6 of 1, half a dozen of another. I just meant they both say the same things, but use different words for the most part. I think I screwed up the quote which made my vague reference even harder to understand. Think of it at a puzzle.
I am very, very new to the game. This I will say irrespective of even having played it or not. In order for the game to be remotely 'fixed' in any way the very first thing it needs are the basics. This game NEEDS above all else a very simple little scan of the machine its playing on to check for drivers/bios/conflicting hardware etc. Sorry but any game that BSOD's due to 1 month old drivers, so badly is not 'fixed' its not funny. Players should not have to log onto forums to find out why their machine is not hanging, not ctd'ing but outright BSOD'ing. Imo a massive amount of the hate and tech problems could be solved by including a really basic benchmarking tool, somehting which has been available on various games,..... ooooh for the last 10+ years!!! Lots and I mean lots of mmo'ers may not be pc savy and they simply want a game to work, if it continually crashes their rig most of them simply bin it, they don't try to fix it and why should they. The game is/was advertised as hardcore to some extent, this should not include installation! All that said having updated my 1 month old driver, the game so far has had no glitches at all, it runs silky and looks fkin unreal tbh. I have all the bells and whistles turned on and it is truely graphically stunning. But I have not played anywhere near enough to give an opinion of other aspects and their current condition, or even if the current graphic splendour continues on through the game.
Actually a game isn't able to directly make your computer blue screen. If you are blue screening then that is usually a hardware or a driver problem. This has nothing directly do do with VG other then VG is using driver functions to do graphics. The driver is what is crashing and there really is no way for VG to know what standard functions on the OS might cause the driver to fail. Now VG is a pretty advanced game and does use a number of advanced graphics functions which might be the reason you blue screen with VG but not with other things. But the bottom line is that a blue screen is not a VG problem it's an OS/Driver or hardware problem.
I haven't played in ages, as I studied abroad in Australia this past semester.
However, I'll say this. If Vanguard truly got so much better, and has improved so greatly, then this board is no indication of that. I see... maybe 8 names that were regularly posting here at release. I also notice the absence of some of the most beligerent fan boys.
Frankly... if the game hasn't even retained the most die-hard fans, how I can possibly believe the game has improved significantly? I see lots of newer faces here, and the fact that (I'm guessing) even the newer, more recent waves of players were/are still dissatisfied just tells me that the game still hasn't become good enough to draw in and RETAIN subscribers.
That's all the information I need to make my decision on whether to sub or not...
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
I am very, very new to the game. This I will say irrespective of even having played it or not. In order for the game to be remotely 'fixed' in any way the very first thing it needs are the basics. This game NEEDS above all else a very simple little scan of the machine its playing on to check for drivers/bios/conflicting hardware etc. Sorry but any game that BSOD's due to 1 month old drivers, so badly is not 'fixed' its not funny. Players should not have to log onto forums to find out why their machine is not hanging, not ctd'ing but outright BSOD'ing. Imo a massive amount of the hate and tech problems could be solved by including a really basic benchmarking tool, somehting which has been available on various games,..... ooooh for the last 10+ years!!! Lots and I mean lots of mmo'ers may not be pc savy and they simply want a game to work, if it continually crashes their rig most of them simply bin it, they don't try to fix it and why should they. The game is/was advertised as hardcore to some extent, this should not include installation! All that said having updated my 1 month old driver, the game so far has had no glitches at all, it runs silky and looks fkin unreal tbh. I have all the bells and whistles turned on and it is truely graphically stunning. But I have not played anywhere near enough to give an opinion of other aspects and their current condition, or even if the current graphic splendour continues on through the game.
Actually a game isn't able to directly make your computer blue screen. If you are blue screening then that is usually a hardware or a driver problem. This has nothing directly do do with VG other then VG is using driver functions to do graphics. The driver is what is crashing and there really is no way for VG to know what standard functions on the OS might cause the driver to fail. Now VG is a pretty advanced game and does use a number of advanced graphics functions which might be the reason you blue screen with VG but not with other things. But the bottom line is that a blue screen is not a VG problem it's an OS/Driver or hardware problem.
Ummm, most of the CTD's and bluescreens are due to memory leaks in the game client, so yes, it very much has to do with the game.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Geez this thread is a flashback to when the game launched. The die-hard VG fans was saying "it's your PC" while the other 90% said it was the game itself.......
Originally posted by mrw0lf This game NEEDS above all else a very simple little scan of the machine its playing on to check for drivers/bios/conflicting hardware etc.
I think that is a great idea, mrw0lf.
It might help to explain why some people have performance issues and others do not. Why one day I log in and everything is great and the next day NPC and player names appear distorted.
Was Vanguard just programmed poorly? How come SOE was able to fix performance and at the game's release performance and bugs were so much worse?
----- WoW and fast food = commercial successes. I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
I am very, very new to the game. This I will say irrespective of even having played it or not. In order for the game to be remotely 'fixed' in any way the very first thing it needs are the basics. This game NEEDS above all else a very simple little scan of the machine its playing on to check for drivers/bios/conflicting hardware etc. Sorry but any game that BSOD's due to 1 month old drivers, so badly is not 'fixed' its not funny. Players should not have to log onto forums to find out why their machine is not hanging, not ctd'ing but outright BSOD'ing. Imo a massive amount of the hate and tech problems could be solved by including a really basic benchmarking tool, somehting which has been available on various games,..... ooooh for the last 10+ years!!! Lots and I mean lots of mmo'ers may not be pc savy and they simply want a game to work, if it continually crashes their rig most of them simply bin it, they don't try to fix it and why should they. The game is/was advertised as hardcore to some extent, this should not include installation! All that said having updated my 1 month old driver, the game so far has had no glitches at all, it runs silky and looks fkin unreal tbh. I have all the bells and whistles turned on and it is truely graphically stunning. But I have not played anywhere near enough to give an opinion of other aspects and their current condition, or even if the current graphic splendour continues on through the game.
Actually a game isn't able to directly make your computer blue screen. If you are blue screening then that is usually a hardware or a driver problem. This has nothing directly do do with VG other then VG is using driver functions to do graphics. The driver is what is crashing and there really is no way for VG to know what standard functions on the OS might cause the driver to fail. Now VG is a pretty advanced game and does use a number of advanced graphics functions which might be the reason you blue screen with VG but not with other things. But the bottom line is that a blue screen is not a VG problem it's an OS/Driver or hardware problem.
Ummm, most of the CTD's and bluescreens are due to memory leaks in the game client, so yes, it very much has to do with the game.
Buzzt Wrong... Memory leaks do not cause blue screens. Memory errors cause blue screens but that is a hardware problem. A memory leak can cause a blue screen by eating up memory to the point where there is a memory hardware error but that isn't really the fault of a memory leak.
But let me put memory leaks aside. I played last night for over 3 hours and VGCLIENT.EXE was at 695mb of memory at the end of my session. That is not leaking memory. This is a huge difference from what it was at release. At release it would eat up lots of memory but not today.
As to blue screens, they are caused by things running in priv mode on the OS. This puts it to hardware, drivers, the OS and maybe some OS DLLs. Generally any app errors the OS will kill the app which is your common crash to desktop. Look at your event log to see these. If you want to really know what is causing the blue screen get a debugger and look at the minidunp that windows makes when you crash. Having recently spent weeks trying to track down a random blue screen I can give you some info on how to do this if you are really interested. Just send me a PM and I'll try to look up the name of the software and where to get the symbol tables. Once you have the right stuff it is actually pretty easy to track down the cause of blue screens.
One thing to note as in my cause not all drivers are hardware drivers. The driver that was killing my system was my antivirus driver shim.
I am very, very new to the game. This I will say irrespective of even having played it or not. In order for the game to be remotely 'fixed' in any way the very first thing it needs are the basics. This game NEEDS above all else a very simple little scan of the machine its playing on to check for drivers/bios/conflicting hardware etc. Sorry but any game that BSOD's due to 1 month old drivers, so badly is not 'fixed' its not funny. Players should not have to log onto forums to find out why their machine is not hanging, not ctd'ing but outright BSOD'ing. Imo a massive amount of the hate and tech problems could be solved by including a really basic benchmarking tool, somehting which has been available on various games,..... ooooh for the last 10+ years!!! Lots and I mean lots of mmo'ers may not be pc savy and they simply want a game to work, if it continually crashes their rig most of them simply bin it, they don't try to fix it and why should they. The game is/was advertised as hardcore to some extent, this should not include installation! All that said having updated my 1 month old driver, the game so far has had no glitches at all, it runs silky and looks fkin unreal tbh. I have all the bells and whistles turned on and it is truely graphically stunning. But I have not played anywhere near enough to give an opinion of other aspects and their current condition, or even if the current graphic splendour continues on through the game.
Actually a game isn't able to directly make your computer blue screen. If you are blue screening then that is usually a hardware or a driver problem. This has nothing directly do do with VG other then VG is using driver functions to do graphics. The driver is what is crashing and there really is no way for VG to know what standard functions on the OS might cause the driver to fail. Now VG is a pretty advanced game and does use a number of advanced graphics functions which might be the reason you blue screen with VG but not with other things. But the bottom line is that a blue screen is not a VG problem it's an OS/Driver or hardware problem.
Ummm, most of the CTD's and bluescreens are due to memory leaks in the game client, so yes, it very much has to do with the game.
Buzzt Wrong... Memory leaks do not cause blue screens. Memory errors cause blue screens but that is a hardware problem. A memory leak can cause a blue screen by eating up memory to the point where there is a memory hardware error but that isn't really the fault of a memory leak.
But let me put memory leaks aside. I played last night for over 3 hours and VGCLIENT.EXE was at 695mb of memory at the end of my session. That is not leaking memory. This is a huge difference from what it was at release. At release it would eat up lots of memory but not today.
As to blue screens, they are caused by things running in priv mode on the OS. This puts it to hardware, drivers, the OS and maybe some OS DLLs. Generally any app errors the OS will kill the app which is your common crash to desktop. Look at your event log to see these. If you want to really know what is causing the blue screen get a debugger and look at the minidunp that windows makes when you crash. Having recently spent weeks trying to track down a random blue screen I can give you some info on how to do this if you are really interested. Just send me a PM and I'll try to look up the name of the software and where to get the symbol tables. Once you have the right stuff it is actually pretty easy to track down the cause of blue screens.
One thing to note as in my cause not all drivers are hardware drivers. The driver that was killing my system was my antivirus driver shim.
After playing fairly solid for 2 days (Im knackered) I will say the memory usage is pretty good, I have not noticed any memory leaks at all and its easy for me to tell as one of my rigs has a stick with an error on it.
However back to the original point. You are 'technically' correct in that VG doesn't in itself cause the bsod, however it creates the environment which causes the driver to crash. I'm well aware of exactly what caused the continual crash but the point is, if any piece of software is going to be so phenomenally picky about the version of driver it will ONLY use then it should be made clear by means other than resulting in a bsod. Besides which there are ways to code around these conflicts without such unforgiving results.
Is it such a big thing to update drivers? Of course not, it's a piece of piss but I just think it would be slightly more user friendly to tell you this rather than let you guess. Many people checking throught the client log, event log and a dx log can tell what causes a crash but many people may not, I would hazard a guess that these are the majority of players who complain about the poor performance and they should not have to decpiher logs to play a game.
Looking throught the VG tech forum imo displays a glaring issue this game has with compatability, with a massive range of things from sound card drivers to usb P&P web cams. If this is going to be the case and people are going to be making adjustments (and from what I've played so far it is very much worth making the adjustments) then it should be easier than it currently is. The game imo deserves better not because of its potential but because of what it currently is! SOE are busy repairing the bugs of which there may have been a large number of, I don't know I didn't play at launch, but along the way they need to make things easier for people to help themselves with regards to its technical issues.
Btw love the foliage in the game I can't get over this grass
----- The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Originally posted by mrw0lf Looking throught the VG tech forum imo displays a glaring issue this game has with compatability, with a massive range of things from sound card drivers to usb P&P web cams. Btw love the foliage in the game I can't get over this grass
The word you mentioned is "compatibility." Is it because Vanguard was released so early or because SIGIL's programmers were so bad? I am curious to know because I remember at release all the bugs and performance issues that really hurt the game and continues to hurt the game's sales.
People are afraid to resubscribe because they think performance is still awful. The nice thing is that SOE has offered the free holiday time, which I admire SOE for doing.
My performance is overall excellent, but some tech stuff needs to be worked out.
----- WoW and fast food = commercial successes. I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
Looking throught the VG tech forum imo displays a glaring issue this game has with compatability, with a massive range of things from sound card drivers to usb P&P web cams.
Btw love the foliage in the game I can't get over this grass
The word you mentioned is "compatibility." Is it because Vanguard was released so early or because SIGIL's programmers were so bad? I am curious to know because I remember at release all the bugs and performance issues that really hurt the game and continues to hurt the game's sales.
People are afraid to resubscribe because they think performance is still awful. The nice thing is that SOE has offered the free holiday time, which I admire SOE for doing.
My performance is overall excellent, but some tech stuff needs to be worked out.
My performance is overall very Poor and my system far exceeds the recommended specs. i admit some improvements have been made and I could even live with the performance i get if I never had to go into any city/town/village but where is the fun in that. Performance just has not improved enough for me to considering maintaining a subscription.
Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. Lao-Tze
Performance just has not improved enough for me to considering maintaining a subscription.
Although my performance sounds better than yours, the game is at a state in which people can play without being hampered by the stability, lag, and hitching issues.
Some issues remain, but they are minor for me.
The biggest issue I have is many and varied end-game content.
----- WoW and fast food = commercial successes. I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
Performance just has not improved enough for me to considering maintaining a subscription.
Although my performance sounds better than yours, the game is at a state in which people can play without being hampered by the stability, lag, and hitching issues.
Some issues remain, but they are minor for me.
The biggest issue I have is many and varied end-game content.
the highlighted statement is just NOT true for me and a lot of people. Here and at the VG forums anyone who dares to say so though is immediately attacked by Vanatics.
Im glad YOUR performance is great, congrats. I do wonder however if the few people who claim such great performance really do have great performance or just lower standards. /shrug
Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. Lao-Tze
Im glad YOUR performance is great, congrats. I do wonder however if the few people who claim such great performance really do have great performance or just lower standards. /shrug
I wouldnt be surprised. I was rarely bugged by performance but then again I usually played the game on lowest settings and didnt care to much. Balanced was much nicer to look at but the game slowed down too much so I usually played at the highest performance-lowest quality setting.
I wouldnt be too surprised if there were many people like me who just dont care too much about graphics. At least compared to being able to turn around at a reasonable rate.
I actually play only Vanguard and stopped EQ2, DAOC; SWG and of course this boring and small Lotro. Always notice bugs (spe with my necro's pet ! ) but game works fine for me. Best Medfan MMO played since DAOC. (IMO) VG needs more improvements but I can play and it's fine. (couldn't play before GU3 without havin a CTD or something like that)
VG isn't perfect yet but if you have a powerfull PC, it's really fine and beautiful.interesting game. Really nice. Much better than EQ2 i think.
The only way i could possibly prove to you that i am telling the truth when i say that for me on my 3.2 ghz dual core gforce 7300 with 2 gig ram ( which i am told is really average) the game runs fine! is for you to come to my house and see for yourself...which you are quite welcome to do obviously there are people that say that just to argue thier point but i swear on my 11 year old sons life that i always do my best to be honest and tell the truth on these forums. And i understand that many people have problems but for me the game runs fine on medium settings with a few small increase in settings (namely grass and tress ) i get low fps but it never seems to slow my system down or cause lag in groups. anything above 14 fps seems fine for me, but i would not consider myself to have lower standards. i hail from eq early years right up untill darkhollow expansion or whatever it was called. i then played wow for 12 months and have since tried lotro ( which i m huge fan of the lore ) d&d and a few other smaller titles. In eq i was in a large raid guild and saw 90% of the top end content. So i dont think that some have lower standards, it's simply VG on one machine could be fine while the next similar machine it is a bag of crap. like its been said many times, the problem is in the coding.
I played late beta, and about 6 weeks after release. performance was horrible, and the servers were getting emptier every day when I left.
I just came back about 10 days ago, and have to admit to being somewhat surprised. I know my CPU/MB is bottlenecking me (only a 3Ghz AMD 64), and I tend to give up performance for looks. I don't raid, and only group every now and then, but performance is adequate- 25ish FPS on average, out in the open in the 40s, in cities I get low-mid teens. I can live with that until I upgrade.
The mergers REALLY helped the population.I'm on Seradon, and we just merged into a bigger guild that has 40-50 people online mostly all the time. I don't go 30 minutes without seeing another player anymore, and have had no trouble finding even a low-level group when I want to. Things are better, no question, across the board.
is it fixed? Not all the way, no. There's still more performance and scalability that they could wring out of the engine. Things still break, and the response to issues could be better. But it HAS improved, and by quite a bit. It's actually very enjoyable now.
Why is this editor so screwed ? He's like 100 or 200 pixels wide, while my screen is 1000 ... meh.
I usually play on highest Performance or Balanced, though I can easily play on best Quality in most areas - in fact, everywhere but cities and very populated dungeons.
Inside cities, even highest Performance still doesnt guarantee issueless playing. Its only a hitching now, better than before, but its stil there.
You make it sound like the game will attract thousands apon thousands once the bugs are or have been fixed. This will never happen with the current hardcore bend of the game. There just aren't enough hardcores to go around and this game will certainly not be popular with the casual crowd in it's current iteration. The majority of the content is bland, the leveling curve is way too steep, soloing is frowned on not only by the developers, but by the obnoxious hardcores too, loot is pretty craptastic outside of the only raid dungeon and group only content and a lot of the group loot isn't that great either. There's too much empty space, housing and ships are unafordable by casuals and casual game play. You're forced to craft to make any real money in the game.
The only appealing part to casuals is the large variety of classes and skills and looks your character can have and maybe diplomacy, although I found it tedious. The rest of it is out of reach for our play style or tedious and boring to us. The quality of much of the content is subpar for a supposed AAA game.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
I played vg in beta, i left about a month after it went live. i recently went back a couple of weeks to try it again and i have to say it is the best mmo out right now. it needs alot more to catch up to its potential but im really enjoying it now.
After playing lotro, going back to wow to check out the burning crusade and going back to eq2 for a couple of days to check out their new expansion vanguard has the best combat system out right now by far imo.
It is a little more geared towards the hardcore player but not nearly as bad as it was at release. they added things like flying mounts and teleports but still make you think before you just take off and travel somewhere, you cant just teleport or take a mount to anywhere in the game, some places are popuilated and easy to get to and some places are desolate and take some time to get to.
The main things i would like to see vg work on is more end game content , A NEW MAP SYSTEM for gods sake please a new map system. I kind of like the fact that you have to ask around and explore to find outposts/quest giver areas, but they need to atleast give you some hints about where you can go at what level.
Vg is never going to be as great as it was supposed to be but its doing well , growing and improving, the one thing i like most about the changes is how easy it is to get a group. theres quite a few people playing it now and ive had no problem at all getting groups most days.
Sure its hard to level, not everyone can be 50 in 3 weeks like in wow or lotro. but fighting at 20-40 is a blast, you make alot of friends bcause its slow leveling for everybody, thats one thing i loved about eq1, i hated the slow leveling but in the end you built friendships and reputations grinding out those levels and it was worth the trouble, you had a character that was you, not 5 level 60's you hopped around on because you can pl a char from 1-50 in a week.
Wow attracts the casual gamer, and they have worked to do that, that is fine and i dont think people who like and play vg really care, but vg can be played by the casual gamer too, vg has a much more robust low level comminity than any other game ive ever played that has been out so long. when games get some age on them and all the vets have friends and extra accounts to pl their alts the low level community dies. i havent really seen that with vg.
Anyways, the only thing else i have to say is give it a try, you might like it, i know im glad i checked it out again.
I played vg in beta, i left about a month after it went live. i recently went back a couple of weeks to try it again and i have to say it is the best mmo out right now. it needs alot more to catch up to its potential but im really enjoying it now. After playing lotro, going back to wow to check out the burning crusade and going back to eq2 for a couple of days to check out their new expansion vanguard has the best combat system out right now by far imo. It is a little more geared towards the hardcore player but not nearly as bad as it was at release. they added things like flying mounts and teleports but still make you think before you just take off and travel somewhere, you cant just teleport or take a mount to anywhere in the game, some places are popuilated and easy to get to and some places are desolate and take some time to get to. The main things i would like to see vg work on is more end game content , A NEW MAP SYSTEM for gods sake please a new map system. I kind of like the fact that you have to ask around and explore to find outposts/quest giver areas, but they need to atleast give you some hints about where you can go at what level. Im gonna agree with most of what you say except this paragraph about MAp Sys and ,Where to go..I always found plenty of quests for my level and they will point you to areas you can hunt in ...Finding places is to easy IMO in the quest journal go to locations bullet the location or npc you want and the compass will guide plus it will be highlighted on map... Vg is never going to be as great as it was supposed to be but its doing well , growing and improving, the one thing i like most about the changes is how easy it is to get a group. theres quite a few people playing it now and ive had no problem at all getting groups most days. Sure its hard to level, not everyone can be 50 in 3 weeks like in wow or lotro. but fighting at 20-40 is a blast, you make alot of friends bcause its slow leveling for everybody, thats one thing i loved about eq1, i hated the slow leveling but in the end you built friendships and reputations grinding out those levels and it was worth the trouble, you had a character that was you, not 5 level 60's you hopped around on because you can pl a char from 1-50 in a week. Wow attracts the casual gamer, and they have worked to do that, that is fine and i dont think people who like and play vg really care, but vg can be played by the casual gamer too, vg has a much more robust low level comminity than any other game ive ever played that has been out so long. when games get some age on them and all the vets have friends and extra accounts to pl their alts the low level community dies. i havent really seen that with vg. Anyways, the only thing else i have to say is give it a try, you might like it, i know im glad i checked it out again.
However, I'll say this. If Vanguard truly got so much better, and has improved so greatly, then this board is no indication of that. I see... maybe 8 names that were regularly posting here at release. I also notice the absence of some of the most beligerent fan boys.
One thing which is and always will be true is that people are FAR more likely to post to complain than to praise something. Gamers, in particular, seem to enjoy complaining almost more than playing.
If the game interests you, try it. That's the only reasonable approach. Personally, I like it ... a lot.
Originally posted by Kenze the highlighted statement is just NOT true for me and a lot of people. Here and at the VG forums anyone who dares to say so though is immediately attacked by Vanatics.
Im glad YOUR performance is great, congrats. I do wonder however if the few people who claim such great performance really do have great performance or just lower standards. /shrug
Well one thing I can do is relate the preformance to anther game I'm playing. I'm mostly playing eq2 now days but still pop into vg to check things out and do a bit of diplomacy.
I'm not having any crashing but i'm not playing more then a couple hours.
gaphics performance I'm finding to be better then eq2 on similar settings and the client uses much less memory now days then eq2. I play both games on pretty maxed settings. VG runs around 900mb - 1.2gb where eq2 runs around 1.4gb - 1.6gb. In fact I just upgraded my computer to 4gb to give eq2 more memory to work with as at 1.6 it would start swapping causing me hitching for a second or so. This was worst in neriak and qeynos harbor.
However generally the first time I go into a city or outpost with VG it does hitch although not as bad as when eq2 swaps but it is irritating. However it does clear up pretty quickly and after that it is pretty much gone. Similarly with going into buildings the first time a bit of hitching after that all smooth.
Animations and spell effects are better in eq2. Artwork is better in eq2. Graphics resolution and textures are much better in VG. Graphics performance is a bit better in VG. NPC interaction and environment is better in eq2. Combat system is better in VG. Crafting is better in VG. Quests are considerably better in eq2. UI polish is better in eq2.
Anyway thats all my opinion. I think the foundation of VG is considerably better then EQ2 but the content and polish are much poorer.
My system is high end with a quad core cpu, 2gb ram (now 4gb but not for these tests), dual raptor drives, and an nvidia 8800gtx.
"Im gonna agree with most of what you say except this paragraph about MAp Sys and ,Where to go..I always found plenty of quests for my level and they will point you to areas you can hunt in ...Finding places is to easy IMO in the quest journal go to locations bullet the location or npc you want and the compass will guide plus it will be highlighted on map..."
I wasnt talking about finding the places to kill stuff for quests or finding where to go when a quest sends you some where.
what i was talking about is grinding through levels solo by killing crap because i didnt know where any quests were my level, then finding a group of dwarves somewhere that offer a bunch of quests except now theyre grey to me. if an npc in a town or at my last quest place would have said het go look up in the northern hills theres some dorfs up there that need help it would have been nice.
And as far as the map goes it just sucks, its undefined and you cant scroll it around. it is really the worse excuse ive seen for a map in quite awhile. but those things dont wreck the game for me, they just piss me off and if you dont bitch at these people constantly they wont do anything about it.
P.S and about performance, i run xp with a 2.6 amd dual core, 2 gigs of ram and an 8800 gs, i get around 55=60fps on medium high settings. towns still suck but everywhere else is really great, theres still a few glitches here and there in the graphics but nothing too bad. but if theres 20 or 30 people fighting together like at a raid i have to turn my graphics down, but ive done that in every game ive ever played,
what i was talking about is grinding through levels solo by killing crap because i didnt know where any quests were my level, then finding a group of dwarves somewhere that offer a bunch of quests except now theyre grey to me. if an npc in a town or at my last quest place would have said het go look up in the northern hills theres some dorfs up there that need help it would have been nice.
I hear this often, so I'm gonna offer a suggestion here. At most main cities I've been to, there's a crafting advisor. Now, whether you choose to craft or not doesn't matter, but the crafting advisor sells 2 books for 0c. These books will give waypoints for city crafting locations as well as outpost crafting locations. While these crafting outposts do not all have quest npc's for the adventuring sphere, the majority of them do. I recommend that you get this book and then roam around to the different locations to find some areas you may have missed wandering aimlessly.
Comments
6 of 1, half a dozen of another. I just meant they both say the same things, but use different words for the most part. I think I screwed up the quote which made my vague reference even harder to understand. Think of it at a puzzle.
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Ethion
I haven't played in ages, as I studied abroad in Australia this past semester.
However, I'll say this. If Vanguard truly got so much better, and has improved so greatly, then this board is no indication of that. I see... maybe 8 names that were regularly posting here at release. I also notice the absence of some of the most beligerent fan boys.
Frankly... if the game hasn't even retained the most die-hard fans, how I can possibly believe the game has improved significantly? I see lots of newer faces here, and the fact that (I'm guessing) even the newer, more recent waves of players were/are still dissatisfied just tells me that the game still hasn't become good enough to draw in and RETAIN subscribers.
That's all the information I need to make my decision on whether to sub or not...
Waiting for something fresh to arrive on the MMO scene...
Ummm, most of the CTD's and bluescreens are due to memory leaks in the game client, so yes, it very much has to do with the game.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
It might help to explain why some people have performance issues and others do not. Why one day I log in and everything is great and the next day NPC and player names appear distorted.
Was Vanguard just programmed poorly? How come SOE was able to fix performance and at the game's release performance and bugs were so much worse?
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WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
the game never appealed to me in the first place
as soon as i saw from the makers of Everquest and the screen shots of a game that looked alot like EQ i tuned out...glad i did
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
Ummm, most of the CTD's and bluescreens are due to memory leaks in the game client, so yes, it very much has to do with the game.
Buzzt Wrong... Memory leaks do not cause blue screens. Memory errors cause blue screens but that is a hardware problem. A memory leak can cause a blue screen by eating up memory to the point where there is a memory hardware error but that isn't really the fault of a memory leak.
But let me put memory leaks aside. I played last night for over 3 hours and VGCLIENT.EXE was at 695mb of memory at the end of my session. That is not leaking memory. This is a huge difference from what it was at release. At release it would eat up lots of memory but not today.
As to blue screens, they are caused by things running in priv mode on the OS. This puts it to hardware, drivers, the OS and maybe some OS DLLs. Generally any app errors the OS will kill the app which is your common crash to desktop. Look at your event log to see these. If you want to really know what is causing the blue screen get a debugger and look at the minidunp that windows makes when you crash. Having recently spent weeks trying to track down a random blue screen I can give you some info on how to do this if you are really interested. Just send me a PM and I'll try to look up the name of the software and where to get the symbol tables. Once you have the right stuff it is actually pretty easy to track down the cause of blue screens.
One thing to note as in my cause not all drivers are hardware drivers. The driver that was killing my system was my antivirus driver shim.
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Ethion
Actually a game isn't able to directly make your computer blue screen. If you are blue screening then that is usually a hardware or a driver problem. This has nothing directly do do with VG other then VG is using driver functions to do graphics. The driver is what is crashing and there really is no way for VG to know what standard functions on the OS might cause the driver to fail. Now VG is a pretty advanced game and does use a number of advanced graphics functions which might be the reason you blue screen with VG but not with other things. But the bottom line is that a blue screen is not a VG problem it's an OS/Driver or hardware problem.Ummm, most of the CTD's and bluescreens are due to memory leaks in the game client, so yes, it very much has to do with the game.
Buzzt Wrong... Memory leaks do not cause blue screens. Memory errors cause blue screens but that is a hardware problem. A memory leak can cause a blue screen by eating up memory to the point where there is a memory hardware error but that isn't really the fault of a memory leak.
But let me put memory leaks aside. I played last night for over 3 hours and VGCLIENT.EXE was at 695mb of memory at the end of my session. That is not leaking memory. This is a huge difference from what it was at release. At release it would eat up lots of memory but not today.
As to blue screens, they are caused by things running in priv mode on the OS. This puts it to hardware, drivers, the OS and maybe some OS DLLs. Generally any app errors the OS will kill the app which is your common crash to desktop. Look at your event log to see these. If you want to really know what is causing the blue screen get a debugger and look at the minidunp that windows makes when you crash. Having recently spent weeks trying to track down a random blue screen I can give you some info on how to do this if you are really interested. Just send me a PM and I'll try to look up the name of the software and where to get the symbol tables. Once you have the right stuff it is actually pretty easy to track down the cause of blue screens.
One thing to note as in my cause not all drivers are hardware drivers. The driver that was killing my system was my antivirus driver shim.
After playing fairly solid for 2 days (Im knackered) I will say the memory usage is pretty good, I have not noticed any memory leaks at all and its easy for me to tell as one of my rigs has a stick with an error on it.
However back to the original point. You are 'technically' correct in that VG doesn't in itself cause the bsod, however it creates the environment which causes the driver to crash. I'm well aware of exactly what caused the continual crash but the point is, if any piece of software is going to be so phenomenally picky about the version of driver it will ONLY use then it should be made clear by means other than resulting in a bsod. Besides which there are ways to code around these conflicts without such unforgiving results.
Is it such a big thing to update drivers? Of course not, it's a piece of piss but I just think it would be slightly more user friendly to tell you this rather than let you guess. Many people checking throught the client log, event log and a dx log can tell what causes a crash but many people may not, I would hazard a guess that these are the majority of players who complain about the poor performance and they should not have to decpiher logs to play a game.
Looking throught the VG tech forum imo displays a glaring issue this game has with compatability, with a massive range of things from sound card drivers to usb P&P web cams. If this is going to be the case and people are going to be making adjustments (and from what I've played so far it is very much worth making the adjustments) then it should be easier than it currently is. The game imo deserves better not because of its potential but because of what it currently is! SOE are busy repairing the bugs of which there may have been a large number of, I don't know I didn't play at launch, but along the way they need to make things easier for people to help themselves with regards to its technical issues.
Btw love the foliage in the game I can't get over this grass
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
The word you mentioned is "compatibility." Is it because Vanguard was released so early or because SIGIL's programmers were so bad? I am curious to know because I remember at release all the bugs and performance issues that really hurt the game and continues to hurt the game's sales.
People are afraid to resubscribe because they think performance is still awful. The nice thing is that SOE has offered the free holiday time, which I admire SOE for doing.
My performance is overall excellent, but some tech stuff needs to be worked out.
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WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
My performance is overall very Poor and my system far exceeds the recommended specs. i admit some improvements have been made and I could even live with the performance i get if I never had to go into any city/town/village but where is the fun in that. Performance just has not improved enough for me to considering maintaining a subscription.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
Some issues remain, but they are minor for me.
The biggest issue I have is many and varied end-game content.
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WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
Some issues remain, but they are minor for me.
The biggest issue I have is many and varied end-game content.
the highlighted statement is just NOT true for me and a lot of people. Here and at the VG forums anyone who dares to say so though is immediately attacked by Vanatics.
Im glad YOUR performance is great, congrats. I do wonder however if the few people who claim such great performance really do have great performance or just lower standards. /shrug
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
I wouldnt be surprised. I was rarely bugged by performance but then again I usually played the game on lowest settings and didnt care to much. Balanced was much nicer to look at but the game slowed down too much so I usually played at the highest performance-lowest quality setting.
I wouldnt be too surprised if there were many people like me who just dont care too much about graphics. At least compared to being able to turn around at a reasonable rate.
The only thing i can say:
I actually play only Vanguard and stopped EQ2, DAOC; SWG and of course this boring and small Lotro. Always notice bugs (spe with my necro's pet ! ) but game works fine for me. Best Medfan MMO played since DAOC. (IMO) VG needs more improvements but I can play and it's fine. (couldn't play before GU3 without havin a CTD or something like that)
VG isn't perfect yet but if you have a powerfull PC, it's really fine and beautiful.interesting game. Really nice. Much better than EQ2 i think.
The only way i could possibly prove to you that i am telling the truth when i say that for me on my 3.2 ghz dual core gforce 7300 with 2 gig ram ( which i am told is really average) the game runs fine! is for you to come to my house and see for yourself...which you are quite welcome to do
obviously there are people that say that just to argue thier point but i swear on my 11 year old sons life that i always do my best to be honest and tell the truth on these forums. And i understand that many people have problems but for me the game runs fine on medium settings with a few small increase in settings (namely grass and tress 
) i get low fps but it never seems to slow my system down or cause lag in groups. anything above 14 fps seems fine for me, but i would not consider myself to have lower standards. i hail from eq early years right up untill darkhollow expansion or whatever it was called. i then played wow for 12 months and have since tried lotro ( which i m huge fan of the lore ) d&d and a few other smaller titles. In eq i was in a large raid guild and saw 90% of the top end content. So i dont think that some have lower standards, it's simply VG on one machine could be fine while the next similar machine it is a bag of crap. like its been said many times, the problem is in the coding.
I played late beta, and about 6 weeks after release. performance was horrible, and the servers were getting emptier every day when I left.
I just came back about 10 days ago, and have to admit to being somewhat surprised. I know my CPU/MB is bottlenecking me (only a 3Ghz AMD 64), and I tend to give up performance for looks. I don't raid, and only group every now and then, but performance is adequate- 25ish FPS on average, out in the open in the 40s, in cities I get low-mid teens. I can live with that until I upgrade.
The mergers REALLY helped the population.I'm on Seradon, and we just merged into a bigger guild that has 40-50 people online mostly all the time. I don't go 30 minutes without seeing another player anymore, and have had no trouble finding even a low-level group when I want to. Things are better, no question, across the board.
is it fixed? Not all the way, no. There's still more performance and scalability that they could wring out of the engine. Things still break, and the response to issues could be better. But it HAS improved, and by quite a bit. It's actually very enjoyable now.
Bite me, Turbine.
Why is this editor so screwed ? He's like 100 or 200 pixels wide, while my screen is 1000 ... meh.
I usually play on highest Performance or Balanced, though I can easily play on best Quality in most areas - in fact, everywhere but cities and very populated dungeons.
Inside cities, even highest Performance still doesnt guarantee issueless playing. Its only a hitching now, better than before, but its stil there.
You make it sound like the game will attract thousands apon thousands once the bugs are or have been fixed. This will never happen with the current hardcore bend of the game. There just aren't enough hardcores to go around and this game will certainly not be popular with the casual crowd in it's current iteration. The majority of the content is bland, the leveling curve is way too steep, soloing is frowned on not only by the developers, but by the obnoxious hardcores too, loot is pretty craptastic outside of the only raid dungeon and group only content and a lot of the group loot isn't that great either. There's too much empty space, housing and ships are unafordable by casuals and casual game play. You're forced to craft to make any real money in the game.
The only appealing part to casuals is the large variety of classes and skills and looks your character can have and maybe diplomacy, although I found it tedious. The rest of it is out of reach for our play style or tedious and boring to us. The quality of much of the content is subpar for a supposed AAA game.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
I played vg in beta, i left about a month after it went live. i recently went back a couple of weeks to try it again and i have to say it is the best mmo out right now. it needs alot more to catch up to its potential but im really enjoying it now.
After playing lotro, going back to wow to check out the burning crusade and going back to eq2 for a couple of days to check out their new expansion vanguard has the best combat system out right now by far imo.
It is a little more geared towards the hardcore player but not nearly as bad as it was at release. they added things like flying mounts and teleports but still make you think before you just take off and travel somewhere, you cant just teleport or take a mount to anywhere in the game, some places are popuilated and easy to get to and some places are desolate and take some time to get to.
The main things i would like to see vg work on is more end game content , A NEW MAP SYSTEM for gods sake please a new map system. I kind of like the fact that you have to ask around and explore to find outposts/quest giver areas, but they need to atleast give you some hints about where you can go at what level.
Vg is never going to be as great as it was supposed to be but its doing well , growing and improving, the one thing i like most about the changes is how easy it is to get a group. theres quite a few people playing it now and ive had no problem at all getting groups most days.
Sure its hard to level, not everyone can be 50 in 3 weeks like in wow or lotro. but fighting at 20-40 is a blast, you make alot of friends bcause its slow leveling for everybody, thats one thing i loved about eq1, i hated the slow leveling but in the end you built friendships and reputations grinding out those levels and it was worth the trouble, you had a character that was you, not 5 level 60's you hopped around on because you can pl a char from 1-50 in a week.
Wow attracts the casual gamer, and they have worked to do that, that is fine and i dont think people who like and play vg really care, but vg can be played by the casual gamer too, vg has a much more robust low level comminity than any other game ive ever played that has been out so long. when games get some age on them and all the vets have friends and extra accounts to pl their alts the low level community dies. i havent really seen that with vg.
Anyways, the only thing else i have to say is give it a try, you might like it, i know im glad i checked it out again.
Anyhow glad your enjoying i
If the game interests you, try it. That's the only reasonable approach. Personally, I like it ... a lot.
I'm not having any crashing but i'm not playing more then a couple hours.
gaphics performance I'm finding to be better then eq2 on similar settings and the client uses much less memory now days then eq2. I play both games on pretty maxed settings. VG runs around 900mb - 1.2gb where eq2 runs around 1.4gb - 1.6gb. In fact I just upgraded my computer to 4gb to give eq2 more memory to work with as at 1.6 it would start swapping causing me hitching for a second or so. This was worst in neriak and qeynos harbor.
However generally the first time I go into a city or outpost with VG it does hitch although not as bad as when eq2 swaps but it is irritating. However it does clear up pretty quickly and after that it is pretty much gone. Similarly with going into buildings the first time a bit of hitching after that all smooth.
Animations and spell effects are better in eq2. Artwork is better in eq2. Graphics resolution and textures are much better in VG. Graphics performance is a bit better in VG. NPC interaction and environment is better in eq2. Combat system is better in VG. Crafting is better in VG. Quests are considerably better in eq2. UI polish is better in eq2.
Anyway thats all my opinion. I think the foundation of VG is considerably better then EQ2 but the content and polish are much poorer.
My system is high end with a quad core cpu, 2gb ram (now 4gb but not for these tests), dual raptor drives, and an nvidia 8800gtx.
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Ethion
"Im gonna agree with most of what you say except this paragraph about MAp Sys and ,Where to go..I always found plenty of quests for my level and they will point you to areas you can hunt in ...Finding places is to easy IMO in the quest journal go to locations bullet the location or npc you want and the compass will guide plus it will be highlighted on map..."
I wasnt talking about finding the places to kill stuff for quests or finding where to go when a quest sends you some where.
what i was talking about is grinding through levels solo by killing crap because i didnt know where any quests were my level, then finding a group of dwarves somewhere that offer a bunch of quests except now theyre grey to me. if an npc in a town or at my last quest place would have said het go look up in the northern hills theres some dorfs up there that need help it would have been nice.
And as far as the map goes it just sucks, its undefined and you cant scroll it around. it is really the worse excuse ive seen for a map in quite awhile. but those things dont wreck the game for me, they just piss me off
and if you dont bitch at these people constantly they wont do anything about it.
P.S and about performance, i run xp with a 2.6 amd dual core, 2 gigs of ram and an 8800 gs, i get around 55=60fps on medium high settings. towns still suck but everywhere else is really great, theres still a few glitches here and there in the graphics but nothing too bad. but if theres 20 or 30 people fighting together like at a raid i have to turn my graphics down, but ive done that in every game ive ever played,
I hear this often, so I'm gonna offer a suggestion here. At most main cities I've been to, there's a crafting advisor. Now, whether you choose to craft or not doesn't matter, but the crafting advisor sells 2 books for 0c. These books will give waypoints for city crafting locations as well as outpost crafting locations. While these crafting outposts do not all have quest npc's for the adventuring sphere, the majority of them do. I recommend that you get this book and then roam around to the different locations to find some areas you may have missed wandering aimlessly.