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Why Vanguard is better than your game
Murugan
Member Posts: 1,494
Vanguard had a bad launch, it was buggy people left us in droves. The game is now playable and its population is recovered from its worst days, not only that but I plan to argue that it is better than your game. Heck I'll even let you make a case for games not released yet, hype away! Convince me I'm wrong, and that I should sub your game. Or at least put up or shut up and leave our forum with your derails.
(this is not in order of importance to me)
Player Created Structures
Not just created, but with stages that show for example a crane. These structures take a considerable amount of effort to make as well, especially as they get larger such as Guild halls, Caravels and the upcoming Galleon ships. You can also decorate these houses with about as much detail as you can housing in say EQ2.
FFA PVP
We got it, it's called Sartok. Wait a second don't all pvp games have FFA servers pretty much? No, FFA means no safe spots, no limits, no rule Free-for-all.
Complex Mob Scripts
Containing:
1. Add spawns, both timed, percentage, random, and curse based.
2. Damage shields, drains, lifetaps, riposte's, immunities, beneficial incoming damage (such as healed by arcane damage etc.), varied resistances, cones (frontal, behind, side), circular aoe's (with varied ranges) both based on the mob and the players (requiring specific spacing in between raid members)
3. Stances and Enchantments which must be removed (sometimes taking multiple classes/casts)
4. Environmental spawns and effects such as blades, poison vents, traps, and plenty of obstacles and props that can and in some cases must be utilized in any successful strategy.
5. Charming, stunning, knock back, tossing (a throw over the bosses shoulder), instant death abilities, aggro loss and wipe, refresh increase, energy/endurance cost increase, casting time increase, and the ability to summon people at range.
6. Abilities and attacks that are not limited to the top of the aggro list (meaning affecting people other than the tank), such as curses that affect people above a certain level on the aggro list, or turn and slap attacks where they will attack someone else high on their aggro list then swap back to the tank.
7. A necessity to have melee in nearly every fight meaning there is no way to get around all area or cone effects by substituting other classes.
8. Important gear progression needed for all classes in order to advance in raid progression.
9. Animations, and NPC warnings that must be paid attention to in order to defeat certain content.
10. Mobs that require the completion of an event to be spawned (often in a timed manner).
18 Man Raiding
Exploit System
Similar to group "skillchains", sympathetic actions etc. Basically ordering skills with others in order to achieve more damage.
Balance
15 Wonderfully balanced classes for PvE content. Okay this one is opinion, but it is the first game I could say this about, what about you? Where every class is wanted from 1-end game? Where everyone CAN solo, and where there are multiple classes for every role and no one class is must have for everything. And where multiple classes are not simply clones of each other, but play very differently (my vote for most varied healer classes in any fantasy MMO) Many classes also have several styles or affinities that they can choose from giving further variety.
Chunk System
Rather than zones you have chunks, allowing for a load free world (although there is a slight hang during chunking sometimes, you are generally immune from damage during it and it is very short on most connections). This was a cause of a lot of bugs and lag early on, however Sony (the ones who ruined this game 
) have done a lot to improve it, and are still perfecting it. I love the system however regardless of that occasional hang.
3 Spheres of Advencement
Diplomacy, Adventuring and Crafting. All which are a considerable "grind" (if you want to use that term), and have considerable amounts of content.
Mounted, Air, and Sea Player Controlled Travel
You can have several land mounts (including upcoming race faction specific mounts 36 in all) , a nice boat , and Flying mounts both of the short term rentable variety, and the uber OMG insane quest line reward ultimate accomplishment type.
A Large World
I would say its easily as big or bigger than most on the market. Fully open to travel with flying open mounts too.
An Average of added substantial content, at all levels of the game at least every quarter
Something any good MMO should strive for, however many do not. Or no longer do.
Comments
Yawn....
You forgot the rest of the stuff Vanguards got;
4 servers left
4 hairstyles to choose from
4 levels in an hour, coz SOE thinks throwing XP at you is gonna make it fun...
4 months between patches..
challenge all you like..we tried it.. its garbage..
and not interested in a Fanbois view after you played it for a week...
Actually it is just as the OP described it. There is nothing wrong with mentioning the strengths of the game and those are all good things the game has going for it. Those are all things that keep me playing it. I just wish SOE would fix the broken quest now and try to squash some of the persistent remaining bugs.
whats the one overwhelming factor to make me NOT play vanguard....SILIUS. i mean this game would rock all the things you describe are good features. this game has improved immensly performance wise. it is even easy to forget some of the past and get into the game. then a petty egotistical person who never should have been a lead dev reaches out and will randomly slap the playerbase across the face. i mean oneday my truest wish for vanguard is that silius will learn that things go much smoothly and work gets done faster if he stays OUt of the forums. a loose cannon can be good for creative juices in a game but not in the position of lead dev. you can call this my opinion or say i am jaded but the facts remain for themselves some changes are made to the game in crafting, dip and some adv to punish the players in coorespondance with silius being challenged.
so you decide if you wanna play a game that any moment the lead dev is offended can change core mechanics to spite you?????
Yes I agree Silius is a...what is the term I should use here...::bites her tongue::...OK I will refrain from saying it...but yes he is perhaps the one thing the game does not need. He should go back to being who he was and SOE needs to get someone with better people skills then Silius.
While it does 'sound' like things have improved the fact that such a bug strewn game was released showed a complete and utter lack of respect for the mmorpg community. When companies do such things they lose the trust of the people playing these games, me included. So I will never go back to this game they've already shown me they don't give a damn about me so I will do the same and never pay for their product.
Also the complete lack of a free trial of this game again says heaps, any company confident of having a quality product would be more than happy to let people have a taster, all the big 'good' mmorpgs do it. So I would say to anybody considering going back don't until you can see the game via a free trial.
I've had a quick look at the videos and screenshots of this game and it looks very dated and old, there are 2 'potentially' fanatastic new mmorpgs due out this year which look way better than Vanguard so why pay for something which has a poor history when you can end up paying for 'possibly' one of the best mmorpgs released in the last few years?
Sorry if my comments offend but Vanguard offended me!
Vanguard may have all of those things, but for me it lacked the most important -- fun. Vanguard just wasn't fun for me, and I found it to be a fairly soulless RPG. I was a huge EQ1 fan, and hoped that VG would continue the great legacy that EQ1 established. It did not, in my opinion, even come close.
Both Vanguard and EQ2 have the same problem, no population at any given time. Everyone quits as fast as new players start.
It's an MMO............players = fun........... bottom line.
Maybe your memory fails you . When vanguard released they had a open beta they dropped there NDA and said sorry everyone but we ran out of money and this is the game where releasing. Now to me that shows alot more respect to me as a player than if they would have just released and said hey where done, come play our game its fantastic
There is suppose to be a free trail coming soon ,what do you want them to do offer a free trail before they clean up the mess sigil left the game in that would be kind of stupid after the release the game had. when sony thinks the game is ready for a free trail they will release one
The game looks dated and old umm ya ok if you say so , but your right there is other games coming out that have fantastic graphics LoTR for example game looks great except there trees look like they came out of a game i played 8 years ago called deer hunter. Age of Conan graphics look awesome but theres a price you have to pay for graphics like that and thats instanced zones that use artifical bordors to hem you in and limit you view distance something you wont find anywhere in vanguard. Myself i cant stand linear little zones that keep you on a narrow little path but each to his own
Maybe your memory fails you . When vanguard released they had a open beta they dropped there NDA and said sorry everyone but we ran out of money and this is the game where releasing. Now to me that shows alot more respect to me as a player than if they would have just released and said hey where done, come play our game its fantastic
Dropped NDA and open beta after three months of pushing pre-order packages. After four or five years of making promises that couldn't be kept; which would've been fine if none of those promises made it into the game manual and box art.
There's also the fact that those respectable apologies of the game releasing before it was ready, came with all sorts of bogus reassurances of major bug squashing, miraculous performance increases and promised content addition making it into game within the first couple of months after release.
Sigil was a very dishonest company. Can't get much worse than the President/CEO lying to you right in your face. SOE was irresponsible for even publishing such a game that was admittedly not ready.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
No its not. Its not even better than games 5 years old. But its ok, really. Some people just don't have that high demands in life, and quality is not that important to them. I am glad someone makes games for your kind too. You should be too, instead of trying to troll an MMO site.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Obviously not in the opinion of the vast majority of the other 200k+ subscribers either.
Obviously not in the opinion of the vast majority of the other 200k+ subscribers either.
I don't think that even though you said it that you do believe that all or even a vast majority of people that left the game left because of performance issues and I don't think so either.
But whatever supports your argument, or?
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
Obviously not in the opinion of the vast majority of the other 200k+ subscribers either.
I don't think that even though you said it that you do believe that all people that left the game left because of performance issues and I don't think so either.
But whatever supports your argument, or?
Well, I included the lack of promised game content alongside my mentioning of promised performance increases. I didn't single out bug squashing and performance issues.
Personally, I quit the game myself because I found it unfun; which some of that promised content addition would've helped. I'd made my hitching and performance issues bearable since Beta 3..that or I became numb to 'em somehow.
That said, my only argument is that Sigil was dishonest for lying despite their plea for sympathy over having to release too early.
I didn't buy the promises, but I had the game pre-ordered since November, and by December the boxes were already at retailers; right around the same time the January release date stuck.
I personally knew what I was getting into due to being a beta player, so I'm not complaining about my own mashochism, I'm just imagining what it must've been like for folks who were told those lies with no way of knowing better. Certainly not all 200k of those first month players were in beta, right? All 200k were fed the lies on the box, on the boards, in press releases and so on though.
Anyway, yes, my argument was that obviously there wasn't enough bug squashing, performance increases and content additions to save most of those 200k box buyers from quitting. Nor was there enough improvement pass the ebbing periods during and after the empty promises to keep the hundreds of thousands more who attempted the game through trial keys from the regular retail boxes, and multitude of of more trial keys from the special edition boxes.
I'm just presenting the grim reality behind "my opinion".
Maybe your memory fails you . When vanguard released they had a open beta they dropped there NDA and said sorry everyone but we ran out of money and this is the game where releasing. Now to me that shows alot more respect to me as a player than if they would have just released and said hey where done, come play our game its fantastic
Dropped NDA and open beta after three months of pushing pre-order packages. After four or five years of making promises that couldn't be kept; which would've been fine if none of those promises made it into the game manual and box art.
There's also the fact that those respectable apologies of the game releasing before it was ready, came with all sorts of bogus reassurances of major bug squashing, miraculous performance increases and promised content addition making it into game within the first couple of months after release.
Sigil was a very dishonest company. Can't get much worse than the President/CEO lying to you right in your face. SOE was irresponsible for even publishing such a game that was admittedly not ready.
No one forced you to pre- order or even play the game. well see how honest funcom is come mid may after there little smoke screen of a pvp beta weekend with no nda ,ummm couple instanced battlegrounds and a peak at levels 1 to 5 single player, they better have some smoking patches coming out in the next month .To bad they wont have time to properly test it even if they do should be funny
Maybe your memory fails you . When vanguard released they had a open beta they dropped there NDA and said sorry everyone but we ran out of money and this is the game where releasing. Now to me that shows alot more respect to me as a player than if they would have just released and said hey where done, come play our game its fantastic
Dropped NDA and open beta after three months of pushing pre-order packages. After four or five years of making promises that couldn't be kept; which would've been fine if none of those promises made it into the game manual and box art.
There's also the fact that those respectable apologies of the game releasing before it was ready, came with all sorts of bogus reassurances of major bug squashing, miraculous performance increases and promised content addition making it into game within the first couple of months after release.
Sigil was a very dishonest company. Can't get much worse than the President/CEO lying to you right in your face. SOE was irresponsible for even publishing such a game that was admittedly not ready.
No one forced you to pre- order or even play the game. well see how honest funcom is come mid may after there little smoke screen of a pvp beta weekend with no nda ,ummm couple instanced battlegrounds and a peak at levels 1 to 5 single player, they better have some smoking patches coming out in the next month .To bad they wont have time to properly test it even if they do should be funny
Yeah I know, pre-ordering Vanguard was voluntary masochism as I already stated.
Not sure what Age of Conan has to do with anything, but I feel quite the opposite with it going into its launch though. I'd pre-ordered before the PvP Beta Weekend, but now that I've experienced it, I'm completely sold.
Did you have fun yourself?
Maybe your memory fails you . When vanguard released they had a open beta they dropped there NDA and said sorry everyone but we ran out of money and this is the game where releasing. Now to me that shows alot more respect to me as a player than if they would have just released and said hey where done, come play our game its fantastic
Dropped NDA and open beta after three months of pushing pre-order packages. After four or five years of making promises that couldn't be kept; which would've been fine if none of those promises made it into the game manual and box art.
There's also the fact that those respectable apologies of the game releasing before it was ready, came with all sorts of bogus reassurances of major bug squashing, miraculous performance increases and promised content addition making it into game within the first couple of months after release.
Sigil was a very dishonest company. Can't get much worse than the President/CEO lying to you right in your face. SOE was irresponsible for even publishing such a game that was admittedly not ready.
No one forced you to pre- order or even play the game. well see how honest funcom is come mid may after there little smoke screen of a pvp beta weekend with no nda ,ummm couple instanced battlegrounds and a peak at levels 1 to 5 single player, they better have some smoking patches coming out in the next month .To bad they wont have time to properly test it even if they do should be funny
Yeah I know, pre-ordering Vanguard was voluntary masochism as I already stated.
Not sure what Age of Conan has to do with anything, but I feel quite the opposite with it going into its launch though. I'd pre-ordered before the PvP Beta Weekend, but now that I've experienced it, I'm completely sold.
Did you have fun yourself?
Actually i seen enough of that game long before this weekend ever came around lol
Many guys would kill to be praised and supported by a girl like Tea-La. *sight*
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
I agree that there are many things you list that are real strengths to the game: The free flow of the world, the well designed classes, the methods of travels. Even houses and boats are nice, even though they serve little more than fluff.
Some things you list as strengths are rather sketchy. Diplomacy for example is nice, but it is about a complex as a bag of hammers and seems to be an abandoned feature after the devs even admitted it needed an overhaul. I wouldn't call chunks a strength of the game either as there are plenty of other games that do seamless without the hangs, bugs and other annoyances that VG chunks offer. The fact that the game has a known term to the players for its zone lines pretty much eliminates that as a benefit.
Then there are some things that just don't seem to add up at all, like the added content every quarter being anywhere near anything else? The game is still filling in level gaps?
Anyhow, I can say why a multitude of other games are better than VG and that is because they have a future. I can reasonably expect a steady stream of content in the form of paid and free expansions. I don't even need to detail the combat quality, the awesome variety of classes offered through far superior customization options that dwarf VG classes in comparison, the better lore that is actually in the gameplay and not a card game, the quality and variety of quests, and on and on and on.
I'm not here to try to make you change games because you put up a pepsi challenge. Play what you like, but VG is just a came that is moving from the crawl to walk stage of its life. Realistically and based on the history of the company that is supporting it, this game is already in the best shape it is ever going to get. It has reached its peak, there isn't much more to come. Performance/stability may increase some more and there might be some mini content updates here and there. Heck, there might even be a great concept introduced at some point, but thats about it. It is just as likely that they start to strip out important features that made the game potential just as great. It is a complete crap shoot at this point.
I'm not saying there isn't fun to be had in VG, but it just isn't great. Especially in comparison to what else the market has to offer. There is just sill to much bland in the game from diplomacy, animations, story text, hastily built quests and content, empty land mass, etc.
Maybe someday, but I'm not holding my breath just yet.
I somewhat agree with a lot of that the OP put up however in the name of balance, there are some very large weaknesses of VG. Mainly a strong compelling reason to stick with it. The world is static and there is no way to impact it.
They need to put in something aside from "raids" at endgame to round this sucker out. Seeing as its a PvE grinder, they really need to get some decent, complex and world impacting quest going on. I'm no dev so I don't know what you can really do but....killing 10 of this and that gets old in any MMO. Horizons (now Istaria) use to have sever wide "quest" to free new player races, fight off the invading "blight"...stuff like that I guess.
There also need to be a few player "tools" to be put n like the ability to create communities. I real use for ships. Add in some of that sea content.
Maybe some sort of "kingdom" territory control for resources...I dunno, but its not like the game world isn't large enough to support just about anything.
Its going to be very disappointing if this evolves into a strict raid game.
But I'll give that time, it took WoW 8 months before they added their PvP endgame portion and almost a year before the their Raid portion was strongly in place. (and remember they revamped both a couple of times...something everyone likes to overlook)
Silly me, I only play on one server at a time, so that doesn't affect me.
I wear a hood, and 4 hairstyles is more than you get in a lot of games.
4 Levels in an hour at low level (pretty common in most games), 4 levels 20+ and I'm pretty impressed you must be pretty good.
4 months between patches.
Well from December 19 to March 19 we had 2 major game updates, and 9 total updates, GU5 hits our test server in <24 hours, and we have had a couple bug fixes since GU4.
I have played it since beta, I quit. I returned for the holidays, I have been playing it since then. Its been a tad over a week.
Sounds like you had a bad server, I definatly find groups easier than I did in EQ2 on Seradon at all levels. The overall population might be lower than lots of games, FFXI when I played it had 10x the population yet anyone who has played that game knows you can LFG for 8 hours+ something I have never seen in Vanguard.
http://xivpads.com/?1595680
http://guildwork.com/users/murugan
A good friend of mine is a 50 Diplomat. I wish they would add more diplo content they have been promising it "forever" but considering forever is a little over a year, I wouldn't say its a broken promise in the world of MMO vocabulary just yet.
Other games have a seamless world, but I would say most are tiny worlds by comparison, with a fraction of the detail.
They have released more content in the past 6 months than they ever did when they had a larger staff. They release content faster than FFXI ever did, more free content than EQ or EQ2 ever did.
Diplomacy is a card game I will give you that, but to say that there is a multitude of games with better combat, classes, and customizations please if you could provide an example of these games. I think that would only be fair.
Those who say VG is dead, are nothing but spoiled gamers who are either new to the genre or have no memory of what MMO's used to be like. Look back at whatever game you are playing now and ask yourself if it did not have similar moments. But your point is lost on me, because I find the game multitudes better than it ever was, and better than any game on the market.
A dynamic world was one thing envisioned for this game, and with them adding more and more stuff promised to us by Sigil I don't see why so many people find it hard to believe that they will not continue this trend.
I have heard plenty of rumors with sea content being added, it would be simple to do and I expect it with the launch of Galleon's either in GU5 (maybe as a surprise) or GU6 which I expect out before the end of summer.
With race mounts , new dungeons announced, and the flying mount quests already in the game (awesome quest line) I think it is hardly a raid only grind.
Now to those who posted useless opinions without backing them up with anything at all, feel free to post again.
To those who called me a troll, posting this in your forum would be trolling, derailing half our threads with "don't play VG its not worth it" is trolling. I posted this thread to have one place in which you can all attack our game, and I or someone else can defend it (I also prefer this title to the 10 or so real trolling threads about the death of VG, or where VG went wrong etc.).
If you enjoyed games like EQ and FFXI then I think you would love this game now personally. If you play other games you might as well, but in my opinion Vanguard is the clear successor of at least those two games and nothing in development or out there competes with it for that title.
http://xivpads.com/?1595680
http://guildwork.com/users/murugan
Whow.
"This game has only 4 hairstyles, therefore its a failure."
Really an interesting logic...
Apparently you didnt play on Sartok, the pvp is so imbalanced its terrible. I played a rogue to 40, and against the majority of the people out there, the fight consisted of me backstabbing twice, and moving onto my next victim, it got a little old, and there was no challenge in that. Plus almost everyone plays the "uber" classes like shaman, and with the lack of tanks because they suck in pvp, groups are a real pain in the ass. With an already low population, it kills grouping and progressing in this game, and thats exactly why I quit.
p.s. when you kill someone, you get infamy, and infamy does nothing but make you a target for other people to kill. You cant buy anything with it, you cant do anything with it, so basically you have pvp that has no reward other than lengthening your e-peen. Its sad really
PVE balance has been their focus of late, PvP balance is entirely different.
There is no point to PvP, well other than the obvious one being to pvp. It is unbalanced, but a FFA pvp server is pretty cool regardless. I'm sure they will fix it in time, but you have me there I will admit it, Sartok currently isn't the most populated or balanced server out there.
http://xivpads.com/?1595680
http://guildwork.com/users/murugan