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You really need to give Vanguard a try !
Arawon
Member Posts: 1,108
I was a VG beta tester and stayed for three months after launch before leaving in frustration. Looking for a game ,I returned....and fell in love. Yep the i'm going to be here a long time kind. Great graphics....deep crafting.....housing you can build .....deep xping...mounts...huge world...ship building ...great community (intelligent..caring)...minimal bugs etc etc. 14 day free trial so no risk to see what you see.Try it.After searching for sooooo long..I just had to pass this along to fellow game questers.See you in the game.
Comments
thanks, I needed a good laugh.
I played VG at launch. It really is not a bad game at all, but I had nobody to play it with so I quit. Any expansions planned at all?
Glad you found a game you enjoy.
For me VG was kind of a bust in that the flaws in the game overshadowed the fun part of the game. The choppy performance every time you went through a chunk i believe they call it was the real game killer for me. The see through barriers at the edge of the zones were a bad idea and took away from the feeling that it was an open world to explore. The diplomacy card game was hard to understand and really not all that fun once I did get into it. The community was lacking to say the least and the groups I did end up getting in reminded me of a bad WOW pug. The whole thing felt a lot like a slow choppy buggy version of EQ2 but that was just my take on it.
This game lost my interest in the first 2 weeks that I played it. You always hear on here that people have no right to review a game that they have only played a short time but I disagree. Game developers should wow you right in the door. You should not have to play for weeks to finally get to the fun part of a game, it should be built to be enjoyable from day 1. Think about how you would feel if you went to a movie and the first hour was boring as hell then it finally got good near the end. You would lose a lot of your target market before it ever got good and that is what happens when games are poorly designed.
There should always be anticipation of what is to come and a strong desire to improve your toon. VG just felt like a series of tasks all of which were as bland and repetitive as the first. That coupled witht the technical flaws make this an experience I have no desire to repeat. Once again glad you are having fun and hope you continue to do so.
1
On the issue of "chunks" ...my experience is...they are about 90% gone.Game has a Christmas celebration going on now(called Glorian). Christmas trees with free presents for players and a free flying mount...rudolph the red nose reindeer(who I suspect will be around for a while before it flys back to the North Pole).So...great time for a newb to see/explore).
SoE = No.
--------
"Chemistry: 'We do stuff in lab that would be a felony in your garage.'"
The most awesomest after school special T-shirt:
Front: UNO Chemistry Club
Back: /\OH --> Bad Decisions
I played VG several times on and off since Beta. It's really a good game -- one of the best PvE games IMO. However, I left recently when the lead dev made it clear that the game was changing to be less solo friendly. I don't mind grouping every now and again, but I'm a solo player at heart and if the game isn't going to be friendly towards my playstyle, I'd be better served moving on instead of getting frustrated and angry about it.
Anywho, have fun in VG.
LMAO.. man VG is DEAD. You find you feel like your the only one in the game. You see chat ..little .. but there is NO ONE is site..
Whoa, quite a hate. Everyone who follows my postings knows I am a very sceptical gamer. And yet, VG does have appeal. Especially after wasting time in craploads like AoC or WAR - and even LOTRO, as good as it is - it shows me the qualities VG has and so far few other MMOs have. Like open world, many classes and races which really play different. It sure isnt for everyone, but it still has qualities other MMOs lack, so I dont understand why bash someone who has a good time in it.
And sorry but hating or loving a game because of the company is just plain dumb.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Are you insane?
actually i tried it and it does have some nice features. i thought it had better character development than lotro
and didn't seem as grindy. i dont hate the game but i do hate the company. i simply cannot play a soe game because i know 6 months down the road they will erase my work/add rmt.
The OP paints a VERY pretty picture of Vanguard when the truth is that it is essentially dead, new content is slow, bugs are still there, and of yeah, nobody plays it.
Don't waste your time. If you enjoy paying to play a beta that probably isn't going to ever leave beta stage, Vanguard is the game for you.
Tecmo Bowl.
There are no expansions planned for VG, and very little staff still working with it. It basically seems to be just circling the drain or on life support (take your pick) its certainly not growing or gonna get much love anytime soon.
My guess is the Op is one of the few remaining VG devs or a SOE employee just trying to drum up some interest, of course its possible the OP's one of the hardcore VG fanbois that used to tell everyone/anyone that had problems with VG that it was because we had $500 computers, and that the game didn't need players like us. (dispite the fact our computers did indeed meet and exceed the recomended system reqs.)
I have some friends playing and enjoying Vanguard. So its probably a good game.
But to me SOE equals a big "Not play this game". I don't trust that company and I won't put effort and time into a game run by that company. I played and loved Star Wars Galaxies, and they took it all away. They did not just ruin the game. They ruined my character ( imagedesigner & Tailor ), my ingame business as an imagedesigner & tailor, they ruined our town, our guild, the community and made a lovely game, probably the best ever, a dead horse. And the way Smed talks about SWG now, and even dare use words as "when to sunset" that game tells me that he and they don't care at all about players. For them its just a product, a box, a dead thing. For us, players its our time, dedication, love - you name it. I am not playing a SOE game ever again. SWG and what SOE did to that game sealed that option forever.
BlueShadow
Lolzorz, sonies pays more people to praase zee game then devlp it!
Which game out of Age of Conan and Vanguard have the best graphics?
Every time someone comes on and says "I like Vanguard" players who havent played since beta express their comments. Its akin to someone coming on and complaining that they dont like windows for work groups because its buggy so dont buy vista....the difference is that great.
I would agree that population issues are a problem. I wish they would open up some of the content to solo or two man teams.
Its a DIKU MMO that wishes it was EvE Online but can't figure out its item grind/static content can never let it be that way.
At least WoW is mostly honest about what its trying to do. Vangaurd is just lying to itself. Add in the vanboi elitists that used to sprinkle their love acorss the inter webs and well you have haters and people like me who have little respect for what it tries to do.
Too bad some of the class stuff is actually nice and interesintg. But come on. This isn't UO or EvE, its a DIKU MMO. All the stuff shoehorned into it that the elitists say make it so superior is actually just crap design that conflicts with the rest of the game and most people know it on some level. They hate the people who push it because WoW basically got rid of the charade that had been lingering around. Even people who don't really care to analyze it know that Vanguard is basically trying to re-start the chrade. You want to stuff VG says makes so amazing ans singular go play Wurm Online. VG just pretends its like that game and then slaps you back into the grindy/tiered/tied down content of the DIKU MMO.
What I am saying here is that the premise of VG is a farce so it evokes scorn. Add in the old school EQ elitism and it turn to down right hate. Notice that Eve and other games like Ryzom do not evoke that kind of hate and scorn. Because people don't see it as a farce. They may not like the games or say that they will never be hugely successful but they do not get the instant Boo that VG does.
VG is a poser and what you see is the reaction many people have when they see a poser. Is it perhaps pointless vehemance at this time, yeah probably. Then add in the SOE hatred to up the volume some too. And some of those guys are basically nuts. I mean they probably build shrines to the death of SOE and smedley filled with Voodoo dolls with pins in them. They are far to obessessed to care how dumb it all is.
Anyway there is some point to all the bitterness.
Why do you think Eve has time base skilling? It is so that you simply cannot get into the DIKU mindset. Many people are so conditioned by these tiered advancement/progression games that they hate Eve solely because it forbids you from doing that. Eve forces you to play the game with your game as your guy exists and as the world exists. UO and SWG had use based skilling and even that turned people into progresson junkies. That is not VG. VG is not a world. Its a progression game that pretends its a world. They don't even offer a comrpromise between features that are at odds like WoW. They just say everything will work together perfectly fine just like in the good old days (except they never did in the good old days).
EQ was the way it was because it was based on a DIKU MUD and almost all MUDs bought in Bartles BS about creating virtual worlds. But the fact is that first MUDs that used the DIKU code set and created the DIKU genre that EQ brought into the MMO world they created a paradigm that is actually directly contrary to Bartle. They were the first steps in proving that Bartles notions are just not universally applicable. Boy am I glad about that even though I do not really like the DIKU/EQ/WoW item grind games. Because I hated the dumbass death penalties and other BS Bartle's ideas created when I just wanted to have fun in a good RPG game.
VG wanted to harken back to EQ that is why it attracted so many old school EQ elitists. And BMQ being an old school MUD kind of guy truly believed that all this Bartle stuff did make things superior and the vanbois talked trash about everything. But none of them learned the lesson of WoW. A lesson I was hoping some one would have the common sense to eventually realize bakc when i was playing MUDs in the early 1990s. That Bartle's stuff about making a virtual world is all well and fine for a game like EvE Online, but for a game like EQ half that stuff is just pure BS that makes no sense.
Explaining that to people in words in the 1990's was virutally impossible unless they already agreed with you. But now that people have an example that very clear in its transitions and what it threw out, namely the EQ to WoW transition it has become quite obvious. EQ was a crapppy virtual world. Might have been a fun game but a lot of its virtual world stuff that Bartle said was so essentially was acutally just plain cumbersome and made the game much more enjoyable when it was eliminated in WoW. The foundation of the DIKU MUDs and later the MMOs that followed the same static content, heavily level tiered, gear grind content is just not conducive to creating a game that simulates a world. The static content alone will completely obstruct most things having to do with travel, that is why Eve has dynamic content.
So when the VG crowd comes in and tries to ressurect this farce of the old Bartle paradigm and people have had it made abundantly clear by the huge gorilla of WoW that the very foundation of this idea is just not true even if they do not know all the hostory or particulars they will react as if people are lying or stupid. Namely they get angry and hateful. Even though no one is really consciously lying or even being dumb.
Is a virtual world like EvE superior to WoW. I dunno and I don't care. I never cared. I play games that are fun. That is why I always knew that Bartle was full of crap. Eve is a perfectly fine game and for that game a lot of what Bartle says is applicable to some degree. WoW is a perfectly fine game. And those people who like them can play them. But games like EQ and VG they are pretending they can be a DIKU style game and have no problem being the Bartle like virtual world they long to be. Well that is a farce. These DIKU types of games cause tons of problems for the virtual world components and it has been made quite plain.
For a long time 90% of the MUD development scene was essentially beholden to the ideas represented by Bartle's point of view. To such an extent that many games that had no business doing it tried to be a virtual world. That got carried over in MMOs, because most successful early MMO, EQ, was based on the DIKU MUD paradigm. It was not a partial virtual world because it made sense. It was because of the social pressure in the MUD development scene that making a MUD that was not a virtual world was heresy.
But the DIKU MUDs and the later EQ were the most popular MUDs. And EQ was the most popular MMO. Because it created a game that catered to the most popular drive. The Achievers. It catered to them to such an extent that it actually had many features that simply get in the way of making a real virtual world. They were always somewhat of a farce. But it took Rob Pardo streamlining WoW to make it apparent just how much of a farce the slavish devotion to Bartle's ideas in the context of games like EQ or WoW or LOTRO really is. Making them immersive is fine. But they are fundamentally progression games. That is their heart it always has been. They have been tiered and static for decades.
You can't get what half of the vanbois said VG would deliver because in order to get that they would need to play an actual virtual world game like EvE. VG can't be a virtual world game. Its a DIKU MMO just like EQ and WoW and would suffer all the problems EQ suffered and that WoW showed had solutions that worked fine, namely mitigate the virtual world stuff inherited from the MUD scene. Put enough in to set the scene and never let it interfere with the real point of the game; character progression.
VG just illustrates that there are too many people who in the end really want to play a real virtual world game but can't kick their DIKU progression addiction. It is so bad that if the game does not have classes and tiered content they have a fit. Go onto a forum for any new MMO and you will always see people agitating for the game to be structured like a DIKU MMO with tiered content. Because they are stuck on it.
Nothing wrong with wanting virtual world type features. But pretending the DIKU type games can deliver it without having tons of serious problems is well just not supportable anymore. Its been proven wrong by example which is the most powerful way to place it into people's minds.
There is a reason Blizzard never even bothers with housing. Its not because they think housing sucks. Its because they know it actually does not fit well into the game they made. And it won't fit well into any DIKU MMO, because at heart they are about progression. And all the practical things that could be made to be a part of housing would undermine the heart of the game so it would be nothing but a small bit of fluff. Housing as it exsits in EvE (point defense, player owned stations) can be very powerful/meaningful. But that is because of things like travel times and local markets, both of which require dynamic content to not unduly punish characters who stay local. The placement of a thing in WoW or LOTRO means very little, it has to be that way because a character is meant and encouraged to go everywhere and grind the content there. The placement of stuff in EvE is very meaningful at the same time they never expect you to even see many parts of the Eve-verse and they do not want it to be easy to see everything.
Frankly calling housing in WoW and housing in EvE the same feature is very deceptive. They would have completely different consequences. Even if they seem to do the same thing in a general sense. The same is true of VG its housing is not EvE housing and it never can be, because VG is a DIKU style game where in the end progression is King and static content and content utilization will determine just about everything in the game. If you wanted the VG housing to actually be anything to talk about you would have to completely change the basis of the game itself.
Yet VG is trying to do this stuff. So what does that say to many people. It means that VG is less enjoyable than WoW because it is trying to have things that interfere with the basis of the game. VG is a DIKU game just like the others (WoW, EQ, LOTRO) and therefore character progression and static content grinds are head and shoulders above everything else. It also means that all those virtual world features are going to be a joke compared to a game like UO,EvE or SWG since making them operate like those ones would very much undermine the progression mechanics of the game. Creating an unfulfilling and frustrating design.
Eve is fulfilling in its virtual worldness (to a decent extent), WoW is smooth in its experience. VG is neither yet claims to be better than WoW because its a half-ass version of EvE with WoW-like progression that actually does not pull off anything EvE pulls off since it has WoW like progression and just has things that imitate EvE's features but functionally do not operate like them. So VG is trying to be two things at once but those two things are in conflict so it just winds of being a farce of a virtual world and that farce causes the progression to be cumbersome and bumpy.
In response (and translation) to the previous gaudy post filled with a lot of posturing and very little content of importance:
Yes, Vanguard is a game that has relied more and more on the often painfully boring progression system and has therefore become less and less immersive and "open-ended". Calling it "DIKU" however, just makes you sound silly and unnecessarily nerdy because before there was ever a DIKUmud, there were games with the same progression, even if it was not in an mmo or mud. Just say, rank or tier progression system so people actually know what you are talking about.
In short (much shorter), Vanguard is filled with a lot of fluff that was not originally designed as mere fluff but is now reduced to such because the game was released over a year early without the funding they originally were counting on. Things like housing and the giant world, ships and so forth were all part of a game which actually was going to be a very versatile "sandbox" mmo with a strong focus on PVP (ya, who would have guessed at this point?). I'd say less than a third of the content VG was intended to release with even exists now. You can see this in the massive world and huge cities filled with meaningless crap and and big open spaces. Does this excuse the lameness of Vanguard? No. That being said though, it still offers a large, reasonably immersive world with a pretty good amount of stuff to do, even though there is hardly anyone to do it with. Most unfortunately, Vanguard doesn't have the funding to ever be developed at a rate that is even close to acceptable.
I, having subscribed twice to Vanguard, am giving it up to a very sad failure as it beyond the shadow of a doubt had more potential than any other mmo of its genre ever. I would even bet if it released as it is right now and it had that larger playerbase, it would truely flourish into the next EQ (no - WoW was not the next EQ and EQ2 was sure as $hit not either. There has been no game like EQ since EQ, even if they use the same progression systems in dungeons, raiding and so forth). This doesn't mean it won't bring months and maybe years of fun to you as it stand today.
@Gestalt
I have to admit I have no clue what you want to say. You mix WoW, VG, Eve, DikuMuds and somehow there seem to be connections (or not?). Around 50% of your text my brain collapsed and I rolled on my back giving up.
@Dullahan
Fair review.
Its a DIKU MMO that wishes it was EvE Online but can't figure out its item grind/static content can never let it be that way.
At least WoW is mostly honest about what its trying to do. Vangaurd is just lying to itself. Add in the vanboi elitists that used to sprinkle their love acorss the inter webs and well you have haters and people like me who have little respect for what it tries to do.
Too bad some of the class stuff is actually nice and interesintg. But come on. This isn't UO or EvE, its a DIKU MMO. All the stuff shoehorned into it that the elitists say make it so superior is actually just crap design that conflicts with the rest of the game and most people know it on some level. They hate the people who push it because WoW basically got rid of the charade that had been lingering around. Even people who don't really care to analyze it know that Vanguard is basically trying to re-start the chrade. You want to stuff VG says makes so amazing ans singular go play Wurm Online. VG just pretends its like that game and then slaps you back into the grindy/tiered/tied down content of the DIKU MMO.
What I am saying here is that the premise of VG is a farce so it evokes scorn. Add in the old school EQ elitism and it turn to down right hate. Notice that Eve and other games like Ryzom do not evoke that kind of hate and scorn. Because people don't see it as a farce. They may not like the games or say that they will never be hugely successful but they do not get the instant Boo that VG does.
VG is a poser and what you see is the reaction many people have when they see a poser. Is it perhaps pointless vehemance at this time, yeah probably. Then add in the SOE hatred to up the volume some too. And some of those guys are basically nuts. I mean they probably build shrines to the death of SOE and smedley filled with Voodoo dolls with pins in them. They are far to obessessed to care how dumb it all is.
Anyway there is some point to all the bitterness.
Why do you think Eve has time base skilling? It is so that you simply cannot get into the DIKU mindset. Many people are so conditioned by these tiered advancement/progression games that they hate Eve solely because it forbids you from doing that. Eve forces you to play the game with your game as your guy exists and as the world exists. UO and SWG had use based skilling and even that turned people into progresson junkies. That is not VG. VG is not a world. Its a progression game that pretends its a world. They don't even offer a comrpromise between features that are at odds like WoW. They just say everything will work together perfectly fine just like in the good old days (except they never did in the good old days).
EQ was the way it was because it was based on a DIKU MUD and almost all MUDs bought in Bartles BS about creating virtual worlds. But the fact is that first MUDs that used the DIKU code set and created the DIKU genre that EQ brought into the MMO world they created a paradigm that is actually directly contrary to Bartle. They were the first steps in proving that Bartles notions are just not universally applicable. Boy am I glad about that even though I do not really like the DIKU/EQ/WoW item grind games. Because I hated the dumbass death penalties and other BS Bartle's ideas created when I just wanted to have fun in a good RPG game.
VG wanted to harken back to EQ that is why it attracted so many old school EQ elitists. And BMQ being an old school MUD kind of guy truly believed that all this Bartle stuff did make things superior and the vanbois talked trash about everything. But none of them learned the lesson of WoW. A lesson I was hoping some one would have the common sense to eventually realize bakc when i was playing MUDs in the early 1990s. That Bartle's stuff about making a virtual world is all well and fine for a game like EvE Online, but for a game like EQ half that stuff is just pure BS that makes no sense.
Explaining that to people in words in the 1990's was virutally impossible unless they already agreed with you. But now that people have an example that very clear in its transitions and what it threw out, namely the EQ to WoW transition it has become quite obvious. EQ was a crapppy virtual world. Might have been a fun game but a lot of its virtual world stuff that Bartle said was so essentially was acutally just plain cumbersome and made the game much more enjoyable when it was eliminated in WoW. The foundation of the DIKU MUDs and later the MMOs that followed the same static content, heavily level tiered, gear grind content is just not conducive to creating a game that simulates a world. The static content alone will completely obstruct most things having to do with travel, that is why Eve has dynamic content.
So when the VG crowd comes in and tries to ressurect this farce of the old Bartle paradigm and people have had it made abundantly clear by the huge gorilla of WoW that the very foundation of this idea is just not true even if they do not know all the hostory or particulars they will react as if people are lying or stupid. Namely they get angry and hateful. Even though no one is really consciously lying or even being dumb.
Is a virtual world like EvE superior to WoW. I dunno and I don't care. I never cared. I play games that are fun. That is why I always knew that Bartle was full of crap. Eve is a perfectly fine game and for that game a lot of what Bartle says is applicable to some degree. WoW is a perfectly fine game. And those people who like them can play them. But games like EQ and VG they are pretending they can be a DIKU style game and have no problem being the Bartle like virtual world they long to be. Well that is a farce. These DIKU types of games cause tons of problems for the virtual world components and it has been made quite plain.
For a long time 90% of the MUD development scene was essentially beholden to the ideas represented by Bartle's point of view. To such an extent that many games that had no business doing it tried to be a virtual world. That got carried over in MMOs, because most successful early MMO, EQ, was based on the DIKU MUD paradigm. It was not a partial virtual world because it made sense. It was because of the social pressure in the MUD development scene that making a MUD that was not a virtual world was heresy.
But the DIKU MUDs and the later EQ were the most popular MUDs. And EQ was the most popular MMO. Because it created a game that catered to the most popular drive. The Achievers. It catered to them to such an extent that it actually had many features that simply get in the way of making a real virtual world. They were always somewhat of a farce. But it took Rob Pardo streamlining WoW to make it apparent just how much of a farce the slavish devotion to Bartle's ideas in the context of games like EQ or WoW or LOTRO really is. Making them immersive is fine. But they are fundamentally progression games. That is their heart it always has been. They have been tiered and static for decades.
You can't get what half of the vanbois said VG would deliver because in order to get that they would need to play an actual virtual world game like EvE. VG can't be a virtual world game. Its a DIKU MMO just like EQ and WoW and would suffer all the problems EQ suffered and that WoW showed had solutions that worked fine, namely mitigate the virtual world stuff inherited from the MUD scene. Put enough in to set the scene and never let it interfere with the real point of the game; character progression.
VG just illustrates that there are too many people who in the end really want to play a real virtual world game but can't kick their DIKU progression addiction. It is so bad that if the game does not have classes and tiered content they have a fit. Go onto a forum for any new MMO and you will always see people agitating for the game to be structured like a DIKU MMO with tiered content. Because they are stuck on it.
Nothing wrong with wanting virtual world type features. But pretending the DIKU type games can deliver it without having tons of serious problems is well just not supportable anymore. Its been proven wrong by example which is the most powerful way to place it into people's minds.
There is a reason Blizzard never even bothers with housing. Its not because they think housing sucks. Its because they know it actually does not fit well into the game they made. And it won't fit well into any DIKU MMO, because at heart they are about progression. And all the practical things that could be made to be a part of housing would undermine the heart of the game so it would be nothing but a small bit of fluff. Housing as it exsits in EvE (point defense, player owned stations) can be very powerful/meaningful. But that is because of things like travel times and local markets, both of which require dynamic content to not unduly punish characters who stay local. The placement of a thing in WoW or LOTRO means very little, it has to be that way because a character is meant and encouraged to go everywhere and grind the content there. The placement of stuff in EvE is very meaningful at the same time they never expect you to even see many parts of the Eve-verse and they do not want it to be easy to see everything.
Frankly calling housing in WoW and housing in EvE the same feature is very deceptive. They would have completely different consequences. Even if they seem to do the same thing in a general sense. The same is true of VG its housing is not EvE housing and it never can be, because VG is a DIKU style game where in the end progression is King and static content and content utilization will determine just about everything in the game. If you wanted the VG housing to actually be anything to talk about you would have to completely change the basis of the game itself.
Yet VG is trying to do this stuff. So what does that say to many people. It means that VG is less enjoyable than WoW because it is trying to have things that interfere with the basis of the game. VG is a DIKU game just like the others (WoW, EQ, LOTRO) and therefore character progression and static content grinds are head and shoulders above everything else. It also means that all those virtual world features are going to be a joke compared to a game like UO,EvE or SWG since making them operate like those ones would very much undermine the progression mechanics of the game. Creating an unfulfilling and frustrating design.
Eve is fulfilling in its virtual worldness (to a decent extent), WoW is smooth in its experience. VG is neither yet claims to be better than WoW because its a half-ass version of EvE with WoW-like progression that actually does not pull off anything EvE pulls off since it has WoW like progression and just has things that imitate EvE's features but functionally do not operate like them. So VG is trying to be two things at once but those two things are in conflict so it just winds of being a farce of a virtual world and that farce causes the progression to be cumbersome and bumpy.
Translation: Vanguard sucks. I like EVE.
The Worst Post of the Year award, sadly, may have been wrapped up on day 1.
Its a DIKU MMO that wishes it was EvE Online but can't figure out its item grind/static content can never let it be that way.
At least WoW is mostly honest about what its trying to do. Vangaurd is just lying to itself. Add in the vanboi elitists that used to sprinkle their love acorss the inter webs and well you have haters and people like me who have little respect for what it tries to do.
Too bad some of the class stuff is actually nice and interesintg. But come on. This isn't UO or EvE, its a DIKU MMO. All the stuff shoehorned into it that the elitists say make it so superior is actually just crap design that conflicts with the rest of the game and most people know it on some level. They hate the people who push it because WoW basically got rid of the charade that had been lingering around. Even people who don't really care to analyze it know that Vanguard is basically trying to re-start the chrade. You want to stuff VG says makes so amazing ans singular go play Wurm Online. VG just pretends its like that game and then slaps you back into the grindy/tiered/tied down content of the DIKU MMO.
What I am saying here is that the premise of VG is a farce so it evokes scorn. Add in the old school EQ elitism and it turn to down right hate. Notice that Eve and other games like Ryzom do not evoke that kind of hate and scorn. Because people don't see it as a farce. They may not like the games or say that they will never be hugely successful but they do not get the instant Boo that VG does.
VG is a poser and what you see is the reaction many people have when they see a poser. Is it perhaps pointless vehemance at this time, yeah probably. Then add in the SOE hatred to up the volume some too. And some of those guys are basically nuts. I mean they probably build shrines to the death of SOE and smedley filled with Voodoo dolls with pins in them. They are far to obessessed to care how dumb it all is.
Anyway there is some point to all the bitterness.
Why do you think Eve has time base skilling? It is so that you simply cannot get into the DIKU mindset. Many people are so conditioned by these tiered advancement/progression games that they hate Eve solely because it forbids you from doing that. Eve forces you to play the game with your game as your guy exists and as the world exists. UO and SWG had use based skilling and even that turned people into progresson junkies. That is not VG. VG is not a world. Its a progression game that pretends its a world. They don't even offer a comrpromise between features that are at odds like WoW. They just say everything will work together perfectly fine just like in the good old days (except they never did in the good old days).
EQ was the way it was because it was based on a DIKU MUD and almost all MUDs bought in Bartles BS about creating virtual worlds. But the fact is that first MUDs that used the DIKU code set and created the DIKU genre that EQ brought into the MMO world they created a paradigm that is actually directly contrary to Bartle. They were the first steps in proving that Bartles notions are just not universally applicable. Boy am I glad about that even though I do not really like the DIKU/EQ/WoW item grind games. Because I hated the dumbass death penalties and other BS Bartle's ideas created when I just wanted to have fun in a good RPG game.
VG wanted to harken back to EQ that is why it attracted so many old school EQ elitists. And BMQ being an old school MUD kind of guy truly believed that all this Bartle stuff did make things superior and the vanbois talked trash about everything. But none of them learned the lesson of WoW. A lesson I was hoping some one would have the common sense to eventually realize bakc when i was playing MUDs in the early 1990s. That Bartle's stuff about making a virtual world is all well and fine for a game like EvE Online, but for a game like EQ half that stuff is just pure BS that makes no sense.
Explaining that to people in words in the 1990's was virutally impossible unless they already agreed with you. But now that people have an example that very clear in its transitions and what it threw out, namely the EQ to WoW transition it has become quite obvious. EQ was a crapppy virtual world. Might have been a fun game but a lot of its virtual world stuff that Bartle said was so essentially was acutally just plain cumbersome and made the game much more enjoyable when it was eliminated in WoW. The foundation of the DIKU MUDs and later the MMOs that followed the same static content, heavily level tiered, gear grind content is just not conducive to creating a game that simulates a world. The static content alone will completely obstruct most things having to do with travel, that is why Eve has dynamic content.
So when the VG crowd comes in and tries to ressurect this farce of the old Bartle paradigm and people have had it made abundantly clear by the huge gorilla of WoW that the very foundation of this idea is just not true even if they do not know all the hostory or particulars they will react as if people are lying or stupid. Namely they get angry and hateful. Even though no one is really consciously lying or even being dumb.
Is a virtual world like EvE superior to WoW. I dunno and I don't care. I never cared. I play games that are fun. That is why I always knew that Bartle was full of crap. Eve is a perfectly fine game and for that game a lot of what Bartle says is applicable to some degree. WoW is a perfectly fine game. And those people who like them can play them. But games like EQ and VG they are pretending they can be a DIKU style game and have no problem being the Bartle like virtual world they long to be. Well that is a farce. These DIKU types of games cause tons of problems for the virtual world components and it has been made quite plain.
For a long time 90% of the MUD development scene was essentially beholden to the ideas represented by Bartle's point of view. To such an extent that many games that had no business doing it tried to be a virtual world. That got carried over in MMOs, because most successful early MMO, EQ, was based on the DIKU MUD paradigm. It was not a partial virtual world because it made sense. It was because of the social pressure in the MUD development scene that making a MUD that was not a virtual world was heresy.
But the DIKU MUDs and the later EQ were the most popular MUDs. And EQ was the most popular MMO. Because it created a game that catered to the most popular drive. The Achievers. It catered to them to such an extent that it actually had many features that simply get in the way of making a real virtual world. They were always somewhat of a farce. But it took Rob Pardo streamlining WoW to make it apparent just how much of a farce the slavish devotion to Bartle's ideas in the context of games like EQ or WoW or LOTRO really is. Making them immersive is fine. But they are fundamentally progression games. That is their heart it always has been. They have been tiered and static for decades.
You can't get what half of the vanbois said VG would deliver because in order to get that they would need to play an actual virtual world game like EvE. VG can't be a virtual world game. Its a DIKU MMO just like EQ and WoW and would suffer all the problems EQ suffered and that WoW showed had solutions that worked fine, namely mitigate the virtual world stuff inherited from the MUD scene. Put enough in to set the scene and never let it interfere with the real point of the game; character progression.
VG just illustrates that there are too many people who in the end really want to play a real virtual world game but can't kick their DIKU progression addiction. It is so bad that if the game does not have classes and tiered content they have a fit. Go onto a forum for any new MMO and you will always see people agitating for the game to be structured like a DIKU MMO with tiered content. Because they are stuck on it.
Nothing wrong with wanting virtual world type features. But pretending the DIKU type games can deliver it without having tons of serious problems is well just not supportable anymore. Its been proven wrong by example which is the most powerful way to place it into people's minds.
There is a reason Blizzard never even bothers with housing. Its not because they think housing sucks. Its because they know it actually does not fit well into the game they made. And it won't fit well into any DIKU MMO, because at heart they are about progression. And all the practical things that could be made to be a part of housing would undermine the heart of the game so it would be nothing but a small bit of fluff. Housing as it exsits in EvE (point defense, player owned stations) can be very powerful/meaningful. But that is because of things like travel times and local markets, both of which require dynamic content to not unduly punish characters who stay local. The placement of a thing in WoW or LOTRO means very little, it has to be that way because a character is meant and encouraged to go everywhere and grind the content there. The placement of stuff in EvE is very meaningful at the same time they never expect you to even see many parts of the Eve-verse and they do not want it to be easy to see everything.
Frankly calling housing in WoW and housing in EvE the same feature is very deceptive. They would have completely different consequences. Even if they seem to do the same thing in a general sense. The same is true of VG its housing is not EvE housing and it never can be, because VG is a DIKU style game where in the end progression is King and static content and content utilization will determine just about everything in the game. If you wanted the VG housing to actually be anything to talk about you would have to completely change the basis of the game itself.
Yet VG is trying to do this stuff. So what does that say to many people. It means that VG is less enjoyable than WoW because it is trying to have things that interfere with the basis of the game. VG is a DIKU game just like the others (WoW, EQ, LOTRO) and therefore character progression and static content grinds are head and shoulders above everything else. It also means that all those virtual world features are going to be a joke compared to a game like UO,EvE or SWG since making them operate like those ones would very much undermine the progression mechanics of the game. Creating an unfulfilling and frustrating design.
Eve is fulfilling in its virtual worldness (to a decent extent), WoW is smooth in its experience. VG is neither yet claims to be better than WoW because its a half-ass version of EvE with WoW-like progression that actually does not pull off anything EvE pulls off since it has WoW like progression and just has things that imitate EvE's features but functionally do not operate like them. So VG is trying to be two things at once but those two things are in conflict so it just winds of being a farce of a virtual world and that farce causes the progression to be cumbersome and bumpy.
Vanguard doesn't have Elitists anymore. They all left the game.
Look i've played EVE for 3 years. EVE is very elitist oriented. It's also not all it's cracked up to be by people like you. It has plenty of issues. Actually at this time it has larger issues than VG does.
The biggest strength of VG right now is its community.
The biggest weakness of EVE has always been it's community. Well that and the lag that makes it's sole purpose (large scale pvp) unplayable.
Make a difference!
The biggest strength of VG right now is its community.
The biggest weakness of EVE has always been it's community. Well that and the lag that makes it's sole purpose (large scale pvp) unplayable.
Except that the community is slowly dying/turning on each other
Thanks for an well written post Gestalt11. To bad you only get short answers like this one
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