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I think you people aren't giving this game a chance
pencilrick
Member Posts: 1,550
And sadly, I have to include myself in this accusation. Yes, I have had the "complainer hat" on for a very long time, but now, alas, I am taking it off and laying it down humbly upon my desk. It is time to give Vanguard its due.
Firstly, many fans are still making posts that say this game has come a long way. And who am I (or you) to question them? They wouldn't pull themselves away from their gaming time to write empty posts. Indeed, there must be some bit of truth to their claims.
Second, McQuaid and Butler themselves designed this game, and who better could have added their creative talents?
Third, if parts of the game seem empty, well, perhaps that's because you and I are not in it. Let us join, sign up, and log on this weekend and see for ourselves if other folks are around. My bet is that we bump into one another and probably spend the first five minutes laughing away our prior concerns about this game called Vanguard.
C'mon now. Take off your "complainer hats" and resub to "The Vision." What's $15? You spend more than that on a blind date.
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except on a blind date u actually have a chance @ getting some puddin
_The Sauce Man
They had A chance. They blew it big time. Without appology they will NEVER get another chance me.
I don't care if the game has come a long way. In fact, if all other MMORPGs were gone tommorrow and the only choice was Vangaurd POS, I would not play. They had their chance and they blew it.
Who could they have added to the team? The foundation was screwed up by McQuaid, the vision and others. With a such a horrible foundation, add new people to build on top of it doesn't make sense. Remove the foundation and start from square one with out "The Visionary" McQuaid. They had their chance and they blew it.
I won't put any money into this game. I don't believe in that type of reward and their failure should lead to the type of success they are experiencing right now. If the game was good for the marketplace, it would have reaped the rewards without your help. They had their chance and they blew it.
Many people are seeing that throwing money at games just because isn't good for the industry. Let bad games loose money and go away. Let it server as a major warning to developers, better use that one chance you have well or you will blow it.
I'll give it a chance - maybe - after their trial is out. I think many will do so just out of curiosity.
I gave it a chance, I loved it. It had amazing potential, but as soon as Sony took over it went down hill. The patches came slower and slower. Features like Equipment Expertise were removed simply because Sony claimed they were "complicated" (this removed further customization). Diplomacy was changed from level 1-500 to 1-50 to make it "easier to understand" It didn't really effect anything, just show the direction the game was going in. Exp on mobs was increased, death penalty decreased, bind on pickup added. The game was becoming a WoW clone.
http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=21665
After I read that, I uninstalled forever.
Darkfall Travelogues!
The vision died when Brad left, just like it did when he left EQ. The future of this game is in new hands and that is my concern. Who cares about $15 bucks a month when compared to the time spent invested in creating a character and community. There has to be a future and what concerns me most is what happens when SOE runs out of Sigil content to finish/recycle? The potential is there and thats why I keep watching and checking things out. So far the game is just kind of ok compared to what it was.
I however am not going to spend $15 to try to save a game. That is what the devs are being paid to do and if they do it well enough the game will save itself.
Indeed there are a number of changes for the better in the game, but not enough given the timespan.
Up until Feb, I had been with the game since the start of beta 3. I don't necessarily blame the current Vanguard devs completely for the lack of momentum in getting the game on track. Personally I think SOE should have given more resources to the devs, including manpower. But I can understand SOE holding back, wanting to see what the devs could come up with in say...12 months.
With regards to the work that the devs themselves have done, like I said, it's taking too long to turn the game around in my mind. Wrong decisions are being made (again, my own opinion) which will only serve to set the game development time back even further. I mean, who honestly thinks that one new central starting location is going to pull the masses back to the game? The fact is it won't. Forcing people to start in the same zone is a tool to promote grouping. But you can't promote grouping if no one is actually using that zone because there are no new players entering the game!
Flying mounts? Well done devs. Its a shame it couldn't have been implemented sooner given that ridable griffons were ridable at launch day. Albeit they required tweaking.
New areas? Well I had a little flutter in APW, and apart from the odd "horizontal saw" trap its the usual "bread and butter" raid zone that you find in MMO's, just with more lag. Still, I found it enjoyable for a few times I went in there.
The game desperately needs "fluff" to make it look and feel more like a persistent world. Sadly, a lot of even the simplest suggestions made on the forums fall into the "nice, thanks, we'll put it on a VERY big list of things to look at in say...2012".
As for performance, yes its improved. Strangely enough though, it is only now, after all this time, that the devs have FINALLY realised that the player models are the things causing major performance drop. I mean, come on guys, the forums were telling you this immediately after launch!
Crafting is different and rich in content but takes way too long. This is because the devs wanted it to be comparable to combat. Which whilst both require an amount of effort (and rightly so) crafting takes approximately 5 x as long to make anything as it would take you to kill anything. Thus making it seem a bigger grind than questing / combat.
As for Diplomacy, I had high hopes for it. Sadly, like everything else, its on the "back burner" till they get combat / questing / performance sorted out. Another facet of the game going to waste due to lack of management skills of certain well-known names at the start of the games development.
In short......I'm sure that Vanguard may appeal to those who've never played it, but theres too many things on that "back burner" for my liking. And until things show any sign of changing in that respect, I'll be watching from the side lines. And the only way the dev team can "catch up" is by having more resources and manpower at their disposal. Which is something that SOE are obviously not willing to give to the devs.
Sadly, Brad Mcquaids legacy to Vanguard is his lack of management skills during the games development. The guy has a great imagination. But he should never have been CEO in my opinion. Lead Designer?: Yes. The guy who decides what is done and when it gets done?: No.
Top 10 Most Misused Words in MMO's
A lot of the ones who said the game has come a long way, or is better, are the same folks who said it was fine at launch to begin with. They've always claimed to have good frame rates, experience no bugs, and have always believed the populations were fine.
So there's no objectivity there. It's difficult to believe a person who yells they receive 60+ FPS, yet every other patch claim miraculous performance increases and bug fixes.
Worst of all, who's ever to believe the worst is over so long the developer's attention remains on performance and bug fixes above all? It's a good course of action, but it also means there's still a lot of performance problems and bugs out there, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.
So personal my stance has aways been, give the team the year or two more they need to create an MMO that can last as long as UO or EQ1. Why rush it?
At the very least I wouldn't encourage folks en masse to give the game a chance until free trials are out. Otherwise I feel like I'm suggesting a bad financial decision more than anything else.
I have a station pass and despite defending this thing many times, trying to keep focused on some cloudy "vision" out there, it's the only one I don't ever log into every so often. GU3 and GU4 completely gutted and destroyed the game. I'd rather have the bugs back than have some soulless, clone-filled pile of crap like it is now.
Bite me, Turbine.
I've given it a couple fair shakes. Character customization is still sub-par and reminiscent of a tech school project. Not sure if they still have the issues with names floating over PC/NPC's heads all buggered up?
PFFT i gave this game the best damn chance it deserved!!!
I was one of the retards that bought the game at launch!! I was in the closed beta as well.
"Negaholics are people who become addicted to negativity and self-doubt, they find fault in most things and never seem to be satisfied."
^MMORPG.com
I quit after GU 4 went online. In its current state it is worst balanced game I have ever played, but it takes few weeks to experience it. But even more important is that developers are fully committed to turn Vanguard into one of the most casual mmorpgs on the market. They already lowered the difficulty to ridiculous level, stripping this game from any real challenge. And no flying/racial mounts or helms will make up for that.
This game is definitely eWoWing with every so called "game update"... It used to be most sophisticated and complex title on the market (although technically it was piece of lagging crap). Now it looks opposite: performance improved drastically, but the gameplay itself deteriorated to “just another WoW clone”.
YOU PEOPLE!? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU PEOPLE!?
I never intended to play Vangaurd, never will either, but I just wanted to say that this is what happens when you have a crappy launch. Even if the game is the best on the market at the time, if you have a bad launch, the game will never be as successful as it should have been. I hope other MMOs that are going to be released in the future learn their lessons, WAR for example pushed it's launch bad several months just so it will have a clean launch and hopefully a complete product and not a bunch of promises of what it could be or will be.
I Reject your Reality and Substitute it with My Own!
The game lags for me. I don't like laggy games. I get maybe 40 fps which isn't so bad, but then it is not a consistent 40. It goes up and down radically, especially when I turn around, sometimes dropping to single digits. That isn't fun for me.
Also, the pauses at the chunk lines is annoying. It's even immersion breaking.
Better wait till the trial is out and let potential subscribers build up their own opinion.
I was paying VG almost one year, even tho often I didnt feel like playing, and WAS my investment into hope and change. Now I have certain demands before I play again. First, a return of a really good character customization, second a certain overhaul of the many sterile quests with more lore and "feeling" and finally a more animated world, not those glued to the ground plastic world. Sounds like much, ya, but I already gave them 1 year money for mere belief and no its their turn to make something of it.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Had a chuckle reading that thread again after all this time. Oh the trouble it unleashed! I think it may have been the last time PhaThom ever showed his face in the forums.
For the OP - I wish u well in VG, theres a lot to enjoy. But i definitely gave the game a chance and after 14 months decided my coin was better spent elsewhere.
<snip> I've changed my mind...ignore my post
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Currently Playing: LOTRO; DDO
Played: AC2, AO, Auto Assault, CoX, DAoC, DDO, Earth&Beyond, EQ1, EQ2, EVE, Fallen Earth, Jumpgate, Roma Victor, Second Life, SWG, V:SoH, WoW, World War II Online.
Games I'm watching: Infinity: The Quest for Earth, Force of Arms.
Find the Truth: http://www.factcheck.org/
SOE has no vision that I want to be a part of. Their vision is milking customers for all their worth while they throw out meager helpings to their "fans". Sorry, after they destroyed EQ, then failed miserably on SWG, then created this soulless EQ2 I just don't see any reason why I would give SOE any more chances. There is a reason why SOE subscriptions are at an all time low, despite having 4 or 5 MMOs in their grasp.
I've never understood how people take a game so personally. So what if it had a bad launch if it's a great game now? Oh well.
The original concept behind the game is brilliant in my opinion, but the Sigil folks couldn't deliver on it technically. With Sony horsepower behind it now, the improvements have been tremendous both performance-wise and bug-fixing-wise. It's nice to see significant investment in the game. It's also nice that Sony has been able to get to the bottom of the game-breaking bugs and performance issues and get them resolved.
The people fixing this game are still the same exact staff that was on the Sigil team, just less of them. SOE didn't really do anything to speed that along.
The "investment" that you refer to from SOE was cutting the staff by about 80%, taking the best talent that was left from the game and moving them to a new project and putting a lead dev in charge that lies to the customers and has a problem discussing things with his customers.
I think the original vision was excellent, but that isn't the vision of the game anymore. The game is decent, but it really needs a future to be worth investing time in playing and that future is the biggest question mark on the game.
Sigil had ONE QA person. I am pretty sure that SOE has more than that working on the project now.
I dont seem to recall these developers as the original crew; and these are just the ones they allow to post. I am not a developer groupie so I am not posative, so correct me if I am wrong.
Hobart - http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/user/profile.m?user_id=39588
Talisker - http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/user/profile.m?user_id=47531
Jansen - http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/user/profile.m?user_id=32590
I think Silius does a pretty good job communicating with the community. A game forum is a pretty tough crowd. He certainly makes the effortl; I dont see them lying and they are not just sweeping things under the rug.
I think the original vision was flawed - it was a pipe dream Brad had. SOE has done an excellent job stabilizing the game. I would like to see a new vision, but until they deem the game pretty much bug free and optimized I dont see them announcing a new vision.
Indeed.
I never give that game a chance. Core design issue. Best groupers are peoples who do a little of everything, aka not groupers. This is NOT acceptable. I am angry just thinking about the conclusion before even starting the journey, this is definitely bad in entertainment! Losers would try to change me, winners will change!
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
Vanguard is alright in that linear rpg style that it is. Sort of like balders gate and that style of play. It's just that.. killing mobs to get the better piece of equipment to be able to kill mobs so that I could farm that better piece of equipment.. thats just dull for me and many other players.
Also I resubscribed to it for a month not long ago.. and most of the buggy behavior that annoyed me to the point of making me leave back when it released were still there. So I left again.
Same here.
I'll give Vanguard a second look once a free trial is released, just to see how things have changed since I last played the game. Before then, I'm not all that inclined to play it. And it's nothing personal, either. I'm just busy dividing my time between CoH/CoV and LOTR and can't squeeze in another sub, so I'll just wait until the trial comes out.