SOE to own VG - Sigil fires employees

[Cuppycake]

I'm not denying that EQ2 combat leaves some to be desired. The problem with EQ2 is that there are tons of skills to mash each fight. Do you have to mash all those skills? Nope - because they don't matter much anyway. As a mystic, I noticed very minimal difference in fighting a mob at level 20 when I threw 5 debuffs on it compared to fighting it solo.

The needed changes for EQ2 combat:
1) Combine/get rid of some abilities so we don't have so many that we either never use them or we use them just because they're there.
2) Make each ability do more, make it matter if you use it.
3) Make spells resist less, the resists make people mash even more.

Basically, if you're mashing, its your own damn fault. You don't have to click all those spells and abilities as they're trivial anyway, which is a whole different problem with combat in EQ2.

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled "I told you so's."

[Kreugen]

Originally Posted by Requiem

EQ2's "button-mashing, skill-spamming combat" does serve the purpose of introducing player skill to a character. I don't think I've played any MMO besides eve where the person behind a character matters so much, even during mundane encounters.

DISCLAIMER: I quit EQ2 a long time ago, I might be wrong today.

Which actually leads to the neccessity of running loggers at all times to see if people are pulling their weight or not. I had to boot people from groups all the fucking time for doing 1/10th or even 1/50th of their potential dps - meaning they were just turning auto attack on and then jerking off. There were so many of them fuckers that I find it likely that 90% of the playerbase doesn't even have all of their abilities hotkeyed. As obnoxiously spammy as the game was, who could blame them? FoH raids printed out DPS after every encounter. They sure as hell knew who was awake and who wasn't. Getting into the top 5 with my shittatsic skill books and second tier dps class was a matter of pride. Even staying in the top 10 required spacing out cooldowns to take best advantage of the two dispatches. So yeah, there was SOME thought involved, but mostly it came down to "wait for dispatch notice, MASH MASH *double up* MASH MASH MASH MASH *wait*"

It wasn't quite as bad on the paladin. But holding aggro was a whole different kind of frustration.

VG's best gameplay was its healers - it takes a good player to effectively handle beating on the mob and healing. Tanks have deaggro and temp buffs that they can put on defenisve targets, so tanking takes quite a bit of management as well. I'm not sure if the DPS classes are any more involved than EQ2's were, though. At least you have two kinds of energy plus chained attacks.

[Larion]

Originally Posted by Aphextwin

Does anyone really give a toss when a person registers on this board? I've been here since late 2003 but only registered in 2006 once my balls dropped.

Ye.. it makes you aprox 3 years lesser then me!

Although probably more, since furor banned my first account for posting the how to willingly crash a zone to reset raidmobs guide =(

No man as long as you don't give a damn, I really doubt anyone does!!!

[redjunkopera]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

Which actually leads to the neccessity of running loggers at all times to see if people are pulling their weight or not. I had to boot people from groups all the fucking time for doing 1/10th or even 1/50th of their potential dps -

I think EQ2's weak link is that you do need skill to reach the maximum potential of your character, but there is zero incentive to do it.

[Sarvius]

I'm a huge fan of Vanguard, have been since I bought the game a month after release. I think it has a lot of things going for it - as a psi, I love how dynamic my class is. I feel very needed in an awful lot of situations, which is both a positive and a negative, because there are a lot of 'needs' to fulfill a group in VG. With the population so low, the game isn't enjoyable because there's no one to group with.

I still consider VG as the most 'fun' game out there right now, and it kills me that it didn't take off. I guess all the bitching on this forum scared people away. Personally, I felt that VG had the biggest potential of any mmo I've seen, they just rushed it out a bit early. Even if they would've released it in the condition its in right now, there would be a whole ton more subscriptions. As it stands, the audience has already come and gone - I suppose I should find something else to play.

I just absolutely despise WoW, and I think I'm far too behind the curve in EQ2 to be able to get competitive in any reasonable time frame. I waited for VG from the time that Sigil was formed (remember the website with just the Sigil logo on it?) and now it seems as though it's dying.

I guess I could pick up LOTRO, but from what I've read here, it's a WoW clone, which I'm not interested in. Though, if I trusted this board's opinion, I would've never tried VG.

[Ape]

John Romero is hiring

[...]

Originally Posted by Sarvius

I guess all the bitching on this forum scared people away.

The bitching didn't scare me away, it was the fact that vanguard would make my computer explode.

I still think choosing to go with fictional computer requrements at launch crippled vanguard and hurt eq2 badly. when me and all my friends open beta'd WoW, the first thing from 2/3 of my friends was "wow, this runs great on my shitty computer! i'm buying this!"

[Suineg]

Originally Posted by Requiem

or SUN SPOTS... sun spots...
solar radiation in ur mmo
stealin ur subscribers

Sunspots is no joke man.....

Anyways as much as I "anticipated" VG bombing I thought it would be a bomb like Anarchy Online or something else that has a fringe following but this is going the way of Earth and Beyond at the worst and AC2 at the best....

[Nathaniel F]

Does anyone really give a toss when a person registers on this board? I've been here since late 2003 but only registered in 2006 once my balls dropped.

There are definitely people here that judge the significance of a person fully on what year they signed up. These people feel if they registered earlier than another person then their post is automatically more important and valid. Some are scared that someone who registered after them may actually make a reasonable or useful post and then they won't feel as important, so they must try to make "05ers/06ers" feel degraded by saying the worst insult imaginable, which is of course calling attention to the date they signed up. It's truly a beautiful thing.

[Mkopec1]

Originally Posted by ...

The bitching didn't scare me away, it was the fact that it would make my computer explode.

I still think choosing to go with fictional computer requrements at launch crippled vanguard and hurt eq2 badly. when me and all my friends open beta'd WoW, the first thing from 2/3 of my friends was "wow, this runs great on my shitty computer! i'm buying this!"

Agree.

2 biggest things that crippled VG from the start was what you said and releasing thwe game 6 months too early.

Add to this the nerfs (which made me quit) and you have a pissed off playerbase which will snap.

[Asmadai]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

Is this point where I say "I told you so" yet, or are we waiting for something more to occur?

You're like that guy, who after WW2 is already over, all the concentration camps found, all the horror of the tyranny of Hitler known, who THEN tries to say 'I told you Hilter was a bad guy'.

I don't think there has been a person who you could actually tell 'I told you so' to on these boards in months. We realized he fucked up a while ago. The game has been out since late January....and it is halfway through May...

Welcome to the present.

[Calroon]

The 1 million $ question is now: Will Vanguard improve like EQ2 did and get, at least some, people back or will it join the hall of fame aka horizons and alike.

[Zarcath]

Originally Posted by Nerion

It's sad to see something like this happen to anyone who really invests artistic energy into a project. However, I have a big question, did they fire the GM's also? Hacking in this game is already really fucking bad. Without GM's I imagine some certain people will be having a field day ganking...

You serious?

First, SOE largely outsources all of their GM's and only keeps a handful of in-house GM's. Like I said before, they might keep a few VG personnel just to train newer, underpaid SOE versions. SOE may bitch slap all of the rehires with significant pay drops.

Second, The SOE support staff is already on VG, saw Ashlanne on their forums.

[Bobleclair]

I like VG and waiting to see what happen with SOE at the commands.
VG is as fun as EQ1 was back in the day for me, perhaps it is due to the fact you can play with game mechanics that aren't planned by the devs(likely due to bug and unpolished stuff), not talking about duping or others nasty exploits that every mmorpgs get anyways, i had a blast using a CoH alt and levi to jump from nameds to nameds in Rahz inkur, playing with pathing, ... . It gave me fresh air, and feel a lot more free than in over polished games like WoW.
It is what are missing most MMORPG : freedom, and for it i am ready to eat all the bugs you want.

Now am just waiting and see what happens to VG, but i think this move will be only good to the game, sigil had to many mouth to feed that weren't really usefull anymore for the game.

[Draegan]

Alot of people have to remap their F1 keys from that old macro they were using.

This doesn't surprise me one bit. We don't need to add any thing else to shit posting about this game. Let it die in peace. It was a good idea, at some point, years ago. I think it's time to move on.

I for one am gonna go back to reading THK's posts about how shitty EQ2 Housing is, and how that makes the game fail in his eyes. Gold Jerry. Gold.