depths that people will go to for their carrot (a la EQ or Lineage), but the masses just won't have it anymore. At least not in the west. 

[Morat20]

This entire 'playing with friends' problem was solved in 2004. It's called sidekicking.

Not to mention handling XP debt and XP penalties. CoH's XP-loss was tolerable, because even when you were in debt 50% of new XP went to advance you and 50% went to pay off debt. You kept going forward -- just slower.

When they added exemplars, and you could "downgrade" your toon to run with lower-ranked friends and all the XP went to XP debt, that was even better. Sidekicking raised them up to your level so you could play together (and everyone got appropriate XP), and explemparing meant you could run stuff at their level and at least be getting something useful out of your time.

[Lantyssa]

..., but the masses just won't have it anymore. At least not in the west. 

I'm not sure the masses ever had it, considering the disparity in numbers.

[Nebu]

I'm not sure the masses ever had it, considering the disparity in numbers.

I'm guessing you missed out on EQ at release. 

[Simond]

What did EQ subs peak at, again?

[Nebu]

What did EQ subs peak at, again?

Using a questionable resource (that shall remain nameless), I'm going to say just over a half million.  Before WoW, that was the "masses" in the west. 

[Lantyssa]

They weren't the masses, they were hobbists.  The masses are only starting to get involved now.

[Murgos]

They weren't the masses, they were hobbists.  The masses are only starting to get involved now.

They followed a philosophy of self-interested cooperation?  Yeah, I guess you're right at that.

[HaemishM]

Western masses didn't get involved with EQ. It topped out around 437k by SOE's published numbers, back when they did that sort of thing. WoW is a mass niche game.

[HRose]

I'm a bigger fan of crafting where you log out and log back in 3 days later and the thing is done.

Me too.

One idea I was suggesting in the past is to use "botting". Instead of removing similar activities, let's just have NPCs that you can use to do the boring work for you. Whatever gets repetitive and boring could be automated.

This would address the problem of bad gameplay while still retaining the complexity of those mechanics.

[Rithrin]

I'm a bigger fan of crafting where you log out and log back in 3 days later and the thing is done.

Me too.

One idea I was suggesting in the past is to use "botting". Instead of removing similar activities, let's just have NPCs that you can use to do the boring work for you. Whatever gets repetitive and boring could be automated.

This would address the problem of bad gameplay while still retaining the complexity of those mechanics.

As much as I like the idea of NPCs doing my crafting work for me, I think for some people it would rob them the experience of being the crafter themselves. And I'll admit, it is certainly nice to be able to wear something or see someone else wearing something knowing that you personally created it. Rather than taking materials, giving to an NPC and having him hand an item back over to you.

[Margalis]

But the crafting in most games is so basic, what you you really creating?

You can have a mixed approach. For example if I need 3000 boards for a ship I can make the first 15 then hand them off for duplication or something. So I still have to do some manual labor and create 15 good boards, just not 3000 of them. Then when the boards are done I can do the next step etc etc.

Using real-world time rather than in-game effort is also nice for some other reasons. If you don't want boats to be that commonplace just make them take 3 months to build, regardless of how much in-game time a person has to spend. If you can only have one boat in process at any given time it gives the devs a very well-understood upper limit on boat production.

[Rithrin]

I'm just looking at this more from a 'getting attached to your character' perspective. Sure all I did was click a couple buttons to create whatever it is I was making, but for all intensive purposes I created it rather than it be a psuedo quest reward.

That said, I like your idea with the duplication. You ask the NPC to make you 300 boards for your boat, but he needs you to give him a couple self-crafted ones for 'reference' or something. You did work, it just wasn't timesink roadblock work. I personally would enjoy a system like this for the large quantities of secondary components for things but still requiring the player to make the last combine. That's only a personal preference, though.

I agree with using real world time for crafting as well as other things (Its why I like EVE's skill system the best). But I think there are too many people out there who would disagree and prefer flaunting in-game about how much free time they can invest in it.

[Lantyssa]

That said, I like your idea with the duplication. You ask the NPC to make you 300 boards for your boat, but he needs you to give him a couple self-crafted ones for 'reference' or something. You did work, it just wasn't timesink roadblock work. I personally would enjoy a system like this for the large quantities of secondary components for things but still requiring the player to make the last combine. That's only a personal preference, though.

Kind of like making a schematic and putting it in a factory ala SWG...

[Azazel]

I'm just looking at this more from a 'getting attached to your character' perspective. Sure all I did was click a couple buttons to create whatever it is I was making, but for all intensive purposes I created it rather than it be a psuedo quest reward.

For all Intents and Purposes.

[Trippy]

I'm just looking at this more from a 'getting attached to your character' perspective. Sure all I did was click a couple buttons to create whatever it is I was making, but for all intensive purposes I created it rather than it be a psuedo quest reward.

For all Intents and Purposes.

For all Insects and Porpoises?

[Hutch]

I'm just looking at this more from a 'getting attached to your character' perspective. Sure all I did was click a couple buttons to create whatever it is I was making, but for all intensive purposes I created it rather than it be a psuedo quest reward.

For all Intents and Purposes.

For all Insects and Porpoises?

For all Incense and Pelvises.

[shiznitz]

The other potential negative with the hand off idea is that a lot of crafters I know like to do it in their home/apartment. I guess the best solution is let them, but offer the NPC bot option to everyone else.

[eldaec]

The other potential negative with the hand off idea is that a lot of crafters I know like to do it in their home/apartment. I guess the best solution is let them, but offer the NPC bot option to everyone else.

There is no obvious reason that the NPC or factory can't be based inside your own building. Much like, once again, SWG.

[DataGod]

hmmmmm I liked SWG crafting I like PotBS take on crafting a bit more though, dont know about Vanguards

[Rithrin]

I'm just looking at this more from a 'getting attached to your character' perspective. Sure all I did was click a couple buttons to create whatever it is I was making, but for all intensive purposes I created it rather than it be a psuedo quest reward.

For all Intents and Purposes.

I'm starting to type my slurs, that can't be good!

[Signe]

I think it's adorable.