Vanguard Round 2 - Post Mortem

[HaemishM]

The EQ2 live team is a case study in how to unfuck a totally fucked game. EQ2 in beta was ass-poundingly awful. EQ2 a year later was night and day better. It's not perfect, but it does a lot of things well (for a diku).

[Sir Fodder]

Agree on the mob swarm encounters. One of my favorite MOG mob encounters were the pygmy goblins from DAoC's Albion; a massive swarm camp of mobs,  you could pull a bunch of them and use crowd control or AE damage or kiting etc. on them, high risk-reward, hectic action.

[Cheddar]

Eq2.... I would be tempted to resub if some others are going to play.  Unfortunetely it will need to be after I get a new CPU fan; mine gasped and died over the weekend and my system overheats if I run anything exciting.

Hartsman is one of the good ones; I am surprised no one has stolen him from Smedleys stable.







edit.  Spelling still eludes me.

[shiznitz]

Nothing is more fun than those encounters of 6 or 8 double down arrow mobs. One thing dikus really need to work on is larger encounters. It just feels more heroic to beat 10 weak mobs instead of 1 strong one.

I'm glad you said that -- That's really what a lot of the population changes came down to.   There were lots of cries of "Wowification" early on, but it's funny in that WoW in particular wasn't the drive.  It was us asking the question "How can we make people feel more heroic?"   

Killing 10 skeletons charging at you in a solo-content instance (of which WoW doesn't even have an analogue, still) just feels a hell of a lot cooler than walking outside Freeport and getting wtfpwned by a 6-man-required beetle.

Hopefully EQ2 will take this to the next level in the next expansion. No reason why an X2 or X4 encounter cannot consist of 40 mobs. I htink the game engine and most PCs these days could handle it.

[tazelbain]

Confessions of a dirty soloer

It's too late you already admited developers shoulded listen to you if they want to make money. :)

Henchmen, EQ2 needs henchmen.

[Nija]

I tried eq2 in beta and hated it. I fired it up again at the opening of the PVP servers and it was alright for the first month or so, until the crazy unbalances started to show.

I can't stand PVE-only games, and the PVP was so mind-bendingly broken that I couldn't stand that either.

I know that a lot of people would like EQ2 today, but most of them can't get past that TRIAL ISLE stuff when it was first released and the immeasurable pain that it inflicted.

[Signe]

It's hard to admit, but my favourite bit of EQ2 were the shiny question marks on the ground.  It didn't matter what it was or if I already had a dozen of the same thing, once I saw it there, it HAD TO BE MINE!  I was obsessed.     I still miss those little shiny suprises.  They were like crack to me.

[Cheddar]

My favorite quest in any game is in EQ2, the city betrayal quest.  Hmmm, maybe once I get my CPU fan replaced I will start gathering the masses and do another invasion.  I imagine many would enjoy it!

[Xanthippe]

It's hard to admit, but my favourite bit of EQ2 were the shiny question marks on the ground.  It didn't matter what it was or if I already had a dozen of the same thing, once I saw it there, it HAD TO BE MINE!  I was obsessed.     I still miss those little shiny suprises.  They were like crack to me.

Seconded.  I don't even have to know what it is, I just want it.

Loot is good.  It's like finding a chest in WoW.  I'm sad they didn't put any in except newbie areas and instances in TBC.

[Falconeer]

I loved/hated (but played for real) EQ2 for 18 months. And yes, my favourite quest in any game is from EQ2 too. There are two actually, one is the small quest related to Dancer, the ranger in Antonica with a sad and mysterious past, which the reward hints without actually telling. Great.
The other is a very obscure one but it's about betrayal again. In the Crypt of Betrayal you meet the ghost of a soldier that (with an unbelievably good voiceover) tells you the story of his and his comrades death. You have to track down these 3 ghosts to put the pieces of the story together and have the first soldier's ghost recall what actually happened that he forgot. Its tragic and intense. Too bad it's so well hidden, I bet just 2% of the players completed (or just stumbled upon) that quest.

EQ2 had some qualities and content I doubt will ever be matched in future MMORPG. If only combat could be a little more compelling (and fun)...

[Ixxit]

Re upped EQ II after dumping Vanguard last month.   With my recent upgrade can now run the game on high settings @ 1600 x 1050 and it looks absolutely amazing.

I know SOE got heat for designing the engine for future hardware, but now I can see at 'least' see  the rationale for it now that there is hardware commonly and cheaply available to take advantage of it.  No so much though, when the game was released.  If WoW didn't have such great art style, it would look crude in comparison.

The only 2 things that really bothered me about EQ II were  1, the multi-tiered spell/skill system (adept, etc); it was a pita to constantly be buying upgrades to them, and 2, some of the skill/spell effects were so overdone  that they completely obscured what was going on the screen, especially for melee.  If I am doing some special sword attack, I would like to see some real cool ninja type animation, as opposed to flames shooting out of my ass and stars out of my pecker.

Other than that EQ II has become a fine game and it's good to be back.  I will be playing this along with LoTRo.

[Sauced]

In EoF there is a super duper shiny collection quest that gives you magic goggles, which allow you to see super seekrit blue hidden shinies.

They changed betrayal, haven't tried it yet but I do want to see the new exile city Haven at some point.

Yay derail.

[Sky]

Exile city? Didn't know about the one! Hmm...I still have a couple guys under lvl 20...but then again, Station Pass goes up and I lose half my characters. Hrm.

[Sauced]

It was added during the change to make betrayal possible at any level (and multiple times per character, even).

[Cheddar]

In EoF there is a super duper shiny collection quest that gives you magic goggles, which allow you to see super seekrit blue hidden shinies.

They changed betrayal, haven't tried it yet but I do want to see the new exile city Haven at some point.

Yay derail.

Oh man, this gives me an enormous hard on.

[Nija]

I think Haven was added to give the PVP server a 3rd side, since it was pretty shitty with just two. Qeynos was outnumbered 2:1 in pretty much every zone. Even Antonica, hah.

[WindupAtheist]

Put me on the "swarms of weak mobs for the win" list as well.  When I say WoW needed to be more Diablo 2 and less Everquest, half of what I'm talking about are those huge waves of monsters you needed to hack through in D2.  The other half is the loot system, but that's another story.

[palmer_eldritch]

I loved/hated (but played for real) EQ2 for 18 months. And yes, my favourite quest in any game is from EQ2 too. There are two actually, one is the small quest related to Dancer, the ranger in Antonica with a sad and mysterious past, which the reward hints without actually telling. Great.
The other is a very obscure one but it's about betrayal again. In the Crypt of Betrayal you meet the ghost of a soldier that (with an unbelievably good voiceover) tells you the story of his and his comrades death. You have to track down these 3 ghosts to put the pieces of the story together and have the first soldier's ghost recall what actually happened that he forgot. Its tragic and intense. Too bad it's so well hidden, I bet just 2% of the players completed (or just stumbled upon) that quest.

EQ2 had some qualities and content I doubt will ever be matched in future MMORPG. If only combat could be a little more compelling (and fun)...

And as I recall, that quest requires you to actually read and remember the story the three ghosts tell you, rather than simply clking through the text boxes, because the soldier asks you questions at the end of it all. That did me in, as I never expected to need to pay attention to what I was told

[Trippy]

EQ2 definitely averages around stability, with the standard live MMO caveats: As other games launch stuff, or as showstopper single player games come out, some of your people stop playing to check it out.  Lots of them come back.  Occasionally they bring more friends with them when they do. (We like when people do that.)

That is treading water to me. I.e. you aren't sinking (a constant net loss of subscribers) nor are you actually swimming anywhere (a constant net gain of subscribers).

[Cheddar]

EQ2 definitely averages around stability, with the standard live MMO caveats: As other games launch stuff, or as showstopper single player games come out, some of your people stop playing to check it out.  Lots of them come back.  Occasionally they bring more friends with them when they do. (We like when people do that.)

That is treading water to me. I.e. you aren't sinking (a constant net loss of subscribers) nor are you actually swimming anywhere (a constant net gain of subscribers).

Most others see treading water as barely staying in business, hence why some might take offense at the term. 

[Trippy]

EQ2 definitely averages around stability, with the standard live MMO caveats: As other games launch stuff, or as showstopper single player games come out, some of your people stop playing to check it out.  Lots of them come back.  Occasionally they bring more friends with them when they do. (We like when people do that.)

That is treading water to me. I.e. you aren't sinking (a constant net loss of subscribers) nor are you actually swimming anywhere (a constant net gain of subscribers).

Most others see treading water as barely staying in business, hence why some might take offense at the term. 

How about "running in place"? Does that work better? :-D

[Calantus]

To me, treading water and running in place indicate that you are likely to fail soon and are just managing to stave it off at present. Stable sounds more like you're just not advancing. So I'd say stable is more appropriate. :P

[Trippy]

To me, treading water and running in place indicate that you are likely to fail soon and are just managing to stave it off at present. Stable sounds more like you're just not advancing. So I'd say stable is more appropriate. :P

Sure it sounds better but that's missing my point. SOE has expended a lot of effort fixing EQ2 from its original broken state. What has that done for subscriber growth? Absolutely nothing (guesstimating from server numbers). In other words they are working really hard just to keep what subscribers they have left. Ergo they are running in place or treading water.

[Margalis]

Put me on the "swarms of weak mobs for the win" list as well.  When I say WoW needed to be more Diablo 2 and less Everquest, half of what I'm talking about are those huge waves of monsters you needed to hack through in D2.  The other half is the loot system, but that's another story.

Early in the promotion of WOW they stated that the gameplay would be like that, with your character going up against large groups.

[Hartsman]

To me, treading water and running in place indicate that you are likely to fail soon and are just managing to stave it off at present. Stable sounds more like you're just not advancing. So I'd say stable is more appropriate. :P

Sure it sounds better but that's missing my point. SOE has expended a lot of effort fixing EQ2 from its original broken state. What has that done for subscriber growth? Absolutely nothing (guesstimating from server numbers). In other words they are working really hard just to keep what subscribers they have left. Ergo they are running in place or treading water.

I can see how this might seem to be the case from the outside.  I'll explain a bit further.

I'm going to make a sweeping generalization that isn't always correct, but is frequently enough to where it's a useful rule of thumb in describing subscriber counts when viewed over long periods of time, and the kinds of actions that it takes to make them swing in either direction.


In online games beyond the boutique scale, you are #1 or you are Everyone Else.

"#1" obeys certain rules that I won't get into, but stability-to-growth becomes easier and you're far more protected from loss, barring extreme triggers.

For "Everyone Else," the converse is true: You are generally in a net state of subtraction over time.  It's just a matter of the rate.  It takes extreme triggers to cause stability or gain.

For an MMO in the Everyone Else category, overall stability is actually a significant victory.


Therefore, saying that "EQ2's investment isn't paying off," is most definitely incorrect -- It's paying off in that "stability" means we have a large percentage more subscribers right now than we would have had otherwise. 

I can't get into specifics, of course, but subscription/uniques/sales modelling is a "hobby" of mine, and has been since even before I started working at SOE.  (I'm an unapologetic stats geek when it comes to MMOs.)  I've spent quite a bit of time projecting out models of what would have happened in the game in different states, and under every sane model it's netted out very well relative to what would have happened had we not.

- Scott

Edited to add:  Addressing a mention of observing server counts as a way of determining growth.  That's not an accurate gauge without knowing all the internals.  What isn't seen on the outside is the expansions to the worlds' hardware over time.  They all currentlly run signfiicantly more hardware then they have in the time since launch - Their capacities have gotten bigger to match the landmass growth.  They can currently hold almost twice the users as they could back then.

If that weren't the case, that simple observation would be meaningful, but with everything changing on the backend including the means by which we dynamically load areas on-demand, and a few other changes, I wouldn't rely on it.  For a game where these kinds of things aren't occurring, and that being a known fact, it would be.   In our case, there are too many other variables in play for it to be correct.

[Falconeer]

Everyone knows that "Once you earn enough money to pay for initial production and development of a MMO, it doesn't cost so much to keep it living" or something like that. Those are not the exact words a couple of devs used here on these boards to say it, but that concept was used more than once to justify the stubborn existance of some failed massive worlds (SWG was the one which that phrase was used for IIRC).
If that is true, treading water or running in place should be applied to subscription numbers alone, as I think they are still making shitloads of money with EQ2.
Maybe not shitloads but "a lot" should be a good guess. The fact that those money are way less than originally expected from SOE it's important too, but a few millions of dollars of subscription income every month, and a stable present and future, are probably a slightly more important fact than any kind of delusion.

[Trippy]

I'm not saying that SOE shouldn't be expending resources improving EQ2. Thanks to the precedence set by EQ, subscribers in MMORPGs expect that the game will continually get new content and new features and if that stops you expect that the game that's at "equilibrium" will start to lose subscribers.

The original discussion that started this subthread was what should SOE/Sigil do to fix Vanguard and Sky made the comparison between NGE and EQ2 and my point was that even though the route EQ2 took did result in a better game it didn't result in increased subscribers. Therefore, if Sigil doesn't want Vanguard to go the route of EQ2, something more drastic may be necessary to increase subscription numbers.

I actually think something NGE-like, without the horrible implementation obviously, would actually be a better solution than the small continually improvement path of EQ2. E.g. take a small "skunkworks" team and move them somewhere off by themselves and have them work on something bold and radically different for a fantasy MMORPG. The Live team meanwhile will be fixing bugs, tuning, and adding missing promised features but not adding in major new stuff (cause now the resources are split so they don't necessarily have the manpower to do that). After a year the skunkworks team comes back, reintegrates what they've worked on into the rest of the game and "version 2.0" of the game is born as an expansion pack, or something.

[Monika T'Sarn]

The way instancing works in EQ2, wouldn't it be possible to merge all pve servers into one ?

[eldaec]

The way instancing works in EQ2, wouldn't it be possible to merge all pve servers into one ?

People don't actually play instances all that much EQ2. Most of the play is static spawn 'world pve' whack a mole, or questing.

Raids are played in instances, but non-raid instances are too much of a ball ache to get going for most people.

[eldaec]

I actually think something NGE-like, without the horrible implementation obviously, would actually be a better solution than the small continually improvement path of EQ2. E.g. take a small "skunkworks" team and move them somewhere off by themselves and have them work on something bold and radically different for a fantasy MMORPG. The Live team meanwhile will be fixing bugs, tuning, and adding missing promised features but not adding in major new stuff (cause now the resources are split so they don't necessarily have the manpower to do that). After a year the skunkworks team comes back, reintegrates what they've worked on into the rest of the game and "version 2.0" of the game is born as an expansion pack, or something.

I'd prefer the JtL approach to the NGE debacle personally.

Add whole new ways to play by all means. But don't wreck the existing game, because however limited it's appeal may be, all your existing players are paying for it.

[Trippy]

The way instancing works in EQ2, wouldn't it be possible to merge all pve servers into one ?

People don't actually play instances all that much EQ2. Most of the play is static spawn 'world pve' whack a mole, or questing.

Raids are played in instances, but non-raid instances are too much of a ball ache to get going for most people.

No, what she meant is that any zone can be "instanced" if it becomes overpopulated, even places like Karana, and hence in theory you could squish everybody into one server. They had it running like this in Beta, for example. Think CoH back when lots of people were playing or Pocket D during the special events.

[Hound]

I always felt EQII was under rated. At release it kind of sucked , mostly due to the friends and family and EQ1 Legends fanboys they used in the early beta testing. I think it was the February after release they "unfucked"  it with a big patch that opened a lot of solo content, did away with the interdependence on crafting, instigated offline craft sales, added more character slots, did away with corpse "essence" runs and a slew of other shit. Most of which was suggested in beta but got shouted down in beta by the jackass ex EQ1 test base who wanted EQ1 with high res graphics. Damn Sam! Sounds just like the Vanguard fanboys doesn't it? SOE needs to learn to never never allow anyone in their betas who subscribed to EQ1 for more than a month.

[Falconeer]

I seriously think that the only thing really wrong with EQ2 was... World of Warcraft.
Without that flesh-eating virus, EQ2 would have scored huge numbers even in crapfuck launch state back in 2004 (they launched 12 days apart from each other).

The hype did the rest, and we all know such hype is still alive and well today.

[HRose]

some of the skill/spell effects were so overdone  that they completely obscured what was going on the screen, especially for melee.  If I am doing some special sword attack, I would like to see some real cool ninja type animation, as opposed to flames shooting out of my ass and stars out of my pecker.

So true.

One of the things I hated the most in EQ2 (and other games) is the overuse of particle effects. It also turned me off right at the first impact when I noticed on the noob island that even a BEAR casted "spells" and fireworks. It just feels lame and spoils the fun and uniqueness of magic. Even the most standard swordfight felt like a circus. Swords are metal, not particle effects.

That's something that completely breaks the immersion for me and feels really, really cheap as magic gets so overused to lose any kind of taste and special feel.

The use of fancy spell effects in EQ2 is definitely excessive, and it was already a problem in SWG.

[Azazel]

Put me on the "swarms of weak mobs for the win" list as well.  When I say WoW needed to be more Diablo 2 and less Everquest, half of what I'm talking about are those huge waves of monsters you needed to hack through in D2.  The other half is the loot system, but that's another story.

Early in the promotion of WOW they stated that the gameplay would be like that, with your character going up against large groups.

Well, compared to Everquest's pretty standard "pull one, kill it, rinse, repeat with maybe a mezzed mob or two if you were really hardcore" then WoW is like that. Think of UBRS runs, or even any of the new instances where a 3-5 pull is standard. Hell, my wife and I playing around with out mages in Terrokar tonight ran into a mess and ended up taking on 5 level-appropriate mobs at once and living. In EQ1, that just doesn't (didn't) happen.