Another lead designer leaves sigil.

[Biodome]

Originally Posted by Tuco

Yeah, but they're MICROSOFT, they could fire you from whatever job you work at if they wanted. /sarcasm

Haha

[Sinshiu]

Originally Posted by Biodome

Haha

Merauk gave me an idea. We can make a system that uses lots and lots of *cheap laborers cough cough* to create our world.

We'll strap them up with motion capture equipment and what they do with their gestures and body movement is captured and interpreted by the game editor tools.

You can then have a fictional world that a bunch of *cheap laborers* create by telling them: "Start digging a hole there with your imaginary shovel". The editor would interpret the commands and slowly but surely the hole would be dug. Want a house? A village? no problem, get some *cheap laborers* to build a bunch of them! You can have framers, painters, everything. The idea is to convert as much traditional labor into game development. We could build all of mexico city in a week.

Thank you thank you, PM me for the place to send the check to Brad.

[findar]

Originally Posted by Cinge

Maybe fire himself.

john romero lol cya

[Venjenz]

To clarify one point - I was not claiming that having Micro$oft as publisher would cure all ills or guarantee success. I merely state that with Micro$soft pouring monetary and publicity resources behind Vanguard, Sigil is in a better PR position to weather the initial 3 months worth of "this game am not teh c00l like WoW" and all that. It gives them operating room. Additionally, with XBox 360 grabbing headlines, Micro$oft has become more recognizeable as a gaming company. It isn't a panacea or a sure thing, but if I wanted to launch a new product, having Micr$oft as nanny wouldn't really bother me too much.

I still think the Blizzard behemoth will chug along at 5-6 million+ subscribers, but Brad's estimate of 500k within a year is certainly realistic. Remember, nobody was going to leave their guild or their friends in EQ1 for WoW. Right?

Blizzard will not lose the ADHD crowd who need PVP zergfests for fun, nor will it lose the folks who have a script to run an entire raid by pressing one button and then watching the game play itself. What will be lost are those folks who have seen what the game has to offer, have played a few t00ns to 60/70, and are just looking for a new world to explore. Another segment that Blizzard will lose are those folks who have to be the first kid on the block with the l33t infoz. But WoW is not the be all end all of MMO play. Right now there are roughly a million+ people spread over "the other MMOs" doing just fine outside Azeroth.

And consider this: take WoW's ~150 servers and divide your 6 million subscriptions by them. That measn that each server has 40k people assigned to them. If Vanguard gets only 200k subscribers, and doles that over 10 servers depending on load, the world itself will seem every bit as busy and every bit as alive as any WoW server does. (Edit - I dropped the number in half because I honestly believe that the 6 million number is total game units sold, and not actual concurrent subscriptions, given that if 50% of the subscription base logged in at once, the queues would be measured in days, not hours.)

Maybe they lose 100k. A drop in the Blizzard subscription bucket, but $1.5 million per month to Brad. Measuring Vanguard's success against Blizzard's subscription numbers is where everyone makes the mistake. Given the longevity of games like UO, AO, Eve, DAoC, and EQ1, I just think it is way premature to write off a game designed by one of the genre's top dogs based solely on Blizzard's success and the Vanguard beta.

[James]

Originally Posted by Esmo

Dedicated PVPers will tell you that AC1 had the best PvP of any MMOG.

Dedicated PvPers clearly don't know shit then, because AC1 PvP blew complete nuthole. Which is really no surprise when you think about it, because the quality of that game was substandard at the very least.

I have to wonder if Vanguard will be hosted on TheZone, though. Man, I hated that place.

[chesire]

Its not just how many WOW players move on to Vanguard its also the classes. If a decent percentage of support classes leave. It will have a ripple effect. Increased looking for support class time will have a gradual but noticeable effect on subscriptions. Couple with the change to 5 man and 10 man in strat , scholo and ubrs/lbrs instances will leave a substantial portion of annoyed players.
If you have to wait around till the next expac and level 70 to start doing those instances due to min/max groups or a high percentage of the playerbase plays your chosen class . It will have an effect especially on the casual or non raid players of both playstyles.

Being a predominantly PVE player with a fluctuating schedule at the moment.
I have pretty much all the toys I would want from those places. Coupled with enough gold to buy an epic mount and most anything I would want thats tradeable. I consider myself done until the expansion is out and or my schedule becomes more standardized.

Be that as it may I had a good time playing .I definitely got my entertainment dollars worth out of WOW. There is simply nothing else I can accomplish at the moment in my available playtime that I find fun or interesting is all.

[Cybsled]

nor will it lose the folks who have a script to run an entire raid by pressing one button and then watching the game play itself.

Damn, you found out our secret!!! We've been trying to hide the fact that no WoW raids take any skill and all thats required is a single "I win" button ;(

Go back under your bridge.

[Cad]

Yea, I really wonder about people who type stuff like that, what game they've been playing. I think they read threads on stuff like decursive and think it really automates the game. Clearly very out of touch with what the mods actually do and what it takes to actually win a raid encounter..

[Soygen]

Originally Posted by Cybsled

Damn, you found out our secret!!! We've been trying to hide the fact that no WoW raids take any skill and all thats required is a single "I win" button ;(

Go back under your bridge.

In his defense he said people who run a script. He didn't really insult WoW at all there.

[Lenaldo]

I still think UO's pvp system was the best(pre-uo:r of course).... Obviously the classes(and by classes i mean dexer or tank-mage) werent balanced the best, but the better pvper always won. Yeilding a vanq hally didnt significantly help you against someone with a gm made one. Not to mention mana was easy to run low on and you couldnt just dump ur mana bar and win. Each char could heal and deal offense.

I dunno... I guess you had to play it to appreciate it, but I have yet to play another game that brought the feeling of skill into pvp. Numbers seem to always win out nowadays. Although I would agree that AC1 had the 2nd best pvp system!

[forge]

I'm unsure how many people Brads going to get from the wow crew. 97% of my guild had never played a mmo before. Only two people had played EQ and one other played Linage2. Thats not to say that somehow these people won't get drawn to Vanguard going OMGZ DID YOU SEE TEH GFX~! I just think of it as well.. why did these people not play uo/eq/ac/earth/ac2/eq2/L2/uhh and whatever other mmo's pre wow that you can still think up. Why did none of these people play those mmo's? Did the heavens somehow open up and shine down a light upon their face which said play WoW? Just because WoW has this unknown huge draw doesn't mean Vanguard will have the same effect on these new people.

[Gnome Eater]

I have my doubts that a game like Vanguard will appeal much to the 'new to MMORPG' crowd, since Brad pretty much stated explicitely that the learning curve and the effort required for character advancement will be much higher in Vanguard than in WoW.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by chesire

Its not just how many WOW players move on to Vanguard its also the classes. If a decent percentage of support classes leave. It will have a ripple effect.

Sounds like a master plan to take over the online world. Recruit all their clerics and they'll go bust

[Marauder]

Last 5 pages neglect the fact that no one will "migrate" to a shitty game. The beta needs to be long and hard, fast and danger, hella, wicked sweet, cowbelled, and more productive than SWG's to get to where it needs to go.

Of course forge makes a great point - WoW was the first mmo for so many. Why? probably cause of the names blizzard and warcraft. Probably cause it looks fantastic... etc etc etc.

SWG had namesake also though, but it blew, and look where it is now. Getting people is one thing; ...

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Cybsled

Damn, you found out our secret!!! We've been trying to hide the fact that no WoW raids take any skill and all thats required is a single "I win" button ;(

Go back under your bridge.

Didn't say that. And this forum is legendary for exaggeration, so simma dahn nah.

But with all the cool goodies in the many raid mods, lots of stuff that used to require attention no longer does, or at least takes a good deal less. Lots of folks dig on that, and only WoW offers that much add-on love. You know that's true. Those folks who are addicted to their mods and scripts won't be inclined to go to a game where that shit is gone.

And you wouldn't be nearly this touchy if you didn't know deep down that UI add-ons have taken raiding to a whole new level of carebear goodness. It's OK to admit it, everyone already knows it. WoW has dumbed down the MMO model...it's a fact. Clearly a winning strategy on Blizzard's part, given their $71 gazillion monthly income, but dumbed down nonetheless. I gave them a year, so I helped the model, and enjoyed while I had it. And I used a few mods, including swap macros on my rogue. If the tool exists, use it. But don't get all indignant when someone points out how fucking easy WoW is.

The only hard part of the game is logging in. =)