Vanguard Patch Notes Update #1

[Mkopec1]

Originally Posted by Big W Powah!

Not to nitpick, but he wasn't shilling. He was quite obviously affiliated with it. Thus, not shilling. More like, whats that worsd? promoting!

And I dont qutie understand why people cannot get that he is here in fact to promote his shit. What do these people expect him to do, come here and badmouth his game, and tell people dont buy it? lolz

I find this amusing.

Like I said in before, if you bought into all his promoting, you are no better than your grandma buying into the latest Ronco product on the infomercials.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

Like I said in before, if you bought into all his promoting, you are no better than your grandma buying into the latest Ronco product on the infomercials.

Yeah, because many of us devoted years of our life to a Ron Popeil product previously, so we expect the next one to be the same. You are a fucking idiot. A lot of people here had overall good experiences with Brad's first product for years and it isn't a stretch to think you would have the same with his second.

If I bought a Ronco blender and it was awesome then my next Ronco blender blew chunks, I would send it back for a refund. This is no different.

But basically what you are saying, and I can't argue with the logic, is that Brad came here and took advantage of his standing and past success in the market to push a crappy product in the hopes of suckering people into buying it. Mission accomplished for ~100k people, and rising!

[woqqqa]

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

And I dont qutie understand why people cannot get that he is here in fact to promote his shit. What do these people expect him to do, come here and badmouth his game, and tell people dont buy it? lolz

I find this amusing.

Like I said in before, if you bought into all his promoting, you are no better than your grandma buying into the latest Ronco product on the infomercials.

We expect him to come here and answer questions, such as:

- why does chunking cause many people to CTD, and what's being done to fix it?
- when will we be seeing the promised caravan/fellowship/player town system?
- what's the rationale behind current class balancing?
- any plans to improve the LFG tool? If so, what are they?

...instead we get the same old "I really love Vanguard and it's a blast to play, in the future we'll have floating cities!" spiel.

[Digits]

Originally Posted by Big W Powah!

Really? Heh, I just haven't had problems with healing mobs. Even pre-revamp in beta, I handled them fine (and our DPS is leaps and bounds ahead of then, with just as good healing/staying power)

If you can't interrupt the heal every time, and they have no mana pool to deplete, you're going to have an endless fight on your hands. I say this not because I play Vanguard, but rather because it's the same exact thing in EQ1. If you don't have an interrupt while fighting healers you may as well not even fight them.

[Kaxmax]

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

And I dont qutie understand why people cannot get that he is here in fact to promote his shit. What do these people expect him to do, come here and badmouth his game, and tell people dont buy it? lolz

How about actual discussion instead of nebulous fluff? Take the post that set off that tirade. We all understand that there's different teams working on different things, we're not idiots (well, most of us at least). How about pulling the team that's working on nerfing classes into the ground & putting them on the class ability bug fix team for a few weeks? They seem to be the all-stars of the group, get them working on something that actually makes your dwindling playerbase happy. Are you honestly telling me that the guys who nerf class abilities are somehow incapable of tweaking in the other direction?

A simple "We're going to hold off on nerfing everything in sight until we fix some of the more glaring class issues" would go a very long way. I don't want to hear about all the cool shit that's planned for some nebulous time in the future, it's meaningless. We're funding their beta at this point, I don't think asking for class fixes ahead of nerfs is an outlandish request. They have a game with fantastic potential, but the nerfing is really killing it for a lot of people, and I personally don't think it's needed at this point. If you're worried about people leveling too fast with broken abilities, how about not throwing out two double exp weekend?

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Kaxmax

Obviously I don't actually want someone fired. It's incredible that actually set you off after all the bullshit you've put up with here. Regardless, my apologies. I actually like your team quite a bit, and was guilded with a few of them in EQ.

That being said, if you're going to comment on "class and tact", you may want to go back and re-read the marketing whitewash you put on this board in the last year (and are still doing in this very thread), and then compare it to the state of your game. You hyped the shit out of VG here, you're going to have to take some lumps that the people who bought it (myself included) are pissed that it doesn't come close to living up to your promises.

Thanks for the apology -- I am usually quite thick skinned, but I care deeply about my team and am proud of them and know how hard they working, the long hours, and how passionate they are about making Vanguard a better and better game.

I too apologize for overreacting.

As for my posts, while I have been promoting the game for a long time here and elsewhere, I did my best to manage expectations. When I talked about a feature that might not make it in by release, I did my best to say so. If there is something you think I over-hyped or we didn't deliver on that I said we would for sure, please let me know. I think, other than releasing a bit early, we overall did a pretty good job at delivering the game, world, features, and mechanics that I and others posted about, put in the FAQ, etc.

Exceptions would be the Fellowship system, Caravans, and the like. We worked with them in beta and had to pull some in the last phase because they turned out to be problematic. We still plan on implementing systems that provide similar functionality as soon as we have time and are able to again test them and make sure they don't create other problems we didn't anticipate.

Vanguard was and is an ambitious game and overall I'm proud of what we delivered. In those areas that slipped, well, we'll do our best to patch them in as time permits. Right now we are juggling new features, adjusting existing features, optimizing, adding more content in areas that need it and in level ranges that need it, etc.

thanks,

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Kaxmax

How about actual discussion instead of nebulous fluff? Take the post that set off that tirade. We all understand that there's different teams working on different things, we're not idiots (well, most of us at least). How about pulling the team that's working on nerfing classes into the ground & putting them on the class ability bug fix team for a few weeks? They seem to be the all-stars of the group, get them working on something that actually makes your dwindling playerbase happy. Are you honestly telling me that the guys who nerf class abilities are somehow incapable of tweaking in the other direction?

A simple "We're going to hold off on nerfing everything in sight until we fix some of the more glaring class issues" would go a very long way. I don't want to hear about all the cool shit that's planned for some nebulous time in the future, it's meaningless. We're funding their beta at this point, I don't think asking for class fixes ahead of nerfs is an outlandish request. They have a game with fantastic potential, but the nerfing is really killing it for a lot of people, and I personally don't think it's needed at this point. If you're worried about people leveling too fast with broken abilities, how about not throwing out two double exp weekend?

We will definitely try to only address (nerf, enhance, etc.) areas of the game that we feel we need to get right on and not let sit for too long. The majority of our resources have been allocated to optimizations, bug fixes, etc. since late beta 4 and continue now post release. I know some of the bugs are frustrating -- we play the game a lot too. In fact, I'm glad to see many team members playing the game so much into the late hours of the night after working 12+ hours days. We didn't do this as much as would have liked with EQ, but we are with Vanguard.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by woqqqa

We expect him to come here and answer questions, such as:

- why does chunking cause many people to CTD, and what's being done to fix it?
- when will we be seeing the promised caravan/fellowship/player town system?
- what's the rationale behind current class balancing?
- any plans to improve the LFG tool? If so, what are they?

...instead we get the same old "I really love Vanguard and it's a blast to play, in the future we'll have floating cities!" spiel.

All CTD bugs, including chunking related ones, are very high priority. Client and server crashes are always top priority.

As soon as we get a handle on some of these bugs, we can return to caravans, etc. The Test server will also help with this.

I detailed where we'd like to see the LFG system go, matchmaking, etc. in another post.

thanks,

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Kaxmax

Give me a fucking break. He's a big boy, if he's going to hype his game to ungodly proportions on a board like this he better expect some negative feedback when his game doesn't come close to living up to the hype. Was I over the line? I guess....I'd say I've seen worse here. I'm certainly not a frothing VG-hater, I bought the game and enjoyed parts of it despite the shitty state it was released in.

It's possible to have civil developer/poster relations here, look at Nino. None of the VG haters give him problems because he actually gives a straight answer.

Nino is doing a great job and as Assoc. Producer on Design is more in the trenches and able to answer questions with more specificity and detail.

[woqqqa]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

All CTD bugs, including chunking related ones, are very high priority. Client and server crashes are always top priority.

As soon as we get a handle on some of these bugs, we can return to caravans, etc. The Test server will also help with this.

I detailed where we'd like to see the LFG system go, matchmaking, etc. in another post.

thanks,

Seeing as you've posted about a book's worth of stuff the past couple of days I must've missed it. Okay, I'll go take a look around then.

[Kaxmax]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

We will definitely try to only address (nerf, enhance, etc.) areas of the game that we feel we need to get right on and not let sit for too long. The majority of our resources have been allocated to optimizations, bug fixes, etc. since late beta 4 and continue now post release. I know some of the bugs are frustrating -- we play the game a lot too. In fact, I'm glad to see many team members playing the game so much into the late hours of the night after working 12+ hours days. We didn't do this as much as would have liked with EQ, but we are with Vanguard.

Fair enough. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. The first update was eerily reminiscent of an EQ patch, hopefully future updates don't exhibit the same mistakes.