Vanguard Beta In Trouble? 176
Heartless Gamer writes to mention a blog post exploring potential problems with the Vanguard Beta. The hardcore MMOG in development by Sigil has had some rocky times of late, and it sounds like the beta testers are right up at the top of the list of problems. From the article: "To the detriment of Vanguard, they (Vanguard's community) will protest any implementation that even remotely resembles a mechanic within World of Warcraft. Good or bad, it doesn't matter. If it's something within WoW, they want it O-U-T. Likewise, if you are from WoW, they want YOU out, too. They've already succeeded in driving out many of those testers. They're long gone and I can't say I blame them." Read on for other sites' commentary on this issue.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't say I blame them... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though WoW is fun (and addicting), if I was playing another game it would be rather annoying to see WoW with just another game engine slapped over it. If you want to play WoW, then it is already there and waiting for you.
For those who want to play something different... Well... It would be nice to have sometehing other than the old "kill things over and over to level up to kill bigger things over and over again to level up to kill bigger things over and over again" because that is pretty much the same formula of WoW, EQ 1/2, and every other MMOG known the man these days. (SWG and UO rest in peace)
Vanguard fails... (Score:2, Insightful)
Shocking, we are hearing reports of them struggling.
Re:Not Invented Here (Score:2, Insightful)
Way to RTFA.
It's not developers that are doing this, it's the hardcore, epeen waving, fanbois that have the WoW hate-on.
Re:reap what you sow (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vanguard fails... (Score:2, Insightful)
But what is wrong with slow leveling? Fast leveling separates friends from each other. A friend in WoW I met in my 30s just blew past me to 60 and we couldn't group again for weeks. Fast leveling means you never really get to do everything there is to do at a certain level. I spent no more than a day or two in any particular zone of WoW, except for the Barrens.
Slow leveling is not a bad thing.
Grinding is bad.
Goths? (Score:4, Insightful)
Listen up, guys, WoW has 5.5 million+ subscribers because what it's doing is good, not bad. It's not dumbed down, and if - like me - you spent hardcore-style hours raiding to get the best stuff, you'd know that.
But no, like the guys at Vanguard, you can't get past appearance. If it's popular, it must be bad.
Re:In some ways I can understand it (Score:3, Insightful)
Please raise your hand if this surprises you (Score:5, Insightful)
And the same "I am Jack's Ass" crowd is full of people with an over inflated sense of self importantce who believe that being invited to join a beta test and asked for some constructive feedback makes their voices more important than those of people who have been developing the game for years, and they regularly hold public roasts of any member of the development team who still cares enough to attempt to communicate with them?
I would be shocked and appalled if it weren't for the fact that this is exactly what has happened with every single game relased this century. The same arrogant twits infest every forum, loudly proclaiming that they now own the game and that those pinhead developers had better start doing things their way or else they're going to leave and take all six billion of their friends with them to whatever the next unreleased game is. The only thing that's surprising about this is that the writer says that Brad McQuaid is still trying to give them what they claim they want.
People often wonder just why it is that game developers often don't participate in their fora or talk directly to the players, and why they are often secretive about what they are working on. This kind of thing is exactly why they do that. Having to deal with this kind of abuse on a daily basis will turn anybody into a recluse.
Not exactly getting both sides of the story are we (Score:3, Insightful)
There seems to be some hatred against WoW players. I can only imagine that this is the same hatred that Counterstrike players get. I was in a beta for a couple of more realistic shooters and we had good reasons to loathe CS players. They would get their beta key and instantly demand the game be turned into a CS clone.
If you get a post like "they should do X like they it in CS" or "this game sucks because I am good at X in CS and I suck at it in this game" then there really isn't much you can do.
So the players who like the game as it is fight the players who want to change the game. This nothing new. Just try following a debate on language reform.
The example of a corpse run is mentioned. Corpse run is a penalty for dying. Everquest 2 for instance punishes you with an experience debt unless you go back to where you died and reassorb your ghost. Other games leave your equipment lying out in the wild forcing you to go back to get your loot.
It makes the game more of a challenge forcing you to think about a battle. Not just wether you can handle that boss you need for a quest but wether you will make it back out again.
Without a corspe run you run the risk of players just using dying to get back to the city to sell their loot. Ask Star Wars Galaxies with the Trials of Obi-wan expansion. For that matter it existed before where people would kill themselves to get rid of a doctor buff that was about to run out so they could get a new one.
Kinda ruins the atmo when you got people begging to be wiped out. "Hey you want to go hunt rancors tonight" "Sure, let me just kill myself before we head out okay?" "Eh, right".
WoW for all its success is not everyones cup of tea and it can be disappointing to see every game try to emulate it. Again, look at SWG. It tried to WoW people and is near dead because of it.
So yes forum discusssions can become very heated BUT there is always two sides to a story. The person comments we read in the main article claim that the hardcore resisted attempts to add WoW elements to the game. Eheh, meaning he wanted to make the game into WoW. Is he basically upset because he didn't get to mold the game into his vision?
MMORPG's are very hard games to produce and if the designer doesn't 100% believe in what he wants to do there is the risk that he could start to believe that the tiny vocal minority on the forums somehow represents the majority. On the other hand if he ignores them he risks that they are infact the majority.
You can't please everyone but you sure as hell can upset everyone.
Re:Goths? (Score:4, Insightful)
Listen up, guys, WoW has 5.5 million+ subscribers because what it's doing is good, not bad.
Reality TV gets a lot of viewers - as does Fox News for that matter. McDonalds sells a lot of burgers. The Da Vinci Code book/movie/hype train is sheer nonsense yet it's taken millions already. This is not because what these ventures are doing is good per se - it's because they've been designed to reach out to the lowest common denominators in order to have a broad appeal.
It's not dumbed down, and if - like me - you spent hardcore-style hours raiding to get the best stuff, you'd know that.
Oh I beg your pardon - I thought you were talking about WoW but clearly I must have misunderstood.
Re:Can't say I blame them... (Score:5, Insightful)
Vanguard could use elements that work great in WoW and implement them with their own gameplay elements. For example, WoW has proved that instances are fun and needed. Not to mention instances allow very creative encounters and great rewards for players because the designers control everything (including the number of people involved in the instance). Take away instances and you have good old issues that plagued EQ: boring fights, retarded competition for mobs where by guilds/players camp mobs. It augments the number of support calls and it encourages griefing. Which avenue did Vanguard chose? No instances. Yes they are planning to put boss mob encounters "on demand", sort of semi instance but even then, they will never be able to make awesome and complex encounters like WoW endzones have (well minus MC). You can't have a complex scripted encounter if you can't control the number of people during the encounter (aka no instances) because guilds will "zerg" it. EQ has proved that.
The more and more I look at Vanguard reminds me of EQ with all their faults. Lot of grinding, no instances, heaven for griefers and gold farmers. Most modern games have implemented ideas from other games, WoW is a perfect example of very little innovation but they cherry picked the stuff that worked in other game. Instances from Anarchy Online, fast paced combat from City of Heroes, PvP from DAoC, humor from
Vanguard will be a huge flop. The designers who were responsible for the worse flaws EQ had didn't learn from their own mistakes, they are the ones designing Vanguard.
Its not the best, it attracts the baseline gamer.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Vanguard is going to be a hardcore MMO. This news article is music to my ears. The core dev team has its roots in EQ. This game will be challenging and give you a run for its money. Carrot on a stick? Hell yes.
But no, like the guys at Vanguard, you can't get past appearance. If it's popular, it must be bad.
My guess based on articles I've read is that Vanguard will be similar to EQ. Very open ended. WoW's problem is that the engame converges. Everyone, and I mean everyone is doing those stupid instances at level 60 or raiding a few dungeons. And once you are 60 all that is left to do is get gear. Whereas in Everquest the landmass is so huge and the design is so open-ended, you have a lot to do. (you can also keep grinding, dumping XP into abilities, but I don't know for sure Vanguard will have a system like that). Vanguard should be that open ended, and it is a roleplayer's wet dream.
Re:In some ways I can understand it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna have to ask you to clarify that. Define "hard". Keep in mind that "takes a long time" isn't hard, it's annoying. Something that requires skill is hard. Something that just anyone can do over a long period of time isn't hard, it's boring. The reason I ask is because you're apparently an FFXI player [slashdot.org] and the standard FFXI player seems to think WoW is "too easy" because things don't take forever.
Quick returns are good, keeping in mind that a quick return can still be a failure. FFXI has plenty of things where you get one try every day (real time) or so. They're "hard" because you have to beat out the 20 gold farmers camping the single spawn point. Succeed in getting it, and you have a 1/20 chance of getting the drop. While that does mean that it's hard to get the drop, it's not hard due to any skill requirement. It's hard because it requires a lot of luck and time.
Compare with WoW, where you might have a 100% chance of getting something if you complete some difficult task. There are plenty of instances in WoW where you'll have to use a large set of abilities to manage to succeed. Fail, and you can try again very quickly instead of packing up and waiting until tomorrow. That's hard, but not due to a time requirement, due to a skill requirement.
So, please. Explain your statement. The rest of your post I agree with completely, I just want to understand why you think WoW "dumbed down" gaming. If anything, WoW is harder to play than FFXI in terms of skill - although not time.
SOE is their biggest problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Star Wars Galaxies Combat Upgrade
Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience
It's so bad that mmorpg.com has posted a stickied "Official SOE hate thread" in the forum of every SOE game.
Re:Vanguard fails... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have three thousand people playing the same game. How many of them are going to overthrow the Iron Throne? How many princesses are out there waiting to be kidnapped? Will each and every one of them get to start a war in the Seven Kingdoms?
The reason that online games tend to be filled with repeatable, low-impact content is because even after one group of players goes through it there will still 2,994 other people who want to keep playing the game. The reason that pen-and-paper games have more involved storylines than MMORPGs is not because there are computers involved and not because the developers are lazy, it's because there are so many more players.
Consider this. A GM runs a weekly p-n-p game session for five of her friends. To do this she will put in something like an hour or two of prep time laying out plot elements, NPCs, locations, and possible alternatives based on what direction the players decide to take the story in. All this for a four hour game night with five other people.
Now let's look at the same level of involvement on the MMORPG scale. You have a persistent world with somewhere around 3,000 people logged in during peak hours. Just to be nice, let's say that if you look at the entire week of play time there are an average of 1,500 people logged in at any given time. That's the equivalent of 1,200 groups of people taking their four hour play sessions every day, or 8,400 p-n-p sessions every week.
In order to provide the same amount of story development you would need a team of GMs to put in 8,400 hours preparing new adventures for all of those people, or 224 full time GMs working 37.5 hour weeks doing nothing but producing content. And that's not even considering that they are all working in the same shared world and will need to coordinate their work to avoid completely screwing one another over with conflicting storylines.
Even if their pay and benefits are rather modest their salary and supporting costs are still going to cost something like two million dollars annually just to run one server. With a total server population of roughly 5,000 people that's still an extra $40 a month, roughly triple the average MMORPG bill nowadays, for each player just to get something near the level of attention they expect from a smaller game.
The thing is that even if there are hard-core gamers who would pay that kind of money there are nowhere near enough of them to support it as a business model. It just doesn't make money, and that's why it isn't happening.
Re:Can't say I blame them... (Score:5, Insightful)
Grinds- check. Expect a long hard grind for levels
Farming- check. Expect to do tons of cash farming
Camping- check. No instances, so expect either a "play nice" rule or guilds fighting for spawns
Death penalties- check. Harsher than EQs, according to articles I've read
Long travel times- check. No fast transport or teleports at all.
Yup, not touching this one with a 10 foot pole.
Re:Goths? (Score:3, Insightful)
Veteran RPGer here. Started playing AD&D back in 1980...then went on to Call of Cthulhu, Morrow Project, Danger International and Fantasy Hero blah blah blah. Me and my group of friends were pretty hard core about it all, but just to have a lot of fun and laugh our asses off.
Then I got into MMORPG's, got on to EQ a few days after it's original release. I knew from the very start it was NOTHING like role playing games. No computer game I've ever played...EVER...was like a role playing game. Not one. But I still had fun with them and I had a blast with EQ.
I tried the other games when they came out like Camelot and Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies....but they didn't grab me like EQ had and I actually became a little nostalgic with EQ and missed some of the places I used to run through. Like visiting a town you grew up in or something. Also EQ seemed bigger back in the old days as it would take a LONG time to run from Qeynos to Freeport if you didn't have a port. It was a challenge. Now, you can just hop over to where you need to go...though I'll admit, it's been years since I've played it.
Then WoW came along. It seemed interesting and the style looked nice. I played in the beta for a while and got hooked in. It was fast, it was fun and I still play it. Is it an RPG? Of course not. As I said before, none of these games are RPG's. That doesn't mean that I like it. I'm a "hard core RPGer", yet I love WoW and the friends that I've met there.
Not even Oblivion is a real RPG...it's a videogame. Yes, I play it. I'm still playing it and it's a lot of fun, but in the end it's all scripted stuff and can't for a moment throw a really WEIRD curve ball at you like a live person controlling another character. It has great stories. It's very deep and of course it's very beautiful to run through...but not for once did I feel like I'm inside the game. I always feel like I'm playing a video game. No matter where I went, I always knew that nothing could happen to me because if I died I was a quick save-game away...and that's really the crux of the problem. When you play a pen-and-paper RPG, when you're character died, that was it for the night for you. At least it was when we played. But it was still a blast to watch how everyone else was playing after you died and see if they could get out of it....or depending on what game we were playing if they could drag my corpse to a healer or not (if they didn't loot my corpse and use me for food, but that's another story).
So what am I saying? I would suggest not trying to compare apples and oranges. To me, videogames and RPG games are two totally different things. I'm not saying one is better than the other, it's just they're different and you're not going to get the same experience from either. I simply sigh when I see yet another developer trying to chase this elusive demon and then proclaim: "it's like the old RPG games of old!".
Also, hard-core gamers DO play WoW, as you've just met one. But if you don't like to play, then by all means don't play. I'm still looking forward to Vanguard and it will be interesting to see what Brad will do with it, if it ever comes out.
Take care.
A Response (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In some ways I can understand it (Score:3, Insightful)
In EQ, skill was more of a strategic/tactical sort of ability, and you could be quite effective with latencies as high as 1 second as long as you were playing smart. That particular aspect of EQ I miss, and I think WoW raids suffer as a result.
Plenty of people will weigh in on real time combat versus other mechanisms, probably it's moot for a multiplayer online game, but there's twitch skill and then there's chess skill. A mmog seems like it should be more of the latter than the former, especially since it's just not technically possible right now to ensure all players are on the same field.
Re:And yet (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't say successful. I said 'huge' - your terminology. To me, 'huge' means large number of players. I would consider WoW to be 'huge'.
'Successful' is a much more subjective word. If their goal is to make a game and sell it, they can easily 'succeed.' If their goal is to make enough money to sustain itself, but not be a major phenomenon, then they might succeed at that as well. The latter goal isn't a rare thing these days.
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"WoW is a watered down MMO. Levels are easy, the endgame converges on 3 instances, the raiding content is sparse, there is very little to do once you are 60
Your opinion makes it sound like you've played it quite a bit. If it was so horrible, why did you keep playing it?
If you didn't play it all that much, then you've got a fairly un-informed opinion.
In either case, that's just your opinion. You hate WoW, and that's fine. Mocking the people who do play it just makes you sound petty.
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"I don't care if I am close minded. There are a lot of us waiting for a game that is hardcore, that has strict rules, that doesn't hand you levels and gear on a silver platter."
All you're describing is changing the difficulty level, not 'removing anything WoWish.'
Exactly what is it that is unique only to WoW that you hate so much?
There have been other games before WoW that were fairly similar in difficulty level. Yet WoW seems to be made out to be some kind of abomination, that no one who claims to be 'hardcore' could ever enjoy, unlike every other game that came out in the history of MMOs.
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"People two years ago were ready to pre-order this game as soon as it was a possibility. It is rare that a game is so well-received."
That doesn't mean they're going to like the final product. Most MMOs go through a lot of changes during their lifetime; just look at SWG. So people were willing to buy a game they hadn't seen. That doesn't mean it's going to be any good.
Re:In some ways I can understand it (Score:2, Insightful)
I have to disagree with this and point out something here. You're saying that WoW has "do this hard task and you get an item 100% of the time" and FFXI is "try for this item once a day for the 20% chance of getting the item." This is true, but the opposite is also true. WoW has its share of "try this every week for a small chance at a drop" (20 or 40 man instances that you can only run every week) and FFXI has the 100% items from quests.
The truth lies somewhere inbetween, as the typical endgame FFXI or WoW both involve running through some sort of dungeon/instance/dynamis/limbus situation with a group of people that meets one or two times a week, and when an item drops that you want, you compete with the other people for a chance to get it, usually within some sort of point based system to reward constant attendance. In other words, do something long enough and you'll get what you want.... eventually.
So, please. Explain your statement. The rest of your post I agree with completely, I just want to understand why you think WoW "dumbed down" gaming. If anything, WoW is harder to play than FFXI in terms of skill - although not time.
And now, my somewhat biased opinion to counter your biased opinion. Yes, FFXI takes more time to get to the end game than WoW, but once you're there, they take an equal amount of time to get the end game gear, but what I've found from personal experience is that in WoW, the gear you have make a huge difference as to how well you do, but in FFXI, skill takes a much larger part. I'm not saying that skill makes no part, but the difference in WoW between a level 60 with all greens and a few blues vs. a level 60 with all purples is huge, two people with equal skill and vastly different gear will be vastly differing in power levels, but in FFXI, two level 75s, one with good gear and one with cheap gear, will be closer in performance if played by two players of equal skill. In FFXI, it takes skill to stand out from other players.
If you say that WoW is harder than FFXI, I challenge you to finish the Chains of Promathia expansion missions.
Also, one other thing to keep in mind is that WoW is really two different games. One from levels 1-59, and another at level 60. Level 60 WoW resembles FFXI in a lot of ways, but levels 1-59 more closely resemble a console RPG, albiet a bit longer and larger in scope. And with other people running around trying to kill you.
(Yes, I have a level 60 character in WoW and a character in FFXI with two level 75 jobs. I do know what I'm talking about.)
Re:Its not the best, it attracts the baseline game (Score:3, Insightful)
WoW for case in point.
No you can't sell something that people have zero interest in, but the game is not what it is marketed as or purported to be by the company that created it.
The game was very carefully designed to suck you in, and require just enough of your time, to get you hooked and keep you paying that monthly fee...these decisions were absolutely NOT made by a group of people sitting around going, what is the BEST rpg we can put together given this IP. A large number of the mechanics and balancing in there are PURELY designed to optimize the funds they suck out of their customers wallets.
Charging FULL PRICE for the boxed game, which is useless without adding on monthly fees, holy shit it's one of the most expensive games EVER PRODUCED. Yeah, and that's purely a function of what it took to produce the perfect game for it's costomers. Wrong. That's what it took to produce the perfect game for it's shareholders.
There are games that are purely designed to make the best game possible. There are games that are purely designed to generate revenue. And there are a lot in the middle.
I don't know about you, but the very best games I've ever played fall in the first category. WoW ain't one of em, by a LONG shot.
Re:In some ways I can understand it (Score:3, Insightful)