Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard?

[stevemcqueen]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

So that's it in a nutshell. A little frustrating short term, but the game is out, it continues to sell well, churn is very low, and the word continues to spread that the game is fun. Also, hardware is becoming cheaper and faster and as people upgrade their machines for Vanguard and other newer games either already out or on the horizon, the performance issues will go away. EQ 1 had a similar issue, but it paid off as well -- we were one of the first hardware only games (remember the Voodoo 1?). People needed to upgrade, but within 6 months or so after launch, Voodoo 2s were out, etc. and performance issues all but went away. In fact, performance past us up and we were able to create zones more detailed in our first expansion (Kunark) without any problems. This will happen with Vanguard as well.

Brad this is what always limited your games.
Eq1, EQ2 (I guess you were still in charge when it was designed) and Vanguard.
Making a game technically 2 years premature compared to what is the actual average machine at the time of release is not a smart move.
The casual gamer which you insist in embracing, don't invest too much money on PC hardware, hence they won't have the latest state of the art machine, and neither can be bothered to upgrade it.
They like to play with Xbox and PS2 as much as they do with PC and they spread their money evenly.
WoW crowd has a very average machine, that could not run Vanguard decently, and that's a huge limitation, I hope you thought this when decided that Vanguard required the most advanced machine of the entire game industry.

Another big issue that has nothing to do with the quality of the computers that run Vanguard is the memory leak.
Brad I don't know if you play your games long enough, but I do.
The game crashes at least once in a hour, sometimes 4 times in 5 minutes.
It is not just me, I look around me when I play and at least other 3 people in my group go LD at least once every hour.
This is a make or break issue for me and I believe for all people who is playing this game.
I would focus on getting at the bottom of it and sort it, I can live with the bugs, but I am not ready to give more than a couple of month to this matter though, I am physically suffering.

Last thing is the server and chunk instability.
The server and the most crowded chunks crash way too often.
Just yesterday (double xp w/e) we had constant server crashes every hour.
In 1 hour alone my chunk (CiS) crashed 10 times in a hour.
People was incensed and very pissed off mate, this is not a one off, it happens every day since the game was launched.
If you really play your game properly, along with us "mortals", you will realise what the real make or break issues are.

Fixing bugs at the moment is not as important as fixing all the issues listed above.
I don't mind not being able to finish a quest or not being able to make a particular recipe.
What people care is the chance to play continuosly without being kicked out of the game every hour or so.
It is not fun to die in an unaccessible area where you cannot recover your body or lose contact with your group (which took you 21 hour to find) just because either the server or your computer implode for a reason or another.

Work on retain the customer you have before tuning up the game to get more customers.
That's my suggestion.
As a very loyal and paying customer, who like Vanguard game design very much, I am willing to put up with all the technical shit for 2-3 months more.
So you can count of me and my money, as I believe you can count on other people who is giving you the benefit of a doubt for few more months.
But don't count too much on it.
If the memory leaks and the server instability is not fixed, people will give up on this game, I am afraid.

[kcxiv]

That doesn't happen to everyone though. The crashing. I know i have a guildy that crashes alot, and he has a pretty bad ass computer. It sucks for him. I have a crappy computer, and i have crashed 2 times since a few days before it went "technically" live. It does need tweaking, but he already said, the money was gone, and he really had no choice but to release. What could he do? not release at all, and take a 30 million dollar hit? yeah right.

[stevemcqueen]

Read the bottom of my post mate.
I just don't criticise for the sake of it, like other people does in this forum.
I play this game and I want to keep playining it.
I put my money where my mouth is.
I am saying that I am giving Sigil my money for 2-3 more months although at the moment I am forcing myself to keep playing it, because I understand the financial pressure Sigil is on at the moment.

But the stability issue is more widespread that people might think.
I play this game and I see how many people go LD while I play in a group. It ain't pretty.
Plus the server/chunck crashes are problem for everyone, and they are getting worse not better.

What I was saying is that taken into consideration all the financial problem of Sigil, I along with other loyal customers are giving Sigil few more months to fix the worst issues.
And in my view the game stability is number 1 matter, before bugs and everything else.
I just don't want it to be overlooked, because for me it is a very big issue.
I don't care if all the bugs will be sorted.
If I can't play for at least a couple of hours without crashing once, I won't keep playing this game (and I am sure is not just me, you just need to read the chat window in game to understand the mood of the players on this matter, I am not over exagerating it).
That's all.

[Ham n Cheese]

Yeah the game seems extremely under tested in a lot of areas, especially on patch days; some shit goes in and you wonder if anyone even ogged in to see if it was working.

[Throag]

Originally Posted by stevemcqueen

Brad this is what always limited your games.
Eq1, EQ2 (I guess you were still in charge when it was designed) and Vanguard.
Making a game technically 2 years premature compared to what is the actual average machine at the time of release is not a smart move.
The casual gamer which you insist in embracing, don't invest too much money on PC hardware, hence they won't have the latest state of the art machine, and neither can be bothered to upgrade it.
They like to play with Xbox and PS2 as much as they do with PC and they spread their money evenly.
WoW crowd has a very average machine, that could not run Vanguard decently, and that's a huge limitation, I hope you thought this when decided that Vanguard required the most advanced machine of the entire game industry.

I disagree here. It's always good to keep in mind the future evolutions of the hardware. WoW ran great one year ago, it still runs great today but IMO we are already reaching the limits of the engine. I just have to look at armored characters and can't help but think that armors look just like body tight pyjamas with enormous shoulders to make up for the lack of detail / volume on the rest of the armor (hey guys, maybe if we oversize the shoulders they will not pay attention to the fact that the rest of the models have nearly no details eh? Oh and let's add some trees on those, I'm 100% positive they will only look at that!). You can also notice that on the environement, most textures look just like crap when close to them. Sure they can add more polygons etc over the years but they won't be able to go beyond the bounds of such a limited engine. What will it look like in another year?
Everyone was saying the same thing about EQ2 when it was released and look at now, a lot of people consider the game to be gorgeous, and I'm not talking about art here, since it's highly subject to taste.
IMO it would be silly to design an engine around the idea that you will get substantially more subs thanks to that taking example on WoW. No one will get 9+m subscribers, it just won't happen. Sure you will get some more, but what made WoW reach so many customers is not that. It helped of course but that's far from being the main factor.

[xregg]

Hey Aradune.

Im almost lvl 21(I know its low for playing everyday since launch, I died a lot in the early stages heh). You should stop in on Flamehammer. We have a pretty nice sized guild made up of a lot of people who post here. Log in and Ill give ya some tips on how to take eye catching in game screenshots on todays hardware for your website


Blacken {Talisman}
Flamehammer Server

[Mithrull]

Originally Posted by kcxiv

All this from a guy who was a main tank on bertox, and was the butt end of every joke becuase you got Stevon ebay style.

OOOF!

[Mithrull]

Originally Posted by Neric

Incredible in comparison to what? This is a serious question btw.

The dungeons really are where VG shines. Its the first game with dungeons worthy of the EQ legacy.

[Xitix]

What concerns me most about VG currently is the customer support and fixing problems cycle. EQ was total shit in this regard, bugs straight out weren't really fixed and instead customer service was penny pinched to reduce costs. A much better approach is to fix all problems/bugs at least twice. First to fix the problem now and a second time to fix underlying problems that allowed it to happen in the first place. Takes more time and money at first but statistics show it saves a ton of cash over time. Instead of 100 plus support incidents per month at $5 each it's $2000 to fix it fully. That means it starts paying off in 4 months and since these games are live for years it's a huge win. Preventing similar errors from ever going live also saves huge amounts of cash.

An example: Quest X says to take item A to NPC Y. The error is it doesn't hand you the item so the quest can't be completed. First fix: edit the specific quest/npc data to have the NPC hand out the item. Second fix: Search and flag all quests that might have the same problem and ensure they are correct. Third fix (!): add warnings/flags to quest/npc/item edit/check tools to show when this problem reappears when creating new quests or making changes to old ones. Re-run checks to flag problems and fix them in the last days before pushing a patch out to the servers.

An actual example from Everquest: ground spawns. For whatever reason with allmost every single expansion for years some ground spawns were bugged and only spawned when the zone was reset. Players, GMs, support people and developers were constantly dealing with the same problem after every expansion was released. Huge waste of time and money for everybody.

[Ham n Cheese]

Originally Posted by Mithrull

The dungeons really are where VG shines. Its the first game with dungeons worthy of the EQ legacy.

What dungeons are you talking about? And really I never thought there was anything wrong with WoW's dungeons, the style of gameplay wasn't for me but they always had pretty well designed places with cool mobs to fight. Even the earliest Horde dungeon has a cool flaming dude to fight at the end

[Alarion]

Originally Posted by Kraks

Brad, I appreciate your response.

I suggest you stop looking at the "data" and start logging in, much like some GMs would back in EQ1, and ask people that are in the trenches. Not feedback systems, as we know only the people that are absolutely in love or absolutely appalled with things typically respond there.

Honestly, the crafting system could be much better. The randomness is what kills it. A good sword smith in real life doesn't sometimes make a good sword, sometimes make an ok sword, and sometimes make a crappy sword. This isn't Honda, Ford, or GM, we're not putting out hundreds of items. We're putting out special, select few, custom made items. These things should take time to make, something that isn't in the game currently. However, when they are made, they should be fantastic. The length of time to create a nice sword should be determined in the actual crafting, not in the gathering of materials (as it is now).

I'm no developer, but I could come up with some ways to make crafting require actual skill. Show the weapon forming on the screen instead of some generic every MMO Crafting Window. Show the hammer. Go to a first person view...the sword is forming in front of you, a minor bump here, a dull edge there. Actually incorporate folding into it. The more you fold the metal, the better the item will become. Actually incorporate the mixing of carbon and iron to create steel. No need for Black Iron and Star Iron and other falseties. Just make the best weapons take hours upon hours of real time invested into them. Make the crafting work to maintain a constant temperature. Allow him to hire 1 or 2 weapon smiths 1 or 2 tiers lower to come and manage the bellows, and in return for their work they gain XP and learn how to make the items themselves.

Something better could be done easily, and it would make more sense, and be 1000x more immersive. I would sign back up immediately and play any game that could do something similar with their crafting system. REAL crafting is the key to immersion within an MMO, something no game has come even close to.

You know, I would love a game that became a real simulation of blacksmithing, or carpentry, etc.

The thing is, while you and I might like this idea - the idea that we can spend 30 minutes making one item - but when it's done, the thing is beautiful and can sell for a hefty premium; the rest of the player base wouldn't. They might say "yeah, that's a cool idea" but really, they want to login for an hour and be able to actually get some stuff done.

Maybe it's because I am a creative person, so I would enjoy actually creating something; using a crafting skill that you really had to learn and not just buy some new recipes from a vendor. Right now, while I do enjoy the crafting system on some level, it is definitely a little wonky. I mean, really the only thing that determines how good you are at crafting is 1. juggling your skills to find a balance between the number of complications and how efficient your progress/quality abilities are and 2. how much +highnumber crafting clothes you can afford.

I personally like systems where you have to figure stuff out. VG has this to an extent, moreso than say World of Warcraft does, but it still is not to the level that some of us would like to see.

That said, while I would enjoy a more involved system where you actually craft something; I can also see myself (and others) getting bored of it and not really wanting to do much as it would take so damn long.

[stevemcqueen]

Originally Posted by Throag

Everyone was saying the same thing about EQ2 when it was released and look at now, a lot of people consider the game to be gorgeous, and I'm not talking about art here, since it's highly subject to taste.

Yes, unfortunately we are not dealing with a painting competition but with games.
Plus EQ2 still has a plastic feel to me, so the graphic departement is pretty much subjective as you mentioned (at least the artistic aspect, because obviously EQ2 is technically superior to WoW).
Anyway EQ2 is still on 250K subs, and that was before Vanguard came out...
Therefore high polygon graphic doesn't always equal succesful game, on the contrary on MMORPGs that's an handycap.

I got your point, BUT there is a big difference between Very Low hardware demand (WoW) and Very Hard (Vanguard), can we do something in the middle?
Look at the market of normal games.
The most demanding games are NWN2 and Oblivion which run smoothly on highest setting on my crappy computer.
With Vanguard I have to play balanced settings and tune down to zero all speculars, shadows, atmospheric distortion and tune down to 20% shader LOD , reflective distance and tree rendering distance.
I believe that is too extreme.

The Nvidia 8800 series , which is the card that allows to play Vanguard almost at highest details, will be an average affordable card in 2 years and that is not acceptable IMO.
This is not good for Vanguard, like it was no good for EQ2.

[woqqqa]

Yeah, you're right Steve...the more I look at this sort of problem, the more I think console MMOs are potentially viable, since it would be far easier to design for a standardized platform. After all, if the choice is between shelling out 2000 bucks for a new rig to play the latest PC MMO or the several hundred for an Xbox, PS3 or even a Wii (I'd love to see an MMO controlled with a Wii-mote), it's no competition. A keyboard and mouse (or headset) can easily work with any of today's systems. And since the new generation all has online connectivity, the updates would be no trouble.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by woqqqa

Yeah, you're right Steve...the more I look at this sort of problem, the more I think console MMOs are potentially viable, since it would be far easier to design for a standardized platform.

It's going to be the wave of the future. In 10 years I bet most MMO's are console only, or have minimal PC support.. opposite of what we have now. Being able to design for one platform, knowing your limits and eliminating 95% of the technical support issues is a huge boon to developers.

[woqqqa]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

It's going to be the wave of the future. In 10 years I bet most MMO's are console only, or have minimal PC support.. opposite of what we have now. Being able to design for one platform, knowing your limits and eliminating 95% of the technical support issues is a huge boon to developers.

Players too. Not having to upgrade because the newest MMO needs a ton of RAM and a faster processor is a boon to pretty much everyone but hardware vendors. And since they won't be trying to trump each other with tech (my MMO requires FOUR video cards just to run), they'll likely end up focusing more on style and content, which imho is just what the industry needs right now.