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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.

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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!

"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.

Originally posted by Arclan

 

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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.

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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 Arclan

 

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Originally posted by gordiflu

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Originally posted by Arclan

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

Originally posted by Velocinox

Originally posted by TangentPoint

Originally posted by Velocinox

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?

Originally posted by SuperXero89

"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."

 

LOL!

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Originally posted by gordiflu

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Originally posted by Arclan  

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Originally posted by gordiflu

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Originally posted by Arclan

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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  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.

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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.

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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.