Flares are pve only and don’t work for pvp and you have just 60 seconds to join a battle not a couple of minutes.

Just wait until you cap as I have and realise that the ONLY end game content is in port contention, or repeatedly killing the same dumb ai on the os over and over and over. Btw to beat the "omfg you capped already" idiots to the punch, potbs is made so that players cap quickly there is no journey in this game. It has been designed from the ground up around port contention, which means if you play a pirate you are shit out of luck. Against similarly levelled nationals playing in mixed groups, pirates get soundly beat due to the array of stackable group and individual buffs that nationals have and pirates don't.

Far too much of the game is instanced leaving the game world feeling disjointed; I dock in port (instance) go to the town boss for a mission (instance) and return to the town(instance) go to the shop to sell junk loot (another instance). I leave the shop and back to town(instance again) talk to the coxswain to access my new mission (another bloody instance) I defeat the escorts and have to board the marked ship (another instance). FFS give me a break, each and every instance separated by a loading screen, they can’t even manage a smooth transition from one zone server to another.

Bah enough already, for what its worth in just one week server population at peak on Roberts has dropped from very heavy for Pirates British and Spain last week Saturday peak time, to heavy this week. That’s at least 300 players gone from a server population of  around 1200 across those nations. ONE QUARTER of last weeks population didn’t bother logging in this week on the second most popular server, a staggering rate of growth for a game just launched

Medium is flagged at 200 players, heavy 300 players and very heavy over 400. Its easy to figure out just takes some patience logging in and doing /whocount at different times ,watching the population, log out back in etc If you want to do it yourselves just start logging in about an hour or two before a server starts to approach prime time for its intended loacale. It is possible that they anticipated different server loads and population flags are different on a per server basis, but unlikely.

If any server actually reached very heavy on all four nations it would indicate over 1600 players which is very low by todays server hardware standards and no server has yet hit heavy load across all four nations. Only two servers have any real population and that is Roberts (eu english) and backbeard (us). At peak these fluctuate beteween very heavy - heavy for british and pirates and low- medium for french Spanish, although Spain has reached heavy on both at weekend prime time.

The games forums were deactivated last night at 2 am GMT when the games servers went off line but had been back up for quite some time, that’s the downtime referred to on the front page.

For what its worth I had a couple of forum pages open just prior to this as I was in the process of writing a post, when I tried to submit the post I received a message that forum access was disabled, this was within a minute or two after the planned launch time.

While you would expect a message on the front page to inform any new users about the delay there is no reason to take down the forums other than to prevent a deluge of negative comments.

*** EDIT oops entire post was set in bold****

Is anyone really surprised by this, fls have deactivated forum access now too, so no one can complain. I saw this coming and made a tongue in cheek post about it on the games forums that got the fan boys all in a lather and the thread locked

A great way for soe to cement it's working relationship with fls, at least they are getting to work right at launch instead of waiting a year with this one

/hex caliber polishes his glass balls looks into the future and predicts the fall of communist russia,

Wtf is there to learn about avcom. It’s boringly easy to figure out, I have been patiently waiting and trying this game since closed beta hoping that things will improve. I have tried all three types of swashbuckling and every style can be reduced to a snooze fest, firing off the same ability until the target dies. If anyone finds it difficult to get the hang of, I would suggest there is a malfunction somewhere between the chair and screen. 

The entire game becomes boringly repetitive, so much so there is no need to read the quest text. Quests are reduced to click accept, open journal, "oh target is at this port", enter instance, spam space bar, use cursor keys once in a while, hand in rinse and repeat. The npc ship ai is so dumb it is embarrassing; at level 15, I was able to go out and start soloing and sinking level 50 targets with out ever feeling in danger. This game needs at least another 12 months of concerted effort to produce a polished product.

What’s most amusing are the fan boys, who for whatever reason believe come the 22^nd the game will magically transform and the servers will fill to bursting. That just isn’t going to happen; you’re more likely to witness the second coming of Christ or alien contact from the Planet Zog between then and now. Most of the people likely to pick up this game have already done so during pre order looking to get a free head start and a couple of trinkets.

Originally posted by grimboj

Originally posted by Hexcaliber
Don't make the mistake of thinking you have to use balanced unless you have a top notch pc

My PC runs every other game I have on the *highest* settings - The only 2 games it cant run are EQ2 and VSOH, see a pattern? SOE has never got the memory leaks out of EQ2 and obviously theyve managed to sneak some of the crap code into VSOH.

Of course he is trolling, oh btw, I now have 26 diplomacy cards and am a level 39 diplomat. I have plenty of choices; I bet you haven’t even seen the advanced cards used in diplomacy yet. Meh, try looking beyond the first 5 minutes of something before passing judgment. Just grinding mobs, harvesting or crafting all the time is BORING at least this offers something else to do within the game if you fancy a change, variety = longevity in my book, it's called content.

Nought out of ten for trying your damnedest to find faults, anyone who has played the game can provide screens unmatched by any other mmo. It is obvious in many screen shots you were changing settings to suit the shot you were taking. One word for idiots like you "PRAT,” ten out of ten for being a Muppet.

Some of you people must have gotten your pc into a sorry state or be running so much crap in the background every thing crawls. My current system is an ati x800xtpe with an Amd 64 4000+ 2 gig of memory and I run vanguard at highest quality 1280 X 1024, I still have shadows, bump mapping, and detailed ground textures, all running at 35 - 40 fps away from cities and populated areas, dropping to about 25 30 in the afore mentioned areas. All you need do is adjust the clipping plane which by default is set further than the horizon for most areas, drop the number of lights to about six, reduce the range at which complex trees, grass is drawn, and every thing is golden. Vanguard makes extensive use of 2.0 shaders and bump mapping which on higher settings is applied to all the ground details as far as the eye can see, structure's, boulders etc. Apply some common sense and it is easy to get the game running at acceptable frame rates, de fragging your hard drives might not be a bad idea either.

The first thing the technically inept start blaming is the software rather than their own systems or lack of understanding, this is not an fps game where frame rate in excess of 70 fps are required for smooth gaming. Yes, it can be demanding on systems that try to run a pile of crap in the background, with msn, skype and god knows what else all adding to higher network latency. Systems with higher network latency (above 300) will notice a stuttering effect because of the way the engine handles timing and pre caching. Get a better net connection or stop downloading porn and other crap using bittorent, regular torrent users can suffer multiple requests for weeks after downloading popular files dragging latency down with it.

You shouldn’t really expect anything different in sectors like jita, avoid like the plaque, it is only one sector after all. I was there yesterday and there were more than 550 people in local so things are bound to get laggy. There are some issue's creeping in atm due to lag, but look at the number of people playing now during peak times, it is obvious ccp are dealing with the situation we have an extended downtime today, to tidy up the database we also had one two weeks ago for the same reason. The number of people active online at any one time has shot up in recent weeks and I suspect it caught ccp a little off guard, don’t forget they are short staffed atm due to employee holidays.

I too was in SWG’s beta and DNL's stress test and can categorically state SWG was in a much better state at launch than dnl. Everyone knows smed stole the SWG server hamster, holding it to ransom for two days, so that he could get a job with SOE.

The real test of server and client stability will be on the fifth when the game is open to all. I wager Pioneers represent a small proportion of the current subscriber base. The stress test had more users than there are pioneers in DNL proper at the moment and as every one who was in the stress test can tell you "It all went without a hitch "