[VG] Producer's Letter

[Ravensign]

Vanguard – Saga of Heroes

Spoiler tagged for your convenience.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Let Yourself Free and Make This Game Great!

These are pretty exciting times for Vanguard right now. The team is currently putting the finishing touches on Phase 2 and 3 of Update 3 after having launched an astounding performance update in Phase 1. We received a lot of great feedback from you on Phase 1, and we're going to continue our focus in delivering consistently high quality, engaging and in-demand content in each update.

I'd like to introduce myself to many of you that do not know me. My name is Thom Terrazas, Producer for Vanguard. In a few words, I've been with Sony Online Entertainment over 9 years (unofficially). During that time, I have and still do work, with some of the greatest people in the MMO world of whom I intend to solicit feedback from and use to my advantage. One of the best things that I have learned in this industry is to work closely with your team, while at the same time allow them to do their jobs and show off their talents - and we have some amazingly passionate and talented developers working on Vanguard. I give them a lot of credit for launching an MMO of this caliber, and you'll continue to see their talents shining through in our future updates.

The Team's Current Focus

In the past few weeks, the team has been examining all of the fundamental game mechanics and discussing what we think it is fun to play and what is not. The great thing is we are not holding anything back - everything is fair game!. So something that may have been perceived as off limits in the past, is now open for debate and is able to be measured on the fun-factor-scale. At the end of the day, we all want to say we created a great game that is fun to play - and of course, we want you to be the measuring stick of whether or not and to what extent we meet that goal. Of course without you, we wouldn't be here.

One of our current priority tasks is setting the Vision for Vanguard. We've come up with dozens upon dozens of elements that we believe will factor into determining the future path of Vanguard but it will take a few more weeks of fine tuning within our internal departments before we distill it down to the vision and have an agreed on list of critical success factors by which to measure all new development against. I'm not able to share the details at the moment but what I can say is that the desired end result of this exercise is to ensure that we produce high-quality game content and features that first and foremost fun to play.

Areas that we're going to make changes to

Optimizations; stability; optimizations; stability; optimizations; stability. I may be wrong but I think I see a pattern here. J Hey let's face it, Vanguard had some performance issues but we've made huge leaps since launch. If you've played since beta, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you had problems at launch and you haven't been back recently, you've got to give Vanguard another try. See for yourself how much has improved.

This bone is connected to that bone...Well, not any more!

Future optimization work you'll be seeing from us is focused on enhancing and optimizing our Player Character models. If you have a weak stomach, you may want to look away for a minute if you are closely attached to your character. (just kidding J) Seriously though, we're going through our first phase of character model improvements that will eliminate unnecessary bones. What does this mean for you? This means that your computer will not have to work as hard to render each character which means faster performance all around.

We're bringing sexy back...

After phase one is complete, we'll be moving onto phase two where we'll be increasing the visual quality of our character models. Not only will we be delivering you a character that is more appealing to the eye, but we'll also be delivering a model that utilizes fewer resources and is easier on your computer. Again, win-win for everyone! A brief update on this is that we're almost complete on our visual improvements with human characters and we'll be moving onto adjustments to animations and to the different body types.

Grouping! Traveling! "Dude, where's my car mount?"

Holy smokes ~ the world of Telon is huge! And we recognize this. There are some fundamental challenges with a world of this size. It's difficult to meet up with other players on opposite sides of the world (especially if you haven't been there before); there are large areas between points of interest; the Riftway system doesn't display where and how you can use it ahead of time and you have to have a mount fairly early in order to explore and travel, etc... If you and your buddy log in to play together and you find yourselves spending more time trying to connect with each other than actually playing, there is something missing. It should be easy to group up in Vanguard. We know there are problems and we're discussing how to fix them right now. (Details coming soon!)

Feel rewarded

We're looking into the loot drop percentages and realize we've been a little cheap when it comes to loot rewards. We're going to tune this upward particularly at the lower levels and examine the mid and higher levels as well. At the end of your play session, we want you to feel like you accomplished something and were rewarded for the time you invested while playing.

Feel accomplished

Whether you log in and play for 30 minutes or for 3 hours, you should see and feel that you advanced your character. Now don't get me wrong. We don't want to create an "easy button" when it comes to leveling up but we definitely need to expedite the experience gain cycle to increase fun factor. We've made some steps already by adding Rest Experience and the ability to share experience within your Brotherhood, so we'll keep those in mind when discussing the percentage increase that we should take it up to in the near future.

Tactics

Vanguard doesn't have enough tactics. We want to make changes in our combat tactics and one tactic or ability that comes to mind is Stun. Stunning an NPC while they are in the middle of casting a spell needs to be available during battle. This is an essential part of warfare tactics and we're going to fix items similar to this.

Death Penalties, do we need them to be so severe?

We're talking about this now and we think that there are enough penalties to dieing that we don't need to sock it to you with a loss of experience. I know there may be some purists or hard-core gamers out there that may disagree, but we think that we can offset the experience loss with item degradation combined with the hurdles of traveling back to the location where you died.

What else is coming?

In no particular order, here are a number of topics we are evaluating for change and improvement:

Additional player housing
Improved map; map icons that distinctly show points of interest
City and Dungeon maps
Readily available information showing you where you can adventure at your level
Factions in towns
Consistency - Streamlining hand off quests that lead you in the proper direction for character progression
Changing some buff spells to group based
Combat Visual Timing - Improve the timing on combat responsiveness (when you click on an ability, the action performed is in sync)
Player power curve versus NPC power curve
The ease of obtaining bags (especially at lower levels)
Additional high-end content - Raid and Non-Raid content
Increasing the Quest Journal size - Also adding organizational tabs to distinguish Adventuring quests from Diplomacy and Crafting quests
Regional banks - remove them!
UI improvements
Alternate form of currency - Special "coins" to redeem at certain Vendors for obtaining items such as adventuring, diplomacy cards, titles, potions, etc.
Alternate advancement or specialization for your character

How do you get a say in all of this?

I think I've exposed many topics that we'll be working on in the near future. I hope that you will find some of these issues at the top of your list of desired changes as well. However, if they are not at the top of your list, please feel free to post your comments regarding this newsletter in the discussion thread on our Vanguard forums.

Also, we're going to be posting more frequently on the forums to keep you informed and to answer questions that are on topic with our development focus. We understand that you have valuable feedback and when you do not hear a response back on a topic, it can be very frustrating. We're responsible for keeping you informed and we'll make changes in that area.

If I was in charge....

As an added bonus to you, we will be opening up a new Forum that is dedicated to you as a player and as our future developer. Essentially, we want to know what you would do with Vanguard if you were in the driver seat. It will be really cool for us to see the ideas and changes that you would make to the game if given the opportunity. So stay tuned to a Vanguard Forum near you!

As always, thank you for your continued support. We look forward to providing you with our continuing commitment to making this game great!

Sincerely,

Thom Terrazas

-Vanguard Team

[Dennadyne]

Originally Posted by Ravensign

stuff!

This could turn it around fo.... nevermind.

[Vatoreus]

If all this shit actually gets done in a timely manner, I'll be pleased. Item degradation is still the dumbest shit added to the MMO genre today and furthering it along and increasing its usage is dumb. Flat out dumb.

[tad10]

Mostly seems to be a decent producer's letter -- better than his introductory note way back when. AA, more raid content and better maps and quest tab are good but I'm meh on the upcoming death xp penalty change. I'd rather keep the death penalty and eliminate item decay -- which I loathe even in its current gimped form. And of course nothing about removing BoE itemization.

I don't think wowifying the game more is going to bring in new players. But maybe I'm wrong.

* * *

The new forum is going to be a bonus. Some guy with five seperate accounts is going to spam the forums saying that VG needs non consensual PvP everywhere on all servers 'just like original UO'.

[Jenison]

So, Brads 'consulting' is all but done I suppose?

[Vatoreus]

I hope not, b/c we don't need people leaving the 1 server that is exactly that now...

This is to Tad's quote on the new forum

[apm]

brad is rolling in his grave

[Ninajrr]

Normally I'd say "Removing EXP penalty on death? Game ruined." But its Vanguard--how do you ruin a piece of shit?

[Danth]

"Item degradation is still the dumbest shit added to the MMO genre today and furthering it along and increasing its usage is dumb. Flat out dumb."


I suspect the line of thinking amounts to, "Warcraft does it, therefore it must be good."

I wonder if this producer actually plays Vanguard very often--he seems to have a very different opinion of it than I had. I didn't think of the death penalty as particularly harsh; death in Warcraft stung more than death in VG. I didn't consider the world especially large, and it was even a bit smallish if the player ignored the colossal amounts of wasted space. Finally, I saw no need for even more item drops--the world was already flooded by a deluge of boring and superflous, by-the-numbers items. Vanguard desperately needed good itemization, and more isn't necessarily better.

Vanguard has turned around, all right--too many times. Much like my wife driving in a crowded parking lot, Vanguard keeps backing up and changing directions without any real plan for reaching an end goal. Perhaps Sony might eventually pull some success out of this monstrosity; more likely it'll chug along on maintenance mode. I got my satisfaction out of Vanguard, but too bad it couldn't have amounted to more than it did.

Danth

[spentmotiff]

Originally Posted by apm

brad is rolling in his grave

Yes, I can imagine how enraged he will be when his game is finally stable, fun and polished. That wasn't his Vision, dammit!


I kid, I kid. It was just too easy to pass up.

[Froofy-D]

Originally Posted by tad10

I don't think wowifying the game more is going to bring in new players. But maybe I'm wrong.

'WoW-ifying' can only help. Fun and easy newbie game (basically WoW solo 1-69), yet still have the extreme time-sink and skill-required content for those that wish to partake (raiding Black Temple and 2k+ Arena PVP ranks).

They should get rid of level requirements and BOE gear though. Twinking in like in old-school EQ where almost nothing was no-drop except the highest end raid gear really added a ton of replayability.

[Sneaky]

I almost stopped reading at "These are pretty exciting times for Vanguard right now".

But once past that it's actually pretty interesting. However I see no timetable at all and he talks about so much stuff that it could easily take years to implement.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Sneaky

I almost stopped reading at "These are pretty exciting times for Vanguard right now".

But once past that it's actually pretty interesting. However I see no timetable at all and he talks about so much stuff that it could easily take years to implement.

I think that's key. With barely 2 dozen people working on the game, as slow as progress has been with 2-4x that number I don't see any major changes coming soon. Good news for those playing that don't like the changes, but not good for those who would play with the changes I guess.

[kcxiv]

They kind of do need better lower level items to drop. it harms nothing but makes the people feel like they are leet at early levels. There's nothing wrong with that.

One thing i have noticed is that alot of people are resubbing and new players are joining all the time. YOu can just see it in region chat. Not saying this game is turned around or anything, but i think the decline in subs is gone and it seems as if its growing a little bit.

We will see.

[Lyrical]

Originally Posted by kcxiv

They kind of do need better lower level items to drop. it harms nothing but makes the people feel like they are leet at early levels. There's nothing wrong with that.

One thing i have noticed is that alot of people are resubbing and new players are joining all the time. YOu can just see it in region chat. Not saying this game is turned around or anything, but i think the decline in subs is gone and it seems as if its growing a little bit.

We will see.

Yeah, I reupped since I have Station Access. Its not costing me anything but the hard drive space. One thing I have noticed is that there has been an influx of people - whether they are brand new to the game, or just haven't played in six months like me. We'll see if they stick around (myself included). This game still needs alot of work, and the sooner they can implement these changes the better. To me, grouping is the biggest issue. There's nothing like waiting an hour for a groupmate to get to the dungeon, just to hunt for an hour. It would be nice if they added in summoning stones ala WoW to the dungeon areas. And I am still seeing a ton of bugs - CTD's, hitching, falling through the world, fighting invisible mobs, inability to res some group members or move tombstones, etc.

It probably wasn't a great time to cut the dev team. They have to be watching the sub numbers and seeing an increase right now. It seems like there are more n00bs than vets playing VG right now. Of course, I have only been in level 25 areas and under, so it could be skewed by perspective.