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Some questions from a prospective player
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,516
Edit: I've added a lot more questions in post #7 on this thread.
It seems hard to find good information on this game. There's a lot of information out there, but most of it seems to have been written before release (and often long before release), or else shortly after release, and apparently quite a bit has changed since then.
Anyway, I've been reading up on the game and turned up a few things that could potentially be game-breaking, so I figured I'd ask about them. There's no sense in spending a few more hours reading up on a game if there's zero chance that I'd end up liking it.
1. It looks like they've tried to make travel difficult. Does travelling across the map still take a very long time? If there's only infrequently any reason to do that, it might be all right. If every other quest sends you halfway across the map, difficult travel would be very bad. How much of your time is spent running back and forth, mainly trying to get from point A to point B? Does this vary by whether you're adventuring, crafting, or engaging in diplomacy?
2. There are some comments from the developers to the effect that gear that you get by grouping will be far superior to gear that you get by playing solo, making it sound as though a soloer will forever be stuck with inferior gear and not really able to get into the game that well, at least in the adventuring sphere. Crafting and diplomacy looked like intrinsically solo activities to me.
Anyway, I'm not intrinsically against grouping. What I am against, however, is being required to group for anything, but unable to actually get a group. How hard is it to get a group in this game, and how much of the game requires a group? Is it the case that dungeons are group content and the rest is solo? Would I be able to pretty reliably get a group (of reasonable levels) for a given dungeon within several minutes, or is it the sort of thing that can take half an hour to find people, and then another half hour for them to run to the dungeon, at which point I'm about ready to log off for a couple hours by the time they show up?
3. One comment from the developers was something to the effect that, if a player doesn't have much time to play one day, there's a little he can do here and there, but he won't be able to do much. Does the game require large blocks of time in order to play? I'd expect that crafting, diplomacy, and solo adventuring could be done with small blocks of time. Is that accurate? On the other hand, getting halfway through a group dungeon, logging off, and expecting to finish it later is unlikely to work well.
How long does it intrinsically take to clear group content? Is it the sort of thing that can be done in an hour or so, from login to logoff? Or does one have to have a continuous time block of several hours available to do a dungeon?
Thanks in advance for any answers. If nothing game-breaking turns up here, I'll be back with more questions later.
Comments
1 - traveling is pretty good. There are portals everywhere so you can teleport to the area you are going. Then when you get there you can get a horse mount at level 10(very cheap but not very fast) and pretty much every camp there is a flight person that rents a flying mount(not like WoW, here you have full control for 5 minutes).
2 - yeah, grouping will yield better gear. The Group quests do have very good rewards. But there are some very good rewards from quests that can be done solo as well. So, a person that only solos will not have as good as gear but not by a huge margin. Later levels(40+) Im not entirely sure about that though).
Also, you have to realise that the game population is not very big so you wont be able to get a group within 5 minutes every time you want one.
3 - its not as time friendly as WoW but if you only has 30 minutes to an hour to do some stuff you can get some of it done. The only road blocks are that mobs dont mill about 20 yards away from town and some time sensitive(ie wolves come out at night).
The group content is varied. Some dungeons are not very big and can be done in a reasonable amount of time but some Group quests may take a bit. There are some(but not all) Group quests that require a quest item that can only be looted by one person in the group. So when you have 5 people that need 20 items it can take a bit. These quests are not common and the quest items drop frequently though.
I would suggest playing the trial island to see if you like game basics first. Its 2.5GB and its a pretty good newbie tutorial for the game.
I'll try to give you a some answers.
1. Travel times - The world of telon is huge. Travel can take time but there are aid that help you get around. There are riftstones that you click on then brings up a map showing riftstones all over the world. Click one and there is a small charge and you are teleported to that location. Most quest hubs have riftstones so they take you to outposts. Also at each riftstone is a flying mount vendor where you can rent a flying mount. Unlike most games you can fly anywhere you want. Finally at low levels around 10 you can buy your first horse. Horses also upgrade based on equipment and tier of the horse. Rift stones are locked by tier. So a level 15 player can't travel to a lvl 25 area via rift. tier 1 is 10-20, tier 2 21-30 etc. Tiers are based on adventuring and crafting levels. So a lvl 45 crafter can rift anywhere.
So finding a group anywhere in the world is a doable thing. You can rather quickly get anywhere.
Quests do sometimes send you places. This goes for all tiers. So you will travel. However I never felt like I did in Wow doing quests and running all over continuously. Sometimes in wow I thought my little feet would wear off
2. Gear - The best gear in the game is in order, vendor, world drops, common crafted, solo quests, group boss drops (mostly dungeons), rare crafted, group quests, raid gear. That is kinda a general progression. Probably the best stuff you can buy is rare crafted stuff but it is best to order that specifically made by a crafter since there is a lot of variation in how gear can be made. If you are gonna have a rare item made it is best to have it made exactly like you want.
The best stuff you can generally buy on the broker is the rare crafted stuff but it is really best to have a crafter make it to order. Another way to look at it is by the color of the gear. gray is vendor bought, blue is common crafted and drops, yellow is rare and boss drops and crafted, orange is very rare mostly dungeon bosses and rare crafted, and red which pretty much only comes from long group quests. Raiding gives probably red gear as well. crafted vs dropped gear at the same level is based internally on a points system to scale the item. Dropped gear has a point advantage over crafted gear, however since drops are not tailored to a character and crafted gear is you can usually do better with crafted items for similar colors.
One of the things I like best about gear in vg vs eq2 is that in vg when I get something from a quest or a drop it can be better then what I bought. So there is more excitement in doing a dungeon and getting loot. Whereas in eq2 you get rare crafted stuff every 10 levels and pretty much till you hit lvl 80 you will never find anything better then the crafted stuff. Kinda takes all the excitement out of adventuring and finding loot...
So generally if you want the best gear in the game you need to do some of the longer group quests that will require you to do dungeons and stuff.
Dungeons past level 10 are pretty much exclusively group oriented affairs.
Getting in a group varies quite a bit. Some areas are hot like the epic group quests that give best rewards. Thinks like hunters league. Other things are harder. What ooc flag yourself lfg. Then go do a solo quest or harvest or go to the area you want to group in and watch for other people there and just group with them.
3. time commitment - For adventuring the time to do something varies quite a bit. There are some epic dungeons like Kregors End or the Ant dungeon that will take a sold group several hours to crawl through. Then there are other smaller dungeons that take maybe an hour. There are also outdoor camps with group and/or small group mobs that you can do which have no real time requirement.
quests are similar some solo or small group quests can be done in 15 minutes some are long chains that will take you 5-6 hours and have 10 steps. You don't of course need to do them all in one sitting. So VG really has a good balance of content and activities for a wide audience.
You can also level up doing any of the above. If you want to solo to 50 there are ample solo quests, if you want to group quest to 50 you can pretty much do that. If you want to grind mobs that is also doable. If you play with a buddy a lot then there are numberous small group quests that provide a challenge for a group of 2-3.
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Ethion
1) When the game was released, travelling was very difficult. You either could not get from A to B or it could take you a couple hours. Since then they've put in rentable mounts and riftways that you can unlock by visiting.... EQ style. Now, you can get anywhere in the world in 10-15 minutes with most trips taking 5 minutes or so. Initially people didn't like making travel easier, but now I couldn't live without it. Makes grouping so much better.
2) Group and raid gear is best. You can get surprisingly good gear via solo and crafting. There is faction gear that you can get via building great faction with your home city. This gear is actually just slightly worse than raid gear from Ancient Port Warehouse and it also has set bonuses. You can solo your entire life and still end up with a pretty incredibble set of gear.
3) You can pick-up and put down this game in any increment you want. If you are a solo'er, and it sounds like you might be, then you can play in 10 minute increments if you want and still make progress. However, if you find a group, your group is going to want a decent committment of time if you are going to dungeon crawl or something. Having an hour to spend for group content is good. That'll get you a good crawl in many dungeons. Heck even we we raid, we rarely spend more that 3-4 hours on our objectives.
Thanks for the replies.
1. It sounds like the travel system won't particularly bother me. It won't be as nice as map travel in Guild Wars, but then, most game travel systems aren't. What I'm mainly against is having to spend long amounts of time running. What drove me nuts about Anarchy Online (and led to my quitting that game) was that it largely consisted of, run ten minutes to get to a mission, spend twenty minutes doing the mission, run ten minutes to get him, and then rinse and repeat.
2. It sounds like the main obstacle to grouping is finding players, more so than waiting for them to reach the dungeon. In WoW, I'd commonly have to send every single person on the server within the suitable level range a /tell offering a group spot in order to get a group, and even that sometimes wouldn't be enough. WoW made the suitable level range on everything obnoxiously narrow, though, which might have been part of the problem.
3. My question is not how long it takes to do something in total, but rather, how long in one sitting. If something takes five hours in total, but can easily be broken up into smaller blocks so that I can do the quest just fine without ever being on more than an hour consecutively, that's perfectly fine. It's only problematic if logging off effectively resets progress.
To me, the ideal amount of time to play a game in one sitting is about an hour. That's not a hard cap; I won't complain about 65 or 70 minutes. I can deal with having to spend two hours in a sitting to do something once in a while, but not if it's an everyday thing. Having to play for 3+ hours consecutively is completely game-breaking unless it's very rare (e.g., once a year).
Are there only a few easily avoidable raids that take hours at a sitting? Is it high level stuff takes longer and low level stuff takes less time? Would I be able to selectively avoid a few particular places that require long blocks of time and get comparable gear elsewhere?
And that may all be a moot point, anyway. How high of level is the stuff that takes a long time? I like to play a lot of alts, which means that they all level slowly. I'll probably never get that close to the level cap, so if the endgame is awful (as is typical of MMORPGs), it may not matter.
On wow a big problem is that at lower levels nobody needs to group and when I played in most cases when I did an instance someone always had a high lvl guildie just run through killing everything so we just were there for the quest updates. I dont' think the last time I played I ever did an instance that had any challenge...
Getting groups in vg is quite a bit easier then many other games because everyone in the level range is fairly likely to want to group. Reason being that group stuff tends to get you better rewards and group xp with a good group is also very good. So when you find there are 50 people in your level range, chances are 75% of them are grouping or want to group. Vs games like wow where maybe 10% would be interested.
For what you can do, yes most things are steps that are kinda small. For example trengal keep is a popular group quest dungeon. Each step on that quest is probably less then an hour. At most steps you get a nice reward. So it is a very popular place in the 20-30 range. Then hunters legues is similar, so is CIS which are both in similar level ranges. Then you have places like ... I can't recall the name... where the quests are about collecting items you can use to get rewards, and where you need faction. Overall you can do stuff there ranging from hours to minutes. Even killing one mob will progress you on faction. Doing a run into a dungeon to kill a named or havest a location or get a random drop can also be done in little chunks.
If you like this kinda achievement thing where you do faction, items, etc and get rewards from lvl 30 there are several places like this. Grouping in these places is usually pretty easy cause a lot of people are working on these quests. Since it is faction and drops there isn't a lot of linearity to it so people aren't like I need to do X vs you need to do Y. So most of the people there can all group up and work on their parts together.
Hope that helps.
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Ethion
All right, I've read up on the game about as much as I realistically can. It looks like the "best" wikis are different wikis for the adventuring (silky venom), crafting/harvesting (vanguard crafters), and diplomacy (VGtact) spheres, and all of them are rather incomplete and/or outdated.
Anyway, my understanding is that the game was a complete disaster at launch, and largely fixed since then. Unfortunately, that means that the fanbase now is much smaller than it used to be, so that much less information gets posted on the game per unit time, and so much of what is out there is rather dated, and possibly no longer accurate. As such, I have some additional questions to make sure I know what I'm getting into.
4. My understanding is that both crafting and diplomacy are fully turn-based, so that if you get up and walk away from the computer and come back five minutes later, the only difference it makes is that you finish five minutes later. Is that accurate? Also, is there much waiting between turns, or is it that as soon as you make your choice in one round, it brings up your options for the next round?
5. Apparently there were 17 classes promised before the game was released, but two of those classes were scrapped and/or delayed, so that there were only 15 classes available at release. Is it still only 15 classes, or were the other two added back? The information on the game's web site now currently says each of those in different places, so it is contradictory.
6. If there are different classes in a game, then I will want to play them all. If that means they all level slowly, so be it. The endgame in most MMORPGs is completely awful, so I'm in no rush to get there, and this game doesn't look like it could plausibly be an exception to that. Anyway, my understanding is that the account cap is 8 characters per server, so that I could have 8 characters on one server and 7 on another, and get one of each class that way. Is that accurate?
7. Would playing a lot of alts effectively shut me out of the guild system? I expect that I wouldn't be able to join a high-end raiding guild, but I wouldn't have any interest in joining such a guild, anyway. If joining a guild on a server is done by account (as Guild Wars does) rather than by character, this presumably wouldn't be a problem. If the cap on guild size is very large (several hundred, or no cap at all), this likewise probably wouldn't be a problem. But if a guild has a hard cap of, say, 40 characters, most guilds probably wouldn't want to waste slots on a lot of lightly played alts.
8. My understanding is that making items "bind on pickup" is very lightly done, unlike, say, WoW. If I get an item and think, well, I can't use it on this character, but it would really be great on this other character, would I freely be able to send it and use it on another alt? My understanding is that the game has a mail system with a fee to send items. Is it a fairly nominal fee, so as not to be prohibitive of passing gear back and forth like this?
9. My routine in other games when I want to get a group is usually to organize one myself. Is there a "who" or analogous command to find other players in the reasonable level range for a dungeon? If so, would it be practical for me to send a bunch of them whispers offering a group invite for such and such dungeon, and get players for a group that way? (Not a blind invite, mind you; something like a whisper saying, "Want to join a group for Sunken Temple?", with a subsequent invite only if the player replies in the affirmative.) Or would that just annoy everyone and make most of the playerbase hate me?
10. How engaging is the combat? Can one start auto-attack, go AFK, and come back to find a dead mob? It's understandable if it works that way at level 2, but if it still works that way at level 20, something is seriously wrong.
11. Is the level range for dungeons clearly marked? I wouldn't want to get a group of level 20ish players and then find out that all the mobs are level 30 or level 10. Also, is the intended group size of a dungeon clearly marked? My understanding is that there are separate areas for solo, small groups (3 members), full groups, and raids. Are those clearly marked as well?
12. My understanding is that many of the game's quests are repeatable. Is that accurate? Can one level by doing quests if one wishes to do each quest only once, or does it take a lot of grinding by repeating quests and/or ignoring quests entirely to purely grind mobs?
13. What sort of "trivial loot code" does the game have? The FAQ seems to say there will be a lot, but doesn't go into that much detail. Would that effectively block a high level player from escorting low levels through a low level dungeon? Would it block players from zerging a dungeon by taking twice as many players as intended, in order to make everything completely trivial?
14. How low of levels do the raids start? If the raids are all endgame, then I can probably ignore them just fine. My understanding is that the game is supposed to be mostly group content, not raids.
15. How severe is the death penalty? If it's enough to make getting one kill per death counterproductive, that's fine, and indeed, I'd be somewhat in favor of that. If it's enough to make one death mean that you have to spend ten hours purely grinding in order to make up for that death, that's a problem.
16. How big is the maximum group size (as opposed to raid size)? In some places I've found it says six, and in others, eight.
17. My understanding is that there is a trial system, but that only lets you play on the Isle of the Dawn newbie area. To start in the various racial starting areas would require buying the game. Advancing past level 10 or leaving the Isle of the Dawn for higher level content also requires buying the game. Is that accurate?
18. It appears that buying a box off Amazon is only $10 (plus tax and shipping, presumably, which still leaves it under $20). Would getting a DVD that way save a good bit of time as compared to a digital download, or have there been enough large updates since then that it wouldn't make much difference?
19. Suppose that I decide that one or two of the spheres are stupid. Would I be able to scrap them and continue with the remaining spheres? It looks like a lot of players basically do adventuring only. Would I be able to do crafting only? Diplomacy only?
20. It appears that each adventuring class has a bias toward a particular type of diplomacy, and each race also has a bias toward a particular type of diplomacy. Is it a good idea to match adventuring classes and races with the same bias or different biases, or does it really not make much difference? Or are there pros and cons to either approach such that it's not obvious which is better?
21. Apparently the plan before launch was to not have an auction house, but instead let players set up NPC vendors to sell their goods. Is that still the way it's done, and if so, does that make finding something you wish to buy a major pain? Or did they relent and add an auction house, or some other easy way to search for items?
That's all the questions I can think of at the moment, but I'm probably forgetting something. Anyway, thanks in advance for any answers.
You know there is a 14 day free trial, right? Why not just try it, instead of asking a book of questions?
I tried it on a whim, and I'm glad I did. Best PvE MMO I've ever played.
A free trial doesn't tell me that much about what the game will be like a couple of months in. To just try the free trial is only a viable approach if not looking for a game to play for more than 14 days.
If a game has something that will completely ruin the game for me, I'd rather find out before playing than a find it a month in and have to quit then. Charging into the game haphazardly and running off madly in all directions at once is a very inefficient algorithm for finding such things.
Perhaps an example will better explain where I'm coming from on this. A few months ago, I seriously looked into EverQuest II. I ended up rejecting the game for a variety of reasons, but the two biggest were things that I didn't discover until several hours of searching.
One was that an account was only allowed 6 characters, total. Not six per server, the way it is common for games to restrict numbers of alts. With the station pass, it's 10 characters per account, but that's still far shy of the 24 character classes in the game. As such, in order to have one character of each class, I'd need four accounts, which is awfully expensive for what looked like a marginal game to me, anyway.
But what really sealed it was a game moderator's remark on the official forums that the game is "casual friendly" because as an alternative to raiding, there are "casual raids" that are done at lower levels and "only" require 3 hours in one sitting.
Had I just jumped into the game without investigating first, that wouldn't have shown up in the very low level areas. I might well have played for a few months before coming across that, and then decided that was game-breaking and quit. That takes a lot more time than spending several hours reading up on a game.
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The other issue is that I'm very finicky about how I'll play games. I plan out how I'm going to play a game months in advance, and this requires understanding quite a bit of the game in order to do it properly. If I were to just jump in and start playing, then a couple of months in, I'd likely decide I was doing it all wrong. To fix it, I'd probably have to delete all my characters and start from scratch, and that would be enough of a nuisance that it would probably be easier to just quit and go play some other game instead.
For example, I played Guild Wars for a little shy of 19 months. Before I first played the game, I planned out which characters I'd make, where, and when, and in which order the characters would do the various quests and missions. I had to make minor tweaks to my plan here and there (e.g., upon discovering that a particular quest had a prerequisite that I hadn't previously been aware of), but largely stuck to my original plan for about ten months.
At that time, I had completed all that I had planned, and had to come up with a new plan for playing Eye of the North and hard mode, both of which had been released in the meantime. At that time, I largely set up a plan for playing Eye of the North, and another for doing the hard mode missions of the campaigns. I didn't follow that plan quite as closely, as I kept putting off Eye of the North in order to do the campaigns in hard mode, after finding that Eye of the North really wasn't very good. But even that was largely a matter of having two separate plans for disjoint sets of content, and switching back and forth from one to the other every few weeks or months--and sticking pretty closely to each plan when I was doing that set of content.
The end result was that my tenth character got the Legendary Guardian title (basically, beat the whole game and then do it again in hard mode) about an hour after my first--more than a year and a half after I started. And I have the screenshots to prove it.
With the various Vanguard wikis not nearly as complete as GuildWiki, I won't quite be able to follow a fixed plan like that. Still, I can set the outline now, and fill in particular parameters later, once I get a better grasp on the details of particular quests and dungeons. That isn't possible unless I get a fair bit of information on the game before playing it, however. Hence, I ask.
Quizzical, no offense, but that's a wee bit crazy.
Character planning aside, the trial does give you a good idea on how the game works and plays out. There's a few towns, some dungeons that might force you to group, a lot of solo quests, there's mounts, crafting, diplomacy, big open maps to explore.
No, it doesn't give you every last detail about how the full game will work and you can never be sure if you'll still enjoy playing two months from now, but this isn't a serious buisness investment. It's an MMO trial. If you like it, it's only $15 to see the rest of the game. If you don't, you only wasted a few gig and a couple hours.
A lot of the above questions would not be answered by playing the game for two weeks, unless perhaps it is by asking random players in-game to give an answer, which is somewhat more awkward than asking here. I guess playing the game for half an hour would answer some of the questions, but the remaining two weeks wouldn't give any salient new information that I don't already have now. All that would consist of is playing the game for two weeks, letting the trial expire, and coming back here to again ask the questions that the trial didn't answer.
Actually it seems to me the majority of your questions could be determined from a trial. Perhaps if you slim down your list just to those that can't people will be more inclined to answer.
A little less to the point but considering that MMOs are always evolving, any of them could end up with something you hate about the game. If reaching whatever goal you set in your mind is more important than the road towards it, single player games are likely more predictable/enjoyable.
Fair enough. I'll partition the questions.
Questions that a trial would, in itself, not answer: 7, 8, 9, 10 (maybe), 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21 (maybe)
Most of the rest are very short answers, and often just one word would suffice.
Sorry for amending your post but it was the only way I could stay organized enough to get them all.
I'm finishing up my trial right now and the box is being shipped as I type this. Most of the info you need is in the trial.
hopefully someone can tie up the questions that I couldn't speak to.
https://www.youtube.com/user/NemsGaming
Sorry for amending your post but it was the only way I could stay organized enough to get them all.
I'm finishing up my trial right now and the box is being shipped as I type this. Most of the info you need is in the trial.
hopefully someone can tie up the questions that I couldn't speak to.
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Ethion
You got bad information on eq2. There aren't really any lower level raids I'm aware of. There were a long time ago but they were changed to group instances. I'm not really sure what a casual raid is :P In any event raiding is something level 80 characters do in the end game. Raids rarely run into 3 yours. Most of the raiding I've been doing takes more around 1 hour and sometimes as much as 2. I've not done all the raids in the game for sure, but so far this is my experience. There are a few raids that were around lvl 70 and these are seldom don't other then by lvl 80s that run through them mostly for AA experience.
Their are quite a few pickup raids that occur. So if you want to try a raid you can get into them even without a raid guild.
Also a quick comment on classes. EQ2 classes are not really all that unique. Many of them are similar versions that are good or evil. You can even switch between them but doing a quest. So if you are a (good) wizard, you can become an (evil) warlock. Many of the spells are similar.
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Ethion
Whats with the old raids like Vox or Venekor? Are these now groupmobs?
...
Not everything that is rare is bop. I tested this maybe a month or two back killing the named spider in the spider cave. He dropped rare (yellow) loot and it was BoE.
Oh and fyi, crafters can make Heroic items for you if you are interested in how crafting gear stacks with these names.
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Ethion
I got it from a mod post on a stickied thread on the official forums for the game. If the information there is wrong, it really should be changed.
Anyway, that wasn't the only reason I ended up rejecting EQ2. The limit of six characters per account with 24 classes total would mean it takes four accounts to play a character of each class, and that would get rather expensive. For a game I thought looked really, really good, I might pay that, but not for a game that looked rather marginal.
The classes in EQ2 didn't look like they were adequately distinguished from each other, so playing all of the classes of one archetype could get awfully repetitive. If I were to decide not to play some classes that looked too similar to others, then it would forever bother me that there were classes that I wasn't playing.
Most of what I read on the game kept making me think, this is too close to WoW, or perhaps rather, nearly all of the things that annoyed me about WoW would also be present in EQ2--and often to a greater degree. The only real exceptions were that SOE can run servers better than Blizzard and that EQ2 might have a decent crafting system, as opposed to WoW's crafting system that is nothing more than something stupid to grind levels in.
It looks to me like Vanguard's crafting system is likely to be fairly similar to EQ2's, enough that it's not obvious to me which I'd like better. Vanguard looked a lot less raid-intensive, doesn't have the item mall, doesn't go nearly as far in making players pick talent points (AA or whatever EQ2 calls them), lets players do the different spheres rather independently, doesn't release constant expansions that destroy old content, has a work order system to be able to craft things for the sake of crafting without needing to obtain materials, and probably won't make me need more than one account (I seem to be hearing contradictory information on character limits). That looked to me like a lot of reasons to prefer Vanguard to EQ2 and no reason to prefer the other way around.
Vanguard also has a diplomacy system that looks to me like the sort of thing that most players won't like, but I might. At the very least, it will be rather different from any other game I've played; the only thing that it reminds me of at all is the monthly budget meetings in PTO 2. The last six MMORPGs I've picked up have all been combat and not much else, with crafting as a minor side feature if it exists at all, so I'd like a bigger emphasis on something other than combat for a change.
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Anyway, thanks for answering my questions. I've ordered the game, and will play it once I decide i've had enough of Wizard101. At the latest, I'll have exhausted the content there within about three months, and I could easily decide to quit well before then.
What, not play it the moment it first arrives, you say? Two simple rules for finding good games to play:
1. Never quit one game for the purpose of going to play some other game. The other game might not be as good as you hope, and then you'll have to go back and play the game you were playing previously, and the time off will make it hard to get back into it. Rather, only quit a game because you want to quit that particular game. The other game will still be there when you're ready for it, unless perhaps it is made by NCsoft. Indeed, if it is a new release, the other game will probably be more polished if you give it a few months. Indeed, word has it that Vanguard is the canonical example of that, though the difference between that and most other games is only one of degree.
2. Always have some other game in mind to play, in case you decide you're sick of the one you're playing. Having to scramble around to come up with some other decent game means that either you have to spend days without any game to play, or pick up a game that you don't know much about. And then you might get stuck playing WoW, because someone you shouldn't have trusted said it was really good and didn't warn you that it was a WoW-clone.
Contrasting EQ2 and VG crafting
To some degree at a brief glance these two crafting systems look and sound similar.
In eq2 you start crafting and have a quality bar and a progress bar. You hit buttons to do bufs that enhance progress or quality and sometimes sacrafice success. Crafting progresses and you use the bufs to progress while trying to keep the quality up. There are 4 tiers of quality that have various effects on what you end up crafting. Usually how many resources you get back or how many items you make or sometimes the level of the item you make. Like a box that is pristine has more slots or a potion you get 10 instead of 8.
As you progress there are complilcations that match a couple of your bufs so you select them as remedies. There are a few items today like a cloak and a belt that give you a small buf that imrpoves your success.
The reality is you primarily just hit 123 to enhance your quality and 456 to speed the progress. If the item you are crafting is easy you just hit 456 456 till done and if the quality starts to get low in the top tier toss in a 123 or maybe be a bit tricky and do 345 :P Complications you can try to match or just ignore. They don't make that much difference and interupting your bufs to hit the complication can sometimes be more damaging then just ignoring them.
EQ2 has a work order system that gives you jobs and gives you status. This is a good way to grind up skills. you need to provide the resources and fuels to make the items. However completion of the task pretty much pays for the cost of doing it. You can eventually use the status to buy items from status merchants for status. Also part of the status goes to your leveling.
Ultimately crafting in eq2 is very simple and very repetative. You could easily bot the whole thing.
For vanguard crafting starts out similarly...
You have quality and progress. You also have a pool of action points. Crafting in VG is a process so that the buttons you push change as you progress. So for each phase there are different buttons. Like working hides there might be a cleaning phase, a tanning phase, a sewing phase, and a finishing phase. In each phase you start with a couple buttons but as your skill in that phase increases you get more buttons you can use. The buttons use action points and add to your progress and/or quality. Certain buttons also use resources. Like cleaning might have 3 buttons you can use. The best one might require cleaning fluid were the lessor ones don't require anything. They will also require tools. Like cleaning might require the use of a brush, where sewing might use a needle. So the goal is to progress through all the stages to completion and get the quality up to grade A before you run out of action points. Once you run out of action points you can completely fail and end up with nothing. Poor planning when you setup your table might hamper you as you might not have put out the right resources or have the right tools available. For tools you can swap tool belts but at a cost in action points. on top of this just to make things a bit more interesting there are complications. Complications come in many forms and can be both good and bad. When a complication appears you get button options associated with that complication called remedies. As you skill up you get more remedies you can use. So early on you got only one remedy for flawed leather, later you might have 2-3. Remedies require special tools and sometimes special resources. like one complication is being thirsty, this decreases the effectiveness of your progress by some percent. When this happens you can ignore it and continue with the decrease or you can drink some water the remedy to the complication.
So you can see the crafting process in VG while similar to EQ2 at a high level is vastly different. When I craft in eq2 I watch TV or zone listening to music. It require 0 concentration. In VG I have to pay attention and weigh my choices and frustration is frequently there. If I make a mistake it is unforgiving and I screw up and I curse at a bad timing of complication. If you tired my crafting goes to hell and I quit in discust however this is what makes it fun also...
In addition crafters have a full character sheet with tools, equipment, skills etc. So you aren't just mindlessly crafting watching your crafting level go up. You are also doing jobs hoping to get rare crafting loot. You take work orders to make things in 1, 3, 5 quantities. Depending on the quality you get money, items (money), equipment, tools, and tokens for recipes.
In addition when you craft something you make say a leather tunic but unlike eq2 as you make it you get chances to add dusts, or various ingredients into different stages of the process. These let you customize or make the item into a rare item with unique abilites and stats. You can litterally have hundreds of variations.
Crafting does have some interdependence. So as a leather worker you might need bolts crafted by a armorer or a swordsmith might need leather straps from a leather worker.
There are also quests and factions where you can learn new recipes or there are drops from adventuring and maybe even diplomacy but I'm not sure about diplomacy. These drops are resources and recipes to make unique powerful items.
Anyway I hope this helps set the two systems appart and gives you some understanding.
For someone that likes a real crafting game VG is without peer. For people that just want to make items to equip there character it is a long tedious grind.
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Ethion
Thanks for the explanation. I hadn't caught that the EQ2 system degenerates like that, but once I found enough to reject the game, there was no point in looking into it further.
I'm still skeptical that Vanguard's crafting system would be as good as A Tale in the Desert's. Having to go hunt down recipes and tools is often more nuisance than depth. Indeed, WoW has the "go get rare recipes" part, and its crafting system is awful--literally click a button and wait for the crafting process to finish awful.
One of the nice things about ATITD's crafting systems is that the game mechanics were so independent. You could mess with charcoal machines for a while and eventually get a batch to work. Practice a lot more and eventually figure out how to run two at once, then three, or four. Or for the people who got really, really good at it, maybe eight. It's all player skill, not straight grinding, so if you were to make a new account and try to make charcoal on your new account, you'd immediately be as good as on the old.
And then, if you went and tried to make glass instead, you'd find that you knew exactly nothing about it. It's not the same process with different parameters. It's completely independent, as though you had closed the game and went to play another instead. The same could be set of quite a few of the other crafting processes.
Vanguard makes you pick one profession, and then one specialty within it, and then relies a lot on character level, so that one character can't just craft everything. ATITD had no need to do that, as there was no way for one particular player to get the player skills to perfect everything. If I wasn't the best in the game at running glazier's benches, I was certainly close, but I couldn't make a good hatchet to save my life, and had to trade for one. Some players tried to craft everything themselves, but this mostly meant that they just crafted a lot of things badly.
Indeed, there were some things in ATITD that arguably no one had really pinned down how to make. It's been nearly two years since the new wine system was introduced, but I'd be skeptical of claims that anyone has really nailed down all the pieces of how it works, rather than just trying something and hoping to get lucky. The paint system was out for a good three years before I pinned down exactly how it worked; people had a good idea before then, but before that it was, if you do this, it might work or it might not, and the only way to find out is to try it.
If Vanguard's crafting has that degree of depth to it, it's certainly not something I picked up on in reading about it.
I'm expecting Vanguard's combat to not be as good as Guild Wars' and Vanguard's crafting to not be as good as A Tale in the Desert's. But a game doesn't have to be the best ever made to be worth playing. Of course, if you reverse that, better crafting than Guild Wars and better combat than A Tale in the Desert would be pretty trivial.
Thanks for the explanation. I hadn't caught that the EQ2 system degenerates like that, but once I found enough to reject the game, there was no point in looking into it further.
I'm still skeptical that Vanguard's crafting system would be as good as A Tale in the Desert's. Having to go hunt down recipes and tools is often more nuisance than depth. Indeed, WoW has the "go get rare recipes" part, and its crafting system is awful--literally click a button and wait for the crafting process to finish awful.
One of the nice things about ATITD's crafting systems is that the game mechanics were so independent. You could mess with charcoal machines for a while and eventually get a batch to work. Practice a lot more and eventually figure out how to run two at once, then three, or four. Or for the people who got really, really good at it, maybe eight. It's all player skill, not straight grinding, so if you were to make a new account and try to make charcoal on your new account, you'd immediately be as good as on the old.
And then, if you went and tried to make glass instead, you'd find that you knew exactly nothing about it. It's not the same process with different parameters. It's completely independent, as though you had closed the game and went to play another instead. The same could be set of quite a few of the other crafting processes.
Vanguard makes you pick one profession, and then one specialty within it, and then relies a lot on character level, so that one character can't just craft everything. ATITD had no need to do that, as there was no way for one particular player to get the player skills to perfect everything. If I wasn't the best in the game at running glazier's benches, I was certainly close, but I couldn't make a good hatchet to save my life, and had to trade for one. Some players tried to craft everything themselves, but this mostly meant that they just crafted a lot of things badly.
Indeed, there were some things in ATITD that arguably no one had really pinned down how to make. It's been nearly two years since the new wine system was introduced, but I'd be skeptical of claims that anyone has really nailed down all the pieces of how it works, rather than just trying something and hoping to get lucky. The paint system was out for a good three years before I pinned down exactly how it worked; people had a good idea before then, but before that it was, if you do this, it might work or it might not, and the only way to find out is to try it.
If Vanguard's crafting has that degree of depth to it, it's certainly not something I picked up on in reading about it.
I'm expecting Vanguard's combat to not be as good as Guild Wars' and Vanguard's crafting to not be as good as A Tale in the Desert's. But a game doesn't have to be the best ever made to be worth playing. Of course, if you reverse that, better crafting than Guild Wars and better combat than A Tale in the Desert would be pretty trivial.
I've never played A tale in the desert so I can't relate. However it sounds a bit like it is a realtime minigame or something like that from what you say?
VG crafting is much more analogus to combat systems with a strategic twist.
Crafting process is turn based. You click a button to progress. See the results and then click the next button. The contest is to get the highest quality possible before running out of action points. Since there are random complications that have a number of effects finishing with a high quality result if the recipe is challenging is far from certain. Knowledge and strategy are your keys to success. Knowing when to remedy a complication and when not to.
For example if you are in a process stage which has 3 options for progress, one that increases progress, one that increases quality, and one that does some of both. So a complication pops up and the description is that the complication decreases progress effectiveness by 20%. So at this point it might be best to only use the option that progresses quality. If you use this option then the complication has no effect. Or if you are close to completion you might do the one that does part quality and part progress knowing that you are almost done with the current stage so doing only progress would be a waste since you only need to do maybe 10% to finish. Or if you really need to progress and it looks like you have enough action points you might remedy the complication. This kinda process is what VG crafting is about.
Success is modified by skills. As you do a particular process there is a skill associate with that process. Each use of it might result in a skill increase. You have maybe 10-12 skills associated with all aspects of crafting. For any level you have a max number of skill points you can learn. You can choose which skills to advance, which to freeze or which to decrease. This works a lot like UO skills. As you level up you also get points you can put into stats. Kinda like in adventuring you have str, sta, agil, etc. In the crafting tab you have stats associated with crafting like concentration.
Also when you do a work order say make 5 horse shoes for the task master. You get rewards for the turn in. These rewards are based on the quality of your product. Make crappy horse shoes and you might get a few coin or a trinket. Make 5 grade A horse shoes and you might get a Box containing money, statues, tools, or work clothes, or even recipe tokens.
Like adventuring equipment adds to skills and stats making you more effective at doing your job. Skill in doing remedies might make it so a complication is resolve with a single application of a remedy where a lesser skill might require two application. Good skills with tools might cause your quality or progress to advance more rapidly saving valuable action points.
Skills can open options like instead of processing one hide into a leather piece you can do 3 or 5 at once.
Making items for players usually involves several stages. You first have to turn raw materials like ore, or hides, or cotton into metal, leather, or cloth. this process also lets you imbue the material with dusts that you buy from adventurers, from some vendors or by decomposing equipment into dust. These give the leather stats like str or wisdom.
Then you use this item as a resource to make a component. Like for a sword maybe you use metal to make a blade. Then maybe you buy lether straps from a leather worker and make a handle. Then the last stage you assemble the components into the final sword.
Along the way you have options to add dusts and various stats, skills, special effects to the components. When you combine the indivitual parts it creates a final product with a composite of the parts and the effects on the parts.
Also there are rare dusts that can make it likely that your process will create a rare and move powerful version of the component you are crafting. These can result in orange con parts with fantastic stats customized specifically to your customer.
in the end game there are rare components that might only drop on a raid. You would use these to craft powerful items for raiders.
So work orders are simple one stage items.
Player items are assemblies of multiple items that are individually crafted.
Resources tend to come in level ranges, and comon or rare versions. Harvesting gives you resources including things like potions for crafting, remedy ingredients, dusts, and rare versions of the resources. A crafter never has to harvest to do work orders. Work orders will make a profit unless you totally botch the job. So a crafter can sit and do work orders and never make a single player item. The crafter will make good money and be completely self sufficient.
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Ethion