Vanguard Update #1 + First Test Server Patch Notes

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by The Hiram Key

Well thats the rub isn't it ? Not to state the obvious but if the game actually has loading times between "zones" or "chunks" then it's not a seamless world. It's a world with invisible zone lines and no "chokepoint doorways" to other zones, that I grant you, but it's not seamless.

Many people wonder why VG and it's developers raise so much ire across many members of the community and I present this as a shining example of one very basic, very simple thing that does just that.

Why they just can't call it what it is, and instead choose to misrepresent their world (when it seems to only open them up for controversy) is truly a mystery to me.

Talk about setting yourself up to fail, sheesh.

I don't think we mis-represented anything. We were open with some of the issues people would experience, especially with older hardware, but then also talked about the upsides and how we would be taking more and more advantage of them over time. Again, I am confident the downsides will become less and less of an issue over time and the upsides more and more appaarent. Arguing over whether we used the right terminology calling the world 'seamless' and what that really means is really a matter of semantics. i don't think we mislead anyone, and certainly not intentionally. If someone got the wrong idea, then I do apologize.

[Mithrull]

Can you say whether the teleportation system will involve class abilities or too early to divulge details? Also, I assume it would not include intercontinental travel (which I actually prefer it didn't to keep each continent as unique as possible), is that correct?

[Squink]

You better not be making a 40 story tree that leads to new areas until the crashes stop because when you crash you keep running in a straight line and I'd be pretty pissed off if I ran off the 39th spiral going up this magical tree to the norse heavens or whatever and fell to my death because my video card is too good and crashes randomly because of vanguard issues or driver issues or a combination thereof.

Also durability is way too costly and damage to equipment is too extreme for tanks, having to take a break 1.5 hours into a dungeon run so we can all run 20 minutes back to nearest repair merchant does not make for a fun game. My memories of sebilis would not be like they are if all I could remember was having to leave the dungeon just when things were starting to get fun because of a badly thought out moneysink that brings unhappiness and tedium to my gameplay time.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

No, there isnt any load times, at least not for me. Its a stop, basically if your moving forward, you stop and you have to push the run button again to start running.

And im sure this will be further refined to be totally seamless, its about 90% there already.

What did everyone expect? Magical server farm to host 3 massive continents without some sort of "zoning" , "chunking" or whatever?

I seem to recall Blizzard claiming that WoW had no "zones" either. But yet every area was its own little zone with chokeways etc.../shrug

Very true and well said. For many computers there is minimal to no chunking time. And this will become more and more true as people upgrade and as we fix bugs associated with chunking. Like I said, my systems with x1950s have virtually no chunking issues -- no falling through the world, and crossing over a chunk border is almost instantaneous. And that 90% will approach 100% over the next year as we continue to optimize, fix bugs, and better hardware becomes both available and cheaper. Having to artificial chokeways, as you put it, makes more a more immersive virtual world. Add to that all the advantages I listed in my long post and this forward thinking architecture will pay off more and more and the upsides eventually so out weigh any downsides that it will cease to be an issue. Planning and architecting for the future, which I think is essential when making an MMOG that should continue to look good, be flexible, be upgradeable, etc. for years to come I feel strongly is the way to go, despite the short term issues some players have (although again I do apologize they do sometimes occur to people, and depending on their set up, the fact that they happen more often to some than to others -- by no means am I being flippant or dismissive of the problems some people experience; rather, like with many aspects of designing an MMOG that is to last years and planning for the future and the technology that will become more and more available and accessible/affordable, this does mean that short term there will be some issues, and more issues for some people -- again, I think for most people the advantages already far outweigh the disadvantages and this will become more and more true as the months go by).

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Seths

Thanks for continuing to push the things put on hold during beta out to us.

Any word on Berserker or Hero classes? Or did they for sure get moved into the first expansion.

Like I've already posted, financial realities were such that we needed to release when we did. We did our best to get as much time as possible and we feel bad that the game could have used a few more months in beta. But what is done is done.

As we've always said, there will be a Live and Expansion team, with the Live team committed to updating, adding to, and refreshing the existing world. They will also be adding classes, new areas, new mobs, updating the AI, continue to optimize, etc. So the Berserker and Inquisitor would be items that would fall into the Live team. The first expansion is some time away and will add new land masses and include some major new features. The smaller stuff, while certainly important, will be added over time with patches.

Right now much of our focus is on bug fixing, balancing, etc. But that's not everybody. For example, while the design team is tweaking things, they are also adding new content, working on classes, etc. It's a balancing game -- how much effort do you put into bug fixes, tweaks, etc. vs. how many assets do you allocate to adding cool new things to the game. Right now, this soon after launch, there are more resources allocated to fixing things than how things will be a couple of months from now. But as you can see with our first major update we patched in, by no means are we only fixing things. We're doing our best to balance our resources and I think, overall, we're doing a decent job at it. Eventually more and more resources will be allocated to new mechanics, features, classes, NPCs, new areas in the existing world, etc. It will be a slow transition where as issues and bugs are addressed, more resources will be transitioned into new stuff and not just addressing bugs and other problematic issues. But it will happen.

[Reggie]

The speed of the chunking has never been bad for me. Even with my 5 year old (albeit SCSI) hard drive I was using in early beta.

What is annoying is having to re-torch, re-mount, hit f9 again, etc.

Hitting my autofollow macro again is acceptable after a chunk.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Mithrull

Can you say whether the teleportation system will involve class abilities or too early to divulge details? Also, I assume it would not include intercontinental travel (which I actually prefer it didn't to keep each continent as unique as possible), is that correct?

To my knowledge, nothing is set in stone yet and there are still meetings figuring out the details. My preference is that they are not class based, but rather fixed locations (that we can move if necessary) that allow for teleportation. But again, that's just my preference. This is and always has been a team effort. The issue of teleportation should be determined fairly quickly and devs who play the game far more than me will weigh in as well and I'm sure we'll come up with some good solutions that, as I mentioned, help community building, help people find groups more easily, but still maintain a large world with meaningful travel. I don't think they are mutually exclusive and if you look up some of my old posts from very early beta, the fact that we might need some overland teleportation was always a plan B -- we just needed to get the game out so we could have a better and more clear idea of what is necessary so we don't go too far (nor not far enough). With any changes or additions like this you want to make sure the pendulum doesn't swing from one side to the other by over compensating for a problem.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Reggie

The speed of the chunking has never been bad for me. Even with my 5 year old (albeit SCSI) hard drive I was using in early beta.

What is annoying is having to re-torch, re-mount, hit f9 again, etc.

Hitting my autofollow macro again is acceptable after a chunk.

Agreed -- hopefully those issues will be addressed soon. It's annoying being on auto run or auto follow and then chunk and have all of that reset

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Squink

You better not be making a 40 story tree that leads to new areas until the crashes stop because when you crash you keep running in a straight line and I'd be pretty pissed off if I ran off the 39th spiral going up this magical tree to the norse heavens or whatever and fell to my death because my video card is too good and crashes randomly because of vanguard issues or driver issues or a combination thereof.

Also durability is way too costly and damage to equipment is too extreme for tanks, having to take a break 1.5 hours into a dungeon run so we can all run 20 minutes back to nearest repair merchant does not make for a fun game. My memories of sebilis would not be like they are if all I could remember was having to leave the dungeon just when things were starting to get fun because of a badly thought out moneysink that brings unhappiness and tedium to my gameplay time.

Repair costs are being looked into. Nothing to announce yet, but it is an issue being discussed.

[Mithrull]

Brad, would you mind addressing the double experience weekends? There's a lot of rumor mongering going on about the "true" motivations behind them.

[KuNi]

Nino responding to the speculations regarding the coming weekend's double-exp bonus:


It is more dramatic to believe the sky is falling, but since this is out there, yes we are honoring the email that was sent late.
__________________
Nino McHammer
Fires of Heaven
Veeshan

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorp...weekend-4.html

[Xitix]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

I realize that there are some issues with some video cards that need to be addressed, but I also know that, for example, the machine I play on has an ati X1950 with 512megs of RAM and I can play for hours and hours with no CTD, fast chunking, etc. So as faster PCs become available as well as faster video cards with more RAM, these issues should fade into the past. And the prices for this equipment continue to drop as well.

From what I see looking at what VG is doing in various monitoring tools I would say your chunking very fast because your using a system with multiple cores. Asset files, especially sound which I looked at in detail, are first opened VERY VERY VERY ineffeciently. Just look at the number of raw read calls and the amount of data that is re-read over and over when if first opens the file and gets the list of what is in it and where. A second CPU handling all those redundant reads would give a huge boost to the game. So would cleaning things up so they aren't done in the first place.

Added: some examples of what it's doing poorly

Take a look at how Engine.u is loaded before character select comes up. This is a 3,223,510 byte file and VG reads from it 14,099 times. Loading the whole thing into a buffer on start up and taking parts from that would be a lot faster.

On shutdown it saves Solo_VGMainBarHotkeys.xml which is 166 bytes long in 166 writes of 1 byte each. Sure it buffers writes to disk but making that many write system calls to Windows takes orders of magnitude longer than making one call to write all 166 bytes. It also opens,reads entire file in one read call then closes this file *twice* on startup here.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Mithrull

Brad, would you mind addressing the double experience weekends? There's a lot of rumor mongering going on about the "true" motivations behind them.

Quite frankly, no BSing around, it's a preemptive attempt at giving players who have less time to play a boost and to give people something to look forward to and to keep subscribing. We want to do things that encourage people to keep subscribing. That said, I think it can be taken too far and it also allows people who already play a lot to advance that much more quickly. It definitely could be taken too far which is something we're aware of.

[nogi]

remove item duration - seriously.

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

Quite frankly, no BSing around, it's a preemptive attempt at giving players who have less time to play a boost and to give people something to look forward to and to keep subscribing. We want to do things that encourage people to keep subscribing. That said, I think it can be taken too far and it also allows people who already play a lot to advance that much more quickly. It definitely could be taken too far which is something we're aware of.

Why not just borrow rest xp from EQ2/WoW instead?