So because they ran out of money, the cost should shift to the player base as the next investor? I can understand some bugs, some level of unfinished product on release, but VG takes it to a whole new level. If they ever get this game in a semi finished state I might consider returning, but I am not going to pay to play a game that should still be in beta. I found myself so frustrated that I wasn't having any fun at all. Add to that a somewhat uninspiring, lackluster environment and it was easy to cancel my subscription. I guess it is up to each individual consumer if they want to finance the completion of this game. I know where I stand on this..
Don't be ridiculous. This game is no longer in a beta state. Yes, it was released before they wanted to release it and yes, it still has some bugs. But the biggest issue is pending content like boats, Tier 3 diplomacy guild houses etc. that are simply not in the game yet.
It's almost two months since release and the game is solid and in a good state. There have been a lot of subscribers recently.. a number of whom I know via my guild (transfers from EQ2 and WoW). None of those folks that have joined in the last couple of weeks have been complaining about the game or what remains of it's bugs.
Of course, some people will not like the game for one reason or another.... and therefore quit. However, I really think it's beyond the point of where bugs and stability should be the issue behind folks quitting. For example, I was a pre-order customer and the game crashed on me multiple times a day and I thought about stopping playing until it became more stable. Compare that to now, where I haven't crashed since the last patch.
I beg to differ, but we are all entitled to our opinions, including me. Unless major changes have happened since last week, I found this game in a far, far more incomplete state that any other game I have played in its infancy. The roll back where I lost an entire level I gained was one of the final, more frustrating incidents, but there were far more mundane performance and bug issues on a daily basis that served to frustrate.
Sounds like you are not having similiar experiences, good for you. I dont begrudge others having a good time nor do I take issue with others having a different opinion. However, there are alot of folks with similiar experiences as me, and that suggests there are lot of issues with this game still.
I wonder what people expected when they bought VG? Those that are crying that it is unfinished and such... did you read nothing about it before you purchased it?
Personally I don't find the game all that amazing. I grabbed a 10-day free trial and levelled to about 15 or 20 during that time, tried crafting, and did some diplomacy too. But... I saw no game-breaking bugs. The graphics were fine, combat was fine, I saw nothing there I had not seen in just about EVERY MMO I have played to date (which is quite a few starting with EQ1).
I wonder what exactly is "broken" about VG? They surely have some balancing issues... but if you did ANY reading then you know the game was designed for PvE so it WILL have balancing issues... heck even PvP games address balancing issues years into release. Sure some of the quests are broken, or mobs have wierd pathing... but again, I can name so many games that face those issues YEARS into release that it hardly warrants the tag of "broken". What breaks a game is when I log in and get kicked to desktop with a nice little "SB.exe" error notice. Then I try to log in again and I cannot due to an actually BROKEN log-in server.
If that is your experience in VG, then it is very different from my own.
The double XP weekends for adventureres only utterly finished the game for me. See, I was a dedicated crafter and at first it was great fun. As an armorsmith, I could make a full set of heavy armor. As long as I could level faster than the adventurers my stuff would be be as good or better than what they would get from drops. I really liked that. I also liked the ability to make armor with deifferent effets so it could be built ot optimize the playstyle of the folks who wore it. But the folks at Sigil decided that crafters were leveling too fast and "balanced" crafter XP. When that happened, I realized that I would have to really grind to keep up with my market. However, grinding like that is not any fun at all, and I was falling behind the adventurers who were getting plenty of high level drops. ("rare" adventuring droips sure happen a heckuva lot more than "rare" crafting recipes) When the first double XP for kills weekend was announced, it hit me pretty much like a kick in the groin. After all, the reason I paid my 65 bucks (game + month) was to be a fricken crafter. I just wanted to make armor that folks would want to use. Sigil just told the crafters that the crafting system was no longer of any importance as the adventurers would be double XPed way beyond the ability of crafters to make them decent gear. I really wanted VG to be the new game for me, but the only way I could come back would be when the leveling rates of crafters and adventurers are more on par (actually crafters need to level slightly faster simply so they can make the gear the adventurers will demand). In addition, since the economy will be utterly screwed over for crafters on existing servers, there would need to be new servers opened for a fresh start. Given the sort of difficulties VG is facing, I don't see that happening. Good luck to y'all
Hell VG needs to double exp period in order to have any chance of recovery. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I have to agree wholeheartedly with Daedalus. I once had the total nerve to post a thread here about why i dislike this game, goin into detail about how it isn't finished and that i didn't understand why people would play it as is. To my amazement i got a string of replies all to the effect of "Get over it, all games suck when they first come out. Just play through it" or "Yes this game runs like crap, but ooooooohh just look at the pretty environments!" . Such a crock. If a company does not have the integrity to release a game in a finished state, then they don't deserve my money (or anyone else's in my opinion). But again, as Daedalus so eloquently pointed out - i guess alot of people are so used to getting dicked in the ass by these games that they now come to not only anticipate it, but expect it!
I'm paying a monthly fee. I demand an unfinished game.
I wonder what people expected when they bought VG? Those that are crying that it is unfinished and such... did you read nothing about it before you purchased it? Personally I don't find the game all that amazing. I grabbed a 10-day free trial and levelled to about 15 or 20 during that time, tried crafting, and did some diplomacy too. But... I saw no game-breaking bugs. The graphics were fine, combat was fine, I saw nothing there I had not seen in just about EVERY MMO I have played to date (which is quite a few starting with EQ1). I wonder what exactly is "broken" about VG? They surely have some balancing issues... but if you did ANY reading then you know the game was designed for PvE so it WILL have balancing issues... heck even PvP games address balancing issues years into release. Sure some of the quests are broken, or mobs have wierd pathing... but again, I can name so many games that face those issues YEARS into release that it hardly warrants the tag of "broken". What breaks a game is when I log in and get kicked to desktop with a nice little "SB.exe" error notice. Then I try to log in again and I cannot due to an actually BROKEN log-in server. If that is your experience in VG, then it is very different from my own.
Excellent post. But no one will agree with you i guess. Even a fucking solo console game have bugs.
Okay so we're just running over the same territory over and over again with this. Some of us are happy with the game as it is, some of us are not. Time will tell what the ultimate fate of this game will be. We're just beating a dead horse here.
The double XP weekends for adventureres only utterly finished the game for me. See, I was a dedicated crafter and at first it was great fun. As an armorsmith, I could make a full set of heavy armor. As long as I could level faster than the adventurers my stuff would be be as good or better than what they would get from drops. I really liked that. I also liked the ability to make armor with deifferent effets so it could be built ot optimize the playstyle of the folks who wore it. But the folks at Sigil decided that crafters were leveling too fast and "balanced" crafter XP. When that happened, I realized that I would have to really grind to keep up with my market. However, grinding like that is not any fun at all, and I was falling behind the adventurers who were getting plenty of high level drops. ("rare" adventuring droips sure happen a heckuva lot more than "rare" crafting recipes) When the first double XP for kills weekend was announced, it hit me pretty much like a kick in the groin. After all, the reason I paid my 65 bucks (game + month) was to be a fricken crafter. I just wanted to make armor that folks would want to use. Sigil just told the crafters that the crafting system was no longer of any importance as the adventurers would be double XPed way beyond the ability of crafters to make them decent gear. I really wanted VG to be the new game for me, but the only way I could come back would be when the leveling rates of crafters and adventurers are more on par (actually crafters need to level slightly faster simply so they can make the gear the adventurers will demand). In addition, since the economy will be utterly screwed over for crafters on existing servers, there would need to be new servers opened for a fresh start. Given the sort of difficulties VG is facing, I don't see that happening. Good luck to y'all
If that is all it took for you to leave the game then you wouldn't have been playing long anyways. I would suggest staying away from any mmo launch for that matter...wait a few months after the launch of a mmo as ya seem a bit on the sensitive side. There is always lots of xp tweaking first few months after launch. Online fantasy games always cater to the adventure side. That's where the majority of the player base is. I would expect to see a crafting oriented event here soon enough though.
Vanguard is pulling through it's " difficulties " fine btw.
Adventure side always out levels the craft side of any game with a strong crafting element. Is this the first mmorpg launch you have played in?
People took these double xp weekends way too seriously.
They're rewards for all the hassles the playerbase is having to deal with with the game.
In WoW, for the first few months they gave free full rested xp to every server several times to make up for constant down-time and server instability and no one bitched about it then. Of course, the Wow playerbase isn't the hardcore VG playerbase which apparantly thinks that you should never ever gain experience ever. There were seriously people griping about wanting to stop gaining xp altogether...to have it toggleable. What kind of mental patients are we dealing with here? I can understand wanting the grind to be severe...but come on...a weekend of double experience now and then isn't going to hurt ANYONE.
On the bright side, I'm pretty sure they said they were going to have crafting double xp weekends too.
You kinda have a good point but then again , no
yea WoW had their full rested xp etc. for server instability , but hey Lineage I or II never had any of thoose things , and the game still has around 14 million subscribers worldwide.
Double XP weekend for what , a little downtime ? , thats what to be expected from a new game, but hell no, little cry babies have to bitch and whine so some companies eventually get tired of it like a mom or dad would and give the child what he/she wants, in this case, double XP weekend.
This is not mounted on you but people in general bitching over instability
If that is all it took for you to leave the game then you wouldn't have been playing long anyways. I would suggest staying away from any mmo launch for that matter...wait a few months after the launch of a mmo as ya seem a bit on the sensitive side. There is always lots of xp tweaking first few months after launch. Online fantasy games always cater to the adventure side. That's where the majority of the player base is. I would expect to see a crafting oriented event here soon enough though. Vanguard is pulling through it's " difficulties " fine btw. Adventure side always out levels the craft side of any game with a strong crafting element. Is this the first mmorpg launch you have played in?
Don't like the problems folks point out with something you have invested time and money in? Obviously the problem is the complainer, not what they are complaining about. Then add in some phony justification such as "Adventurers always outlevel crafters". Sorry, but when adventurerers are flooding the market with rare drops and crafters are grinding through a ten level tier without getting a "rare" upgrade recipe because it is depending on the RNG rather than any sort of actions taken by the player, that is not a matter of XP "tweaking". As I said way back when, the double XP weekends were the last straw, not the sole reason.
As to mmorpg launches...
Horizons at launch. Highest level spellcrafter on the server when I just stopped logging on. Yes the adventurers outleveled me. But unlike VG, the market for my goods there was not limited to adventurers 10-15 levels below my tradeskill level. In fact three different guilds were helping me get my tradeskill gear twinked so I could make them spells 10 levels above my tradeskill level. Nice things in that tradeskill system, but having to spend 8 hours gathering(and dodging mobs 60 levels higher than my adventuring level) for a 5 minute carfting spree was a killer.
SWG at launch. Did the tradeskill thing there, some of it was fun, mostly it was not. Having to travel and getting back to the game after a couple of weeks and finding all my harvesters gone was a prime example of "not fun". It seems that you had to log in on a regular schedule and maintain your harvesters.
EQ2 at launch. Oh yes I played tradeskills and gathering. The tradeskill grind was pretty mind numbing, but I stuck with it until my guild leader picked the same tradeskill combo I had and used a "thumper" to powerbot his tradekill leveling pretty much 24/7. At that point I decided I had had enough trying to "play" that game. If the game is not rewarding your efforts, if a fricken "thumper" can play the game better (longer). then why bother?
And Sigil has made me ask "Why bother" when it comes to VG?
I don't know of any crafting bots in the game (and I have not looked for any), but the way Sigil has set up the game mechanics make things feel just as unfair as the thumper in EQ2. And before any poohead can make some crack about life not being fair, I would remind you that we are talking about a GAME. Unlike life, we have a choice when it comes to playing games.
You want to know some things that would help things out a bit more?
Triple or quintuple the costs of equipping gear beyond your level. Folks should not be able to fully gear up in stuff that s +10 levels. Make so equipping even a single item at +5 levels is ggoing to eat up a major amount of your expertise. Faster leveling and the ability to equip gear way beyond level have a significant combined negative effect on crafting
Alternatively, let crafters make pristine gear that is five level above their crafting level. (Not really what I would call a good solution, but it is "balanced" without "nerfing" the adventurers.
Some crafters think the answer is item decay. Well rather than decay, just let items break outright. And that goes for even the most powerful ultra rare items that were made by the gawds themselves. And let crafters learn how to repair those broken items (and only crafters - no NPC repairs for anything other than stuff sold by NPCs). But let the crafters make and sell repair kits so the adventurers will not have to spend a lot of time hunting for someone who can repair their broken axe.
And eliminate recipe "drops" from workorder turn ins. Let the trainers drop clues (give quests) that will lead the deidcated crafter to new recipes. The quests should be appropriate to the crafter's skill, they can involve travel, but they should not in general require any adventuring. It might take six hours of play to get through a quest for a new recipe upgrade, but it should not require 7+levels of grinding in the hope that the RNG will smile upon you.
Comments
Don't be ridiculous. This game is no longer in a beta state. Yes, it was released before they wanted to release it and yes, it still has some bugs. But the biggest issue is pending content like boats, Tier 3 diplomacy guild houses etc. that are simply not in the game yet.
It's almost two months since release and the game is solid and in a good state. There have been a lot of subscribers recently.. a number of whom I know via my guild (transfers from EQ2 and WoW). None of those folks that have joined in the last couple of weeks have been complaining about the game or what remains of it's bugs.
Of course, some people will not like the game for one reason or another.... and therefore quit. However, I really think it's beyond the point of where bugs and stability should be the issue behind folks quitting. For example, I was a pre-order customer and the game crashed on me multiple times a day and I thought about stopping playing until it became more stable. Compare that to now, where I haven't crashed since the last patch.
I beg to differ, but we are all entitled to our opinions, including me. Unless major changes have happened since last week, I found this game in a far, far more incomplete state that any other game I have played in its infancy. The roll back where I lost an entire level I gained was one of the final, more frustrating incidents, but there were far more mundane performance and bug issues on a daily basis that served to frustrate.
Sounds like you are not having similiar experiences, good for you. I dont begrudge others having a good time nor do I take issue with others having a different opinion. However, there are alot of folks with similiar experiences as me, and that suggests there are lot of issues with this game still.
I wonder what people expected when they bought VG? Those that are crying that it is unfinished and such... did you read nothing about it before you purchased it?
Personally I don't find the game all that amazing. I grabbed a 10-day free trial and levelled to about 15 or 20 during that time, tried crafting, and did some diplomacy too. But... I saw no game-breaking bugs. The graphics were fine, combat was fine, I saw nothing there I had not seen in just about EVERY MMO I have played to date (which is quite a few starting with EQ1).
I wonder what exactly is "broken" about VG? They surely have some balancing issues... but if you did ANY reading then you know the game was designed for PvE so it WILL have balancing issues... heck even PvP games address balancing issues years into release. Sure some of the quests are broken, or mobs have wierd pathing... but again, I can name so many games that face those issues YEARS into release that it hardly warrants the tag of "broken". What breaks a game is when I log in and get kicked to desktop with a nice little "SB.exe" error notice. Then I try to log in again and I cannot due to an actually BROKEN log-in server.
If that is your experience in VG, then it is very different from my own.
eqnext.wikia.com
eqnext.wikia.com
If that is all it took for you to leave the game then you wouldn't have been playing long anyways. I would suggest staying away from any mmo launch for that matter...wait a few months after the launch of a mmo as ya seem a bit on the sensitive side. There is always lots of xp tweaking first few months after launch. Online fantasy games always cater to the adventure side. That's where the majority of the player base is. I would expect to see a crafting oriented event here soon enough though.
Vanguard is pulling through it's " difficulties " fine btw.
Adventure side always out levels the craft side of any game with a strong crafting element. Is this the first mmorpg launch you have played in?
yea WoW had their full rested xp etc. for server instability , but hey Lineage I or II never had any of thoose things , and the game still has around 14 million subscribers worldwide.
Double XP weekend for what , a little downtime ? , thats what to be expected from a new game, but hell no, little cry babies have to bitch and whine so some companies eventually get tired of it like a mom or dad would and give the child what he/she wants, in this case, double XP weekend.
This is not mounted on you but people in general bitching over instability
List of SOE lies
Don't like the problems folks point out with something you have invested time and money in? Obviously the problem is the complainer, not what they are complaining about. Then add in some phony justification such as "Adventurers always outlevel crafters". Sorry, but when adventurerers are flooding the market with rare drops and crafters are grinding through a ten level tier without getting a "rare" upgrade recipe because it is depending on the RNG rather than any sort of actions taken by the player, that is not a matter of XP "tweaking". As I said way back when, the double XP weekends were the last straw, not the sole reason.
As to mmorpg launches...
Horizons at launch. Highest level spellcrafter on the server when I just stopped logging on. Yes the adventurers outleveled me. But unlike VG, the market for my goods there was not limited to adventurers 10-15 levels below my tradeskill level. In fact three different guilds were helping me get my tradeskill gear twinked so I could make them spells 10 levels above my tradeskill level. Nice things in that tradeskill system, but having to spend 8 hours gathering(and dodging mobs 60 levels higher than my adventuring level) for a 5 minute carfting spree was a killer.
SWG at launch. Did the tradeskill thing there, some of it was fun, mostly it was not. Having to travel and getting back to the game after a couple of weeks and finding all my harvesters gone was a prime example of "not fun". It seems that you had to log in on a regular schedule and maintain your harvesters.
EQ2 at launch. Oh yes I played tradeskills and gathering. The tradeskill grind was pretty mind numbing, but I stuck with it until my guild leader picked the same tradeskill combo I had and used a "thumper" to powerbot his tradekill leveling pretty much 24/7. At that point I decided I had had enough trying to "play" that game. If the game is not rewarding your efforts, if a fricken "thumper" can play the game better (longer). then why bother?
And Sigil has made me ask "Why bother" when it comes to VG?
I don't know of any crafting bots in the game (and I have not looked for any), but the way Sigil has set up the game mechanics make things feel just as unfair as the thumper in EQ2. And before any poohead can make some crack about life not being fair, I would remind you that we are talking about a GAME. Unlike life, we have a choice when it comes to playing games.
You want to know some things that would help things out a bit more?