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Things I dont like about Vanguard
Adamantine
Member RarePosts: 5,094
- Too many bugs everywhere. Just small ones you get used to, but still its annoying. Why never anyone fixed those things ?
- Variety of opponents. Why is there so little ? Why do so few opponents have ranged attacks ? Also I miss effects like reflect spell or fetch arrow.
Why mobs have stealth is also quite mysterious, you can spot them all easily. The only thing stealth actually does for mobs is training your awareness skill.
- Soulbound items. I dont even think it is the point of fantasy games to have an "economy". Even if you want one, there are better solutions, such as overenchanting, like in Lineage 2. Worse, too, are things like permanent item decay. Soulbound is OK for quest items or as an option, but forced soulbound is crappistic.
- Faction. What I would find great is if you would start off with a number of KoS cities, then would have to solve quests to gain special non-KoS-status with these cities. But you would still be disadvantaged there. As it is, the faction issue is solved quite idiotically. Nobody is KoS anywhere, but you get into KoS once you get your racial mount. After which long and boring mass murder of mobs to get rid of the KoS status follow.
- XP. Frankly there is much too much. For the extreme amount of content that is there, you level much too fast. This was already true when the game started, but ever since they made it worse.
- Crafting Tiers. Now this is truely stupid. Why does every tier get a completely new set of ingredients ? Why is copper completely worthless to a higher level character ?
At very least it should be possible to exchange things for each other. Say a rare can be traded for a stack of normal items, a ultra rare can be traded for 3 normal items, a stack of rare can be traded for an ultra rare, five stacks of normal can be traded for one rare, and you can trade 1 normal for 2 normal of lower tier, and 3 normal for 1 normal of higher tier. The way it is, people accumulate for example tons of Umber Timber (T5 rare) for no use at all.
In designing a new game, this is definitely something I would not include.
- Crafting, the flexibility of items one can create. That is frankly much too limited and really weird.
For example, attuning dusts. They start of nicely - one for each Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality, Wisdom and Intelligence. Then with tier 3 the attuning powder are introduced - and suddenly you get Str with Dex, Dex with Con, Con with Dex, Vit with Con, Wis with Vit, and Int with Wis. One half of these combinations are meaningful (Str with Dex, Int with Wis, Wis with Vit), the other three are frankly completely superflous, and many important combinations are missing (Dex with Wis for ranged Ranger, Vit with Wis for Healers, Vit with Dex for Disciple, ...). On Tier 5 it only gets worse with the Attuning Crystals (Str + Dex + Vit, Dex + Con + Str, Con + Dex + Vit, Vit + Con + Str, Wis + Vit + Con, Int + Wis + Vit). What you want would look more like: Con + Dex + Str for tanks, Str + Dex + Con for melee dps, Dex + Wis + Vit for ranged rangers, Vit + Wis + Con for healer, Int + Wis + Con for most mages.
Or dust of hexing. Why not make one dust of healing and one dust of damage ? Instead they had only one, and it is all over the place. Light Armor only can give spell damage focus, medium and heavy armor only healing focus. And thats when it still works nicely. Cloaks, Rings, Earrings and Amulets can only give BOTH Healing and Spell Damage Focus at the same time, with is the crappiest crappiness of crap, for there is really no class that wants to have both.
Resonating Dusts. There are much too many crappy ones one never needs.
Focusing Dusts. The only really interesting focusing dusts are: Pain (Weapon and Armor General Critical), Power (Weapon Damage Rating), Regeneration (Weapon Energy Regen), Restoration (Weapon Endurance Regen), and Countering (Armor Counterspell). Quite frankly focusing dusts below Tier 5 could get removed from the game.
The only meaningful focusing dusts available on Tier 3 are Restoration and Regeneration, and those are ONLY available from solving Crafter questlines. And they are NOT available on Tier 4.
All in all crafted items are often very inferior to what you get through quests. They would need a rebalance now that there is so much stuff you can quest easily.
- Lack of meaningful PvP. Obviously. Now to make Vanguard a game with good PvP, so many things would have to change that I would just summarize: hopeless, let it be. Rather create a completely new game from scratch.
- Lack of players. And devs. Obviously.
Comments
Those are all valid points, but your last one is most apt.
Simply lack of devs.
I log onto this game, and the game world, the graphics, the range of races classes and content its a AAA title, all of these things awe me everytime I play. At its core VG is the best DIKU MMO out. Half a dozen sized team, animator, artist, designer +programmers could whip this title into shape in less than year.
It actually is rearly frustrating to play the game sometimes, because you see a little bug and i would happily freely fix it for SOE as it would only take 30secs. Or just spend a few minutes a day rerigging some anitmations, or adding new textures. Very quickly the game would be at the stage where it would not instantly repel people new to the game / genre. But knowing SOE dont have anyone improving the game, letting so much investment and potential sit idle, its like they have gone to the effort to build disney world, but not told anyone about it and only powered up the merry go round.
Your last point is pretty much responsible for all your other points. Just sayin.
Because of the lack of players, they offer alot of xp boost weekends. (don't worry, after lvl 40ish the leveling gets realllllllllly slow.) Because of the lack of devs, they took all the pvp systems out, and didn't finsish alot of shit that needed finishing. Or fix the bugs you are talking about. Same deal with the crafting.
Your KoS city idea they actually had at launch (or something similar, I can't remember cause I only played for an hour or two because the game was shit at launch) don't know what happened to it.
Vanguard is the only game that I watched fail and didn't give a crap, only to try it again later and realize what an awesome game it could have been with a couple of devs working on it.
The game had potential but it died before it got started thanx to the horrible launch. The character models are horrible and they were doing a redesign and managed to make them look the same :S Once the PVP server got shut down I have no interest to come back.
Thats actually mostly a question of knowing the right spots and/or getting a group. You can be really quick with the later.
Playing a class with high dps and/or having a class with AoE attacks is also a factor.
At the beginning of the game, you had to find and kill 200 mobs that gave you faction for the city in question. Really boring. Even back then, I rather would have wanted the solution I described in my first posting.
The really bad character models and animations hurt it alot for me, followed closely by the lack of any signs of life beyond myself.
Being able to make a darkelf thing with tits larger than her head was amusing though.
The terrain and world was so nice that the PC models really stuck out - as if they were a highschool art class project or something.
Personal preference I guess.
I find the graphics and character models excellent. I prefer the realism approach versus other......"less realistic" looks that "some" game utilize.
I cannot stand the huge cartoon weapons and cartoony characters.
What I was saying was:
The terrain, sky and such are pretty high quality (clouds are best of any game I've saw to be honest)
But then the character models stick out like a sore thumb, as if they were added to world as an after thought by someone who had never used 3DS Max before.
I could be wrong, but I think they changed it back due to counter-whining - but for all I know they removed it again.
I agree for the most part - but I have to say I like the dwarves, gnomes and goblin models - although they don't feel as organically a part of the world as in Rift, AoC or SWTOR for example.
That being said, they are still very technically detailed models and despite the majority opinion, I like the animations because of the technical detail. I think that although they are technically superior, making an inferior model do them is what kills it for most.
The sky is likely the best of any mmo I've ever played - but that's sort of ironic; on the one hand, the sky is actually great enough to impress, on the other, what's that say about a game? "Well, they got the sky right...."
I thought Vanguard was a great game that just needed a lot of the bugs worked out of it at launch. All the changes they made trying to capture WoW's audience is what drove the game into the ground. It became this congealed mess of "love me because I'm like WoW now" mixed with "I'm totally nothing like WoW, please love me" that just left a bad taste in most every player-base's mouthes.
I really wish when people decide to make a more challenging MMO that they stick to their guns and create a fanbase of their own instead of catering to the whims of another game's audience.
I stopped playing a long time ago, and I didn't notice a lot of bugs when I left, no more than anything else imo...If their was, it must not of been a big deal, since I can't remember it being a problem.
The factions, it was different, and their was FFA PvP, and Faction PvP when it launched. I started on faction, and they got merged, so ended up playing FFA....I liked the faction, nothing to do with hating FFA, but it felt more purposeful, once it went to FFA, it was basically my guild (and allies, when and if we had some at the time) vs. everyone else. I left a while after they announced they weren't going to work on PvP anymore, and only PvE....Most that were there went to play AoC it seemed...Felt like I would be losing some of the game going to a PvE server so left when the population got too low.
Xp...Use to be slower, think it was increased a couple times, and then they started giving out xp potions and such....It wasn't supposed to be this way, but it was incentive to keep subs, due to bugs/lag on launch imo....I would of rather had it stay the way it was.
Soulbound - Kind of a pain, but not a big deal imo. It has pros/cons.
Crafting Tiers - I didn't have a problem with it, and I liked their harvesting system, group harvesting, Common/Rare/Ultra Rare mats. I dislike trading mats, we want things to often be more 'challenging', that seems like a step in the wrong direction, like a dungeon finder for raw materials....Getting things you needed to time/work sometimes, it was more rewarding than playing a trade-in game imo.
Crafting - I played on a PvP server, and we used about all the combinations of raw materials, since people had to worry about more than pve, people often had two suits on them at once, a pve and pvp suit. It could of been optimized a little bit better, I remember wishing they had a couple more combo choices, but I still liked their crafting system a lot more than 95% of the other mmos out there....The crafted stuff was still very viable, when I quit playing, I don't remember it being obsolete, so if it is now, I don't like it...I think crafting needs to be viable at all levels, and I thought I remembered raids dropped stuff that you had to be a crafter to put together....Been a while...Talk about rude awakening, going from their system to WARs meaningless/useless crafting, that wasn't even finished at launch.
PvP - talked on it some earlier, but I enjoyed it when it was there. Their was some problems, as with most games, and it got a little silly when the druids got a bunch of instant cast/no cool down stuff, you could macro some skills together and kill a ton of people in like 2 seconds (hitting them with like 5-6 spells/items/phenomena)...If they were good and certain classes, they could survive, but it was a little rediculous. So I don't think you would need to start over, as it was there before, and could be brought back if population deemed....But thats the big part.
I have a love/hate relationship with this game. I love the openworld aspect, but hate the large empty cities. I love the beautiful vistas but detest the models with a passion. Love much of the gameplay, bur get furstrated by the lack of people. I would add that it has aged badly. I looks lovely if you view things from a distance, but upclose, horrible. The idea of vanguard is a lot better than the reality at least for me. It had very obvious potential, but destroyed by a dreadful release then neglect and under investment. All rather sad really, since Vanguard is the type of MMO I want to play.
Nor would it be possible in a non-instanced world.
Heroic versions of "dungeons" is great for instanced, linnear and in my opinion boring and non-immersive games.
With the non-instanced world, making dungeons this was is impossible and would destroy one of the major unique features that Vanguard has to offer.
I for one hope they do not cater to the masses ala WoW. Let WoW have the masses, let Vanguard focus on the niche population that it lost after the buggy launch. Regain that nich population and Vanguard will be just fine...if it's possible to do so.
They reworked the character models though, and the end result was a much less realistic look.
Ever since, my women tend to have arms that are smaller than the BONES alone of a reallife women, let alone the muscles and fat that usually should surround them.
I really hate those arms.
With lots of work, I managed to make most of my characters look quite okay, though.
The advantage is, the new character models are cheaper in respect to graphic power. Less lag in raids, more natural movements, thats not bad.
Nope, they didnt.
They introduced faction with racial mounts. An IMHO *REALLY* stupid "solution". You get KoS in the cities opposing your faction mount city.
And I talk really superboring "you have to kill 14k of mobs to gain back" faction.
Yes, 14k ! I am not exaggerating. Thats the precise number.
They even made a forum vote for this back then. I was in the minority who opposed it. I think this is a major example to demonstrate that players have no clue how to make a fun game.
Thankfully later they changed the faction rules. If you get positive faction, you get 3 times the amount from before. Negative faction however is unchanged. That means, if you get 18k faction for the level 50 mount (or the flying mount, or the city armor), instead of a full 18k hit in faction, now you only get a 6k hit ! Which puts you 2k into KoS faction.
Also, you get now 3 faciton per mob. Which means instead of 14k mobs you "only" have to kill 670. As you are also level 50 (unless you want to get the flying mount, which you can actually get at any level, assuming you have 300 plats), and the mobs in question are like level 3-13, its not really much more work (actually rather less, if you have an AoE class) than the original 201 mobs you had to kill for faction.
I played the game at release. Why do you explain to me how it was at release ? I know. In fact, judging from your post, I know it better than you do. And I am complaining about the current status of the game.
I consider forced soulbound on everything a typical bad WoW concept. Their reasoning was it would "improve the economy". I say they didnt think what their game was about and rather just copied what they saw in WoW.
What it really means that I, as an altoholic, have to get again and again the same gear for every new alt. I really dont like this kind of gaming. I always want to create the "perfect" item, but I dont want to create it more than once.
There are many things that are bad in Lineage 2. But one of the things I massively enjoyed was overenchanting. It wasnt too well done either, but it was a way to create powerful items through a luck gamble.
What I get in Vanguard instead is always the same item. I cant improve it more than to a certain barrier, and I cant reuse it, in fact in the end it just gets sold to a merchant (funny how that is possible).
Everybody knows the vast majority of MMOs uses tiered crafting, you may as well have been ranting about themeparks in general. SoE has never ever been abount meaningful pvp neither in EQ, EQ2 or Vanguard. You are confusing them with Mythic. If you mentioned something even remotely tangible I wouldn't even have commented on anything. Notice your post is the only one I commented on
Oh and some of the best non raiding items comes from crafting. Again I have to school you
I followed this game for so long before release, and was able to play it during beta, launch, and more recently.
Watching this game develop was like watching a newborn baby start walking, say it's first words, eventually have its first day of school, then somewhere down the line it starts doing crystal meth and pimping out underage girls. Frickin' heartbreaking.
SoE threw this game in the garbage on purpose, those heartless monsters.
If it was your money that this game was funded with, you would've dumped it a loooong time ago. There comes a time when you've spent too much money and you are getting little to no return, you just have to stop spending more money into it. SOE not only bailed Sigil out and bought Vanguard just so it could even launch, it gave Vanguard more development time when Sigil ran out of money. SOE then spent the 2 years after release staffing the game with developers, coders, programmers, graphic artists, animators, etc.. just to tweak, fix, and finish the game off.
To suggest SOE threw this game in the garbage is turning a blind eye on just how bad of a shape this game was in, and how little players it had from the very beginning and how many left the game during the first year. Again, if it was your money funding this game before and after launch, you would've dumped it a long time ago. Because nobody would be willing to operate at a loss for such a long time, only companies that can do it are like SOE with several games in their lineup that could pickup the tabs.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
I've been long enough in the internet to know that only people who run out of arguments feel the urge to resort to insults. Thus I thank you for clearing up in the very first sentence that you didnt had anything to say. I didnt bothered to read the rest of your posting.
If it was MY money I wouldnt have released it too early, bugridden and unfinished, I would have made sure I had enough developers for the project, I would have kept advertising for the game in magazines, and I would thus have made sure I get my money back from the project in the end.
And why would SOE shut the game down ? They have very little cost running it, and it still gives them some returns.
The only reason SOE shut down SWG was because they had to pay license to Lucas Arts. Otherwise, SWG would still be up and running as well.
Also, you didnt get your facts right. SOE got Vanguard cheap, after Microsoft dumped it. It was Microsoft who originally wanted an AAA MMO, then suddenly changed the leadership of the game department, demanded suddenly Vanguard should be finished now, then dumped Vanguard altogether. AFAIK theres no official word on how much SOE payed for Vanguard, but they might have easily gotten their money back even after the way they treated it. Either way they removed a big concurrence of EQ2 in the process, and got another game for their station pass. It was far from a bad deal for them.
You however make it sound like SOE would be a charity. Which is quite absurd, dont you think ?
I am still suprised that this game cause so many emotions.
Of course this game was wasted potential - that for sure. Don't know exact history ,but problem was releasing it in state this game was. Don't know if it was Sigil who was forced and decided this or SOE decided ,but it was a mistake. I know 'running out of money, etc' thing ,but for investors it would be better to sell company / part of shares in company BEFORE release - then spent more time BEFORE releasing and overall their return on investiemt would be much better imo.
After so horrid release Vanguard had - this game was doomed in first two-three months after release. It was unavodable.
What MAYBE could have save it - it would be turning server off after this 2 months - gettting game back on developing and re-releasing it year later with bugs, exploits fixed and much better support. Of course it is sc-fi
Anyway - this game already have 5 years old. Will SOE shut it down or convert to freemium / f2p is still not decided (?),
Imo even if they DO convert it - it will be CHEAP conversion , I very much doubt SOE would want to invest massive amount of money into this game again especially that this game for 'good conversion' (if that can be said about converting to f2p) would need big investments considering scale of this game and that it clearly was not developed with microtransations in mind.
Anyway even if it release as freemium in let's say a year -then it will already have 6 years.
I wish all Vanguard ppl have fun with this game no matter what will happen to it - I also played it for short time (bugs, bad performance ,empty servers among other thigns killed it for me) - but I won't try it again. F2P or not.
For seamless ,big open world experience I will go for ArcheAge.
Until then there is plenty of signle player games + GW2 to amuse me.
I haven't logged into Vanguard in months but I understand your frustrations with the game. Though it seems many of your frustrations would apply to most MMOs.
My biggest pet peeves with the game is the feeling of being trapped: trapped in a grind. Crafting, killing or diplomacy are require thousands of points of experience and reputation and skill and time. Building a house, questing for armor, leveling, all seem like overwhelming tasks to me. Just don't feel like dealing with it. Hit the snooze and roll over for another nap.
/rant on
And the crafting system gets on my nerves. I love the mini-game itself: action points and all that. The quests and the tasks all make the grind almost bearable.
But the products themselves make no sense. Sure, it's awesome gear, but it's NOT tiered. Some tier-one stuff requires the crafter to be in the next tier to craft it AND the adventurer to be in a higher tier as well: a copper two-hander is a level-eleven recipe and only useable by eleventh-level adventurers.
And I have spent hours looking for an ultra rare for a weapon upgrade -- Upgrade complete -- Weapon two levels too high for the toon to equip. Very frustrating.
And how many times have I crafted some weapon for the first time and it looks like the cartoony bull manure from WoW?
Yeah, I really like to know what I am crafting before I start the process.
/rant off
TSW, LotRO, EQ2, SWTOR, GW2, V:SoH, Neverwinter, ArchAge, EQ, UO, DAoC, WAR, DDO, AoC, MO, BDO, SotA, B&S, ESO,