how does the hi-res client work? is it a special edition of the game you have to buy or just a setting? what are the system specs required for the hi-res client to run?
It will be released when the game goes "official". However, you can get it from the dvd preorder.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
At the time of writing, my last friend in Vanguard quit today (and he held out although all of us from EQ quit and his rl family members quit). He was a huge Vanguard fan and would get upset when we would talk about it. If he just quit, and using him as the most invalid and unreliable sample, I have to conclude that people are dropping out of this game like flies.
I was a vanboy at one time, but i realized brad's vision for the game is going the wrong way. Heck, Many of my guildmates quit the game now. As I myself i canceled THATS RIGHT I canceled. Performance is really bad i wasted $600 for upgrades. And i try sooo hard to ignore the performance issues, YET it is not improving. 40 member guild quit this month.... and I am but a few left in Shidreth server. I try so godamn hard ignoring the flaws of this game. Unfortunately, Ive had it, I canceled and will wait 4 months before resubbing. I am soo ashamed, its such a fun game. I wish I could say Vanguard kicks ass and it pwns. But everyone needs to learn the truth. I was such a vanboy that i bought 2 vanguard guild collectors edition for $99 each. Me and my girlfriend quit today, its a sad day for all of us here.
Without getting into the "VG, crap or not?" debate, I think there is one thing that I haven't seen brought up. It doesn't much matter what happens with the game, it's not going anywhere. If Planetside, Matrix Online, and Everquest Online Adventures can be allowed to limp along with their absolutely meager subscriber base, I can't see the plug getting pulled on Vanguard any time soon. It may go on life support (i.e., number of devs cut down drastically), but they'll keep a few servers up whether the game falls on it's face or not.
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
If you read the pardon post by brad he already hints that there are to many servers. hmmm i wonder what follows when there are "to many servers" and low server pop on most of em.
Without getting into the "VG, crap or not?" debate, I think there is one thing that I haven't seen brought up. It doesn't much matter what happens with the game, it's not going anywhere. If Planetside, Matrix Online, and Everquest Online Adventures can be allowed to limp along with their absolutely meager subscriber base, I can't see the plug getting pulled on Vanguard any time soon. It may go on life support (i.e., number of devs cut down drastically), but they'll keep a few servers up whether the game falls on it's face or not.
Not true. Unlike Planetside, Matrix, EQOA, and the rest of the SOE line-up, SOE doesn't own VG, Sigil does. Therefore, it is not in SOE's best interest to keep it afloat. Why pay to keep someone else's garbage above water? Sigil will either sell VG to SOE and make it viable for SOE to care about it's future, or SOE will drop SIgil like a hot iron the minute the sub numbers deplete far enough.
When I first read this title... despite my sceptics, I didnt want to chime in. Now... reading all the complains on SV, re-thinking all the issues and the many traps they caught themselves in... it feels spooky. NGE showed me one thing: once a game fell, it is VERY, VERY hard to reanimate it, IF at all possible. Once you have your bad reputation, its hard to recover - ever! A pity, I really dont wish VG that. But now, reading all those posts about empty world, Brad admitting so many errors, server merge rumors, empty servers... it sounds indeed like the drums of doom have started to beat now. Who would have thought?
What they need is the courage to make a REAL deep cut and change in philosophy, something really revolutionary, but I fear they lack the guts.
Brad... the man who calls himself the person who made EQ... rather the man who had to leave EQ before it could become a big success. Why cant humans just learn from history?
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Without getting into the "VG, crap or not?" debate, I think there is one thing that I haven't seen brought up. It doesn't much matter what happens with the game, it's not going anywhere. If Planetside, Matrix Online, and Everquest Online Adventures can be allowed to limp along with their absolutely meager subscriber base, I can't see the plug getting pulled on Vanguard any time soon. It may go on life support (i.e., number of devs cut down drastically), but they'll keep a few servers up whether the game falls on it's face or not.
Not true. Unlike Planetside, Matrix, EQOA, and the rest of the SOE line-up, SOE doesn't own VG, Sigil does. Therefore, it is not in SOE's best interest to keep it afloat. Why pay to keep someone else's garbage above water? Sigil will either sell VG to SOE and make it viable for SOE to care about it's future, or SOE will drop SIgil like a hot iron the minute the sub numbers deplete far enough. Agreed. Soon as Sigil fails to pay SOE their fee's SOE will drop them without pause or buy the game themselves.
As to why Planetside, MxO and EQOA can stay afloat? Probably because they have paid for themselves already and SOE is only paying Server maintenance and maybe one or two devs time on each one and they pay for themselves. MxO is in there because it came with the package when SOE bought the rights to the Marvel MMO so it was just gravy. Bet Warner took the full loss on that MMO and SOE is probably making a profit on it with little overhead.
Originally posted by Elikal What they need is the courage to make a REAL deep cut and change in philosophy, something really revolutionary, but I fear they lack the guts.
I agree with your first paragraph and not really this one.
Even if they do a complete 180 I think it is too late. Look at EQ2, it did a complete 180 and it has just now kinda somewhat recovered and gotten back to it's original numbers (250k+) which were far greater than what Vanguard has done and EQ2 didn't rock bottom out as low as it appears Vanguard has. I don't think EQ2 ever dropped below 100k-125k so it had a healthy base to rebuild on.
Vanguard if bought by SOE may survive and make a complete 180 and maybe make some respectable numbers in 1-2 years. But I seriously doubt Sigil or Brad will be anywhere near it by then.
Originally posted by mcquaided If you read the pardon post by brad he already hints that there are to many servers. hmmm i wonder what follows when there are "to many servers" and low server pop on most of em. think guys think
Vanguard had a lot of new good ideas. Fellowships, Caravans. Unfortunately, neither of these function. I think one of the most detrimental decisions on Sigils part, despite the howls of the vanboys to the contrary, was their decision to make travel so irritating.
Honestly, I know people who purchased the game, made characters of the race and class they wanted, and spent several hours just trying to figure out how to get to the starting area of the other player. Finding it impossible in most cases, they'd play for a week or so, and still not be able to get to where the other person was, due to long distances, aggro along the way, faction, whatever. Of a 50-person guild who was going to come to Vanguard, only half lasted beyond the second week due to this and various issues.
Yes, there are too many servers. And the world is too big. This relates to the travel issue. If you ever open up the LFG window, you'll see maybe 10 people in your level range that are LFG. And many of them are over an hour of travel time away. Not counting relogging and/or crashing after moving through so many chunks. We've literally waited over an hour for someone to just get to the team from wherever they were. No one wants to deal with that. While I appreciate the realism of the travel, fact of the matter is that if I'm in Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, and I need to get to say, Tursh Village - the only option is to run over to ahgram, boat to khal, boat to new targanor - and assuming I don't crash, zone-bug to black screen at least once, etc, I can now start running north. There is no local teleporter and even at level 40 I'm still balking at the idea of coughing up for the 3 gold mount, and the 10 gold mount is just out of the question. So me and my faithful lowbie horse with his expensive horseshoes plod along through about 6 chunk lines, group bugging at least twice, to reach my team.
Meanwhile, other people are making their treks from other far points of the world.
Suppose you only have an hour to play? Forget it.
The world is too big. We don't need 18 separate newbie areas. We don't need 12 different level 10-15 quest areas. Yes, its nice to have variety, for it not to be linear, etc. but the problem is that in any given area you sometimes find no other people at all. I recently levelled an alt, and instead of going into Lord Tsang's tomb, I instead ported out to Upper Defense Garrison at lvl 17 or so to do the quests up there - the mines, the coven, etc. I never saw another soul in any of the dungeons, and I saw only one other person in town, and they were afk. This was on the weekend during prime time. With the population declining as much as it is, there aren't enough people to fill this vast, expansive world.
Honestly, they should have two starting areas per continent (for the order/shadow races.) Kojan actually makes sense. It has three starting areas, but two of them are easily reachable by taking the boat from the docks. Why doesn't the rest of the world make sense? Pick two starting areas on any other continent and running between them before level 20 is a task indeed. This was my complaint in beta, at release, and even now - the time it takes to get around is making everyone feel isolated. We need more local teleporters, or at the very least, double the speed of all mounts. The vision is one thing, but practicality is quite another.
Now add to that existing problem the decline in population as people get frustrated with bugs, lag, xp loss, dying for no reason (New Targanor incident?) game breaking issues not being addressed for several hours of exploiting, etc. and you have too few people on too many servers in a too-big world. So I'd expect a server merge fairly soon, as well as some tweaks to the travel system, so that the few subscribers who are left can play the game. Lets face it folks, Vanguard is ANTI-SOLO. The only solo content beyond level 20 is CRAFTING. Unless you're a particular class (necro, psion, dreadknight to name a few) soloing anything worthwhile at any sort of decent xp rate beyond that point is impossible. Completing your quests without a group - impossible. Most of my game experience has been in a Dreadknight_Paladin_Cleric trio. We have trio'd damn near everything, even the Kronus fight lol. But now that we're in our 40s there's a lot of content that just can't be done anymore without a team. Okay, fine. You ever tried to look for a team at 40+? There might be 6 other people online in the entire game who have the quest you do. Its pretty disheartening. Thats because no one can level because no one can group, and if you look at the leaderboards, all the highest levelled toons for the most part are the classes who are more solo friendly. Whats that tell you?
Wow I made a wall-of text. Sorry.
Gaming? That's not gaming! That's just people sat 'round in costumes drinking...
They needed to implement some type of leader call.. Meaning if your in a group the leader has an ability to port players directly to his spot.. That would of helped in group forming huge but may not have seemed realistic.. He basically did a swg open ended world/landscape.. The only difference is, when people log into swg they have a quest right away for a speeder..
Failing the port call idea, he would of needed to get everyone horses, very fast horses that generate zero agro while riding one.. If you can't get to your leaders position in 10 minutes you know there is definite problems.. But it was his vision to have that in game.. It was a time-sink he thought people would put up with (he never said that but anyone with half a brain knew it was part of his plan)... Obviously he was wrong there.. I've seen eq2 groups fall apart because some people take too long to get to the groups position.. I mean, who wants to wait 30 minutes for people to arrive at the group, when you've already been waiting 20 minutes to get in a group.. You basically blow an hour worth of playing on waiting around for people to get there.. Eq2 is kind of bad too because if one of the classes your waiting for is a tank or healer, your not going anywhere till they arrive.. One thing eq2 has is smaller areas and mostly you can get to where you gotta go in about 15 minutes without warden ports etc...
Precisely. And even in EQ2, you had 1 class with a 'calling' ability.
Vanguard has the skills in place - all healer classes can 'warp' a party member to their location. Why they chose to not make it work except in like, 4 specific places total in the entire game is a mystery. I can understand confining it to the continent, but ugh. Allowing that spell to function reasonably would solve a big part of the grouping problem -every situation in fact unless you're just waiting on 'the healer'. ^^
Gaming? That's not gaming! That's just people sat 'round in costumes drinking...
I wonder how this game would've been if they could've stayed with Microsoft...
freedom would have been limited, but the game would have been more solid.
Obviously, Brad felt constricted where his artistic boundaries were having higher opinions. He didn't like it. He spent a great deal of money seperating from Microsoft. He wrote his own Epitath as a result to his decision.
Edit: Just for the record: Brad pulled away from Microsoft and went to his best friend, John Smedly to help with the distribution, tech support, and server hosting. Further information can be seen here. Also, if you read that entire link, you will see that Sigil made some brash and inadequate decisions in lieu of a furious storm of Vangaurd followers begging them not to make those mistakes.
Sadly, it seems, the fans were right and Sigil was dead wrong.
Life Lesson #3:
Don't go to your Best Friend and former boss (who fired you) to ask for support after blowing millions of dollars leaving microsoft because you believe they were limiting your freedom of expression.
Life Lesson #2: Never get in a deal with Microsoft in the first place. That was his biggest mistake.
PR drivel, nothing more. There is no way to know why Sigil - MS didnt work. Unless you know someone personally close to the issue that would leak information and violate an NDA.
Anything that comes from either company is simply PR spin, nothing more. The post i read was that MS bailed out. ( was posted in these forums a while ago ).
Vanguard is finished, I'm not familiar with the financials of Sigil, their investors, or the arrangement with SOE, but it is painfully obvious that the game will not be able to make return on the investment sunk into its creation. It might limp along for a few years but the game will never meet its potential or even be a major player in the MMO market. The business world today seems to be plagued by a lack of vision and long-term planning. Decisions are made to return immediate, short term profits and boost shareholder value, with little if any thought to building long term viability or any concern for the effects on the environment, economy, and society at large. I think this same mentality was at work in the early release of Vanguard. A little more money, at least in relation to the amount already spent, and time invested in polishing the product might have resulted in a game that could endure for some time and even recoup most, if not all of the monies invested. So the game was pushed out the door early for financial concerns, and uncontrollable forces were unleashed. The company was overwhelmed with the amount of work still remaining to be done to finish the game and correct deficiencies, but with thousands of players now paying for the game, the focus switched to whatever short term fix was necessary to maintain the subscription base. Sigil has been running scared to maintain the subs since day one and has only exacerbated the situation with patch after patch. Players are angry about poor performance and bugs so Sigil gives them 'double xp' to compensate. Result, players level faster and now are complaining about a lack of content. Sigil gets its personnel focused on the high end game and takes resources away which are needed to fix the basics. Exploits are rampant in the game, some are very old issues that Sigil pays no attention to until they become widely known. Scared of losing players they are unwilling to take action against the exploiters. Even a rollback is not forthcoming, and the only reason can be that the company is terrified of losing more money. In the crafting sphere as well, they have failed to deal with botters due to the fear of losing players, in the end they will lose more honest players than the small amount they would have lost by dealing with cheaters. These exploits, which are fairly widespread due to the game being unfinished and the lack of will on Sigil's part only cause faster leveling, which results in positive feedback to the cycle described above. As people attain higher and higher levels they become bored or require more content. More and more attention is payed to this set, to the detriment of the game as a whole. Add to this the failure, time and time again, to be able to release a solid patch. Each new patch seems to fix a problem while at the same time breaking something that was working or introducing a new bug or issue. I don't know if it is simple incompetence, or a financial issue where they don't have enough on the payroll to properly code and test changes. I believe the upcoming availability of LOTRO open beta this week and the release of AoC and WAR in the fall is only going to accelerate the downward spiral, right now a lot of people are logging in as there is nothing else out there atm that is new. I would be very, very suprised if this game has more than 100,000 subs in 6 months.
LOL....
Your obviously a payed shill hired to paint a pcture of doom & gloom aimed at deturring people from Vanguard. The funny thing is, no matter how hard you try, Vanguard will become one of the worlds biggest MMORPG's. It will just take time. Hell it took Everquest 3-4 years to hit 400k. Vanguard is already at 200k and it's only 2 months old.
All the features are there. After 9 years of playing every MMORPG out there (18 of them) no game I have tried is this big, this deep and this chaulked full of content. There are some 80 dungeons (seen a fan-site list) but I have no idea how you'd explore them all over the next year. Everywhere I turn there is some hidden area with something to do. You could pass an area 20 times, then that one time you ride off the path (horse) and make a short-cut you stumble upon some rocks and notice in the cracks an opening to yet another DUNGEON...!
There are mini, major and Epic proportion sized dungeons. I have come across some dungeons is sooooo big you can easily spend weeks in there. Awsome....! Build your own house.... awsome. Build your own boat... awsome. I do not have the cash yet to afford such luxuries, but I have been on others who do own such things, but it's kewl to explore and sail with other to a new continent or dungeon.
I won't pretend to know what happened between MS and Sigil, or for that matter how SoE wound up with the game aside from the PR that we have been fed. I do know how I feel about things and my own outlook on some serious "throw out the baby with the bathwater" issues.
First off, I don't agree with the RMT market so don't get my points wrong, please. With that much said, many of us old fart gamers have come to rely on sites like EQ Interface for excellent UI Mods. Some of them even posted by the renowned artist King. What's the first spin I get when I visit those sites? While we are owned by IGN, we don't support RMT and down supply any advertising for RMT sites. Nope, not good enough, Sigil pretty much does not want them doing UI's for the game so they are pretty empty with VG Interfaces. Okay, I can live with that I guess and visit a lesser known site with limited UI Mods.
Let me go check out our "Official" community forums. Ooopsies...seems they were shut down at the end of Beta and are simply a tech support forum. SoE may do many things wrong in the eyes of many but their official site is a god send for many players. It's quite easy to narrow down a specific question you need answered due to the layout of the boards and the interaction between the developers and the community is right there for me to see. But we don't have that now do we? The "Vision" says that we need to frequent many websites to gleam what information we can to make us a tighter community. That is providing the website is under the control...ooops..."affiliation" of the company. Even then, the important matters are not discussed with the players, but rather the elite FoH team where the average Joe can't hope to get posting rights. We have to understand however that the company places great weight in the accomplishments of the FoH Guild and were clearly not worthy of such attention.
Then I read how 35 million, the 2nd largest MMoG budget if I'm correct is not enough money, nor is 5+ years enough time to produce such a "Vision". MS was not going to meet their standards and SoE forced them into a corner. The hardware industry failed to deliver the massive systems and upgrades needed at a cheap price to run the "Vision" as Sigil intended. You and I failed to deliver the patience and understanding on how rough it must be on Sigil to have released something so costly and time consuming while we complain about not being able to play something that costs us $50 in a suitable manner. Silly us.
All the time I keep thinking to myself, you know, instead of asking us for more money so you can reload the gun, maybe they should just learn to stop shooting themselves in the foot in the first place.
If you read the pardon post by brad he already hints that there are to many servers. hmmm i wonder what follows when there are "to many servers" and low server pop on most of em.
think guys think
Honestly, I know people who purchased the game, made characters of the race and class they wanted, and spent several hours just trying to figure out how to get to the starting area of the other player. Finding it impossible in most cases, they'd play for a week or so, and still not be able to get to where the other person was, due to long distances, aggro along the way, faction, whatever. Of a 50-person guild who was going to come to Vanguard, only half lasted beyond the second week due to this and various issues.
LOL...
This is utterly not true. Either that or your friends are all 12 years old and have no clue and need to be spoon fed everthing. You can create a character and within 1 hour of casual exploring/playing/questing you can be lvl 5.
I can get lvl 6 in 35 minutes. But for those who are just learning the UI and combat and enjoying the newness will spend hours exploring or learning about the world they are in. If you goal is strait up EXP, within a few days you can easily be lvl 12'ish with a horse and seeking out deeper and tougher content.
Yes, there are too many servers. And the world is too big. This relates to the travel issue. If you ever open up the LFG window, you'll see maybe 10 people in your level range that are LFG. And many of them are over an hour of travel time away. Not counting relogging and/or crashing after moving through so many chunks. We've literally waited over an hour for someone to just get to the team from wherever they were. No one wants to deal with that. While I appreciate the realism of the travel, fact of the matter is that if I'm in Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, and I need to get to say, Tursh Village - the only option is to run over to ahgram, boat to khal, boat to new targanor - and assuming I don't crash, zone-bug to black screen at least once, etc, I can now start running north. There is no local teleporter and even at level 40 I'm still balking at the idea of coughing up for the 3 gold mount, and the 10 gold mount is just out of the question. So me and my faithful lowbie horse with his expensive horseshoes plod along through about 6 chunk lines, group bugging at least twice, to reach my team.
Meanwhile, other people are making their treks from other far points of the world.
Travel yeild interesting results. It's not as if there are only a few spots to level up or explore, everything and I mean EVERTHING has nooks and crannies that expose hidden dungeons or weird stuff. Me and some nw friends met at this keep every day so we could head out and keep fighting in this dungeon. Were doing it for a week. Someone new in our group asked why we were going out there...?
Turns out, there was a huge above ground dungeon absolutly nobody knew off just 5 min away. Vacant, yet 30-40 people all scurrying about this underground dungeon. It was a hotspot that everyone knew of. Yet right on top of a town, over a hill was a semi hidden dungeon. Not obvious.
Travel is what you make it. You travel stories and woes are pointless and MOOT. Because once you travel to your friends continent you don't do it everyday. Once with them, you can stay with them.
Ohhh... 20 minutes travel to meet up with friends on a fresh server is hardly an issue. Thats 50% longer than in WoW. But yet again Vanguard offers 400% more world to play in.
Suppose you only have an hour to play? Forget it.
The world is too big. We don't need 18 separate newbie areas. We don't need 12 different level 10-15 quest areas. Yes, its nice to have variety, for it not to be linear, etc. but the problem is that in any given area you sometimes find no other people at all. I recently levelled an alt, and instead of going into Lord Tsang's tomb, I instead ported out to Upper Defense Garrison at lvl 17 or so to do the quests up there - the mines, the coven, etc. I never saw another soul in any of the dungeons, and I saw only one other person in town, and they were afk. This was on the weekend during prime time. With the population declining as much as it is, there aren't enough people to fill this vast, expansive world.
Honestly, they should have two starting areas per continent (for the order/shadow races.) Kojan actually makes sense. It has three starting areas, but two of them are easily reachable by taking the boat from the docks. Why doesn't the rest of the world make sense? Pick two starting areas on any other continent and running between them before level 20 is a task indeed. This was my complaint in beta, at release, and even now - the time it takes to get around is making everyone feel isolated. We need more local teleporters, or at the very least, double the speed of all mounts. The vision is one thing, but practicality is quite another.
Now add to that existing problem the decline in population as people get frustrated with bugs, lag, xp loss, dying for no reason (New Targanor incident?) game breaking issues not being addressed for several hours of exploiting, etc. and you have too few people on too many servers in a too-big world. So I'd expect a server merge fairly soon, as well as some tweaks to the travel system, so that the few subscribers who are left can play the game. Lets face it folks, Vanguard is ANTI-SOLO. The only solo content beyond level 20 is CRAFTING. Unless you're a particular class (necro, psion, dreadknight to name a few) soloing anything worthwhile at any sort of decent xp rate beyond that point is impossible. Completing your quests without a group - impossible. Most of my game experience has been in a Dreadknight_Paladin_Cleric trio. We have trio'd damn near everything, even the Kronus fight lol. But now that we're in our 40s there's a lot of content that just can't be done anymore without a team. Okay, fine. You ever tried to look for a team at 40+? There might be 6 other people online in the entire game who have the quest you do. Its pretty disheartening. Thats because no one can level because no one can group, and if you look at the leaderboards, all the highest levelled toons for the most part are the classes who are more solo friendly. Whats that tell you?
Ahhh.... more doom & gloom..? Is that all you have. Speaking about isolated incidents that no longer exsist. Every MMORPG has it growing pains. You make some good points, but yet you paint them as if thats the current state of the game.
It is NOT, whats happened, happened..! But, thats was true for many of the games I have played. Why dwell on them. And why lie about server population...? All that does is discredit your post. I have a feeling there are some payed shills out there trying to ruin the image of these newer MMORPG's so their survive.
Anti-solo ..? This is where I can call your post a scam. There are SOLO dungeons out there. Specifically designed for solo play/quest. Overland content can be had en'masse for solo'ers. I don't solo much because I am a healer, but when doing harvesting I can kill solo mobs for hours (light blue) to get skins for crafting and never run out of mobs. EVER! Matter of fact I have come across a few rare roaming mobs that I've tried to solo, some succesfully some not. Recived a server first on loot on 1 of them. Meaning, nobody has ever seen this mob...!
If you read the pardon post by brad he already hints that there are to many servers. hmmm i wonder what follows when there are "to many servers" and low server pop on most of em.
think guys think
Vanguard had a lot of new good ideas. Fellowships, Caravans. Unfortunately, neither of these function. I think one of the most detrimental decisions on Sigils part, despite the howls of the vanboys to the contrary, was their decision to make travel so irritating.
Honestly, I know people who purchased the game, made characters of the race and class they wanted, and spent several hours just trying to figure out how to get to the starting area of the other player. Finding it impossible in most cases, they'd play for a week or so, and still not be able to get to where the other person was, due to long distances, aggro along the way, faction, whatever. Of a 50-person guild who was going to come to Vanguard, only half lasted beyond the second week due to this and various issues.
Yes, there are too many servers. And the world is too big. This relates to the travel issue. If you ever open up the LFG window, you'll see maybe 10 people in your level range that are LFG. And many of them are over an hour of travel time away. Not counting relogging and/or crashing after moving through so many chunks. We've literally waited over an hour for someone to just get to the team from wherever they were. No one wants to deal with that. While I appreciate the realism of the travel, fact of the matter is that if I'm in Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, and I need to get to say, Tursh Village - the only option is to run over to ahgram, boat to khal, boat to new targanor - and assuming I don't crash, zone-bug to black screen at least once, etc, I can now start running north. There is no local teleporter and even at level 40 I'm still balking at the idea of coughing up for the 3 gold mount, and the 10 gold mount is just out of the question. So me and my faithful lowbie horse with his expensive horseshoes plod along through about 6 chunk lines, group bugging at least twice, to reach my team.
Meanwhile, other people are making their treks from other far points of the world.
Suppose you only have an hour to play? Forget it.
The world is too big. We don't need 18 separate newbie areas. We don't need 12 different level 10-15 quest areas. Yes, its nice to have variety, for it not to be linear, etc. but the problem is that in any given area you sometimes find no other people at all. I recently levelled an alt, and instead of going into Lord Tsang's tomb, I instead ported out to Upper Defense Garrison at lvl 17 or so to do the quests up there - the mines, the coven, etc. I never saw another soul in any of the dungeons, and I saw only one other person in town, and they were afk. This was on the weekend during prime time. With the population declining as much as it is, there aren't enough people to fill this vast, expansive world.
Honestly, they should have two starting areas per continent (for the order/shadow races.) Kojan actually makes sense. It has three starting areas, but two of them are easily reachable by taking the boat from the docks. Why doesn't the rest of the world make sense? Pick two starting areas on any other continent and running between them before level 20 is a task indeed. This was my complaint in beta, at release, and even now - the time it takes to get around is making everyone feel isolated. We need more local teleporters, or at the very least, double the speed of all mounts. The vision is one thing, but practicality is quite another.
Now add to that existing problem the decline in population as people get frustrated with bugs, lag, xp loss, dying for no reason (New Targanor incident?) game breaking issues not being addressed for several hours of exploiting, etc. and you have too few people on too many servers in a too-big world. So I'd expect a server merge fairly soon, as well as some tweaks to the travel system, so that the few subscribers who are left can play the game. Lets face it folks, Vanguard is ANTI-SOLO. The only solo content beyond level 20 is CRAFTING. Unless you're a particular class (necro, psion, dreadknight to name a few) soloing anything worthwhile at any sort of decent xp rate beyond that point is impossible. Completing your quests without a group - impossible. Most of my game experience has been in a Dreadknight_Paladin_Cleric trio. We have trio'd damn near everything, even the Kronus fight lol. But now that we're in our 40s there's a lot of content that just can't be done anymore without a team. Okay, fine. You ever tried to look for a team at 40+? There might be 6 other people online in the entire game who have the quest you do. Its pretty disheartening. Thats because no one can level because no one can group, and if you look at the leaderboards, all the highest levelled toons for the most part are the classes who are more solo friendly. Whats that tell you?
Wow I made a wall-of text. Sorry.
Always a pleasure to read your good analysis. I followed your posts and I find you analytic style refreshing here, heh.
Maybe Sigil should pay you as advisor. ^^
I think you hit the nail here. There are FAR too many starter areas and low level zones, indeed. The entire big world idea feels like someone designed a wonderful world, and then a giant walked over it with a bag of mobs, 70% below level 20, and then littered them all over the world without a "red thread" to guide people. I find myself meandering back and forth and thus built no feeling for any zone in particular. Sometimes less is more.
You see if you start in Tanvu and then spread out on Kojan how a more guided zone exploration could have been, and if ppl of one guild would have stayed to one race/place it would have worked maybe. However, you cant advocate a huge world and so many race and classes and then expect ppl to play all the same race to stay together. It would need some streamlining, the creation of a more guided experience to actually create a feeling for the world. As it is you are dropped in huge VG wonderland and then see for yourself, goodbye and thanks for the money.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Your obviously a payed shill hired to paint a pcture of doom & gloom aimed at deturring people from Vanguard. The funny thing is, no matter how hard you try, Vanguard will become one of the worlds biggest MMORPG's. It will just take time. Hell it took Everquest 3-4 years to hit 400k. Vanguard is already at 200k and it's only 2 months old. All the features are there. After 9 years of playing every MMORPG out there (18 of them) no game I have tried is this big, this deep and this chaulked full of content. There are some 80 dungeons (seen a fan-site list) but I have no idea how you'd explore them all over the next year. Everywhere I turn there is some hidden area with something to do. You could pass an area 20 times, then that one time you ride off the path (horse) and make a short-cut you stumble upon some rocks and notice in the cracks an opening to yet another DUNGEON...! There are mini, major and Epic proportion sized dungeons. I have come across some dungeons is sooooo big you can easily spend weeks in there. Awsome....! Build your own house.... awsome. Build your own boat... awsome. I do not have the cash yet to afford such luxuries, but I have been on others who do own such things, but it's kewl to explore and sail with other to a new continent or dungeon.
But here, a pic is worth a 1,000 words:
and another:
One of the World's biggest MMOs? Are you joking? It will become the biggest failure in MMO history and will be a warning to all other companies who release shoddy, half finished rubbish. It may have 200k subs but how many of those are active? I'll wager not too many and there'll be even less when LotRo releases and you can count on Conan, WAR et al taking whatever is left come Autumn. The fact that they are totally changing the game 2 months after launch is a pretty clear sign they are in trouble. The only way Vanguard could have lived is if it had stuck to its original design.
Your obviously a payed shill hired to paint a pcture of doom & gloom aimed at deturring people from Vanguard. The funny thing is, no matter how hard you try, Vanguard will become one of the worlds biggest MMORPG's. It will just take time. Hell it took Everquest 3-4 years to hit 400k. Vanguard is already at 200k and it's only 2 months old. All the features are there. After 9 years of playing every MMORPG out there (18 of them) no game I have tried is this big, this deep and this chaulked full of content. There are some 80 dungeons (seen a fan-site list) but I have no idea how you'd explore them all over the next year. Everywhere I turn there is some hidden area with something to do. You could pass an area 20 times, then that one time you ride off the path (horse) and make a short-cut you stumble upon some rocks and notice in the cracks an opening to yet another DUNGEON...! There are mini, major and Epic proportion sized dungeons. I have come across some dungeons is sooooo big you can easily spend weeks in there. Awsome....! Build your own house.... awsome. Build your own boat... awsome. I do not have the cash yet to afford such luxuries, but I have been on others who do own such things, but it's kewl to explore and sail with other to a new continent or dungeon.
But here, a pic is worth a 1,000 words:
and another:
One of the World's biggest MMOs? Are you joking? It will become the biggest failure in MMO history and will be a warning to all other companies who release shoddy, half finished rubbish. It may have 200k subs but how many of those are active? I'll wager not too many and there'll be even less when LotRo releases and you can count on Conan, WAR et al taking whatever is left come Autumn. The fact that they are totally changing the game 2 months after launch is a pretty clear sign they are in trouble. The only way Vanguard could have lived is if it had stuck to its original design.
Think "outside the box" Vanguard is at the moment the biggest MMO this has nothing to do with succes, Big as in size.
Also you have no way of knowing the future untill it's past. Also the asumtion of LotrO coming will take Vanguad players away, i reality those that favour LotrO want a different kind of MMO instead of a MMORPG, there is nothing bad to say about LotrO it is a very nice sweet looking game, Conan also a very different game compared to Vanguard, the thing to be ported with th Xbox is a never before done thing, yeah we have the regular FF and some more mmo's on xbox but not ported to be played both on pc and hook up with your buddy on the Xbox (we'll see how that pans out) but again no real trheat for Vanguard. And well WAR, i know what kind of people that game will atract so absolutely no intrest in that game personaly.
Futhermore you keep telling about its original design, you mean what you have read on forums, or did you attend meetings at Sigil. Again look "outside the box" you really think a company will give you 100% details on a product they are working on. True some things are not worked out yet as we where told on forums, doesn't mean that the original concept is lost because of this.
Originally posted by Reklaw Think "outside the box" Vanguard is at the moment the biggest MMO this has nothing to do with succes, Big as in size. I get your point, quantity > quality! OK! Well, I disagree, these days an MMO has to be functional, rather than BIG! In a game where the content can be accessed only via grouping, the world has to be group friendly. I don't call waiting 30 mins for everyone to arrive group friendly. Also: the world is not populated, I rather have a dense world, than an empty BIG world. And only a small size of VG world is hand crafted, and that shows, I just don't think they went the right way. And the larger the world, the more empty it seems, especially with 150k subs. Also you have no way of knowing the future untill it's past. Also the asumtion of LotrO coming will take Vanguad players away, i reality those that favour LotrO want a different kind of MMO instead of a MMORPG, there is nothing bad to say about LotrO it is a very nice sweet looking game, Conan also a very different game compared to Vanguard, the thing to be ported with th Xbox is a never before done thing, yeah we have the regular FF and some more mmo's on xbox but not ported to be played both on pc and hook up with your buddy on the Xbox (we'll see how that pans out) but again no real trheat for Vanguard. And well WAR, i know what kind of people that game will atract so absolutely no intrest in that game personaly. All of those games will take away part of the VG fan base, how do I know, I look at their boards regularly, and see many posts starting with : I just finished with VG, and now ... etc. Deny it all you like, VG is the same as most games before it from EQ1 to WoW, built on the same recipe, whilst gamers are ready to move in the realms of 3rd gen games, and very many people will flock to the new play style of AoC or TR. WAR I do not know so much about, but it will probably be a success.
Futhermore you keep telling about its original design, you mean what you have read on forums, or did you attend meetings at Sigil. Again look "outside the box" you really think a company will give you 100% details on a product they are working on. True some things are not worked out yet as we where told on forums, doesn't mean that the original concept is lost because of this. On the boards they promised the skies to the players, and they didn't deliver. Seeing many people didn't like the design they launched with, they dumbed down the "hard"-ness of the game. Too bad they defined hard by time consuming and annoying. It is getting similar to WoW with every change they make.
Originally posted by Reklaw Think "outside the box" Vanguard is at the moment the biggest MMO this has nothing to do with succes, Big as in size. I get your point, quantity > quality! OK! Well, I disagree, these days an MMO has to be functional, rather than BIG! In a game where the content can be accessed only via grouping, the world has to be group friendly. I don't call waiting 30 mins for everyone to arrive group friendly. Also: the world is not populated, I rather have a dense world, than an empty BIG world. And only a small size of VG world is hand crafted, and that shows, I just don't think they went the right way. And the larger the world, the more empty it seems, especially with 150k subs.And right you are but what i said was not to reflect the world Vanguard should have been, but merly the statement that regardless it flaws its still is the biggest MMO, but the things you point out are correct when looking in that way at size. Also you have no way of knowing the future untill it's past. Also the asumtion of LotrO coming will take Vanguad players away, i reality those that favour LotrO want a different kind of MMO instead of a MMORPG, there is nothing bad to say about LotrO it is a very nice sweet looking game, Conan also a very different game compared to Vanguard, the thing to be ported with th Xbox is a never before done thing, yeah we have the regular FF and some more mmo's on xbox but not ported to be played both on pc and hook up with your buddy on the Xbox (we'll see how that pans out) but again no real trheat for Vanguard. And well WAR, i know what kind of people that game will atract so absolutely no intrest in that game personaly. All of those games will take away part of the VG fan base, how do I know, I look at their boards regularly, and see many posts starting with : I just finished with VG, and now ... etc. Deny it all you like, VG is the same as most games before it from EQ1 to WoW, built on the same recipe, whilst gamers are ready to move in the realms of 3rd gen games, and very many people will flock to the new play style of AoC or TR. WAR I do not know so much about, but it will probably be a success.I'm sure it will, nothing to deny here my friend read the boards to seen the lifely discussion we had over a Codemaster beta forums a few months back about Vanguard and many people might going to stick with LotrO, just saying they both very different type of game though still remain in the same genre.
Futhermore you keep telling about its original design, you mean what you have read on forums, or did you attend meetings at Sigil. Again look "outside the box" you really think a company will give you 100% details on a product they are working on. True some things are not worked out yet as we where told on forums, doesn't mean that the original concept is lost because of this. On the boards they promised the skies to the players, and they didn't deliver. Seeing many people didn't like the design they launched with, they dumbed down the "hard"-ness of the game. Too bad they defined hard by time consuming and annoying. It is getting similar to WoW with every change they make. True i've been on board looking for older news after i was already with Vanguard for some time, and yeah when you really get into what they have promised its abit like looking at that great sign that shows you a big fat hamberger at mcdonalds untill you see it on your plate. Still taste okay. I don't see Vanguard as a fantastic mmorpg, but it is delivering me a good experiance, some of the bugs i notice but many i read about remain at reading about them. All in all Vanguard is doing things not all for the good but also not all for the bad, all i can say its about time more MMO's finaly get here with choices for everyone, this is kinda the reason why i might react somewhat harse at some topics cause i just can't understand why some people keep making topics about a game they don't play anymore, don't confuse this with not wanting others opinions,. instead why not spend some fun time at the game they are looking forward too. Let the topics be worthwhile again, no we don't have to have "I love Vanguard " topics, just normal debats where we can discus things in a cosntructive healthy way. Yes i admit my reactions lately are abit of radar but thats just the way i am when i see and read many things i can hardly imagine people being that worried about a game.
This was a decent reply, and thanx for keeping it civil... makes you wonder, having to mention civil, as many people really do just troll around, on both camps. I am glad you are enjoying VG, but I wonder, when other games come out, I am sure they will have open beta, will you try them? Will you change your mind then perhaps?
If games shape up like promised, there is great threat for VG, and I can see many fans leaving it. Ofcourse other games might be just as "bad" bu we shall see.
I for one post here, because I looked forward to this game, and bought in the hype, not because I was naive, I by definition am not, I just gave them credit, which turned out to be a mistake of sorts.
Think "outside the box" Vanguard is at the moment the biggest MMO this has nothing to do with succes, Big as in size. Also you have no way of knowing the future untill it's past. Also the asumtion of LotrO coming will take Vanguad players away, i reality those that favour LotrO want a different kind of MMO instead of a MMORPG, there is nothing bad to say about LotrO it is a very nice sweet looking game, Conan also a very different game compared to Vanguard, the thing to be ported with th Xbox is a never before done thing, yeah we have the regular FF and some more mmo's on xbox but not ported to be played both on pc and hook up with your buddy on the Xbox (we'll see how that pans out) but again no real trheat for Vanguard. And well WAR, i know what kind of people that game will atract so absolutely no intrest in that game personaly. Futhermore you keep telling about its original design, you mean what you have read on forums, or did you attend meetings at Sigil. Again look "outside the box" you really think a company will give you 100% details on a product they are working on. True some things are not worked out yet as we where told on forums, doesn't mean that the original concept is lost because of this.
Scientists, Analysts there all make asumptions to what the future will be like. So why would it make any differences when others asume utter destruction of an MMO. We all know it is going down hill and losing subscirbers by the day. It's too unfinished in a huge world, think D&L, this is where Vanguard will be heading shortly.
You need to get your facts straight before you post: Porting an MMORPG to a game console has and is already done, same thing with same server space. FFXI PS2, XBOX360, PC they all link together. Another fact is AoC has already commented that they have no clue if they will link the x360 to the PC servers.
LoTRO, AoC, WAR they are all the same genre as Vanguard, just different game machinics. The reason why people look to these games is because they have heard the amount of neglect towards this game. It's still unfinished and you people play to pay for beta. This is truely sad, have the companies walk all over you and we won't be expecting any better from the future.
[[ DEAD ]] - Funny - I deleted my account on the site using the cancel account button. Forum user is separate and still exists with no way of deleting it. Delete it admins. Do it, this ends now.
This was a decent reply, and thanx for keeping it civil... makes you wonder, having to mention civil, as many people really do just troll around, on both camps. I am glad you are enjoying VG, but I wonder, when other games come out, I am sure they will have open beta, will you try them? Will you change your mind then perhaps?
If games shape up like promised, there is great threat for VG, and I can see many fans leaving it. Ofcourse other games might be just as "bad" bu we shall see.
I for one post here, because I looked forward to this game, and bought in the hype, not because I was naive, I by definition am not, I just gave them credit, which turned out to be a mistake of sorts.
Oh i sure will leave Vanguard if but only if something better for my taste comes along. I'm in "Fury" beta currently, unable to play though due to server maint.ongoing till friday but actualy not that into pvp games but do love beta testing and squasing those bugs (please don't blame me for Vanguards i did my "beta duty" in reporting them what happens after that is out of my control ).I'm more of a roleplaying pve player and LotrO had me by the balls "in a good way " when i went into beta last dec. thinking it was a really awesome experiance compared to beta Vanguard i was in at the same time. Havn't played Monsterplay i probebly will try it some day, just not going for it anymore at release even cancel'd pre-order. I will not deny the game feels better for release then Vanguard did on release, it also has a much bigger player base already from beta and well with the product being at the state they have it they can trow around bunch of ads with succes, commercials and whatnots to atract many players and so will its IP. In this respect Vanguard has failed with its adds, promising to much to quick and having to deal with the icon "SOE" above their heads made it even more diffecult. However i do see Vanguard future alott brighter then some people seem to see its future, but also again only time will tell
Conan however might get me away from Vanguard it all depence on how well that port-thingy works out, not in favour of that to be honost, only time will tell and besides thats about 5/6 months or more from now, who knows what i be doing then (i did signup for beta AoC) There is another game i'm intrested in but not well know thus far you can read it > http://www.projectoffset.com/buzz.html
Comments
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
At the time of writing, my last friend in Vanguard quit today (and he held out although all of us from EQ quit and his rl family members quit). He was a huge Vanguard fan and would get upset when we would talk about it. If he just quit, and using him as the most invalid and unreliable sample, I have to conclude that people are dropping out of this game like flies.
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
think guys think
Im going to sell you a dream.
When I first read this title... despite my sceptics, I didnt want to chime in. Now... reading all the complains on SV, re-thinking all the issues and the many traps they caught themselves in... it feels spooky. NGE showed me one thing: once a game fell, it is VERY, VERY hard to reanimate it, IF at all possible. Once you have your bad reputation, its hard to recover - ever! A pity, I really dont wish VG that. But now, reading all those posts about empty world, Brad admitting so many errors, server merge rumors, empty servers... it sounds indeed like the drums of doom have started to beat now. Who would have thought?
What they need is the courage to make a REAL deep cut and change in philosophy, something really revolutionary, but I fear they lack the guts.
Brad... the man who calls himself the person who made EQ... rather the man who had to leave EQ before it could become a big success. Why cant humans just learn from history?
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
As to why Planetside, MxO and EQOA can stay afloat? Probably because they have paid for themselves already and SOE is only paying Server maintenance and maybe one or two devs time on each one and they pay for themselves. MxO is in there because it came with the package when SOE bought the rights to the Marvel MMO so it was just gravy. Bet Warner took the full loss on that MMO and SOE is probably making a profit on it with little overhead.
Even if they do a complete 180 I think it is too late. Look at EQ2, it did a complete 180 and it has just now kinda somewhat recovered and gotten back to it's original numbers (250k+) which were far greater than what Vanguard has done and EQ2 didn't rock bottom out as low as it appears Vanguard has. I don't think EQ2 ever dropped below 100k-125k so it had a healthy base to rebuild on.
Vanguard if bought by SOE may survive and make a complete 180 and maybe make some respectable numbers in 1-2 years. But I seriously doubt Sigil or Brad will be anywhere near it by then.
Vanguard had a lot of new good ideas. Fellowships, Caravans. Unfortunately, neither of these function. I think one of the most detrimental decisions on Sigils part, despite the howls of the vanboys to the contrary, was their decision to make travel so irritating.
Honestly, I know people who purchased the game, made characters of the race and class they wanted, and spent several hours just trying to figure out how to get to the starting area of the other player. Finding it impossible in most cases, they'd play for a week or so, and still not be able to get to where the other person was, due to long distances, aggro along the way, faction, whatever. Of a 50-person guild who was going to come to Vanguard, only half lasted beyond the second week due to this and various issues.
Yes, there are too many servers. And the world is too big. This relates to the travel issue. If you ever open up the LFG window, you'll see maybe 10 people in your level range that are LFG. And many of them are over an hour of travel time away. Not counting relogging and/or crashing after moving through so many chunks. We've literally waited over an hour for someone to just get to the team from wherever they were. No one wants to deal with that. While I appreciate the realism of the travel, fact of the matter is that if I'm in Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, and I need to get to say, Tursh Village - the only option is to run over to ahgram, boat to khal, boat to new targanor - and assuming I don't crash, zone-bug to black screen at least once, etc, I can now start running north. There is no local teleporter and even at level 40 I'm still balking at the idea of coughing up for the 3 gold mount, and the 10 gold mount is just out of the question. So me and my faithful lowbie horse with his expensive horseshoes plod along through about 6 chunk lines, group bugging at least twice, to reach my team.
Meanwhile, other people are making their treks from other far points of the world.
Suppose you only have an hour to play? Forget it.
The world is too big. We don't need 18 separate newbie areas. We don't need 12 different level 10-15 quest areas. Yes, its nice to have variety, for it not to be linear, etc. but the problem is that in any given area you sometimes find no other people at all. I recently levelled an alt, and instead of going into Lord Tsang's tomb, I instead ported out to Upper Defense Garrison at lvl 17 or so to do the quests up there - the mines, the coven, etc. I never saw another soul in any of the dungeons, and I saw only one other person in town, and they were afk. This was on the weekend during prime time. With the population declining as much as it is, there aren't enough people to fill this vast, expansive world.
Honestly, they should have two starting areas per continent (for the order/shadow races.) Kojan actually makes sense. It has three starting areas, but two of them are easily reachable by taking the boat from the docks. Why doesn't the rest of the world make sense? Pick two starting areas on any other continent and running between them before level 20 is a task indeed. This was my complaint in beta, at release, and even now - the time it takes to get around is making everyone feel isolated. We need more local teleporters, or at the very least, double the speed of all mounts. The vision is one thing, but practicality is quite another.
Now add to that existing problem the decline in population as people get frustrated with bugs, lag, xp loss, dying for no reason (New Targanor incident?) game breaking issues not being addressed for several hours of exploiting, etc. and you have too few people on too many servers in a too-big world. So I'd expect a server merge fairly soon, as well as some tweaks to the travel system, so that the few subscribers who are left can play the game. Lets face it folks, Vanguard is ANTI-SOLO. The only solo content beyond level 20 is CRAFTING. Unless you're a particular class (necro, psion, dreadknight to name a few) soloing anything worthwhile at any sort of decent xp rate beyond that point is impossible. Completing your quests without a group - impossible. Most of my game experience has been in a Dreadknight_Paladin_Cleric trio. We have trio'd damn near everything, even the Kronus fight lol. But now that we're in our 40s there's a lot of content that just can't be done anymore without a team. Okay, fine. You ever tried to look for a team at 40+? There might be 6 other people online in the entire game who have the quest you do. Its pretty disheartening. Thats because no one can level because no one can group, and if you look at the leaderboards, all the highest levelled toons for the most part are the classes who are more solo friendly. Whats that tell you?
Wow I made a wall-of text. Sorry.
Gaming? That's not gaming!
That's just people sat 'round in costumes drinking...
Failing the port call idea, he would of needed to get everyone horses, very fast horses that generate zero agro while riding one.. If you can't get to your leaders position in 10 minutes you know there is definite problems.. But it was his vision to have that in game.. It was a time-sink he thought people would put up with (he never said that but anyone with half a brain knew it was part of his plan)... Obviously he was wrong there.. I've seen eq2 groups fall apart because some people take too long to get to the groups position.. I mean, who wants to wait 30 minutes for people to arrive at the group, when you've already been waiting 20 minutes to get in a group.. You basically blow an hour worth of playing on waiting around for people to get there.. Eq2 is kind of bad too because if one of the classes your waiting for is a tank or healer, your not going anywhere till they arrive.. One thing eq2 has is smaller areas and mostly you can get to where you gotta go in about 15 minutes without warden ports etc...
Precisely. And even in EQ2, you had 1 class with a 'calling' ability.
Vanguard has the skills in place - all healer classes can 'warp' a party member to their location. Why they chose to not make it work except in like, 4 specific places total in the entire game is a mystery. I can understand confining it to the continent, but ugh. Allowing that spell to function reasonably would solve a big part of the grouping problem -every situation in fact unless you're just waiting on 'the healer'. ^^
Gaming? That's not gaming!
That's just people sat 'round in costumes drinking...
freedom would have been limited, but the game would have been more solid.
Obviously, Brad felt constricted where his artistic boundaries were having higher opinions. He didn't like it. He spent a great deal of money seperating from Microsoft. He wrote his own Epitath as a result to his decision.
Edit: Just for the record: Brad pulled away from Microsoft and went to his best friend, John Smedly to help with the distribution, tech support, and server hosting. Further information can be seen here. Also, if you read that entire link, you will see that Sigil made some brash and inadequate decisions in lieu of a furious storm of Vangaurd followers begging them not to make those mistakes.
Sadly, it seems, the fans were right and Sigil was dead wrong.
Life Lesson #3:
Don't go to your Best Friend and former boss (who fired you) to ask for support after blowing millions of dollars leaving microsoft because you believe they were limiting your freedom of expression.
Life Lesson #2: Never get in a deal with Microsoft in the first place. That was his biggest mistake.
PR drivel, nothing more. There is no way to know why Sigil - MS didnt work. Unless you know someone personally close to the issue that would leak information and violate an NDA.
Anything that comes from either company is simply PR spin, nothing more. The post i read was that MS bailed out. ( was posted in these forums a while ago ).
-Allegria
LOL....
Your obviously a payed shill hired to paint a pcture of doom & gloom aimed at deturring people from Vanguard. The funny thing is, no matter how hard you try, Vanguard will become one of the worlds biggest MMORPG's. It will just take time. Hell it took Everquest 3-4 years to hit 400k. Vanguard is already at 200k and it's only 2 months old.
All the features are there. After 9 years of playing every MMORPG out there (18 of them) no game I have tried is this big, this deep and this chaulked full of content. There are some 80 dungeons (seen a fan-site list) but I have no idea how you'd explore them all over the next year. Everywhere I turn there is some hidden area with something to do. You could pass an area 20 times, then that one time you ride off the path (horse) and make a short-cut you stumble upon some rocks and notice in the cracks an opening to yet another DUNGEON...!
There are mini, major and Epic proportion sized dungeons. I have come across some dungeons is sooooo big you can easily spend weeks in there. Awsome....! Build your own house.... awsome. Build your own boat... awsome. I do not have the cash yet to afford such luxuries, but I have been on others who do own such things, but it's kewl to explore and sail with other to a new continent or dungeon.
But here, a pic is worth a 1,000 words:
and another:
Wow, you have profit margin information for a product... competitive intelligence. You must be some sort of industry insider?
Seriously, your post was one of the most absurd I've read on a board that is over-run with absurdity. Congrats!
First off, I don't agree with the RMT market so don't get my points wrong, please. With that much said, many of us old fart gamers have come to rely on sites like EQ Interface for excellent UI Mods. Some of them even posted by the renowned artist King. What's the first spin I get when I visit those sites? While we are owned by IGN, we don't support RMT and down supply any advertising for RMT sites. Nope, not good enough, Sigil pretty much does not want them doing UI's for the game so they are pretty empty with VG Interfaces. Okay, I can live with that I guess and visit a lesser known site with limited UI Mods.
Let me go check out our "Official" community forums. Ooopsies...seems they were shut down at the end of Beta and are simply a tech support forum. SoE may do many things wrong in the eyes of many but their official site is a god send for many players. It's quite easy to narrow down a specific question you need answered due to the layout of the boards and the interaction between the developers and the community is right there for me to see. But we don't have that now do we? The "Vision" says that we need to frequent many websites to gleam what information we can to make us a tighter community. That is providing the website is under the control...ooops..."affiliation" of the company. Even then, the important matters are not discussed with the players, but rather the elite FoH team where the average Joe can't hope to get posting rights. We have to understand however that the company places great weight in the accomplishments of the FoH Guild and were clearly not worthy of such attention.
Then I read how 35 million, the 2nd largest MMoG budget if I'm correct is not enough money, nor is 5+ years enough time to produce such a "Vision". MS was not going to meet their standards and SoE forced them into a corner. The hardware industry failed to deliver the massive systems and upgrades needed at a cheap price to run the "Vision" as Sigil intended. You and I failed to deliver the patience and understanding on how rough it must be on Sigil to have released something so costly and time consuming while we complain about not being able to play something that costs us $50 in a suitable manner. Silly us.
All the time I keep thinking to myself, you know, instead of asking us for more money so you can reload the gun, maybe they should just learn to stop shooting themselves in the foot in the first place.
Vanguard had a lot of new good ideas. Fellowships, Caravans. Unfortunately, neither of these function. I think one of the most detrimental decisions on Sigils part, despite the howls of the vanboys to the contrary, was their decision to make travel so irritating.
Honestly, I know people who purchased the game, made characters of the race and class they wanted, and spent several hours just trying to figure out how to get to the starting area of the other player. Finding it impossible in most cases, they'd play for a week or so, and still not be able to get to where the other person was, due to long distances, aggro along the way, faction, whatever. Of a 50-person guild who was going to come to Vanguard, only half lasted beyond the second week due to this and various issues.
Yes, there are too many servers. And the world is too big. This relates to the travel issue. If you ever open up the LFG window, you'll see maybe 10 people in your level range that are LFG. And many of them are over an hour of travel time away. Not counting relogging and/or crashing after moving through so many chunks. We've literally waited over an hour for someone to just get to the team from wherever they were. No one wants to deal with that. While I appreciate the realism of the travel, fact of the matter is that if I'm in Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, and I need to get to say, Tursh Village - the only option is to run over to ahgram, boat to khal, boat to new targanor - and assuming I don't crash, zone-bug to black screen at least once, etc, I can now start running north. There is no local teleporter and even at level 40 I'm still balking at the idea of coughing up for the 3 gold mount, and the 10 gold mount is just out of the question. So me and my faithful lowbie horse with his expensive horseshoes plod along through about 6 chunk lines, group bugging at least twice, to reach my team.
Meanwhile, other people are making their treks from other far points of the world.
Suppose you only have an hour to play? Forget it.
The world is too big. We don't need 18 separate newbie areas. We don't need 12 different level 10-15 quest areas. Yes, its nice to have variety, for it not to be linear, etc. but the problem is that in any given area you sometimes find no other people at all. I recently levelled an alt, and instead of going into Lord Tsang's tomb, I instead ported out to Upper Defense Garrison at lvl 17 or so to do the quests up there - the mines, the coven, etc. I never saw another soul in any of the dungeons, and I saw only one other person in town, and they were afk. This was on the weekend during prime time. With the population declining as much as it is, there aren't enough people to fill this vast, expansive world.
Honestly, they should have two starting areas per continent (for the order/shadow races.) Kojan actually makes sense. It has three starting areas, but two of them are easily reachable by taking the boat from the docks. Why doesn't the rest of the world make sense? Pick two starting areas on any other continent and running between them before level 20 is a task indeed. This was my complaint in beta, at release, and even now - the time it takes to get around is making everyone feel isolated. We need more local teleporters, or at the very least, double the speed of all mounts. The vision is one thing, but practicality is quite another.
Now add to that existing problem the decline in population as people get frustrated with bugs, lag, xp loss, dying for no reason (New Targanor incident?) game breaking issues not being addressed for several hours of exploiting, etc. and you have too few people on too many servers in a too-big world. So I'd expect a server merge fairly soon, as well as some tweaks to the travel system, so that the few subscribers who are left can play the game. Lets face it folks, Vanguard is ANTI-SOLO. The only solo content beyond level 20 is CRAFTING. Unless you're a particular class (necro, psion, dreadknight to name a few) soloing anything worthwhile at any sort of decent xp rate beyond that point is impossible. Completing your quests without a group - impossible. Most of my game experience has been in a Dreadknight_Paladin_Cleric trio. We have trio'd damn near everything, even the Kronus fight lol. But now that we're in our 40s there's a lot of content that just can't be done anymore without a team. Okay, fine. You ever tried to look for a team at 40+? There might be 6 other people online in the entire game who have the quest you do. Its pretty disheartening. Thats because no one can level because no one can group, and if you look at the leaderboards, all the highest levelled toons for the most part are the classes who are more solo friendly. Whats that tell you?
Wow I made a wall-of text. Sorry.
Always a pleasure to read your good analysis. I followed your posts and I find you analytic style refreshing here, heh.
Maybe Sigil should pay you as advisor. ^^
I think you hit the nail here. There are FAR too many starter areas and low level zones, indeed. The entire big world idea feels like someone designed a wonderful world, and then a giant walked over it with a bag of mobs, 70% below level 20, and then littered them all over the world without a "red thread" to guide people. I find myself meandering back and forth and thus built no feeling for any zone in particular. Sometimes less is more.
You see if you start in Tanvu and then spread out on Kojan how a more guided zone exploration could have been, and if ppl of one guild would have stayed to one race/place it would have worked maybe. However, you cant advocate a huge world and so many race and classes and then expect ppl to play all the same race to stay together. It would need some streamlining, the creation of a more guided experience to actually create a feeling for the world. As it is you are dropped in huge VG wonderland and then see for yourself, goodbye and thanks for the money.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
One of the World's biggest MMOs? Are you joking? It will become the biggest failure in MMO history and will be a warning to all other companies who release shoddy, half finished rubbish. It may have 200k subs but how many of those are active? I'll wager not too many and there'll be even less when LotRo releases and you can count on Conan, WAR et al taking whatever is left come Autumn. The fact that they are totally changing the game 2 months after launch is a pretty clear sign they are in trouble. The only way Vanguard could have lived is if it had stuck to its original design.
One of the World's biggest MMOs? Are you joking? It will become the biggest failure in MMO history and will be a warning to all other companies who release shoddy, half finished rubbish. It may have 200k subs but how many of those are active? I'll wager not too many and there'll be even less when LotRo releases and you can count on Conan, WAR et al taking whatever is left come Autumn. The fact that they are totally changing the game 2 months after launch is a pretty clear sign they are in trouble. The only way Vanguard could have lived is if it had stuck to its original design.
Think "outside the box" Vanguard is at the moment the biggest MMO this has nothing to do with succes, Big as in size.
Also you have no way of knowing the future untill it's past. Also the asumtion of LotrO coming will take Vanguad players away, i reality those that favour LotrO want a different kind of MMO instead of a MMORPG, there is nothing bad to say about LotrO it is a very nice sweet looking game, Conan also a very different game compared to Vanguard, the thing to be ported with th Xbox is a never before done thing, yeah we have the regular FF and some more mmo's on xbox but not ported to be played both on pc and hook up with your buddy on the Xbox (we'll see how that pans out) but again no real trheat for Vanguard. And well WAR, i know what kind of people that game will atract so absolutely no intrest in that game personaly.
Futhermore you keep telling about its original design, you mean what you have read on forums, or did you attend meetings at Sigil. Again look "outside the box" you really think a company will give you 100% details on a product they are working on. True some things are not worked out yet as we where told on forums, doesn't mean that the original concept is lost because of this.
If games shape up like promised, there is great threat for VG, and I can see many fans leaving it. Ofcourse other games might be just as "bad" bu we shall see.
I for one post here, because I looked forward to this game, and bought in the hype, not because I was naive, I by definition am not, I just gave them credit, which turned out to be a mistake of sorts.
Originally posted by Reklaw
Scientists, Analysts there all make asumptions to what the future will be like. So why would it make any differences when others asume utter destruction of an MMO. We all know it is going down hill and losing subscirbers by the day. It's too unfinished in a huge world, think D&L, this is where Vanguard will be heading shortly.
You need to get your facts straight before you post: Porting an MMORPG to a game console has and is already done, same thing with same server space. FFXI PS2, XBOX360, PC they all link together. Another fact is AoC has already commented that they have no clue if they will link the x360 to the PC servers.
LoTRO, AoC, WAR they are all the same genre as Vanguard, just different game machinics. The reason why people look to these games is because they have heard the amount of neglect towards this game. It's still unfinished and you people play to pay for beta. This is truely sad, have the companies walk all over you and we won't be expecting any better from the future.
Oh i sure will leave Vanguard if but only if something better for my taste comes along. I'm in "Fury" beta currently, unable to play though due to server maint.ongoing till friday but actualy not that into pvp games but do love beta testing and squasing those bugs (please don't blame me for Vanguards i did my "beta duty" in reporting them what happens after that is out of my control
Conan however might get me away from Vanguard it all depence on how well that port-thingy works out, not in favour of that to be honost, only time will tell and besides thats about 5/6 months or more from now, who knows what i be doing then (i did signup for beta AoC) There is another game i'm intrested in but not well know thus far you can read it > http://www.projectoffset.com/buzz.html