All Posts by ethion

Looks to me like LoTR and AoC are neck in neck at the moment...  Course I'm guessing next week aoc will have clearly dropped below LoTR and be heading to Lineage II territory.  It is gonna be kinda funny when AoC drops below the most bashed game in the industry, SWG....

Originally posted by Kazzer

when i played the game there was a few things that mde me leave, justw anna hear if they are gone and arrived yet. The water problem, is it fixed? does it look ok when ur in water, and u wont jump up and down when u swim in the water?

ship combat in yet?

thx :-)

The water skipping issue has been fixed.  Water looking ok is kinda subjective.  Water is kinda hazy and you swim in it.  Not much more to say.

No ship combat in the game now or in the forseeable future.

Well, I'm in the same boat from a background.  Used to raid in EQ and spend countless hours which I just don't have to spare anymore.  I'm a casual player and you can see from my xfire I'm on maybe 10-15 hours a week.  I'll play a couple hours in the evening after the kids and wife are in bed and I'll play several hours on the weekend.  So for me a game needs to have a variety of play styles for me to stay with it.  Sometimes I only have an hour or even less and I'd like to have something I can do.  Sometimes i have 3-4 hours and like to have some larger activity.

I like grouping and if I had my choice I'd spend all my time doing dungeons in groups.  Thats my favority thing second maybe to raiding but with my time issues I don't really see raiding fitting in to well...

So this brings me to vanguard.  I like vanguard and feel it overs me the best set of gameplay feature that suit my casual style, need for variety and love of grouping.

So in the last week I did a little bit of diplomacy on my bard, I also did some crafting one night and a bit of another.  I did a quest solo for a drum and a couple of the soloable ones in TK area.  I also did on of the hunters league quests solo which was really a small group one but the 3 dot mobs were green and if I was careful I was able to solo it.  I also did 2-3 hours grouped one night in graystone dungeon with my rogue.  And I did a couple of the TK quests over the last two weeks having just finished it last night.  These were all groups but we did them with 3-4 people so it was not hard to get people together and get going.  Those were mostly 1-2 hour runs doing one of two steps in the quest.

Now comparing the game now to after SoE took it over I don't see any change in the balance of solo vs group oriented stuff.  My rogue took a run up at teiman harbor (I'm killing that name but don't want to bother looking it up.).  I spent a couple hours there reaquainting myself with playing my rogue and working on the faction quest I had solo.  This is a long grindy type quest where you can get faction and get some great rewards.  Still it is soloable and ok.  I imagine the swamp area has a number of solo things as well as farming for faction.  So no I dont think there is much change.

I did notice some new quests so they might have filled out some areas with additional quests.  I tend to see at 20+ a pretty healty mix of solo, small group, and group oriented quests.  I frankly like that cause it means I can get on and do a solo quest if I want or I can try to get a group going and do something tougher.

One big change is the addition of the riftstones which for me are fantastic.  I don't have a lot of time and having to run to a group would suck up a lot of time in the past making grouping near impossible.  Now with the rift system and rentable flying mounts I can be just about anywhere in 5 minutes or less.  For a casual player this is GREAT.  I've logged on for a night and seen a group looking for someone in OOC and joined and been grouped in a dungeon in litterally 5 minutes after logging in.  No game beats it.

You can solo 1-50 I understand.  There seem to be ample quests.  However my gut says you will have to really work at it and will start scraping the bottom of the barrel.  This assumes you stick to only solo quests.  Now if you add some group, small group stuff then no problem.  Or if you play a class that can solo small group quests you would be good as well.  But if you are playing a rogue and want to solo to 50 my feeling is that you will find some dry spots or you will need to do a lot of running around finding quests.

I'm not sure that gives you the answer you wanted.  If you ask more details I'll give you the most unbiased answers I can.

Originally posted by Orphes

Originally posted by logicbox9

Meh, not bad I guess... Honestly, they don't look THAT Much different to me >.>

 

I don't think it was about making completely new characters, with new style one them. It was alot about keeping the characters, tweaking them and  readding the sliders to them. With keeping the apperance and the earlier performance increase.

And if they look the same as before, or close to, that you and others are saying.
With no performance loss and with added sliders. I think they have actually succeded with the goal set.

Well that would be true except that PhAnToM or whatever his name is made a big deal about bringing sexy to VG with new models.  That might have been pure hype or who knows.  I think he is gone since we haven't heard from him in months.  So that leaves us with improved performance from the models.  I still think that is a win.

In the end what we have gotten in the last couple updates is new models that have less polys and are more efficient giving better fps with groups of players, and we have gotten helms.  If we get nothing else we are still better then we were.  Assuming of course the Avatars are not largely worse then what they were.

They are live on test and looking pretty good so far.  Still cliping issues but everything else is looking pretty good.

Who really cares about close up face shots you will never see in game...

I care more about performance and the ability customize my character with differnt bodies, armor, and looks.  Hair is important and gross facial features.   A facial portrait at 1280x1024 is just stupid for anything other then nitpicking.  Hey don't move in game while I go to first person and stand 3 inches in front of your character to get a good look at your face.

So I don't notice a significant different between either face and they both look fine to me.

They changed a couple of dungeons.  The pyramid one and the black castle so they have changed some stuff since launch.

Course I think the biggest changes have been in new bugs but I wanted to make sure they were getting credit.

Looks like a new revision of test models is going up on test this weekend.  There are some screen shots in this forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m thread to look at if interested.

Originally posted by dsebutchr

big ones, because i've no desire to go through all those paragraphs and summarize for those too lazy to read it themselves...

1.  After level 10 your thrown to the winds.

2.  Quests are not layed out well to guide the player.

3.  Some quests have zero in game information, you have to be lucky or ask somebody or use a website.

4. Pisspoor implimentation and location of new quests and old quests

5. Cookie cutter path to 50, all toons do basically same thing to level

6.  Flying mounts for end game...this is stupid, you need them at lvl 15, you basically do NOT need them at lvl 50

Just to name a few....

I gotta stay I pretty categorically disagree with your opinion on all of these points.

1. This is a good thing do you really need to have everything spoon fed to you?  Not like it is really that hard there are usually quests that give you a clue about another area that is near.  But even so you can see forever and you do have a map.  just do a little looking around.

2. No idea what you mean they seem fine to me....

3. Yeah maybe thats part of the challenge you gotta think a little bit...  Try it you won't strain anything.

4. disagree

5. wrong.  There are popular paths to 50 but there are several you can pursue.

6. wrong.  You get horses early and you can rent flying mounts.  there is a progression of mounts and upgrades.

Don't bother listing more your quality of points frankly sucks.

Originally posted by trozyxxx

Originally posted by ethion

I doubt it.  AoC was more hyped that this game and they appealed to a broader base of player types.  Also AoC had fantastic reviews from all the big game magazines.  I kinda doubt that War will match AoCs numbers.  Especially after War burned the industry so bad there are people like me who are kinda bruised and not willing to pay for a game sight unseen again.

 

"Especially after AoC burned the industry so bad ..."???

Anyway I see your playing Vanguard, a game which did burn me and I was a bit down on the whole mmog thing for a bit, aoc wasnt THAT bad for me, I played it 2 months maxed a priest and got bored.

its weird but the only thing that can make me decide on whether i like a game or not is getting in and playing it.

1.5 mill sounds like a success number and a party in mythic's office.

 

Honestly even at launch I played more vanguard then I did Aoc.  I had a pretty high end system and VG had a lot more depth and potential then AoC ever did.  I also think I leveled faster in AoC.  Seems like in about a month if that long I was pretty much done with AoC where with VG I think I kept at it for like 2-3 months before tabling the game and moving to wow.

In any event I'm gonna put war at maybe 500k 1st month sales.

What I wonder is will AoC still be around a year from now....

Funcom is acting like business is good and all the while it seems like AoC is dying and that financially they are overextended.  Do they know something that isn't public knowledge or have some deep investor that will bail them out??

I would think they would be 100% focused on costcutting, server merges, and fixing problems not spinning off part of their resources to work on a new game and a new expansion.

Either it is all hype, they got some deep pockets somewhere, or they are making some awefull management decisions....

Does anyone really believe they will do what they are saying??

I doubt it.  AoC was more hyped that this game and they appealed to a broader base of player types.  Also AoC had fantastic reviews from all the big game magazines.  I kinda doubt that War will match AoCs numbers.  Especially after War burned the industry so bad there are people like me who are kinda bruised and not willing to pay for a game sight unseen again.

You know, given that FC has fallen from around 65K (400-700K) subs and is now around 6k it would seem to me the subs are probably in the 40-70k range.  I'm really shutting to think what the pops on the servers must be like with roughly 1/10 the people playing. 

Has funcom said anything about merging servers?  Because if they don't soon I'm not sure they will have any subs at all soon.  I mean PvP is only good if there are more then a few players on a server.  You can't exactly have raids and pvp battles if there isn't a reasonable number of players.

Based on other games merging servers can be a difficult thing to do.  Also I got the impression that funcom is concerned about database sizes on the servers which makes this even more difficult since they will be making the database on a single server potentially several times larger.  Wonder if they will need to delete inactive accounts?

Ouch a new record! AoC soundly dropped below LOTR today.  In fact it looks like lineage 2 almost beat it.  How low can you go....

I think that VG is more about dungeons and group exploration then many games.  It has some great dungeon/group experiences.  Yes you can solo it and play it like wow but really you are missing some of the best parts of the game.  Did the basement of TK last night with a small group of 4 and it was another great night of fun.  Challenging yeah we died a couple times.  Fun yeah we explored a lot of TK and that place is huge. 

Realistically they really can't answer your question.  One GM just has to enforce the policy as best they can.  Getting into a discussion with you about it is frankly a waste of time and since you obviously have issues with the details of execution of that policy which the GM is unlikely to be able to justify since many people are required to execute it your petition and conversation were really bogus and just trying to stir up trouble.

I think the GM did very well in handling a challenging customer.  Not engaging you in a debate that would serve no purpose was well done and I would commend this GM for not going down that path and not wasting time that could be spend on people with real issues.

In evaluating the legitamacy of someones statements it is always good to look back at their past behaviors to gain some insight into the ligitamacy and dependability of their current statements.

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2097355#2097355

How have they done against the things that were promissed to be delivered in the month of June?

Originally posted by TheICE

Nice chart but why not  make it fair? since you used vanguards most populated server, compare it to Eq2's Antonia bayles server.

Cause I don't have any accounts on that server and all my slots are full.  I play on najena.  Although if you have an account just do the same thing I did at around 6:30 on AB...

Do

/who all 1 10

/who all 11 20

etc

/who all 70 79

/who all 80 scout

/who all 80 mage

/who all 80 fighter

/who all 80 priest

I'm not sure what the max number /who can report so also do

/who all 1 80 to find the max number.  If any of hte numbers above hit max break it down into smaller chunks like /who all 15 20.

Although I wasn't really trying to talk about eq2 numbers other then to say that VG has a good number of people and that the distribution by level is pretty good.

That would be

Chaos vs Order....

Since it is real life I'd go with order :P

Originally posted by TalRasha

Originally posted by ethion

wow like my response wasn't sarcastic as well.... you guys completely missed it as did the mod....

 

It obviously was, but in completely the wrong way.

 

Or was it perhaps sarcasm^2

Well yeah it was in the other direction in the extreme.  I kinda thought it was enough in the extreme to be past the point of believability but I guess not :P  I said something like fanboi nice recovery but we see through you or something.  Personally I thought it was funny showing the rediculousness of some of the discussion on these forums. 

I'm definitely not an extreme person and I like to think very moderate and I try to be fair in what I say.  I'm disappointed with AoC and I won't not say that but on the other hand I'll say that the early levels of the game are a lot of fun.  I'll even tell people the game is worth playing for a month.

I don't have any faith in anything funcom says because frankly they have said a lot and not done it.  I posted a scorecard once upon a time when I was still paying for the game and they had accomplished 0% of what they claimed they would in the time they said. 

Anyway my followup was a joke and I'm sorry if people were offended or didn't take it as a joke.