Vanguard: Round 1 - FIGHT!

[tazelbain]

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!

You have what we call Stupid Fingers.

[Venkman]

Crafting is not as appealing to as many players as hunting, both in the genre and across the whole video game industry. I even question what will become the primary activity in Spore (as mass market a "crafting" system as I can foresee). Will people spend most of their time playing it like Legos or building something just good enough to unleash into the life simulator?

The challenge for MMO devs is to make crafting fun enough to compel those who like it anyway to create the goods/services that the vast majority of the rest of the players may be programmed to want. I liked EQ2's concept, though that's just repetition a different way. I do like Eve's approach, but the entire game is niche so they have more freedom to feature complexity. WoW is a good mass market approach because crafting there is just resource gathering (whether resources or faction or recipes/schematics/patterns) while adventuring (or having to adventure in order to gather), and what can be made, while not required per se, can be pretty good. Finally, I thought SB's and GW's solution of using NPCs to create the stuff while players gathered the resources removed much of the grunt work of clicking "make this and roll dice" button.

[robusticus]

I like the XNA crafting system best.  We used to joke about forced raid crafting but I guess some people took that seriously?

On Vanguard in general, do you think Sophie Ellis-Bextor plays?

Never give the game away
Try to keep me entertained, baby
Don't make it too easy
Leave something, for me and my imagination

We're a possibility
When you make it hard for me, baby
I'm not in a hurry
Leave something, for me and my imagination

;)

[Signe]

Uh oh.  Bad pop lyrics! 

[Azazel]

There's (a) Marder on the Dance floor!

[Simond]

Going vaguely back on topic, people are starting to hit the level cap and discover that the end-game doesn't actually exist...at least, at the moment. So much for Brad's 20/60/20 promise. 

Expect a catass exodus Real Soon Now.

Edit: Link to FOH boards, btw.

[Secundo]

Only a catass exodus? I'd say that the normal non-insane-gamers will hit the brick wall at about the same time as these catasses hit 50. Even perma double xp won't cut it since there is very little actual entertainment in this world.

I know I have certainly tried to xp in this game.. I have 1 lvl50 in CoH and 2 lvl 60 in wow and consider myself to be an average catasser at best.. But in Vanguard I seem to have hit a wall at 21 despite the fact that I and a friend are duoing sorc's which arguably are the fastest xp'ers there is.

We can kill loads and loads of baddies with ease but when the xp bar doesnt visibly move, you will start to wonder; What's the point?



There is some good news for those who want to test this game though. Apparently the test servers have perma 2x xp gain and a 3x crafter xp gain(though this is probably just for the weekend) Me and my friend actually considered moving permanently to the test servers but it soon dawned on us that this would only prolong the pain, not change it to 'fun'.

[Lt.Dan]

Uh oh.  Bad pop lyrics! 

What's the female version of Emo? Femo?

[Sky]

The challenge for MMO devs is to make crafting fun enough to compel those who like it anyway to create the goods/services that the vast majority of the rest of the players may be programmed to want. I liked EQ2's concept, though that's just repetition a different way.

I know I've coined the term 'craftard', but in reality I like the concept of crafting. It's the execution that always falls short. Most games get a few things right. UO's resources being actual mountains or trees that can get mined/forested out. EQ's desirables like SoW potions to fill weak points in a character. SWG's resource system (if not the actual implementation) and automation.

EQ2 had some good ideas that really fell apart in implementation. I felt the original crafting system was a nightmarish tangle of subcomponents of varying quality that overly complexified the process without making it fun or much better. It was a struggle just to upgrade a single spell scroll. I was on vacation last week and had a decent experience working up crafting on a couple of characters having huge wood boxes, weight reduction bags, good food and drink and an imbued blackened iron greatsword and half a suit of imbued BI vanguard plate, plus as many Adept III spells are I could crank out....good stuff with little of the frustration simply making a single spell scroll would've incurred under the old monster subcombine system (and having to keep notes on all the subcomines of each tier...bah).

[shiznitz]

I am definitely in the school that says have the player do the tedious part once and then let them automate it.

[Rithrin]

Interesting development:

The current changes are:

- You will no longer leave a corpse when you die; instead you will drop an essence.
- You no longer leave items (Soulbound or not) on your essence.
- Essences will return a large amount of experience upon retrieval.
- Your essence will decay after 70 hours.
- Altars will still allow you to summon corpses from before the patch on 3/30/07 (Build 1799), however, you are unable to summon essences.
- The amount of experience lost when you die has been decreased.

These changes are part of our ongoing plan to improve your experience while playing Vanguard without removing the risk involved. Please realize that these may be changed and modified as we continuously test them to ensure the best gameplay experience is achieved.

Looks like they're caving in. I would've posted this in the other VG thread, but that one seemed to be about Housing mainly.

[Engels]

Its not really caving in. In fact, it slightly more catass than currently, since now there's a time limit on the 'spheres' aka tombstones of 70 hours. Its not really that big a change one way or another.

IMNSHO, all they need to do is give Druids & Sorcerers teleporting abilities so that people can get into a fight faster, instead of having to spend 1/2 of their time travelling to area. I don't know how many countless times my guildmates and I have said "screw it, lets just craft tonight, we only have an hour before timmy and tommy have to log". If one could actually get on with the game within that time period, things would change dramatically for Vanguard. Such as it is, I've spent 8 hours crafting for every hour of adventuring. Naturally, the xp curve on crafting is far steeper than adventuring.

Plus ca change, and all that.

[Rithrin]

Yeah, on a couple forums I was trying to point out that this is essentially the same thing. Before: Die, drop corpse, try to corpse run. If you can't, you summon and lose xp. After: You die, drop an "essence", try to retrieve your essence. If you can't, you lose XP without the summoning. But, dear God, the pages and pages and pages of people claiming their virtual world is ending because they don't drop their items on death anymore. Its amazing, really, amazing.

I know what you mean about the crafting. I started crafting in my "free time" instead of soloing when I had a bit of time, but not enough to get a group... only then I realized it was kind of pointless as I wasn't gaining adventuring levels either way.