Rumor - SOE to purchase VG?

[Ortega]

Originally Posted by Dolalin

I think some critical introspection about what actually made EQ successful could have helped Sigil out... back in 2004. Now they've just got to work with what they have: a huge world with a few players, and what feels like a single-player game.

Remember, you can always add zones, but you can't make the zones you already have smaller.

I think some critical introspection into their own fucking game would've helped them. I mean did Brad even play the game the normal way? As in did he create a level 1 and level it up level by level without twinking himself, without cheating to travel, and without using some supercomputer, because if he did I see no way in hell that he could've thought this game was good. Also on the world size, I remember him bragging about that constantly when he was here advertising, earth to you Brad, randomly generated worlds are NOT FUN!!! Give your game some fucking soul buddy. Ah well, chalk another one up to some jackass seeing nothing but the monthly fees. Hell I can just see Brad sitting there with his little calculator out. "Oooo if we get this many subs at this rate will make XXXX$$ per month" Damn I'm gunna go post a few more screen shots on FoH that show nothing of interest and hope it works!

[Indiana]

Originally Posted by Itzena

Found a graph in one of the rumour threads elsewhere, and if it's true, it throws a little more light onto Sigil's current situation.

Itzena where did you find that chart, and is there any credible source to it?

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Torrid

It's not like anybody forced you to play the game. Brad gave everybody the option of another game to play.

I forked out for 2 Collector's Editions just for the Guild enhancing items, that still dont work. Nobody forced us to buy it but it sure as fuck was missold and flat out lied about.

They may as well given out a small tub of Vaseline which we could apply liberally before they fucked us over.

Originally Posted by Torrid

He tried to make a game that wasn't just a WoW clone at great risk. Personally, I think that should be encouraged. I don't want to be playing WoW with better graphics and different lore 10 years from now.

You're making an argument supporting Brad, yet you are saying games aren't all about the graphics. Best have a word with Brad then - he is the guy who set up a company with as many artists as everyone else put together and next to zero quality management.

[Esmo]

Originally Posted by UnchainedAcolyte

I consider part of his success good ideas, especially early on.

Comments like these are what bring people out to flame idiots like you. Good ideas? The number one problem that Vanguard had in development was the slew of *horrible* design ideas that Sigil held onto for an extended period of time despite literally hundreds of posts by fans expressing their concerns. Finally (though far too late in the process) they were forced to make significant changes to some of the core elements of the game because they couldn't even get enough beta testers to log in and play due to the fact that it sucked balls and *was not fun*.

Yet here you are singing its praises, completely oblivious to the history of the design process Sigil stumbled through and oblivious to the plethora of mistakes that Sigil made at almost every turn that resulted in this game becoming the flop that it is. And make no mistake - with subscribers teetering below 100k and the actual world population dipping below 50k it is a monumental flop. It is utterly laughable that anyone who has followed this game for an extended period of time (as most of us have) can think it is the least bit successful. I'm sure there are people who enjoy it but you know what - MOST of the people who bought it didn't and are no longer playing it. The second month churn for VG was very significant. March box sales for the game didn't even top 20k. That is not one person's opinion of the game, that is a fact.

Originally Posted by UnchainedAcolyte

I also consider part of it to be luck (and SOE bailouts - If I were him I'd be embarrassed already) and right place/right time. That can be said for many.

Luck was EQ. Or more accurately, good timing. It didn't matter that the game was full of terrible design choices or buggy code or shitty mechanics - we gamers at the time were starving and the first fruit that came along tasted sweeter than anything we'd ever had before despite it's rancid core. That time was also the blossoming of the internet as a communication tool and for most of us, EQ provided the very first place where we met large numbers of like-minded people. Of course we liked it - it made our misenthropic lives more bearable and less weird.

The other thing that fucking kills me is when people (and Brad especially) talk about the longevity of EQ as evidence of his genius and he completely and utterly forgets that the reason it has had such longevity is that most of the bullshit mechanics and bad designs he implemented in the original were removed after he jumped ship. It isn't nearly the same game today as it was years ago and if it were, it would have folded ages ago.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by UnchainedAcolyte

By the way, I hear early EQ was a total flop too, Neric. Did you play it?

If March '99 counts then I did.

One of the biggest fallacies in our culture lies in believing that individuals who are a part of something new, innovative, and/or successful can continue to be so unerringly. Every creator/innovator has flops. It doesn't matter who they are. Yet when those people stumble and don't deliver, everyone acts like the bottom fell out of existence.

I always thought EQ was very innovative and there thousands of great ideas, but then I ran into the docs of Sojourn. Now I know that EQ is just a MUD clone set in a nice 3D world with pretty unique dungeon layouts. From the standpoint of pure game mechanics judging from the engine protocol in the chatbox, it seems the game never really left the MUD stage.

Brad and Co had some great ideas about game mechanics, lore, and sphere design, some elements of which are a positive in VG's current state. The implementation fell flat. Brad is the conceptual guy, not the implementation guy. And he must be a heck of a salesman.

That's exactly the problem, whenever Brad&Co tried to come up with something on their own, it flopped big time.

Yes, it is easier to be critical than to be correct, but all of this didn't come unexpected. People like me pointed out that the game will fail and mostly because of the reasons it did fail and it wasn't difficult to predict. I based my concerns on the shallow gameplay, the generic stereotypes and the total lack of life in their world while others claimed the engine was asking for too much hardware power. In the end, it's a mixture of both. People couldn't run it well and got bored on top of it.

I think Sigil should have hired people not only with experience, but also with common sense and the courage to voice their opinion. The way it worked out it seems to me that everyone in the company didn't want to interrupt Brad in his daydreams, so this whole project slowly but surely went down the drain.

This game is a model for mismanagement. Too much weight was put on meaningless details on not enough weight was put on the important things and worst thing of all is that nobody noticed it or refused to take notice until it was too late.

Don't get fooled by Brad's lame statements. If he had released it half a year later, the game wouldn't be much better, it would only contain more meaningless details.

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by Indiana

Itzena where did you find that chart, and is there any credible source to it?

Either the Silky Venom or Ten Ton Hammer forums - can't remember which, sorry! It was either in one of the "SOE takeover" or "For fuck's sake Sigil; man up, get over yourselves, and merge the sodding servers for the good of everybody" threads.

Also, it's great that the vanbois are breaking out the ad hominems on Z-V...it means that they have no real arguments left, so are just playing 'shoot the messenger'.

Edit: Forgot the reply to UA -

Originally Posted by UnchainedAcolyte

*shrugs*

Considering the lesson he's getting, I'm guessing he won't be quite as stubborn about certain things on his next try - if he gets one.

The time to learn lessons was when WoW surpassed EQ's all-time subs record within a week of its launch, not three months after VG launches.

Whatever decisions he made that were detrimental to VG's development are well on their way out most likely. Hence this "new Vision".

Read: Brad was wrong about everything, and it's going to cost Sigil dear.

Then again, it's hard to be considered a founder and revolutionary of a newer game/online genre and not be just a wee bit swell-headed.

What genre did Brad found, out of interest? It certainly wasn't the MMOG.

[Chaid]

Originally Posted by Soriak

Sure, Luclin was pretty buggy and incomplete when it released, but I think it turned out to be a fairly good expansion.

Talk about rose colored glasses. You must not have raided during Luclin. It was still a steaming shitpile when Planes of Power was released. Curse death touching, assinine chain aggro issues in raid zones, farming Emp keys, bosses warping to zone safe spots due to geometry issues, farming Shissar bane weapons, insane boss AC (hi2u wizard class stacking), VT key farming, fast raid zone trash respawn rates and promoting guilds to VT key a mage bot for CoH in order to leapfrog past pointless trash were excellent design choices, yo.

[redjunkopera]

Originally Posted by Maxxius

Guess you never ran a business

"Running a business" works a little different than "running a large privately held corporation".

Originally Posted by Itzena

Found a graph in one of the rumour threads elsewhere, and if it's true, it throws a little more light onto Sigil's current situation.

Still looks like they have >30K active, and it's not some massive fall-off, it's a slow decline if you can even call it that with any kind of statistal significance. EVE operates with that much...

Luclin, was the last awesome EQ1 expansion, imho.

I still call BS on this rumor.

[Twobit Whore]

LOL, you sound like the silkyboys.. "as long as they have a few k subs and can keep a server or two going then everything is fine!"

[redjunkopera]

Seriously.

Look at the massive shit-piles of game that continue to run:

Dark and Light
SWG
Horizons
etc...

Compared to those VG is sitting pretty. There is no reason for them to jump ship, and given the most likely motivations of the people who kept it running (or even starting it in the first place - AKA - teh vision), it would have to be something more pressing than a weak start.

[r.gun]

iirc, that graph is fairly old and the person who made it went onto his server and did /who's on all the level brackets. Also, it was pointed out the first time it was shown on these boards that those spikes in numbers were on the double xp weekends.

So really, that chart isn't as doom and gloom as it looks. No, it's not an upward curve, like I'm sure Brad would like it to be, but it's not some massive drop off.

[tad10]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Don't you have more "This game sucks but I'll support it anyways!!!" posts to make?

Eh. I always though his posts were like mine -- viz. VG has issues but we're still having a pretty good time. I guess I don't really care that you and etc. didn't enjoy the game. I did and still do.

This is the problem with discussing VG here -- if you play the game and try and make some constructive criticism everyone who hates the game will seize on that criticism and come up with a post like this.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by r.gun

iirc, that graph is fairly old and the person who made it went onto his server and did /who's on all the level brackets. Also, it was pointed out the first time it was shown on these boards that those spikes in numbers were on the double xp weekends.

So really, that chart isn't as doom and gloom as it looks. No, it's not an upward curve, like I'm sure Brad would like it to be, but it's not some massive drop off.

He used a program to poll VGplayers.com. He did the same thing for EQ2 before and it is pretty accurate and the site that gets a lot of traffic because of it. eq2census.com

[redjunkopera]

How about linking the source. I'd be interested to see that.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by redjunkopera

How about linking the source. I'd be interested to see that.

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