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Sigil, afterthougth.
Orphes
Member UncommonPosts: 3,039
If I can divide up some of the issues players state they have in some categorys. There are more maybe and these examples can be divided up into their own categorys. But let's say this is them. Atleast in my opinion this is what I seen bashing upon.
Performance/CTDs.
Examples. Getting low fps. Crashing. Hitching. Chunking.
Gamebreaking bugs.
Examples. Falling through world. Being killed by invisible mobs.
World immersion/Lore
Examples. NPC's not doing anything. Thelons story is not that apperant.
What did Sigil do after they released the game. What did they focus on, did they start in the wrong end?
I remember they they focusing on bugs and performance. I think one of the earlier patches made a big improvement on performance. Yet I think they still kept to much focus on getting better performance and after that even more performance. Alot circled about performance.
In march I had decent performance, allthough the game runs more fluently now then back then, it was ok also at that time.
But they continued with performance fixes.
How much did they focus on the world. Would it be better if they stepped down from improving the performance after the initial fixes and after remedying some of the gamebreaking bugs. And instead had alot of focus on getting the world more alive. There are, and was, many great areas and there are many areas that is worse.
They should have focused on this in the first 4 months of the game aswell. I'm quite shure they did, maybe not enough.
In an afterthougth. Should they have focused more on the world in the game, bringing in content. Maybe they should have put in something like APW instead of performance fixes. Should they let those that had a 'slideshow' have a 'slideshow', and letting those that fell through the world do that.
There is only so much one can do in that short time up until that time Sigil collapsed. But assuming that people went from the scale.
They can play the game (Performance/CTDs fixed) and they don't fall through the world(Gamebreaking bugs fixed) and so they discover that they actually finds the game booring and the world is lacking (World immersion/Lore not fixed). Oh I like the game, just making an example.
Should it have been.
The gameworld is really fun (World immersion/Lore fixed) they can play it somwhat(Performance/CTDs fnot fixed) but they still have gamebreaking bugs (Gamebreaking bugs not fixed)
At the time when SOE bought out Sigil, I don't think that would have changed nor would the major drop in population from beginning of april to beginning of may beed changed. But I think would they have been better of getting a more buggy and slower performance Vanguard. But the with a World that is in a sence more complete?
So I dont think regardless of descicion made after relased that Sigil would still be around, that people would have stayed in the the game or started to return to the game already after the summer. But I do think that the game would have been easier to SOE to handle and that we would have seen more improvements today population wise and so see more resources added to it.
I simply think that Sigil would skipped alot of performance and bug fixing.
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*Some disclaimers here* I'm quite shure I will have to make some. But let's do a Sigil and post a unfinished argumentation. 
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
Comments
[blank]
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
I pretty much agree. The only way sigil might have survived would be if they had sold out right at the start a much larger chunk of vg to SOE. SOE might have invested enough to have spend 6 months of so really getting the game cleaned up and ready for launch.
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Ethion
Yes, the best thing would have been to delay the release. But I'm thinking of other what if's here.
Edit: You maybe meant initially after they left Microsoft. I got it first as delaying the release.
Assuming that it would not have "saved" sigil or something. I think they knew at release how much time they had left, they must have had an indication on the preorders to how much they would sell. I do think that the management knew when the day would come.
I'm assuming that they did know that they would not be received well. But was looking for fix the immediate problems early, but failed, and perhaps also choosed the wrong things to fix first.
The way it was received and told down across the universe internet, it is or was interesting to see that they still in April had good population on servers. I'm assuming that it was way less then in Februari, but still there was many continuing to subscribe. Apperently they enjoyed the game the first months.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
One thing to remember is they also introduced as many or more bugs then they fixed in the months following release. On release day the game was pretty stable and a lot of the crashing and group breaking and a bunch of other crap came after. Also they had no real content past lvl 30 on release day.
Frankly it's my opinion that Brad just got greedy and thought he could pull it off and didn't want to loose control of his game. So I think it was Brad's ego that killed VG... I can't help but believe if he acknowledged that he couldn't pull it off and went out to sell out as much of the company as was possible he could not have found a situation where development could have continued long enough to get the game in decent shape.
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Ethion
I disagree with almost everything the OP said.
1. In the 3.5 months Sigil ran Vanguard they added arguably more content than any game has ever seen in such a short time. On a weekly basis sigil added more content than we have seen total by SOE. The problem was the game was released completely devoid of lvl 30+ content. When I levled up almost all dungeons post 30 were not itemzed until a few weeks after I left the area. There was no lvl 45+ content. NN, RI the swamps were all added into the game in March.
2. Sigil had a ballon payment due to MS in April. There was no way they could make this payment. The only chance they ahd was to release the game and hope it was such a smashing success that they would be able to find investors. Neither Sigil or Brad wanted to release Vanguard in such a state and a year early but it was their only chance for survival. Who's to blame here Sigil or SOE? Did Sigil have the opportunity to bring SOE in as a partner or did SOE realize they would be able to buy the game for cheap once Sigil defaulted on the payment due MS. We do not know.
3. The game failed not because of bad design or inability to produce content but mainly because they competely changed the design of the game in early 2007. One cannot completely rebuild a game in a year. Sigil either was overconfident in the amount of work they could do in a short time or believed they could get an extension on the baloon payment. Sigil did an amazing job. I never seen a game improve as much as Vanguard did in such a short time. But the problem here was they tried to do to much. They completely revamped the core systems of combat, crafting, harvesting and diplomacy, they added in qalia, redid Thestra and then added in Kojan all in a very short time. In retrpsoect they probably should have just released with a polished qalia and no diplomacy. But they thought to big and that is the virtue and the failing of Vanguard. They simply tried to do much when most developers usually try to do to little.
Now contrast that with what SOE has done since they took over. The only new content thay have added is the Ksvari Goulch quests and APW. And even those projects had already been started by Sigil last April just as the brotherhood system and LFG system and everything else that has been added since were already almost finished finished by SIgil last April. The one area SOE has done well in is giving most areas and quests a pass. Most areas of the game has been improved by revisiting them although I think almost all dungeons and areas still need a good deal of finishing.
Now I will agree with the OP that perfomance was good at release. For me performance was better at release than it is now. At release I never had any hitching nor did I ctd like I do now.
It is a sad story. SIgil was really doing an amazing job of improving this game. SOE has done close to zero. Now do not blame this on the devs. The devs should be commended the amount of hours they out in and inetraction they have with many players in game and guilds is amazing. They have done a pretty amazing job given the size of the staff. But one can only wonder how much better VG would be now if Sigil had found away to fund the game. But despite all that Vanguard is still a very solid game. The core systems of the game are very well done and it is arguably the best MMO on the market.
I don't really know the proper way of describing what I want to say.
It's like. Let's say you owe someone a bunch of money. You have to pay or lose your company, now I come in as a possible investor. I'm looking at you like, well I could give you a small amount of money, enough to play some of your overhead, but you still owe that guy a bunch and if you don't pay him then I'm losing the money I gave you. I have no way of recouping my money in a way that would be good for me. Now, I could invest enough to get that guy off your back and pay some of your overhead for a bit, let's say 6 months, but now I've just paid off all of you debts and I don't really have anything to show for it. I own nothing, and sure if things work out I'll recoup my money over time, but if I'm going to bankroll you I might as well own what you're doing, or at least a large enough portion to make my risk worthwhile. That's basically what it comes down to.
There were no guarantees that VG would make enough money to make investing millions of dollars into it worthwhile. Even if the game runs 9 years, would it be enough to repay something like 50 mil on top of whatever was negotiated for SOE to run the servers. Even if the game got another year in developement would it be enough for it to make enough over a period of time to guarantee that Sigil could pay back the investment.
If it is how I think it is. Sigil had to buy the game, the rights, something along those lines from MS, If SOE invested enough to bail them out then they would in essence be paying for Sigil to get the game, Sigil gets the product for the least amount of investment. I can't see SOE making anything close to what they may have invested in Sigil off the publishing deal. Mcquaid didn't want anyone to own VG as long as he was running Sigil. To me that sounds like an if you give me x amount of money I will give you back y amount, possibly over this amount of time kind of deal; not an if you give me some money I'll give you this % of profits earned off the game or company itself. The later essentially means that the investor is buying a portion of the game, or into a portion of the company; I can't see a company like SOE not ensuring in a contract like this that they can excercise some amount of control over the game or company if things aren't looking good. Mcquaid didn't want this, he wanted VG to be wholey owned by Sigil. <--- This is what killed Sigil imo, that is bad business.
Wish Darkfall would release.
I played in their Beta 2, a year and a half before launch, and as much as I wanted a Vanguard-style game to succeed, I could hardly remain logged in for more than 5 or 10 minutes.
And no, it wasn't the bugginess or the character models that drove me off, but the world design. The world was bland, repetiitive, and in a difficult-to-describe way, had no identity. Every area of the world felt the same and there was no specialness to any one place.
To sum it up: I think Sigil mismanaged and did not design within the parameters of time and dollars. And there are many, many games who have succeeded to some degree with less time and less money invested.
As far as MMO's go.
If it's running it's succeeding.
If the servers are off, it's failed.
You don't get anymore black and white then that.
Here are some examples.
CoH running
DDO running
VG running
AC2 not running
Auto assault not running
I don't understand this sence of succeeding some people have. Most are talking about degrees of success. You can have 30k subs and be fine or you can have 9 mil and be even better. One nets you a larger profit but doesn't make the other a failure. How much money the game makes has no impact on us the player as long as there is a developement staff. How many subs shouldn't matter as long as you have someone to play with. Profits matter to the people in charge of the games, the ones that make a living off them, to the consumer it has no real bearing as long as there is a dev team. Sub numbers should only matter to us if the game has to many or to few servers to support the player base addiquately.
I can log into WoW right now, on a heavily populated server (yeah, had to wait in Q the other night, lots of fun) and spend the most if not all of my play time looking for a group with a low to mid lvl alt; in fact I do, more often then I like. Lots of good those millions of players do me.
You'll know very clearly when VG isn't succeeding, they will shut the servers down. Really is that simple.
Wish Darkfall would release.
Speaking more generally, yeah in some MMOs it doesn't seem to matter if a game has 200k subscribers or 2 million subscribers, so long as one's own server is populated. Such as City of Heroes which averages three Issues a year or so.
But you know, games like City of Heroes met the expectations of the companies that created them. So a company like NCSoft/Cryptic has been able to carry out planned content updates and other expansions.
Vanguard on the other hand was a failure to its company, and so that whole seven year plan of Sigil's went up in flames with the rest of the company. Now SOE's stuck with a game they've announced no expansion for a year into it's lifespan, and its highly doubtable that they will anytime soon.
So when it comes to deciding whether Vanguard is succeeding or failing, there's more criteria to judge an MMO on other than whether or not its running.
Goals must be present for anything or anyone to fail or succeed, and making sure the servers are plugged in is hardly a goal.
You are sort of right here. Although I would not call it "succeeding", I do think that SOE must be making money on the game simply because the servers are still up. Whether that is because they have a skeleton staff or 100k subscriptions may not matter.
I don't think you can call it a success since the game has not announced expansions and still have a very poor reputation. My guess is that the game has around 15k subs but that seems to be enough to make money for SOE so hats off to VG for that.
What was the source for this balloon payment thing? I never read anything about what Sigil owed MS or what the terms of the break up were? Frankly when MS broke up with Sigil one would wonder that they really expected anything since it basically means they wrote the game off as a loss? When you invest in a company you don't necessarily get anything if the company fails. What you get is a stake in ownership of the company so if the company does well and grows in value your investment grows if the company falters and shrinks your investment shrinks. It isn't like you did a loan to Brad saying I'm loaning you 30M and you need to pay me back...
So I'm curious where you saw any terms or agreement to make any payments at all? About all an investor can do is stop investing and try to find someone to sell his investment to. Now if the company is loosing money the investor can certainly stop funding the company and ultimately the company would need to liquidate. Then the value of the assets go to pay off debts and then investors based on ownership.
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Ethion
Speaking more generally, yeah in some MMOs it doesn't seem to matter if a game has 200k subscribers or 2 million subscribers, so long as one's own server is populated. Such as City of Heroes which averages three Issues a year or so. What does CoH issues have to do with server population?
But you know, games like City of Heroes met the expectations of the companies that created them. So a company like NCSoft/Cryptic has been able to carry out planned content updates and other expansions. VG hasn't been out a year and they've already added quite a bit to it.
Vanguard on the other hand was a failure to its company, and so that whole seven year plan of Sigil's went up in flames with the rest of the company. Now SOE's stuck with a game they've announced no expansion for a year into it's lifespan, and its highly doubtable that they will anytime soon. The game didn't develope itself. You do realise that most MMO's don't have expansions right; so how is this a MEASURE of success? WoW, you know that game with like everyone on the planet playing it, took 2 years to release an expansion.
So when it comes to deciding whether Vanguard is succeeding or failing, there's more criteria to judge an MMO on other than whether or not its running. No there isn't. There is no "other" criteria. The only thing that we need to be able to play is that the servers are up and running. As long as they are up and running the game is succeeding. It doesn't matter "how much" or if it compares to other MMO's in the number of subs, content patches, or expansions. As long as people are playing, as long as the servers are running, an MMO is succeeding.
Goals must be present for anything or anyone to fail or succeed, and making sure the servers are plugged in is hardly a goal. Now that is a retarded statement. If they shut the game down no one makes money. Ultimately thier goal is to provide something that people are willing to play; as long as they are the servers run and people make money. Not to mention that's a rather soft mentality. Goals don't get met so you just quit? You give up? If you pick up a basketball and try to make a basket and miss, do you never try again? You just walk away and say oh well? If I spent my life giving up everytime I didn't meet my goal (expectations) I would never get anywere in life. That would be one hell of a mentallity to live by.
Wish Darkfall would release.
What was the source for this balloon payment thing? I never read anything about what Sigil owed MS or what the terms of the break up were? Frankly when MS broke up with Sigil one would wonder that they really expected anything since it basically means they wrote the game off as a loss? When you invest in a company you don't necessarily get anything if the company fails. What you get is a stake in ownership of the company so if the company does well and grows in value your investment grows if the company falters and shrinks your investment shrinks. It isn't like you did a loan to Brad saying I'm loaning you 30M and you need to pay me back...
So I'm curious where you saw any terms or agreement to make any payments at all? About all an investor can do is stop investing and try to find someone to sell his investment to. Now if the company is loosing money the investor can certainly stop funding the company and ultimately the company would need to liquidate. Then the value of the assets go to pay off debts and then investors based on ownership.
I have 2 sources one private connected to Sigil who told me this last May and a public statement by Smedley in late May confirming part of the deal was they would pay off the balloon payment due MS. I don't know whether the balloon payment was money loaned to Sigil or money Sigil owed to MS to allow Sigil to buy MS out but it was part of the seperation agreement between MS and Sigil.
Now the question is did SIgil turn down an offer to make SOE a partner or did Sigil get taken by SOE as SOE knew there was no way Vanguard would be release ready in time to pay off their note to MS and SOE would be in prime position to buy VG for almost nothing. My hunch would be on the latter. SOE most likely set Sigil up and took them for everything they had.
Whether you like Brad or not he lost quite a bit on Vanguard. He ended up losing not only the money he put into Sigil but a good deal of his reputation and 5 years of work. Such a shame as Vanguard despite its flaws turned out to be such a good game. It might be a long long time before we see a game with such good core systems of combat and crafting as Vanguard. As a player it does not mater much to me whether Vanguard has 30k players or 300k players but what i do find sad is the effect Vanguard's failure will have on future games. With new games turning their back on complexity, difficulty, depth and thoughtful gameplay Vanguard's failure sends the message to developers that gamers do not want challenge or complex gameplay. We all know Vanguard failed for many other reasons. But at least in my mind its failure sadly means the death of complex and somewhat hardcore MMO designs.
I think there is so many MMO's out there. They are being released one after another, some minor releases and some(a few) major releases.
I think if we think past this "wowkiller" idea, not saying that you are refering to such, we can see that games do not need to exceed WOW to be enjoyable. That is pretty obvious though, why would a game be a wowkiller to attract people. But I'm saying that as I mean that alot of games will have their audiance and their subscriptions level only a fraction of WOW let it be 30k or 300k. If a game is set out to be the biggest next thing shortly after release the developer are hallucinating.
How many would VG have needed to keep SOE the amount of people thay started with this summer? I dont think it would have to be the 200k buyers subscriptions but more then today for sure.
I don't think that Vanguard is something that sent a signal for other MMO developers that their game can't be that complexed or hardcore as they intend that their game to be. They must be targeting a specific audiance with their game, let it be everyone, the hardcores, the casuals or any other target group. They must succed with attracting that group. And I think that a game have to set out to be different in some areas then the next. A phantasy theme in itself wont diverse the game from others in its genre, a space or pirate MMO won't either. It can be graphical, general feel and the other things as complexity.
But if we let go of stating that a game is a failure because it attracts a smaller amount of people if not WOW then lets say EVE, LOTRO, EQ2. I think we will see that a game still can be a success for the developer. And with that also see those games being developed and released as a hardcore, complex, easy, casual etc game.
(Personally I frown when people asks if this or that game is a wowkiller, you don't enjoy or play a MMO because other think it is fun. You do it by your own accord. Sorry for bringing in the word in this though.)
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
Sigil isn't VG today? The people working on Vanguard are the same exact people from Sigil, except only a fraction of the original entity. That aside, obviously they're still pursuing the goals of their original Sigil entity, since everything they "plan" for is nothing more than the same crap that attributed to Vanguard's failure at launch.Case in point your question: "content that was supposed to be in the game? Is there anything that's even still missing?"
Sure, take your pick of anything between helmets and Diplomacy subclasses to every goofy thing Brad McQuaid said such as releasing an expansion on the Unreal 3 engine with RTS style player city building. Or go further than that along to chunking on the Z-axis and raiding in the sky during flying mounted combat.
Granted much of Sigil's goals should've been seen as pipedreams from the very start, a lot of them have been too basic to forgive or see as anything else other than failure.
Content aside, financially Sigil needed a few hundred thousand subscribers to keep Vanguard afloat with an appropriately sized team capable of continuing development of the game; development in terms of timely live updates and expansions. But what we have is SOE taking in only half of the original team, and then cutting that in half as well. Financially the game failed Sigil, and financially its been failing SOE if they decided to cut staff instead of increase it.
You probably don't know what an "issue" is. Issue as in a publication issue. That's the terminology used for City of Heroes' game update.
My point there was that you were right about server populations no mattering in some MMOs. City of Heroes was the first that came to mind. It receives content updates all the time and has never had more than 200-300k subscribers.
I should've added that World of Warcraft is at ten million subscribers, but the subscriber count hasn't meant anything like free expansions every month, paid expansions with thirty new classes or etc.
Point being, so long as content updates arrive every now and then, it is possible to not care beyond one's own server; since only so many people can fit on one server.
As far as Vanguard goes though, it does matter how many people are subscribed to the game since the dwindling amount now hasn't proved to be enough to support any content updates outside of what Sigil was already working on, or plans for any expansion.
I'm sure Sigil planned for Vanguard to have expansions and such. I'm not sure what SOE had planned for it when they bought it, but on both accounts Vanguard seems to me as a failure to both. I'll always cite the original company sinking and the existing development entity being cut in half as reasons, because the consequences still show today. It's not so easy to view 'em as things of the past.
They've only added what Sigil originally failed to add in a timely manner after launch. Not everyone is going to consider helmets introduced more than a year after launch a "success". Especially not permanently flying mounts, which were insinuated (as good as promised) to be in game by boxes and advertisement pitches already.
Even if you forgive the origin of the Game Update's, its still a bit difficult to overlook how meek they've been.
I certainly doubt this was the pacing either Sigil or SOE originally wanted for Vanguard's content dole out.
WoW sure did take a long time to release an expansion. It also still hasn't fulfilled a lot of before launch promises such as siege engines and hero classes, which are coming next expansion but still.
But you know, World of Warcraft received a ton of content additions between launch and now. Obviously in the presence of content different from what was originally expected, Blizzard put priority on every content addition that exists now over things like siege engines and hero classes, or everything that appeared before Burning Crusades released.
So while it'd be convenient to say Blizzard hasn't met "goals" set for themselves as well, most just see their content dole out as a change of plans. Sure, helmets can be forgiven as similar, but when placed on the backburner to other crap that was late out the door, Vanguard's content updates can't really be seen in the same light as World of Warcraft's.
It's also worth noting Burning Crusades was at least announced a year after World of Warcraft released. So at least there was that in a comparable amount of time.
Most MMOs don't have expansions? I don't know of many that were successful that didn't receive at least one.
And it's a measure of success for Vanguard because it was EXPECTED to have an expansion; both by its original development team, which remnant's still operate the game today, and players who bought the game.
Again, World of Warcraft had an expansion announced around this same amount of time. EQII had two adventures packs and an expansion released around this same amount of time.
The term "expansion" aside, it doesn't much matter to me how the content expands, so long as it does. It's just that Vanguard was obviously meant to have expansions. There's no system in plan for it akin to EQII's Adventure Packs or City of Heroes Issues; so in the absence of those when Game Updates have been mostly performance and bug fixes, and any content updates have been crap they've been working on since beta...its worth asking how exactly will content expand?
In the absence of any meaningful content expansion its fair to call the game a failure since steady content updates should be a goal for ANY MMO. That's the reason they require subscribers; to have a staff that maintains the existing game and expand upon it with NEW content. When a company is doing nothing but fixing pre-launch issues and fulfulling late promises, nothing seems new or impressive about it.
Forgive me for not being impressed over a third-generation MMO adding the ability to form a raid group almost a year after it launched, and helmets more than a year after it launched. That kind of crap isn't much of a content update or expansion. They're things that should've been in-game from the start.
When you're that black and white about it though, so long as one person is on a server, and one person is in the office making sure that server is plugged into a wall, an MMO is a success.
You're going to find it difficult getting any amount of people to agree with that type of reasoning.
It's best if other criteria are used to determine whether an MMO is successful or failing, because there's more to being an MMO than making sure to pay an ISP.
I have no idea what you're talking about in comparing basketball to playing or running an MMO, but moving along...
As aforementioned, there's more to an MMO than it's server being online and the players being able to login. If you're content with just that, then fine, that's you, but you'll have to forgive the majority that's come to expect a combination of free and paid content expansions (NEW game logic, art and sound assets).
Is it unreasonable to believe a player's subscription cost is meant to pay for more than electricity and bandwidth? I certainly hope you don't pay your cable company whatever you pay a month and only receive local channels, or would you be content with just the evening news?
Maybe if Vanguard was a free MMO you could sell that "as long as its running" crap, but so long as players pay a price comparable to other MMOs, players will compare Vanguard to other MMOs and expect from Vanguard the same type of service they received from other companies. When Vanguard fails to meet those expectations, or any other expectations set for it, it's going to be called a failure. Period.
i just gotta say 1 thing @ Zippy
Vanguard was NEVER re-designed. only in the last year had they start working on content.
Sigil isn't VG today? The people working on Vanguard are the same exact people from Sigil, except only a fraction of the original entity. That aside, obviously they're still pursuing the goals of their original Sigil entity, since everything they "plan" for is nothing more than the same crap that attributed to Vanguard's failure at launch.Case in point your question: "content that was supposed to be in the game? Is there anything that's even still missing?"
Sure, take your pick of anything between helmets and Diplomacy subclasses to every goofy thing Brad McQuaid said such as releasing an expansion on the Unreal 3 engine with RTS style player city building. Or go further than that along to chunking on the Z-axis and raiding in the sky during flying mounted combat.
Granted much of Sigil's goals should've been seen as pipedreams from the very start, a lot of them have been too basic to forgive or see as anything else other than failure.
Content aside, financially Sigil needed a few hundred thousand subscribers to keep Vanguard afloat with an appropriately sized team capable of continuing development of the game; development in terms of timely live updates and expansions. But what we have is SOE taking in only half of the original team, and then cutting that in half as well. Financially the game failed Sigil, and financially its been failing SOE if they decided to cut staff instead of increase it.
You probably don't know what an "issue" is. Issue as in a publication issue. That's the terminology used for City of Heroes' game update.
My point there was that you were right about server populations no mattering in some MMOs. City of Heroes was the first that came to mind. It receives content updates all the time and has never had more than 200-300k subscribers.
I should've added that World of Warcraft is at ten million subscribers, but the subscriber count hasn't meant anything like free expansions every month, paid expansions with thirty new classes or etc.
Point being, so long as content updates arrive every now and then, it is possible to not care beyond one's own server; since only so many people can fit on one server.
As far as Vanguard goes though, it does matter how many people are subscribed to the game since the dwindling amount now hasn't proved to be enough to support any content updates outside of what Sigil was already working on, or plans for any expansion.
I'm sure Sigil planned for Vanguard to have expansions and such. I'm not sure what SOE had planned for it when they bought it, but on both accounts Vanguard seems to me as a failure to both. I'll always cite the original company sinking and the existing development entity being cut in half as reasons, because the consequences still show today. It's not so easy to view 'em as things of the past.
They've only added what Sigil originally failed to add in a timely manner after launch. Not everyone is going to consider helmets introduced more than a year after launch a "success". Especially not permanently flying mounts, which were insinuated (as good as promised) to be in game by boxes and advertisement pitches already.
Even if you forgive the origin of the Game Update's, its still a bit difficult to overlook how meek they've been.
I certainly doubt this was the pacing either Sigil or SOE originally wanted for Vanguard's content dole out.
WoW sure did take a long time to release an expansion. It also still hasn't fulfilled a lot of before launch promises such as siege engines and hero classes, which are coming next expansion but still.
But you know, World of Warcraft received a ton of content additions between launch and now. Obviously in the presence of content different from what was originally expected, Blizzard put priority on every content addition that exists now over things like siege engines and hero classes, or everything that appeared before Burning Crusades released.
So while it'd be convenient to say Blizzard hasn't met "goals" set for themselves as well, most just see their content dole out as a change of plans. Sure, helmets can be forgiven as similar, but when placed on the backburner to other crap that was late out the door, Vanguard's content updates can't really be seen in the same light as World of Warcraft's.
It's also worth noting Burning Crusades was at least announced a year after World of Warcraft released. So at least there was that in a comparable amount of time.
Most MMOs don't have expansions? I don't know of many that were successful that didn't receive at least one.
And it's a measure of success for Vanguard because it was EXPECTED to have an expansion; both by its original development team, which remnant's still operate the game today, and players who bought the game.
Again, World of Warcraft had an expansion announced around this same amount of time. EQII had two adventures packs and an expansion released around this same amount of time.
The term "expansion" aside, it doesn't much matter to me how the content expands, so long as it does. It's just that Vanguard was obviously meant to have expansions. There's no system in plan for it akin to EQII's Adventure Packs or City of Heroes Issues; so in the absence of those when Game Updates have been mostly performance and bug fixes, and any content updates have been crap they've been working on since beta...its worth asking how exactly will content expand?
In the absence of any meaningful content expansion its fair to call the game a failure since steady content updates should be a goal for ANY MMO. That's the reason they require subscribers; to have a staff that maintains the existing game and expand upon it with NEW content. When a company is doing nothing but fixing pre-launch issues and fulfulling late promises, nothing seems new or impressive about it.
Forgive me for not being impressed over a third-generation MMO adding the ability to form a raid group almost a year after it launched, and helmets more than a year after it launched. That kind of crap isn't much of a content update or expansion. They're things that should've been in-game from the start.
When you're that black and white about it though, so long as one person is on a server, and one person is in the office making sure that server is plugged into a wall, an MMO is a success.
You're going to find it difficult getting any amount of people to agree with that type of reasoning.
It's best if other criteria are used to determine whether an MMO is successful or failing, because there's more to being an MMO than making sure to pay an ISP.
I have no idea what you're talking about in comparing basketball to playing or running an MMO, but moving along...
Sepher, I played CoH at release for about 2 years. I have a 50 energy/ energy blaster on the guardian server. I'm well aware of what an "issue" is. What I'm not aware of is how you draw a correlation between CoH issues and server pops.As aforementioned, there's more to an MMO than it's server being online and the players being able to login. If you're content with just that, then fine, that's you, but you'll have to forgive the majority that's come to expect a combination of free and paid content expansions (NEW game logic, art and sound assets).
Is it unreasonable to believe a player's subscription cost is meant to pay for more than electricity and bandwidth? I certainly hope you don't pay your cable company whatever you pay a month and only receive local channels, or would you be content with just the evening news?
Maybe if Vanguard was a free MMO you could sell that "as long as its running" crap, but so long as players pay a price comparable to other MMOs, players will compare Vanguard to other MMOs and expect from Vanguard the same type of service they received from other companies. When Vanguard fails to meet those expectations, or any other expectations set for it, it's going to be called a failure. Period.
You're MEASURES of success don't matter in the bigger picture guy.
VG servers are up and running, there is a developement staff working on content, and people are paying and playing.
That's really all that matters.
Diplomacy subclasses were never promised at release.
An expansion was never guaranteed. It was hinted at as a possibility later down the road.
A raid dungeon is content, quests are content, fluff is content. Everyone is well aware the VG was released to soon and that much of the stuff being added was just missing content, but content is content; you can't just ignore what's been put in and say nothings being added because it doesn't meat your standard of what content should be. As far as MMO's go the amount of content that has been released has been about par with most every other game out there. Most games will average about 2 a year and at the pace SOE is on they will have released 2 magor content updates in about that same amount of time.
Wish Darkfall would release.
Here is what you originally said:
I disagree that there's no difference between 30k subscribers in Vanguard and 9 million subscribers in World of Warcraft when it comes to us as consumers.
Yes Vanguard has a development staff, but the only thing you yourself hold them accountable for is making sure the servers are running.
That's where the City of Heroes correlation fits in, its possible for there to be an MMO with far less than 9 million subscribers to still roll out new content on a regular basis; expansion or not.
Vanguard on the other hand with 30k subscribers hasn't even caught up to what it was meant to be at launch, a year after it's launch.
Also, it doesn't seem to matter to you how large the development staff is, which directly relates to how effectively and timely they can roll out content. It doesn't matter to you that SOE fired off half of an already pitiful amount of developers. Your logic doesn't account for gray areas, so to you ONE developer is enough for a development staff and it should make no difference to us as consumers what Vanguard's subscriber count is.
So again, it does matter when considering criteria such as live content updates, among other things.
Mine doesn't matter? Not alone, but I'm one of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought Vanguard or used a trial key and then decided it wasn't worth subscribing to.
Vanguard may be successful to the dwindling minority that still plays it, but its seen as a failure to many more.
Sure, the ones that play now are all that matter when it comes to keeping the game on life support; but it is us, the majority whom quit that sank Sigil and shrunk the servers and development staff down to a quarter of what it originally was. That means it's us and everyone else in the MMO market who could return to Vanguard and give SOE reason to allocate more resources to it. That's how it works, and that's why subscriber counts matter when they begin to effect the development team and content they're able or not able to produce.
So yeah "you matter", but you aren't "all that matters".
Sure I can, and I do. The majority does.
There's a reason World of Warcraft reaches new highs and Vanguard reaches new lows. One succeeds at fulfilling expectations, the other fails. It's that simple. It's up to developers to design in accordance to the expectations of their target demographic.
Since Vanguard wasn't designed for 30k active subscribers, obviously it failed a lot of expectations out there, eh? If it continued to dwindle in population over the course of its first year, obviously it continued to fail expectations, no? The content can then be deemed subpar, and it isn't unreasonable to suggest maybe its subpar because they're releasing crap that should've been in at launch, instead of new content that actually expands the game.
MMO developers never really promise anything for launch, and those that do often fail to deliver on promises, but the good ones make sure to meet enough expectations that it ends up not mattering. Case in point World of Warcraft and anyone fresh off of WCIII that hoped for hero classes and siege engines sooner rather than later.
Par? Nah, subpar. See aforementioned reasons for my believing so.
I would add a 4th category:
Balancing:
What I saw was a LOT of the patch notes had "Skill xyz is now doing 26 damage instead of 28" ad nauseam. I feel they wasted WAY too much time and effort with such arbitrary balancing. If VG was a PVP based game I would understand it, but I never head anyone complain "oh my spell does 2 dmg too much/less" oh noes! They really focussed on secondary and tertiary things way too long. Besides, with all the performance and bug fix talk: first, I dont see the perfomance improved so much, and second, at least I didnt see SO many critical bugs, maybe besides falling out of the world or such, but not on such a scale to make it a first prriority. Basically I played my charecters from launch and only VERY rarely I ran into quest bugs that really hindered me from playing on.
MY personal gripe No1 was and is the lack of immersion, the sterile world and the total lack in terms of story telling. Its just such a sterile, boring world. *shrug* And I havent seen ANY change, progress or even the slightest HINT of understanding from the mouth of either SIgil or now SOE to realize they seriously LACK in that department. All I ever hear is about performance and bugs.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
The game was almost completely redesigned in 2006. The combat system was completely thrown out. The old system using perception and combat quees was completely scrapped and replaced. In early 2006 they made to the decision to switch directions and move the game to quest directed gameplay. Resulting in the need to create thousands of quests and change much of the games design.Most of 2006 focused on these changes. Mainly redoing Combat and redoing the focus of the world. Redoing crafting throwing out the Oblivion type diplomacy system and completely redoing it. Redoing crafting. Junking the combataive style harvesting system. Vanguard like many other failed games suffered greatly from a massive change in design and direction late in development. Like most games its virtually impossible to do such a thing and out out a polished and finished game at release. Prime examples of such tom foolerey are Horizons firing of David Allen and switching to the DSavid Bowman design and EQ2's late change in design to attempt to copy WoW's quest directed design and then subsequent changes after release to copy WoW. Games simply cannot be made overnight or redesigned so close to release.
Most of 2006 focused on these changes. Mainly redoing Combat and redoing the focus of the world. Redoing crafting throwing out the Oblivion type diplomacy system and completely redoing it. Redoing crafting. Junking the combataive style harvesting system. Vanguard like many other failed games suffered greatly from a massive change in design and direction late in development. Like most games its virtually impossible to do such a thing and out out a polished and finished game at release. Prime examples of such tom foolerey are Horizons firing of David Allen and switching to the DSavid Bowman design and EQ2's late change in design to attempt to copy WoW's quest directed design and then subsequent changes after release to copy WoW. Games simply cannot be made overnight or redesigned so close to release.
Zippy bloody hell. Please open your eyes. It was not WoW who brought heavy solo quest design. It was Asheron's Call 2 in 2002. Do not say that the game failed at other areas but focus on this single point. The idea was made by Turbine and the fact AC2 had other issues it is undoubtedly true that AC2 was the first one spammed by thousands of solo quests.REALITY CHECK
The game was almost completely redesigned in 2006. The combat system was completely thrown out. The old system using perception and combat quees was completely scrapped and replaced. In early 2006 they made to the decision to switch directions and move the game to quest directed gameplay. Resulting in the need to create thousands of quests and change much of the games design.Most of 2006 focused on these changes. Mainly redoing Combat and redoing the focus of the world. Redoing crafting throwing out the Oblivion type diplomacy system and completely redoing it. Redoing crafting. Junking the combataive style harvesting system. Vanguard like many other failed games suffered greatly from a massive change in design and direction late in development. Like most games its virtually impossible to do such a thing and out out a polished and finished game at release. Prime examples of such tom foolerey are Horizons firing of David Allen and switching to the DSavid Bowman design and EQ2's late change in design to attempt to copy WoW's quest directed design and then subsequent changes after release to copy WoW. Games simply cannot be made overnight or redesigned so close to release.
Zippy bloody hell. Please open your eyes. It was not WoW who brought heavy solo quest design. It was Asheron's Call 2 in 2002. Do not say that the game failed at other areas but focus on this single point. The idea was made by Turbine and the fact AC2 had other issues it is undoubtedly true that AC2 was the first one spammed by thousands of solo quests.What your rantings about AC2 has to do with the discussion above here I do not know. Like many of your posts your above post makes little sense and offers nothing to the discussion. Who cares about AC2 and WoW and what does that have to do with Sigil's decision to completely redesign Vanguard in early 2006 or anything discussed above? Absolutely nothing.
I don't mean to be critical, negative or offensive but you might want to consider putting a little more thought into your posts rather than just typing random thoughts that seem to be causing you distress.
By confuting one of your basic reasons I gave a big question about the relevance of the other "facts" you wrote about.
REALITY CHECK
After so much performance increase I came back for free christmas time, In fact my comp. had 2 gb of ram instead of 1, and I found the game ran as always, not bad, not good. But I didnt find any performance increase. IMHO, sigil wasted a lot of time in performance increase that most of players did notice. But this is how I feel after the free time. And no, I didnt resub.