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SOE/Sigil's view on the alleged bugs in Vanguard

EiaeEiae Member Posts: 61
in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

"What you may consider defective content may actually be intentional or as properly functioning by another player. We cannot guarantee your perceptions of the product and cannot provide a refund of any kind because of that."

"Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee full operation or availability of 100% of the features inside the game and this is stated on the packaging and the Digital Download site as (I quote): "Game experience may change during online play."

 

So, no bugs at all in the game just game experience changing. What a relief, I thought I was being cheated.

Comments

  • SWGLoverSWGLover Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 539

     

    It saddens me that these replies would come from a company ( any company ) - they show  a dim view of customer service and a lack of respect for their customers.

    This attitude will haunt them in the future.

     

     

     

  • NooblordNooblord Member Posts: 202
    C'mon, you made that up! lol

    image .............image

  • Deathstrike2Deathstrike2 Member UncommonPosts: 1,777
    Originally posted by Eiae


    "What you may consider defective content may actually be intentional or as properly functioning by another player. We cannot guarantee your perceptions of the product and cannot provide a refund of any kind because of that."
    "Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee full operation or availability of 100% of the features inside the game and this is stated on the packaging and the Digital Download site as (I quote): "Game experience may change during online play."
     
    So, no bugs at all in the game just game experience changing. What a relief, I thought I was being cheated.




    Player to SOE/Sigil:

    "What I may consider a defective product may actually be different from the views of your company.  Because you cannot meet my expectations as a MMO player and a responsible consumer, I cannot subscribe to your products or provide you with funds of any kind.

    p.s.  In case you were wondering, I just set myself free."

     

     

  • 0k210k21 Member Posts: 866
    Cheers, I needed a good laugh but my Simpsons episodes haven't downloaded yet To be honest with you, I just simply won't touch this game not because of Sigil, because of SOE, no matter what excuses and lies to themselves they can give in gaming history SOE have always had a say in the games they publish with regards to development and release dates, if this were a game published by Microsoft, even those guys know how to publish and run a game properly, I might have actually tried it, but because of SOE I won't, they simply don't care about their customers, ages ago I remember cancelling Star Wars Galaxies (R.I.P the only MMORPG I was really a fanboi of pre-cu wise) I had to get the customer service folks rung up and had to get the entire account wiped completely so that the bloody credit card bill wouldn't keep coming, just because of things like this I won't touch the game, I honestly have nothing against the folks that would like to play the game but if they're actually willing to support and say "I like this game it's perfect and so are SOE" well you can expect to get a lot of quotes and rants from me speaking otherwise.



    I can honestly say that I feel sorry for the actually good developers in the company such as Raph Koster, they're going to have the games SOE made a failure hanging over their resumes and I just wouldn't be surprised if the poor sods would be out of work because of their reputation as devs, it's a damn shame because it means a lot of talent goes to waste really, the same goes for the devs who actually decide to stay as a ghost crew really.

    Quoting people doesn't make you clever, in fact, it makes you all the more stupid for not bothering to read the quotes you post in the first place.

  • SpectralHunterSpectralHunter Member UncommonPosts: 455
    Originally posted by Eiae


    "What you may consider defective content may actually be intentional or as properly functioning by another player. We cannot guarantee your perceptions of the product and cannot provide a refund of any kind because of that."
    "Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee full operation or availability of 100% of the features inside the game and this is stated on the packaging and the Digital Download site as (I quote): "Game experience may change during online play."
     
    So, no bugs at all in the game just game experience changing. What a relief, I thought I was being cheated.


    Good grief I hope those aren't actual responses.  It'd be better not responding at all...
  • godpuppetgodpuppet Member Posts: 1,416
    Originally posted by SWGLover


     
    It saddens me that these replies would come from a company ( any company ) - they show  a dim view of customer service and a lack of respect for their customers.
    This attitude will haunt them in the future.
    In almost 5 years, SoE attitude has always been this way and I have very little doubt this will change.

    ---
    image

  • ChessackChessack Member Posts: 978
    Someone needs to explain to them that "Game experience may change during play" does not mean the same thing as "Game features may not be available during play."



    "Experience may change" covers them for changing the game from one 100% working feature set to another. It does not cover them for the current experience, before or after a change, not working 100%.



    Not that I expect any game this size and scope to be 100% bug free, but I am sick to death of dev teams (not just SOE -- they all do it) hiding behind the "game experience may change during play" catchall to cover for their incompetence. "Game experience may change during play" means "rebalances" or "new/additional content, classes" etc. It does not mean "bugs."



    C
  • MX13MX13 Member Posts: 2,489

    Well, here's Sigil's attitude, from the mouth of Brad himself (note, these are not the entire quotes in order to save space):

    And I agree with you -- some of our biggest problems are LFG, performance, some PvP tweaks, and low server pop. We messed up, as I've said before, and were so worried that noob areas would be over crowded, that we should have launched with fewer anyway and people would have spread out naturally.

    No, I'm not in denial -- I read these posts here and elsewhere and see the issues. And I know the team is hard at work on these issues and doing the best that they can.

    I believe I said it needed 200k-300k to be successful, and that I hoped to see 500k after the game was out 1 year, which would make it very profitable. So far we are in the mid 150s which is less than I would have hoped, but still good and still growing.



    I have said we released 2-3 months early and that releasing near BC was a mistake, but there was nothing we could do about it. That doesn't mean we were perfect in our development -- we made mistakes -- I talked about in the NYT about how hard it was to manage and organize a team of 100 people when we were used to to EQ 1 (which had about 25 people). So yes, it was harder to schedule and remain as focused and efficient. We also had the switch from MSFT to SOE which slowed us down and caused us to start beta too early.



    We also made the mistake of releasing a little early in terms of tech, e.g. we had hoped that computers would be cheaper that could run Vanguard by the time we launched. Time will fix this, but it is hurting us short term. In 20/20 hindsight we probably should have gone a bit lower tech and made a smaller world. But we really felt strongly from the very beginning that part of immersiveness in next gen MMOG was being seamless where you could travel wherever you wanted to, fly anywhere, be able to load any object in the world anywhere in the world, etc. Again, I think longer term as tech is increasing so rapidly, a lot of these problems will go away and having a seamless world with no instancing, ships and flying mounts, etc. will pay off.



    I will apolgize for all of the above and the buck stops here. I won't, however, apologize for the team: they worked their asses off and continue to and truly believe in the game (as do I). That said, while I apologize for the mistakes, some of which we made and some of which were out of our hands, we also got the opportunity to make a very ambitious game, the game of our dreams, and were a start-up company that got a 30M+ budget, which is basically unheard of. So while VG does indeed have some issues, I know a lot of people are having fun with it, and a lot more will have fun with it in the future and call it a home. I am also proud to have been part of such an awesome team and to have been able to launch a second MMOG (not something a lot of people can say they have done). So, again, I do apologize for the shortcomings, but am also proud of the game and its potential, and am confident that while it is a successful game now (certainly not a WoW, but not a D&D online either) it will gain momentum as tech catches up, people tire of BC, etc. And also as we through both expansions and the live team add more really cool features to the game over the next year.



    Also things like teleporters, experience rates, better LFG tools, etc. are all being looked at and you will see changes soon. I don't have the details yet, but we are listening and the game will get better and the areas where we messed up (large world, but too hard to find a group, etc.) will be addressed.

    What are we going to do about it? Well, the team is continuing to crunch and kick ass and are quickly making up for what happened. We're killing bugs, tweaking content, adding polish, etc. And, at the same time, putting in new content as well. We're patching often and the game is getting better every day. That, combined with the hooks and planning we did early on, makes me really excited. I'm loving the game now, and I'm just as excited about the future. We have 5+ years planned out in terms of expansions, live updates, new game mechanics, etc. We'll be able to take advantage of new technology, implementing it relatively easily because of the way the game is architected.



    So that's it in a nutshell. A little frustrating short term, but the game is out, it continues to sell well, churn is very low, and the word continues to spread that the game is fun. Also, hardware is becoming cheaper and faster and as people upgrade their machines for Vanguard and other newer games either already out or on the horizon, the performance issues will go away. EQ 1 had a similar issue, but it paid off as well -- we were one of the first hardware only games (remember the Voodoo 1?). People needed to upgrade, but within 6 months or so after launch, Voodoo 2s were out, etc. and performance issues all but went away. In fact, performance past us up and we were able to create zones more detailed in our first expansion (Kunark) without any problems. This will happen with Vanguard as well.

    I could go on...

    I'm not excusing poor CS or responses, or even say I agree with all Brad has said here. I do believe they realize the game is flawed.

    The response you have there seem like the classic SOE response. Unfortunatly, since they are a Co-Pub, that will probably continue to be the case.

     

    I'll start my own SWG... with Black Jack... and Hookers!!!

    In fact, forget the SWG!!!!

    image
    image
    image

  • therain93therain93 Member UncommonPosts: 2,039
    Originally posted by Chessack

    Someone needs to explain to them that "Game experience may change during play" does not mean the same thing as "Game features may not be available during play."



    "Experience may change" covers them for changing the game from one 100% working feature set to another. It does not cover them for the current experience, before or after a change, not working 100%.



    Not that I expect any game this size and scope to be 100% bug free, but I am sick to death of dev teams (not just SOE -- they all do it) hiding behind the "game experience may change during play" catchall to cover for their incompetence. "Game experience may change during play" means "rebalances" or "new/additional content, classes" etc. It does not mean "bugs."



    C

     

    I wish people wouldn't make stuff up.   "Game experience may change during play" is in reference to the ESRB rating -- typically games get "E for everyone" or "T for Teen"; that's the rating while playing the game alone essentially.  What the publisher can't control is user contact that may be more mature when they go online, hence the disclaimer. It has nothing to do with giving license to the publisher to change the game.

    http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp

    Online Rating Notice

    Online games that include user-generated content (e.g., chat, maps, skins) carry the notice "Game Experience May Change During Online Play" to warn consumers that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB.



  • EiaeEiae Member Posts: 61
    Thanks for pointing that out, therain. I wasn't going further with this, but if the "experience may change" excuse they used only covers the ESRB, then they lied to me too. Maybe I should "bug" them a little more on this.
  • MossdabMossdab Member UncommonPosts: 13
    "Game experience may change during play" 

    Nice... about two days ago, decided to "kill" a huge number of players who traveled by teleports. 

    Wasn't a bug, was game experience change. Sure... my experience (xp) changed to down. 

    I just  want to say, I have made a big mistake to pay a 6 months subscription.
  • SionedSioned Member UncommonPosts: 135

    Looks like the Players of Vanguard don't have much SOE experience yet.. Let me give you a sentence you will all soon know and HATE. Its asymbol of the SOE Customer Service and it also shows how drunk devs can be from thei own product.

    This is working as intended !

    Players with SOE experience will remember this phrase too well i guess. For all the others get used to it, because that is how it is.

  • KariTRKariTR Member Posts: 375

    "What you may consider defective content may actually be intentional or as properly functioning by another player. We cannot guarantee your perceptions of the product and cannot provide a refund of any kind because of that."

    Two examples of that -

    Certain skills work on mobs in accordance with their description but work differently, or not at all, on player characters. I expect to see (and welcome) dual systems for PvE/PvP, however this issue has been reported by some players as a bug.

    Cant see the health of your enemy in PvP.  And nor should I! But yet again, this has been reported by players as a bug.

    Does that make Sigils statement any clearer now, or will you still insist on your preferred (mis)interpretation?

    The bottom line is Sigil have decided that part of the fun of gaming is to make discoveries for yourself; this includes determining how game systems works. Sure if they gave us the small print on everything it would make some people happy and it would sure reduce the false bug reporting. But, dare I say without offending anyone? they were looking to attract the more intelligent type of gamer, the type of gamer that becomes a game developer when they grow up (or chooses a 2nd career later in life).

  • EiaeEiae Member Posts: 61

    Oh dear. They have false bugs in the game too? How devious!

    "Hey, don't report your constant falling outside the game world as a bug, its a false bug, made intentionally so clever people can figure out how it is supposed to work!"

    Please...

  • KorususKorusus Member UncommonPosts: 831
    Heh... like another poster said "Game Experience May Change During Online Play" relates only the ESRB rating and has nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with not being able to control what the players say/do online.  That's almost as bad as using the "No MMORPG is ever finished" excuse for releasing early.



    Now if Sigil/SOE would put "Some Advertised Features May Not Actually Be In The Game" on the box, then they might have a point.

    ----------
    Life sucks, buy a helmet.

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