Another lead designer leaves sigil.

[Zuuljin]

Originally Posted by Raglaum

No idea how this would work, but they need to fucking kick people out who aren't making a honest attempt to at least put SOME effort into giving a fuck, otherwise replace them with someone else.

Agreed, my PM box is waiting....(I hope that wasnt too subtle)

[Gnome Eater]

Originally Posted by Raglaum

QFT.

B. Really wish Sigil would revoke beta accounts that aren't being constructively used to heighten the game. I don't care how fucking lame the game is. It's a shame that what, 4 thousand god damn people have beta access but peak nights remain at 100? No idea how this would work, but they need to fucking kick people out who aren't making a honest attempt to at least put SOME effort into giving a fuck, otherwise replace them with someone else.

You are looking at the wrong thing - in WoW people were begging to play. I know a few EQ guilds who got destroyed because some members got WoW access and instantly quit playing EQ all-together. Vanguard has not evoked that response yet, and I am glad people are fixing this - if people do not want to play it means the game needs fixing, but the problems might be due to a mixture of techincal issues instead of just gameplay issues.

Second, I might be 'alone' in this but I hate features in MMORPG. I don't give a shit about physics, boats, the ability to sit in cantina and cyber manginas. Give me great content, balanced gameplay, the rest is totally fluff that is used so marketing guys can sell the game as 3rd gen.

[Eomer]

Replying as I go, my bad if someone already addressed these points.

In case you hadn't noticed, WoW is the biggest-selling MMOG since, well, ever and didn't have an NDA past friends-and-family late-alpha/early beta. The trick isn't having an NDA, but having a solid game during beta. Beta testing ought to be about testing, not fixing fundamental broken game mechanics.

And in case YOU hadn't noticed, Aradune has been very upfront about Vanguard's beta process, and the fact that they'll be doing it quite a bit differently than other games in the past. The plan was to introduce a fair number of testers very early on to hammer on the game and it's mechanics and things they were trying to see what worked and what didn't. And testing IS about finding and fixing broken game mechanics.

That said, I do agree that it seems like Vanguard is woefully behind schedule.

I'm not trying to come off as cool, I'm coming off as someone who's truly disappointed in the way Vanguard was, is, and hopefully isnt going to be.

No? One of your posts contained a statement that said you should be given a medal because you had the "balls" to "speak out when told not to." That's about grade 8 coolness, right there. Perhaps you were being somewhat sarcastic, but you still come across as an immature kid "sticking it to The Man."

They did have a very VERY strict NDA during friends and family beta, which lasted a hella long time. In a nutshell, Blizzard is smrt. Real beta test = call it an alpha and F&F and keep it very hush hush. Beta test = give the kiddies what they want and go public. Wordplay at its finest.

Ding ding ding.

Unfortunately, what I have heard from a lot of beta testers leads me to tell you that indeed the gameplay is boring, the game world is uninspired, and unfortunately, the game is not fun and they are scrambling to try and make it fun.

Other comments aside, how would your l33t inside infoz friends know whether or not the game world is uninspired or not, since two thirds of it are not yet available, and the third that is is being revamped and changed on a daily basis.

Again, no excuses for it being way behind schedule though.

Also, technically (from a programming point of view) Blizzard was much closer with their nomenclature than most other MMOG developers - Alpha should be "We're mucking about with the core design - be prepared for bugs, downtime and so forth" and beta should be "We're more or less happy with this - please try to break it and make non-game-redesigning-from-scratch suggestions for changes".

I'd say that's accurate for a single player game, but a MMORPG requires a lot more work on the fundamental game mechanics to achieve fun and balance. To me an "alpha" stage of an MMORPG would be where only the very basic core elements are functional (graphics, basic combat, limited world etc). I believe Aradune made a remark here that for all intents and purposes, their Beta0 and 1's were basically an alpha.

I don't in any way support breaking NDA, but they are not doing it to be "cool" you fucking cretin.

Yes they are, because it's "cool" to dissent from the popular viewpoint, and it's been the height of "cool" to bitch and complain about shit for as long as the internet's been around.

Here's a quote to prove my point:

And gives me a fucking medal for having the balls to stand up and say something sucks, despite being told not to.

Originally Posted by Zehn

It's reassuring to know that dev's are willing to change the game, but honestly...shouldn't a developer at some point sat down, looked at the design and said, "Wait a second...this fucking sucks."

I won't disagree here, the pretty thorough revamping of game systems and zones strikes me as just plain strange for such an experienced dev team.

Originally Posted by Raglaum

B. Really wish Sigil would revoke beta accounts that aren't being constructively used to heighten the game. I don't care how fucking lame the game is. It's a shame that what, 4 thousand god damn people have beta access but peak nights remain at 100? No idea how this would work, but they need to fucking kick people out who aren't making a honest attempt to at least put SOME effort into giving a fuck, otherwise replace them with someone else.

Why would they need to kick accounts to add more? Just add more and be done with it.

[Citten]

Originally Posted by Digo

Do you see a problem with this reasoning?

The only problem i could forsee would be a few faggot ass's throw a emo fit because they lost their access.

Well fuck them, seriously...Sigil does not need 3900 random people logging in every other week to look at how pretty the water has gotten, then to log off the minute after.

I'm so bloody tired of hearing how much the game sucks and hearing that peak numbers REMAIN at 100 a night. Ban your god damn lazy random testers and get new blood in - keep the NDA live for anyone who has touched the game. Sure you might take some heat for the action, but you need to get more active input and all the other crazy shit beta entails going on or cya to the 2006 release date.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by BanquozGhost

This only works when your concepts of what constitute fun and what sucks are ... you know .... normal.

True enough. I want to slap whatever developer thought killing deer should take 3 minutes and then another 2 minutes of downtime. I wasn't at the GDC this past week but for fucks sake, is there an entire seminar on "How to incoproate killing rats, slugs and other mundane shit into your game."

[Citten]

Originally Posted by Gnome Eater

Second, I might be 'alone' in this but I hate features in MMORPG. I don't give a shit about physics, boats, the ability to sit in cantina and cyber manginas. Give me great content, balanced gameplay, the rest is totally fluff that is used so marketing guys can sell the game as 3rd gen.

I agree, i'm not so worried about that shit either, but they've talked a load about it and now it's all pretty much scrapped because they didnt get their basics down tight.

and BTW Eom they've stated they don't want to go beyond X number because of some reason i dont want to get into, which was my reasoning for just replacing then. I agree, that it really doesn't matter though which way it's approached it just needs to be approached.

[forge]

Originally Posted by Zuuljin

Agreed, my PM box is waiting....(I hope that wasnt too subtle)

I'm still waiting as well.. Now its been about 6 months since I quit wow. I've been bored off my ass sitting here hitting f5 over and over, most days. When I could have been at least honestly trying to fix our fucken LAST BEST HOPE.. of a mmo.

Meanwhile my friend who got in the beta like 6 months ago before I quit wow or whatever doesn't even play, and hasn't. He even offered to send me his stuff, but I figured I'd just wait and surely get in legit. Seriously you have a ton of people waiting to play and some like me don't care if it sucks or not since we have nothing better to do. If I could help even in the smallest bit to make vanguard better how could that possibly be a loss?

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by Gnome Eater

Second, I might be 'alone' in this but I hate features in MMORPG. I don't give a shit about physics, boats, the ability to sit in cantina and cyber manginas. Give me great content, balanced gameplay, the rest is totally fluff that is used so marketing guys can sell the game as 3rd gen.

And with that attitude, the great content will be monsters, graphics and loot. And that is all.

Possible oblivion spoilers ahead.

I think you need to play Oblivion and come back and tell me you do not want any of that in an MMORPG. I cannot tell you how fucking cool it is to kill a wisp to grab a needed component and watch with horror as the component drops to the bottom of a ravine, while laughing at the poor luck it entailed, and having to kill another wisp. Or waiting as a thief for an NPC to finish dinner and go to bed, so you can wait until they put a ring they have on their hand away into a locked box so you can sneak in that room when they go to bed and steal the ring to finish a quest. Or see a statue created for you because you saved their city. Watch as that very same NPC on the 16th through 18th of every month leaves the castle with an armed guard to visit the capital city, so if you wanted to get the ring another way, you could ambush the caravan. Having to tail a character that, between the hours of midnight and 3, has weird tendancies and you need to see if they are a vampire or not.

Oblivion spoilers over.

Behavioral AI is crucial in designing a living and breathing world, and I am sick to death of MMORPG's that purely concentrate on loot and killing. Yeah sure, that's what is needed as well with a good combat system. But you can only "innovate" combat ideas so much before everything becomes a rehashed borish mechanism used in a different incarnation in a previous game.

And the main problem is, the hype machine touted this as a 3rd generation MMORPG. How convenient for the NDA to stop the people playing it to warn potential customers of what is being cut, while official word on any features hyped to players to get them excited get met with a resounded thud of non-informative silence. Of which I think most would agree sounds like the selling strategy of Peter Molyneux.

[Aethn Anvel]

Originally Posted by Laerazi

Blizzard doesn't need any PR to sell their product. I doubt if you saw EQ2/VG pulling in 6 million subscribers you'd see Smed and Brad here as much.

Actually when Everquest was king of the hill a few years back, Brad and Smed still posted on various boards. I firmly believe that if both games have 10 million active accounts today both Smed and Brad wouls STILL post on community boards. Its how they do buisness and will probably keep doing buisness.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Aethn Anvel
Why do we never see the CEO or even management from Blizzard post in the public?

I have, on a regular basis. And yes, I have lost many brain cells trying to wade through that trash. But the only "Blue" you see posting on a regulat basis are the mods that get paid specifically to do that. I hardly if ever see Rob Pardo or anyone higher post anywhere. But you see Brad, Smed and even Scott Hartsman posting frequently on company owned boards and community boards.

[Oloh]

First and foremost, all the posts above by beta testers break the NDA. I know because I wrote it.

Aside from the legal aspect, I strongly advise that you consider the effects of your actions on your reputation. The gaming industry, and the MMOG industry in particular, is quite small. As a general rule, if you can't keep your mouth shut, you will quickly find yourself without information and without a forum in which to speak. In short, don't be a jackass or it will come back to haunt you, in more than one way.

But let's not harp on that stuff.

Instead, let's talk about the substance of the previous posts. In the interest of full disclosure, as I have said in the past, I have an affiliation with Sigil as their attorney. So, take what I say in context, but anyone that knows me, knows I do my own thing play wise, and I wouldn't say things that were not true.

This isn't a sekret sauce post like I made before. I hope to do more of that stuff soon. I just want to address a few of the things being said above by providing some additional, informed thoughts. I would normally just let this slide, but I have seen a few pot shots like this and want to unofficially represent the players that would like to speak up but can't.

Vanguard is very buggy.

Vanguard has bugs. I have seen them myself. Most are petty annoyances. The gamebreaking ones get fixed very quickly and the annoying ones get fixed with regularly scheduled patches. This is common stuff that anyone that has tested a MMOG before should know.

While I don't want to discount the previous poster's extensive one week experience in the world of Telon, I will say that Vanguard ranks well above average on the bug scale compared to the other MMOGs I have tested (almost all). In the, hmm, 9 months or so I have been playing, I can recall one bug that stopped me playing for a whole night. It was when snare effects were accidentally set to root for an unlimited duration. There are bugs that are annoying (VG has its fair share every patch) and there are bugs that threaten the viability of the game long term (none on the hit list now from what I can tell, most of which were corrected during Phase 0).

So, yeah beta has bugs. I even got stuck in a rock once too (true story).

Vanguard has been radically changed recently, which isn't a good sign.

The game has not radically changed. I have been playing it since day one and it just hasn't. Things like the March Newsletter that scream "re-design" should be ignored for the most part for those not playing because they can't put it in proper context.

I will give you an example of what can seem like a complete redesign on paper, but really was not a big deal. Aradune, myself and a group of the other early testers were working through the initial pass of dungeons on Thestra. We got to a dungeon and killing the mobs was like chopping down trees. The mobs just had too many hp and it was tedious. So, we fought through it that night just to make sure we weren't flaking out, and all concluded it needed adjustment. Tagad went to his magic mob control panel, tweaked some hp/dps and ability numbers that probably took all of about a half of an hour. We tried it the next night and it was much better. You didn't see a Newsletter about it or anything because it was just us. But, if that happened now, when more players are there, you would see something that says "readjusted the difficulty of Dargun's Tomb." Sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't.

Point being, don't assume that major revamps happen based on the wording of patch notes or anything. It just doesn’t work that way. I am always amazed how sometimes some of the most trivial things can be a nightmare from a time-invested standpoint, and some of the most seemingly complicated aspects of gameplay can be addressed by a coder in an afternoon. (It took NCSoft a few months of solid dev time to get English word wrapping to work in their Korean-based chat box.)

Tons of features are getting cut.

I see this a lot, but when you know how MMOGs are made, the "cutting" of features start to make more sense. Basically, a good company will take the first several years of dev time and schedule what all needs to be done in rough form. As you finish with stuff, you fill in details about the next thing. As you start allocate resources to something, it gets fleshed out into final form, and completed.

I have seen some of the schedules for VG and it is a list a mile long of stuff to do, with different phases for each item. At some point, the game gets released, but that doesn’t do much to the schedule from a developer standpoint (other than it serves as a solid "catch up point" where things in progress have to be finalized before starting new projects). For modern MMOGs, a release date is an arbitrary line drawn in the sand, because, guess what? The day after the game is released...well, the whole team is coming back into the office, picking up that exact same schedule you were working on the day before release, and tackling the next thing on the "to do" list.

So when you hear things getting "cut," in a MMOG you are really hearing an estimation of what the company thinks it can do and can do right, before the release date.

That is all I have time to say right now. I will say Vanguard beta is moving along quite well. Happy, mature players don't break NDAs.

Hopefully, I will have some time to put together another "facts only" gameplay post in the near future.

[Frax]

Originally Posted by FloridaGamer

I love how every Vanguard thread brings out the NDA-breakers bitching about beta. Dumbasses..

Along with every armchair MMO designer and Smedley hater. Its more predictable than sunrise lately.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Oloh

Stuff.

"Lead designer leaves Sigil" is a little more impacting then "tweaked a dungeon" though.

edit:

From a newsline standpoint that is. I realize that maybe he just really hated the weather or something.

[Oloh]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

"Lead designer leaves Sigil" is a little more impacting then "tweaked a dungeon" though.

Fair enough. I was only addressing the "beta leak infoz" folks.

[FloridaGamer]

Originally Posted by Oloh

stuff

NDA-breakers pwned, film at 11.

[GrobbeeTrull]

I was supremely inspired and wanted Vanguard to be the game that brought it all back for me, that made me remember and feel the things that Brad and co. hoped.

As for the hidden jabs and veiled threats (oh noes never beta testing again!) - that's fine, whatever you need to say to help bolster your ego.

While I don't want to discount the previous poster's extensive one week experience in the world of Telon,

In the, hmm, 9 months or so I have been playing,

Maybe I mispoke, it took me one week to get a group to level past 6 or so on my own. I spent about a month in the world of Telon, hopping from incomplete starting city to incomplete starting city, generally being lost and trying to find my way, all the while jotting down notes and things I thought could be improved - only to wander to the beta forums and find about 30 people beat me to it. That's fine though.

9 months of playing, awesome! I'm glad you stuck with it thusfar. You obviously find it more fun that I never did. And that's ok.

But when an obvious fanboi like me (and you can check back through my posting history if you want) plays the game (even in it's most rudimentary and "unfinished" form) for about a month and doesn't like a SINGLE thing that's going on... there's a problem.

You can discredit me, my lack of experience, the fact I'm not an employee and didn't get to tool around with it from the beginning, whatever you'd like... the fact of the matter is, I am "your average gamer" and fuck if I didn't dread logging in. And eventually I stopped. You managed to achieve in 1 short month what it took Everquest 5 years to do, and even World of Warcraft (MMOlite) 7 months to do. Kudos to that.

I'm glad Beta is moving along well. Unhappy, average gamers won't play Vanguard.