This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Yea in my opinion EQ succeded because there was very little competition at the time so people had to live with corpse runs and forced grouping
This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Nonsense. It proved no such thing either for or against those things.
The majority of people quit the game in the first 10 levels before they'd even gotten to the point of even experiencing any of those things you cite. I was there in beta and I was there for launch, and I can tell you that the reasonsn people gave for quitting and not going back was the mountain of technical issues the game had, rendering it unplayable. Horrible performance, mobs falling through the ground, and on and on.
See, that's the problem you run into when you try to revise history and replace the actual events with your own version that better suits your narrative... There will always be people who were actually there and who actually remember what went down first-hand.
Vanguard's failing early on had nothing to do with its xp penalties or anything you cited. The reasons given, repeatedly, for why people didn't continue playing after that was because of the continued technical issues with the game, and becuase it was basically a ghost-town with so few playing in such a massive game world.
I'm not a huge fan of Vanguard myself, but I'm also not going to sit here and let someone make crap up just to push their personal agenda against a playstyle they don't like.
This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Yea in my opinion EQ succeded because there was very little competition at the time so people had to live with corpse runs and forced grouping
It's amazing how often this argument comes up. It's wrong, every single time, for the same reason.
People are not going to continue playing and paying for a game that they aren't enjoying enough to do so, regardless of how many "other options" there are. If the game isn't fun enough to them, and none of the other options seem interesting, then they have the choice of simply not playing any of them at all. "Not having many other options" means absolutely nothing.
Everquest 1 did not succeed as much as it did for as long as it did "because there weren't many other options". It succeeded as much as it did, for as long as it did because the people playing it genuinely enjoyed playing it and wanted to continue.
Saying "oh they only played it 'cause there weren't many options" is not a rational argument. It's an irrational attempt to dismiss and undermine the popularity the game actually had.
Originally posted by Paladrink Again please put some damn AI bots for hire ingame, this game is unplayable if you do not have people to play with and sadly even with the f2p still wont cover a 10% of the damn world as its too huge.
Agreed VG was too big and felt empty. VG is a social failure, not a technical failure. Game mechanics made it so players neither had time nor reason to interact. Hindsight is 20/20. In theory, lots of button mashing and lack of downtime sounds cool; in the implementation it was impersonal.
I disagree on the higlighted parts.
VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done.
The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping.
While i love many parts of the game, the character annimations are so bad it ruins my fun, they are irritating the hell out of me? And thats the only reason i will not play Vanguard anymore, unless they update the annimations.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Played it for a year or two, raided a few times with a guild etc. The game was fun and immersive, however the game is to buggy, bad framrate,bad servers and bad graphics and bad character/armour/weapon models and combat was too slow and WoWish..but slower. GW2 is the best mmoprg, or even best game at the moment. I can't stand playing Vanguard again...it was fun while it lasted, now die.
This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Yea in my opinion EQ succeded because there was very little competition at the time so people had to live with corpse runs and forced grouping
It's amazing how often this argument comes up. It's wrong, every single time, for the same reason.
Not that your reasons i cut out are wrong, but there is another reason why this is wrong.
The competition was arguably stronger.
At the time of EQ's peak there were options. DAoC was in its prime. AC and UO were good options early on in EQ's reign, and FFXI and SWG came along when it was still growing. So looking at EQ's peak period, from about 2001 up until EQ2/WoW launch, you always had at least 3 main competitiors in their prime. from 2002-2004, where EQ2 was still growing, you had 3 main competitors, 2 agng old games, and stuff like AO, Earth and Beyond, AC2, EvE online.
When Rift launched in 2011 It had less current competition. WoW was 7 years old off a massively unpopular expansion and EQ2 had seen better days. the only game that was currently in its prime was EvE.
SWToR and GW2,along with Rift and a return to form WoW expansion, have finally given us an era where there is more competition than EQ1 had, but that wasnt the case for most of the last 5-6 years
This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Yea in my opinion EQ succeded because there was very little competition at the time so people had to live with corpse runs and forced grouping
It's amazing how often this argument comes up. It's wrong, every single time, for the same reason.
People are not going to continue playing and paying for a game that they aren't enjoying enough to do so, regardless of how many "other options" there are. If the game isn't fun enough to them, and none of the other options seem interesting, then they have the choice of simply not playing any of them at all. "Not having many other options" means absolutely nothing.
Everquest 1 did not succeed as much as it did for as long as it did "because there weren't many other options". It succeeded as much as it did, for as long as it did because the people playing it genuinely enjoyed playing it and wanted to continue.
Saying "oh they only played it 'cause there weren't many options" is not a rational argument. It's an irrational attempt to dismiss and undermine the popularity the game actually had.
You could be right, but the fact is there were less options certainly compard to today. Eq was also unique for its time and certainly had appeal,it also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine so it got great pub. my guess is that corpse runs and other annoying parts of the game people learned to live with because perhaps they did not know any better until WOW and others showed them a different way, at that point EQ quickly faded from the scene to become a niche game
You could be right, but the fact is there were less options certainly compard to today. Eq was also unique for its time and certainly had appeal,it also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine so it got great pub. my guess is that corpse runs and other annoying parts of the game people learned to live with because perhaps they did not know any better until WOW and others showed them a different way, at that point EQ quickly faded from the scene to become a niche game
Less crappy options but more 'current' and quality options.
I do think you are partially right in that a forced grouping game wouldnt go over so well in today's age, but i do think bringing back some that sting to death would go over well. As would a game that takes a long time to level. I think a game in the EQ model absolutely could sustain 400k subs again.
Originally posted by boojiboy I played Vanguard from launch until 2011. Despite the problems, it was by far the best MMO experience I've ever had with the best community I've ever experienced. It's set the standard so high, that I can't find another MMO that I can enjoy.
I also played it at launch Enjoyed it for a couple of month, didn't have allot of bother from the bugs/issue's, but eventually mainly me growing abit tirde of fantasy gave up on the game pure based on it's fantasy theme.
But have a similar feeling like you have with Vangaurd but in my case it's SWG, it has set the bar so high that no MMORPG has even come close to the amount of content/social feature's SWG gave me.
While I can enjoy certain themepark MMORPG, it will alway's be SWG that has given me the best MMORPG experiance I ever had despite it's bugs/issue's.
You could be right, but the fact is there were less options certainly compard to today. Eq was also unique for its time and certainly had appeal,it also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine so it got great pub. my guess is that corpse runs and other annoying parts of the game people learned to live with because perhaps they did not know any better until WOW and others showed them a different way, at that point EQ quickly faded from the scene to become a niche game
Less crappy options but more 'current' and quality options.
I do think you are partially right in that a forced grouping game wouldnt go over so well in today's age, but i do think bringing back some that sting to death would go over well. As would a game that takes a long time to level. I think a game in the EQ model absolutely could sustain 400k subs again.
Taking a long time to level is not included in the 'punishment' gameplay I listed above. I am actually for lengthier levelling time, though I think many would blanch at it, unless mid level rewards were offered, or simply the levels didn't take long but there were so many the entire trip took a long time.
Providing a huge world at launch like EQ and VG is good, allowing players to level the entire time they explore that huge world is also good. (Rather than levelling up on 50% of the world and 'endgaming' on the other half.)
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Nonsense. It proved no such thing either for or against those things.
The majority of people quit the game in the first 10 levels before they'd even gotten to the point of even experiencing any of those things you cite. I was there in beta and I was there for launch, and I can tell you that the reasonsn people gave for quitting and not going back was the mountain of technical issues the game had, rendering it unplayable. Horrible performance, mobs falling through the ground, and on and on.
See, that's the problem you run into when you try to revise history and replace the actual events with your own version that better suits your narrative... There will always be people who were actually there and who actually remember what went down first-hand.
Vanguard's failing early on had nothing to do with its xp penalties or anything you cited. The reasons given, repeatedly, for why people didn't continue playing after that was because of the continued technical issues with the game, and becuase it was basically a ghost-town with so few playing in such a massive game world.
I'm not a huge fan of Vanguard myself, but I'm also not going to sit here and let someone make crap up just to push their personal agenda against a playstyle they don't like.
I find it amusing you bring up revisionist argument when you get so much wrong about early VG. As in the penalties started at level 5, which means if they played to 10 (Which took a while back then) then they were fully exposed to the PITA/Punishment aspects of VG.
Horrible performance? DDO stutters unless you have an SSD due to their terrible file management, and it has only gotten worse with all the changes and additions over the years. People still play they because they enjoy the game and what they want out of a MMO can only be found in that unique game. So Performance forcing people out of their favorite game? Pure Bunk.
Mobs falling through the world? Won't happen in the VG engine. They can get stuck in the geometry, but the floor in the VG engine is always Z axis 0, the mobs have no code going below that. If there are stairs or a cliff, then the Z axis changes to 9 being the floor for that as well.
Honestly, you get so many things wrong when you talk about early VG, makes me wonder if you were actually there. Revisiont Argument? I beleieve that only occurred to you to bring up because you were making up your arguments as you typed them.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
It wasn't the harsh gameplay that drove people away from Vanguard. It was the lag, the glitches, the performance, the unfinished state of things, and the biggest one, lack of development.
Over time, SoE started cutting more and more of the interesting features from VG to make it simpler, a bit more themeparkish. Bind on pickup was added, corpse runs removed, xp penalty reduced, EE was removed, icons were added over NPC heads, sparkles for quest objectives were added.
Do you know what this resulted in? A large large percentage of the core audience of Vanguard getting upset and leaving.
SoE was barely giving any development money to Vanguard and what little it got they spent on making it like WoW. That was the final straw for most people.
Originally posted by gordiflu Originally posted by ArclanOriginally posted by PaladrinkAgain please put some damn AI bots for hire ingame, this game is unplayable if you do not have people to play with and sadly even with the f2p still wont cover a 10% of the damn world as its too huge.
Agreed VG was too big and felt empty. VG is a social failure, not a technical failure. Game mechanics made it so players neither had time nor reason to interact. Hindsight is 20/20. In theory, lots of button mashing and lack of downtime sounds cool; in the implementation it was impersonal. I disagree on the higlighted parts.
VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done.
The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping.
By social failure I mean that folks did not socialize...as in talk. Sure we grouped, but never had time to say more than 'incoming.' Yes the game would crash every few hours, and once in a while I would fall through the world (which was cool, actually); sometimes the graphics were choppy even on my top-end computer, but that had no bearing on my disinterest in the game.
Vanguard is a shadow of its potential for too many reasons to list here, and every one of them is gameplay related.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Originally posted by DavisFlight It wasn't the harsh gameplay that drove people away from Vanguard. It was the lag, the glitches, the performance, the unfinished state of things, and the biggest one, lack of development.Over time, SoE started cutting more and more of the interesting features from VG to make it simpler, a bit more themeparkish. Bind on pickup was added, corpse runs removed, xp penalty reduced, EE was removed, icons were added over NPC heads, sparkles for quest objectives were added.Do you know what this resulted in? A large large percentage of the core audience of Vanguard getting upset and leaving.SoE was barely giving any development money to Vanguard and what little it got they spent on making it like WoW. That was the final straw for most people.
OMG SOE did those things? ROFL stoopid! I assumed Sigil added in the WoW features to appease Microsoft. In short, those additions made the game terrible!
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Actually, Silius did those things. After breaking Vanguard he apparently went over to break EQ2. I heard they were able to get rid of him before he before he completely sunk that ship. Sadly, we were not able to get him off Vanguard before he did his WoW, easy mode damage.
Originally posted by DavisFlight It wasn't the harsh gameplay that drove people away from Vanguard. It was the lag, the glitches, the performance, the unfinished state of things, and the biggest one, lack of development.
Over time, SoE started cutting more and more of the interesting features from VG to make it simpler, a bit more themeparkish. Bind on pickup was added, corpse runs removed, xp penalty reduced, EE was removed, icons were added over NPC heads, sparkles for quest objectives were added.
Do you know what this resulted in? A large large percentage of the core audience of Vanguard getting upset and leaving.
SoE was barely giving any development money to Vanguard and what little it got they spent on making it like WoW. That was the final straw for most people.
OMG SOE did those things? ROFL stoopid! I assumed Sigil added in the WoW features to appease Microsoft. In short, those additions made the game terrible!
Yes those were all changes made about 3 months after launch by SOE after they bought and disbanded Sigil.
Originally posted by PaladrinkAgain please put some damn AI bots for hire ingame, this game is unplayable if you do not have people to play with and sadly even with the f2p still wont cover a 10% of the damn world as its too huge.
Agreed VG was too big and felt empty. VG is a social failure, not a technical failure. Game mechanics made it so players neither had time nor reason to interact. Hindsight is 20/20. In theory, lots of button mashing and lack of downtime sounds cool; in the implementation it was impersonal.
I disagree on the higlighted parts.
VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done.
The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping.
By social failure I mean that folks did not socialize...as in talk. Sure we grouped, but never had time to say more than 'incoming.' Yes the game would crash every few hours, and once in a while I would fall through the world (which was cool, actually); sometimes the graphics were choppy even on my top-end computer, but that had no bearing on my disinterest in the game.
Vanguard is a shadow of its potential for too many reasons to list here, and every one of them is gameplay related.
Bugs and crashes may not have relation with your reasons for leaving the game, but it was the main reason for many players. You only need to remember forums and the game chat by then.
You are right when you say we were all very busy when the game started, but still there was plenty of social interaction by then. Crafters selling their stuff, guilds recruiting, diplomats announcing the new buffs up, guilds from enemy factions arranging neutral zones for crafters and such, pvp fights involving many people... However it did not last long, since the critical mass I mentioned before disappered quite quickly.
Our reasons for leaving the game back then are not the same. Fair enough. However, the main reason for the quick exodus was the bad, laggy, buggy performance. Remember the threads back then, or check this same thread and you will realize that it was the main complain back then and it's the main complain stil now.
This article keeps bringing up 'The Vision'. That isn't anywhere to be seen in the current Vanguard. VG was Brad's Fight against WoW, and included XP loss, corpse runs and other 'old school' PITA gameplay. He thought WoW was too easy on players and Vanguard was to return to early EQ's punishment formula and forced grouping. NONE of that remains.
The XP loss was mitigated, the corpse runs eliminated, the forced grouping relaxed. Faction grinding eased. In short, it basically took all that noise that people keep making in the MMO forums about difficult games, put it to the test, and it FAILED.
Bugs, glitches, and broken mechanics aside, if there was a market for punishment based PITA gameplay like old EQ, then people would have stuck it out throught the bugs and supported it. As it is, it didn't get popular until after all that nonsense was removed or seriously curtailed.
Nonsense. It proved no such thing either for or against those things.
The majority of people quit the game in the first 10 levels before they'd even gotten to the point of even experiencing any of those things you cite. I was there in beta and I was there for launch, and I can tell you that the reasonsn people gave for quitting and not going back was the mountain of technical issues the game had, rendering it unplayable. Horrible performance, mobs falling through the ground, and on and on.
See, that's the problem you run into when you try to revise history and replace the actual events with your own version that better suits your narrative... There will always be people who were actually there and who actually remember what went down first-hand.
Vanguard's failing early on had nothing to do with its xp penalties or anything you cited. The reasons given, repeatedly, for why people didn't continue playing after that was because of the continued technical issues with the game, and becuase it was basically a ghost-town with so few playing in such a massive game world.
I'm not a huge fan of Vanguard myself, but I'm also not going to sit here and let someone make crap up just to push their personal agenda against a playstyle they don't like.
I find it amusing you bring up revisionist argument when you get so much wrong about early VG. As in the penalties started at level 5, which means if they played to 10 (Which took a while back then) then they were fully exposed to the PITA/Punishment aspects of VG.
Horrible performance? DDO stutters unless you have an SSD due to their terrible file management, and it has only gotten worse with all the changes and additions over the years. People still play they because they enjoy the game and what they want out of a MMO can only be found in that unique game. So Performance forcing people out of their favorite game? Pure Bunk.
Mobs falling through the world? Won't happen in the VG engine. They can get stuck in the geometry, but the floor in the VG engine is always Z axis 0, the mobs have no code going below that. If there are stairs or a cliff, then the Z axis changes to 9 being the floor for that as well.
Honestly, you get so many things wrong when you talk about early VG, makes me wonder if you were actually there. Revisiont Argument? I beleieve that only occurred to you to bring up because you were making up your arguments as you typed them.
You know what would be a great public service? If Sony gave away a SSD hard drive if you subbed for one month. Think they will do it?
"At this point, I feel it important to note that while Vanguard was a failure in terms of both management and development, this wasn't the desired end result."
Originally posted by gordiflu Originally posted by ArclanOriginally posted by gordifluOriginally posted by ArclanOriginally posted by PaladrinkAgain please put some damn AI bots for hire ingame, this game is unplayable if you do not have people to play with and sadly even with the f2p still wont cover a 10% of the damn world as its too huge.
Agreed VG was too big and felt empty. VG is a social failure, not a technical failure. Game mechanics made it so players neither had time nor reason to interact. Hindsight is 20/20. In theory, lots of button mashing and lack of downtime sounds cool; in the implementation it was impersonal. I disagree on the higlighted parts.VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done.The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping. By social failure I mean that folks did not socialize...as in talk. Sure we grouped, but never had time to say more than 'incoming.' Yes the game would crash every few hours, and once in a while I would fall through the world (which was cool, actually); sometimes the graphics were choppy even on my top-end computer, but that had no bearing on my disinterest in the game. Vanguard is a shadow of its potential for too many reasons to list here, and every one of them is gameplay related.Bugs and crashes may not have relation with your reasons for leaving the game, but it was the main reason for many players. You only need to remember forums and the game chat by then.
You are right when you say we were all very busy when the game started, but still there was plenty of social interaction by then. Crafters selling their stuff, guilds recruiting, diplomats announcing the new buffs up, guilds from enemy factions arranging neutral zones for crafters and such, pvp fights involving many people... However it did not last long, since the critical mass I mentioned before disappered quite quickly.
Our reasons for leaving the game back then are not the same. Fair enough. However, the main reason for the quick exodus was the bad, laggy, buggy performance. Remember the threads back then, or check this same thread and you will realize that it was the main complain back then and it's the main complain stil now.
Appreciate your perpsective; perhaps your started elsewhere on the map. Two things sound odd, though, (1) Crafters selling their wares and (2) guilds from enemy factions setting up a safe area for crafters.
(1) everyone bought and sold items through the npc (what was it called?). This required no interaction. (2) did you play on a pvp server? Otherwise I don't get it.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Comments
Yea in my opinion EQ succeded because there was very little competition at the time so people had to live with corpse runs and forced grouping
Nonsense. It proved no such thing either for or against those things.
The majority of people quit the game in the first 10 levels before they'd even gotten to the point of even experiencing any of those things you cite. I was there in beta and I was there for launch, and I can tell you that the reasonsn people gave for quitting and not going back was the mountain of technical issues the game had, rendering it unplayable. Horrible performance, mobs falling through the ground, and on and on.
See, that's the problem you run into when you try to revise history and replace the actual events with your own version that better suits your narrative... There will always be people who were actually there and who actually remember what went down first-hand.
Vanguard's failing early on had nothing to do with its xp penalties or anything you cited. The reasons given, repeatedly, for why people didn't continue playing after that was because of the continued technical issues with the game, and becuase it was basically a ghost-town with so few playing in such a massive game world.
I'm not a huge fan of Vanguard myself, but I'm also not going to sit here and let someone make crap up just to push their personal agenda against a playstyle they don't like.
It's amazing how often this argument comes up. It's wrong, every single time, for the same reason.
People are not going to continue playing and paying for a game that they aren't enjoying enough to do so, regardless of how many "other options" there are. If the game isn't fun enough to them, and none of the other options seem interesting, then they have the choice of simply not playing any of them at all. "Not having many other options" means absolutely nothing.
Everquest 1 did not succeed as much as it did for as long as it did "because there weren't many other options". It succeeded as much as it did, for as long as it did because the people playing it genuinely enjoyed playing it and wanted to continue.
Saying "oh they only played it 'cause there weren't many options" is not a rational argument. It's an irrational attempt to dismiss and undermine the popularity the game actually had.
I disagree on the higlighted parts.
VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done.
The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Not that your reasons i cut out are wrong, but there is another reason why this is wrong.
The competition was arguably stronger.
At the time of EQ's peak there were options. DAoC was in its prime. AC and UO were good options early on in EQ's reign, and FFXI and SWG came along when it was still growing. So looking at EQ's peak period, from about 2001 up until EQ2/WoW launch, you always had at least 3 main competitiors in their prime. from 2002-2004, where EQ2 was still growing, you had 3 main competitors, 2 agng old games, and stuff like AO, Earth and Beyond, AC2, EvE online.
When Rift launched in 2011 It had less current competition. WoW was 7 years old off a massively unpopular expansion and EQ2 had seen better days. the only game that was currently in its prime was EvE.
SWToR and GW2,along with Rift and a return to form WoW expansion, have finally given us an era where there is more competition than EQ1 had, but that wasnt the case for most of the last 5-6 years
You could be right, but the fact is there were less options certainly compard to today. Eq was also unique for its time and certainly had appeal,it also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine so it got great pub. my guess is that corpse runs and other annoying parts of the game people learned to live with because perhaps they did not know any better until WOW and others showed them a different way, at that point EQ quickly faded from the scene to become a niche game
Less crappy options but more 'current' and quality options.
I do think you are partially right in that a forced grouping game wouldnt go over so well in today's age, but i do think bringing back some that sting to death would go over well. As would a game that takes a long time to level. I think a game in the EQ model absolutely could sustain 400k subs again.
I also played it at launch Enjoyed it for a couple of month, didn't have allot of bother from the bugs/issue's, but eventually mainly me growing abit tirde of fantasy gave up on the game pure based on it's fantasy theme.
But have a similar feeling like you have with Vangaurd but in my case it's SWG, it has set the bar so high that no MMORPG has even come close to the amount of content/social feature's SWG gave me.
While I can enjoy certain themepark MMORPG, it will alway's be SWG that has given me the best MMORPG experiance I ever had despite it's bugs/issue's.
Taking a long time to level is not included in the 'punishment' gameplay I listed above. I am actually for lengthier levelling time, though I think many would blanch at it, unless mid level rewards were offered, or simply the levels didn't take long but there were so many the entire trip took a long time.
Providing a huge world at launch like EQ and VG is good, allowing players to level the entire time they explore that huge world is also good. (Rather than levelling up on 50% of the world and 'endgaming' on the other half.)
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
I find it amusing you bring up revisionist argument when you get so much wrong about early VG. As in the penalties started at level 5, which means if they played to 10 (Which took a while back then) then they were fully exposed to the PITA/Punishment aspects of VG.
Horrible performance? DDO stutters unless you have an SSD due to their terrible file management, and it has only gotten worse with all the changes and additions over the years. People still play they because they enjoy the game and what they want out of a MMO can only be found in that unique game. So Performance forcing people out of their favorite game? Pure Bunk.
Mobs falling through the world? Won't happen in the VG engine. They can get stuck in the geometry, but the floor in the VG engine is always Z axis 0, the mobs have no code going below that. If there are stairs or a cliff, then the Z axis changes to 9 being the floor for that as well.
Honestly, you get so many things wrong when you talk about early VG, makes me wonder if you were actually there. Revisiont Argument? I beleieve that only occurred to you to bring up because you were making up your arguments as you typed them.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
It wasn't the harsh gameplay that drove people away from Vanguard. It was the lag, the glitches, the performance, the unfinished state of things, and the biggest one, lack of development.
Over time, SoE started cutting more and more of the interesting features from VG to make it simpler, a bit more themeparkish. Bind on pickup was added, corpse runs removed, xp penalty reduced, EE was removed, icons were added over NPC heads, sparkles for quest objectives were added.
Do you know what this resulted in? A large large percentage of the core audience of Vanguard getting upset and leaving.
SoE was barely giving any development money to Vanguard and what little it got they spent on making it like WoW. That was the final straw for most people.
I disagree on the higlighted parts.
VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done.
The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping.
By social failure I mean that folks did not socialize...as in talk. Sure we grouped, but never had time to say more than 'incoming.'
Yes the game would crash every few hours, and once in a while I would fall through the world (which was cool, actually); sometimes the graphics were choppy even on my top-end computer, but that had no bearing on my disinterest in the game.
Vanguard is a shadow of its potential for too many reasons to list here, and every one of them is gameplay related.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
OMG SOE did those things? ROFL stoopid! I assumed Sigil added in the WoW features to appease Microsoft. In short, those additions made the game terrible!
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
"OMG SOE did those things?"
Actually, Silius did those things. After breaking Vanguard he apparently went over to break EQ2. I heard they were able to get rid of him before he before he completely sunk that ship. Sadly, we were not able to get him off Vanguard before he did his WoW, easy mode damage.
Yes those were all changes made about 3 months after launch by SOE after they bought and disbanded Sigil.
Bugs and crashes may not have relation with your reasons for leaving the game, but it was the main reason for many players. You only need to remember forums and the game chat by then.
You are right when you say we were all very busy when the game started, but still there was plenty of social interaction by then. Crafters selling their stuff, guilds recruiting, diplomats announcing the new buffs up, guilds from enemy factions arranging neutral zones for crafters and such, pvp fights involving many people... However it did not last long, since the critical mass I mentioned before disappered quite quickly.
Our reasons for leaving the game back then are not the same. Fair enough. However, the main reason for the quick exodus was the bad, laggy, buggy performance. Remember the threads back then, or check this same thread and you will realize that it was the main complain back then and it's the main complain stil now.
You know what would be a great public service? If Sony gave away a SSD hard drive if you subbed for one month. Think they will do it?
LOL!
I disagree on the higlighted parts. VG is totally group oriented and many mechanics work in that direction. Anything you do in a group has bonuses, and that even includes farming for crafting materials. So, when you come across somebody farming them where you are farming too, what you do is teaming up instead of fighting for the resources. You have an insane amount of group content and tons of quests that point you to that content. Content is not instanced, so you can come across other groups while running a dungeon. Crafting is meaningful and crafters need to interact. Building things like ships or houses require many different crafters to get all the parts done. The problem is that in a world this big you need a critical mass of players to get the feeling of a lively world, and that level population was only achieved at launch. After that, all the bugs and performance issues drove people off, but the problem was never VG mechanics not encouraging grouping.
By social failure I mean that folks did not socialize...as in talk. Sure we grouped, but never had time to say more than 'incoming.' Yes the game would crash every few hours, and once in a while I would fall through the world (which was cool, actually); sometimes the graphics were choppy even on my top-end computer, but that had no bearing on my disinterest in the game. Vanguard is a shadow of its potential for too many reasons to list here, and every one of them is gameplay related.
Bugs and crashes may not have relation with your reasons for leaving the game, but it was the main reason for many players. You only need to remember forums and the game chat by then.
You are right when you say we were all very busy when the game started, but still there was plenty of social interaction by then. Crafters selling their stuff, guilds recruiting, diplomats announcing the new buffs up, guilds from enemy factions arranging neutral zones for crafters and such, pvp fights involving many people... However it did not last long, since the critical mass I mentioned before disappered quite quickly.
Our reasons for leaving the game back then are not the same. Fair enough. However, the main reason for the quick exodus was the bad, laggy, buggy performance. Remember the threads back then, or check this same thread and you will realize that it was the main complain back then and it's the main complain stil now.
Appreciate your perpsective; perhaps your started elsewhere on the map. Two things sound odd, though, (1) Crafters selling their wares and (2) guilds from enemy factions setting up a safe area for crafters.
(1) everyone bought and sold items through the npc (what was it called?). This required no interaction.
(2) did you play on a pvp server? Otherwise I don't get it.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit