AOC - General Information

[Snugglebear]

Originally Posted by Pyros

And wow was totally a pvp endgame game too. Until they release and people get to actually play sieges and all the crap that's supposed to be endgame, and not only hear their great stories of 300 Q&A testers fighting it out every night when they can't even find out which feats are broken for every class by spending 5mins respecing and testing them out, I'll keep my judgement on how finished this game is.


And snugglebear about priests feats, I'm not too sure about the general tree. Interupts, do they even exist? I never get interupted by mobs at least, as long as I put points into concentration, and I don't remember seeing interupt based combo(such as pummel/counterspell stuff in wow). Maybe it works through stuns/knockback, but I somehow heavily doubt that. Also reducing the single target heal cooldown doesn't seem that useful, currently healing seems pretty crappy for pvp, and casting those heals put a 1min immunity on the people. Maybe for group pvp to rotate those heals, but I'm still not sure yet.

Two of the talents in the general healing tree I was looking at specifically mentioned the radius and the timer of the burst heals. I assumed the timer one might also reduce the 'one minute immunity' (what the fuck?) on the burst heals. I really can't fathom how PvP healing will work when your team is immune to your fucking heals. I guess we just cast a heal and go LAWL SHADOWFORM IMMUNITY IZ UP GUYZ

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Snugglebear

They said the open beta client isn't the newest client. If the Secret Miracle Build myth becomes reality, we'll all have to re-evaluate our Vanguard-induced skepticisms.

I officially announce that if the magical build that only Funcom and Keebler elves can play becomes reality then I will come here and admit as much.. and buy the game and play it. Trust me, I want it to be great... I just don't see it happening.

[DJk_zero]

I know they said the OB client was older, but c'mon. Anyone saying it doesn't run like a total piece of shit (half the things in it are disabled) is outright lying.

[Hatorade]

Runs just fine for me...initial long loading but smooth smooth after that. Minor hitching once in a while but even WoW does that with me.

[Snugglebear]

The funniest thing is that in an interview regarding the Open Beta problems, the spokesman claimed that the newest client version didn't make it to OB testers because those hard-workers at Funcom just had to tinker with it a bit more and accidentally put more bugs in it! I'm guessing that's why there is an 8 hour downtime ATM.

[Ashes Emberblade]

Spent all night pvping in some OB mini games tonight. Generally had a lot of fun despite the class imbalances and dealing with PUGs.

Played a few team annihilation games, which in a PUG are pretty fail. Our team lost all of our spawn points, but the opposing team hadn't captured the northern bunker. We all died except an assassin and we're screaming in group chat to capture the northern bunker. But no, he runs around aimlessly until he gets snared by a ranger and owned by their entire team.

Team annihilation is fun but the games end way too quickly. Right now I'm going to chalk this up to sucky PUGs.

Played severl CTF games in Blood Ravine. These were very, very fun. The first game we had a healer who was very good at herding cats. He got everyone into line and we were able to win 1:0. Great action, and the fighting lasted for a good while with a healer who was actually, you know, healing.

The next game I was placed on the opposing team from this guy, and his team had another healer also. Our team ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, plus we had two level 7s in our team. The dps / heal train of a ToS, PoM, 2x Assassins, Barbarian, and a Ranger completely owned us. They had us camped into our spawn for a few minutes straight.

Class imbalances are pretty significant. I was playing as a DT, and rangers/assassins straight up own me at level 13. Of course, level 13 is a weird place to be testing class imbalances. And furthermore, this seems like a team pvp game more than anything. A level 13 PUG isn't a good place to test that.

For some strange reason, out of nowhere, I started to get really bad stalling. I think it started after I upgraded to the beta 175 nvidia drivers, but I'm not sure. So I deleted my cache files, changed from shader 3.0 to 2.0, and turned off bloom. That fixed it for the most part.

In game chat is mostly positive compared to these boards. Most people in the global channel have good performance and are pre-ordering. YMMV.

[Lost Ranger]

Minus the obvious imbalances at 13 I have found the pvp to be very enjoyable. I can see it being a more enjoyable experience then WoW pvp but that rests on balance at high end.

I am still torn on what I want to play once the game releases. I think the demo is a hardass but at the same time I have never been a real pure caster fan. Ill prob end up a healer like every other MMO heh.

[Lonin]

Originally Posted by Ashes Emberblade

In game chat is mostly positive compared to these boards. Most people in the global channel have good performance and are pre-ordering. YMMV.

I'm not discounting that some people are having a lot of fun and think the beta is great, but that always positive crowd is in every MMO beta. If you judged Vanguard purely on the in-game chat, you would think it would have a million subs.

[Ashes Emberblade]

The only thing that irks me about PVP right now is the utter inability to tell what the opposing player's class is. You can't tell by looking at them, you can't tell by mousing over them, you can only tell one of two ways: Recognizing the spell they're casting or what weapons they're carrying (dual wielding daggers = assassin, big 2 hander is probably a barbarian but could be a tank, bow is a ranger, lighting is a tos, lots of zombies is a necro, etc.) or targeting them, then right clicking their name/health bar above your hotkeys, selecting player info, then reading a popup... yeah.

[Northerner]

What continues to strike me funny though is that Blizzard did do it... but why exactly is it so hard to repeat?

I mean that honestly. Blizz (for all I hate them recently) ran a brilliant beta from F&F to open and had a decent client and fun game through the whole process. I've been in many betas and that was the only one that played like a good Live game barring hideous balance issues and generic glitches.

Since then Blizz has had errors (TBC beta was bad in terms of execution and horrid in terms of working off feedback) but as a whole, they have done well. Still, other companies continue to release betas that would make sense ten years ago and not in comparison to what now should happen. Fuck guys. why so tough? Blizzard didn't sink 100m into QA at start you know?

[Elerion]

Originally Posted by Lonin

I'm not discounting that some people are having a lot of fun and think the beta is great, but that always positive crowd is in every MMO beta. If you judged Vanguard purely on the in-game chat, you would think it would have a million subs.

There's obviously a lot of fanboys, especially in-game. This board has it's share of the opposite though. Posts by Twobit, hauwk, etc just reek of irrational hatred for the game/company. Alternatively e-thuggism.

The game runs plenty well enough for MMO release quality on many systems, regardless of "high end" or "low end" (within the game's specs, obviously). Anectodally, of the 30+ MMO friends of mine that have tried beta, none of them have had any issues once they fixed glaring problems with their own rigs (viruses and shit). Some people obviously have issues, for various known and unknown reasons. Let's hope the shader compile fix that is supposedly complete on their end fixes this, as pretty much every problem I've encountered has been related to shaders.

Content-wise, the game is ok. It has enough content to get you to 80 without tearing your eyes out. It could use an alternative path. Dungeons in the leveling area aren't polished at all and are pretty shit. Nice atmosphere though. The raid game is apparently just as good as anything else in the industry at launch, meaning 5-10 relatively bland bosses to kill. The siege content is the main draw of the game, and they better not be lying about it being ready. I will feel 10x better about the game if we get to test it before launch with a bump to level 80.

Regarding mechanics, I think the game is very promising. It's an interesting twist on old systems, and both feels natural and deep. Spellweaving didn't impress me as much as I hoped conceptually, but I'll wait and see until it's in.

Balance is probably trash right now, but most the feedback they are getting is from level 13s PvPing anyway. I won't worry about it until we hit 80. Every class is fine to both solo and group their way there so no pressing concerns.

This game is not the second coming of Jesus. It's not even the second coming of WoW. It's a worse game than WoW was at release, in most areas. Then again, WoW was an amazing game from an amazing developer and I never expected AoC to match it.

AoC is fun, feels adequately different, and has decent performance on average. AoC could use 6 more months in development to flesh out every aspect of the game that much more and fix the performance issues, so if you want a better experience you might want to wait a while. Then again, that's true for pretty much every MMO.

I've preordered and will be playing with friends. I'm looking forward to it and think I will have fun for a while. I don't think I'll be playing the game in a year, but they could surprise me.

[wild_whiskey]

I don't understand the obsession with comparing everything to Vanguard solely based on observer responses. Vanguard was a complete mess financially, it was overly ambitious, and developer-wise it was a total nightmare.

Just because people are saying "it's only beta" doesn't mean it's a disaster like Vanguard. Personally I'm enjoying OB - it has its share of flaws, and of course I'd admit its no WoW, but it really brings the lulz when people are comparing this game to Vanguard. Hell, the thing runs pretty damn well on my year-old Mac laptop (GF 8600) - a lot better than EQ2 on equivalent settings (medium-high at 1440x900). Vanguard not only looks atrocious but is riddled with floating limbs, black textures and hitches at every turn.

My hugest gripe is the loading. That shit is just unnecessary. Worse than early EQ, which was pretty damn bad for me.

[Pyros]

As a side note, servers are still down for patching. Patch doesn't change much either from the look of it(mostly gui fixes), but seems they can't get a decent version working. It's been 16hours. Even if they have a magical build(or at least a build with the stuff they said we can't test in beta but do exist, such as spellweaving and sieges), we're probably looking for a whole lot of downtimes.

It's ok though, cause they'll get all those 5$(or 5euros for us euro players, someone should tell those asshats $ != euro) preorder thingies for 6days of extended beta. At least release should be smooth, but it will be interesting to see exactly how much playtime we'll be able to fit between downs. Oh and yeah I said we, cause I'm actually gonna buy this, seems everyone wanna test it so well might as well, can always sell my 80 before the first month is over to get my money back with a bonus.

Oh well, I guess it still beats 21000 kills per level and xp potions for 3$ that reduce it to 900, damn korean item malls.

[painbringer]

PS: there's some performance tricks:

First after patching run simpleconfig and compact resource databases. (if it crashes, run it a few times)

Then defrag the files.

(those 2 reduce the load times by 3-5x for me)


Also, try using the pre-set low-medium-high graphics configurations, that should prevent real time shader recompilations.

[madmaan]

First off as an personal account, I will give an update on the game performance issues based on the past weekend.

All studdering/hang ups/npc slow spawning/and blah blah blah seemed to have been all server related. All weekend long it seems that load times existed while zoneing, but were less than 10 seconds long. Running at max res with all the features turned down to low the game not only looks better than anything out, it ran super smooth.


amd 64 6000+
4 gigs ram
ati x1900

All the negative points about the game I have had have changed since my performance problems had vanished. The default interface options are retarded but can be easily fixed. (who turns off pc name plates by default?)

Hopefully the 10th goes smooth!