Another lead designer leaves sigil.

[Lhon]

Originally Posted by Krones

Maybe Vanguard's beta retention will improve when they zerg invite another 5-8 thousand testers and their proposed 3rd gen mechanics such as combat, crafting and dueling npcs with canned phrases should be more polished.

Your "zerg invite" prediction appears to be true.

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

Within the next 2-3 weeks, however, we will be bringing in thousands of people -- like 5-10k -- and I am bullish that the changes we have made, the more polished content, the additional density of content in Thestra that we needed, and then the critical mass that will make grouping much easier, will result in much better retention.

[Murr]

Originally Posted by Smed

I put the filling in them... no way I'm eating them

Whoa there, tiger. You had me with the driving 6 miles joke and then WHAM, mental image of Tycho's mouth overflowing with Smedseed. The soap to wipe clean my mental tissues has yet to be invented.

Takeaways from this thread:
Mistakes have been made.
Is there cause for concern? Yes. Should we collectively panic and then, in our insolent, nerdtacular rage at not being selected to beta test, furiously rail against Sigil folk who take the time to post here? No.

Krones raises some really valid points - I think all that's left to do is take our 'managed' expectations and hope E3 and subsequent information proves them wrong.

[Gnome Eater]

The original Vanguard community was fucking fantastic if you were into armchair design and wanted too help shape and mold Vanguard into a remarkable world, something different, a mmog with advanced concepts and ideas, potential, tremendous fucking kick-ass potential, the funding was there, the development team was there, the early community support was there.

hahahahahahha what?

The original Vanguard community was compromised of the biggest amount of fanboys and retards collectively known. From idiots who posted non-stop drivel to try and somehow pump up their post count to hope for a slot in beta, to people who made entire guilds and fan-sites of classes that were yet to be released in a game yet to be releasted.

You are also 100000% wrong about how beta invites were handled. There were plenty of very hardcore players who got into beta and tested the shit out of it.

The boards of a game that is yet to be released house the biggest gagle of fucking idiots willing to prostitute themselves for a game they have yet to see - this is nothing to do with Vanguard, StarCraft, WoW, SB were like this as well - I didn't beta test EQ so no clue how their external beta boards were.

That type of 'armchair development' is exactly the type of person you don't want in beta. Do you see the type of suggestions those drool-cup wearing douches post? Vanguard should have permanent death upon death. Tradeskills should require you to press 10000 buttans before the window even opens. Maps shouldn't show where you are, where your party is, where the zone is. The job of a beta player is not to tell a dev how to design his game, it is for you to test the game a developer made and tell him what parts are not fun/not working. You are not asked to come in beta to give advice.

Back to asking stupid questions: There are some things that even speaking candidly Brad or Smed cannot adress, but I'd love to hear about. Besides a few ex EQ guildmates, noone probably knows who I am IRL - I can call CAD a fuckstick and wish he'd die in a fire, but people who represent their companies don't have that option.

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by Tripamang

So one or two people flame you with issues they have and because you can't/wont'/don't want to respond to them you're just ceasing posting?

Wow... Brad I'm not sure what you expected from a community site but people coming here and sucking your dick every time you post isn't a reality.

Just wait until Vanguard goes live, the official boards shut down, and Brad expects the fansites to play nice and never disagree with him.

SK.org had maybe half a dozen dev posts per year (if that) in the six years or so it was up - mainly because most of the posters there had a low tolerance for bullshit combined with a willingness to call a spade a fucking shovel.

Edit: Whoops, freudian.

[Cuppycake]

OMFG Smedley talking about jizzing in donuts....this thread is definately worthy of a hall of fame.

[Slick Willey]

Originally Posted by nyx

Ok Vanguard Beta 2 sucks.

Can we start harping on Conan now? I want to see how far this forum gets with that one.

There simply is no where near the hype and expectations with Conan as there is with "Brad's New Game", and for good reason -- while AO had its fans and was a pretty good game after launch bugs were worked out, let's not kid ourselves, it wasn't EQ. Because people view EQ as the brainchild of Brad, there is a TON of interest in Vanguard. And where there is interest, there is fanboys, haterz, debate and flames. Where no one gives a shit, there is . . . well nothing.

Brad has kind of thrown a tantrum in this and the other thread, including getting pissy with me in the other thread, but all this controversy only means that Vanguard is definitely "the next big thing" on the horizon. Otherwise, people wouldn't even care . . . .

[Neric]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

The intent behind my 'flame' was to expose misinformation about Vanguard and to make sure that people who have chosen to break the NDA and mix truth and lies about their experiences, or to predict doom and gloom are counterbalanced by the truth, clarity, and a different point of view and perspective.

truth = the game sucks
lie = there are not 100 people online at peak times, it's only 98

As I've stated, I'm here to promote Vanguard...

We have noticed that already. The good thing is that in contrast to you, other posters don't have to restrict themselves in such a way.

I am 100% sure that you are trying your best to make Vanguard at least as successful as Everquest. The problem is that after all those years you still don't know why EQ was successful, therefore you need to hit another /random 1 1000000 shot to make it. From what has leaked so far you have missed and you have missed by a ton. Hopefully your trial&error approach on making adjustments will lead to success before time runs out. My suggestion would be to stay as open minded as possible and even to be willing to dump core features of the game in order to get the project back on track.

[Itzena]

Also: Is it me, or does Brad's post (linked above) pretty much confirm what's been said earlier in this thread by the NDA breakers - namely there's few testers playing at the moment, and that Vanguard needs a lot more work doing to it?

[Old Man Potter]

Originally Posted by Gieve

So monday they let go of Laurence Poe. This is like the 3rd high in the ranks designer that's left. Seems like working with Brad isn't exactly a stable position. I'm not really a vanguard hater, but who's replacing these guys? They let go of steve burke before, and the famous rogue epic guy a while back.

How many designers have to leave before your game becomes shit? There arn't a lot of guys with lead MMO design experience. Is it now going to be Brad and um... Brad?

Laurence Poe single-handedly helped destory the EQ necromancer class and helped gimp the class for many years. He took the brilliant work of Geoffrey Zatkin the guy who designed and implemented the original EQ magic/system and ruined it. For that I will never forgive him and SOE.

[Old Man Potter]

Originally Posted by Krones

The original Vanguard community was fucking fantastic if you were into armchair design and wanted too help shape and mold Vanguard into a remarkable world, something different, a mmog with advanced concepts and ideas, potential, tremendous fucking kick-ass potential, the funding was there, the development team was there, the early community support was there.

Think about it, how many positive leaks have you read besides from Oloh, which are discredited by many who know his history since he is McQuaid's lap dog and the conglomerate game sites who know absolutely fucking jack-shit about mmogs compared to any veteran on this board? I've read constant pessimistic outlooks ever since beta 0, including private channels from friends of friends breaking the nda, etc. Friends whom I trust more than any of those cocksuckers. Why all the fucking negativity when Vanguard had one of the most outstanding pre-beta communities ever?

Vanguard's early community downfall was inevitable, nothing lasts forever. I’ve noticed that a lot of the core vanbois didn't stick around after McQuaid announced Sigil would be shit-canning their forums in favor of third party forums after Vanguard's release, aside from the few die-hards still sticking around. Not worth it, no beta invite, no forum as we once knew it.

Still despite the death of one of the best communities, the majority of Vanguard's early followers would have made excellent alpha testers before adding random signups and starting the transition to a disastrous closed public beta and Vanguard didn't take advantage of that. I'm not talking about Oloh and his cronies either.

Sigil fucked up the selection process early on, while random beta picks are fair and needed for optimization, Vanguard needed a large decent core of hardcore alpha testers early in the creation process who are understandable, respectable and patient. Testers who don't fucking need, but more than anything else desire and want too put up with the bullshit that comes with early development. Yes, I know these testers are still out there, but that's not the point.

The sorry ass retention numbers for beta floating around only prove Sigil fucked up, someone please tell me what exactly McQuaid was expecting after the majority of those random pickups have played EQII and WoW for the last year? Gosh, Idiot! comes to my mind. It's too late to fix that fuck up now and Sigil has to basically start over with a substantial credible testing base in phase 3. Frustrating for those players who really could have made an impact on Vanguard. I'm scraping the surface, I'm not even going to dilvulge all the nitty-gritty details I've fucking heard from trusted sources on how Sigil has handled Vanguard's early testing phases.

Maybe Vanguard's beta retention will improve when they zerg invite another 5-8 thousand testers and their proposed 3rd gen mechanics such as combat, crafting and dueling npcs with canned phrases should be more polished. However, despite all that shit I just wrote, the most detrimental outlook too Vanguard is the fact Sigil lost three of their most talented (senior) designers in the last year, a massive fact and that alone hurts Vanguard's development more than anything else.

Vanguard@E3 compared to the progress we witnessed last year should be very interesting.

Agree 100% with pretty much everything you say here. The Vanguard forums used to be the #1 place for cutting edge brainstorming of MMORPG ideas. The posters were thoughtful and mature. We even believed the Brad and the Sigil crew listened to us. Remember the campfire idea? Did they even implement this at all? After all those years of suggestions and input has Brad listened to any of it? Or was it just a pool of free ideas for the designers to eavesdrop on while contributing almost nothing over the years to the discussion.

As far as the forums and the so-called affiliate fan site program, this is a disaster waiting to happen. You can not simply delete a community from existance and tell the loyal fans to "run along now and form a community somewhere else". Community is something that takes years to build and should not be taken lightly by Brad and the powers that be at Sigil. All the goodwill that Brad has generated over the years will all be for naught if they remove the official forums. However if you look closely at how Sigil operates history is indeed repeating itself with Brad yet again about to can the official forums as he did with the original EQ. Even with the massive success of WoW, Blizzard would never dare to can their official forums. All I can say is that Sigil better be something very special or their will be many more layoffs and departures to come.

[Schatze]

The original system was horrible and wasn't designed to scale at all. All the problems that would continue on in later times were based on the problems with the original spell lines.

The only reason why necros loved GZ was because they were insanely overpowered during that era. Better necros get kicked in the teeth so hard that it took years to recover than to continue on with the stupidly broken status quo (hurr, solo ghoul lord, duo king, duo efreeti, first fear break after the pats got increased to 14 [or 20?] I think it was, I was there and it was like 6 necros 2 mages and a druid and wizard).

The original class balance/spell lines were horribly broken and continued to get even more so well into kunark, it was only in velious that shit started to get turned around.

edit: and smed means the penny arcade filling, rather than a van wilder type filling.

[splok]

I put the filling in them... no way I'm eating them

Didn't most of those donuts end up going to sick children?

The halarity here could be significant.

[Zehn - Vhex]

There's a potential hilarity there that needs to be tapped more then the guild names for the Africa MMO.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by Schatze

The original system was horrible and wasn't designed to scale at all. All the problems that would continue on in later times were based on the problems with the original spell lines.

Original spell ballance was not broken until lvl 49. That's the moment necros received the overpowered pet*. Verant reacted and "fixed" the problem. Regardless if you like the way they did it or not, the problem was gone. What then occured was the real problem, because instead of following the path of linear progression certain classes got totally screwed over with Kunark. The fact is that people got betrayed for their choice of class and for all of their playtime invested to build their character with this!

I chose to play a necromancer because I expected to have certain abilities that I judged to be very powerful in advance. If I wanted to play a whimp class I would have chosen SK, rogue or ranger, they were known to suck. 100 days played later it's too late to switch. Well, in fact I had a chanter twink so I could do it, but the average casual player couldn't. With Velious even twinks were out of question. You got nailed to your choice of class and had to endure the endless ballance lotto. One day the most popular class in EQ, one day later nobody would group with you anymore....


*For some funny reason mage pets were totally ignored in the discussion, despite of the fact that their pet was better and their epic pet was insane and that way into Kunark.

[Zuuljin]

Originally Posted by Neric

One day the most popular class in EQ, one day later nobody would group with your anymore....

I dunno, maybe I'm weird, but I enjoyed the constant flux of spell tweaks. Every patch had new and exciting stuff. Was I going to be super powerful for the next 2 weeks, or will I suck balls? I played a Human SK and loved every minute of it. I think just about every class had their repeating 15 minutes of uberness, it was just wondering under which patch it would return.