1) Crafting -- one of the most complex systems I've seen in a game and very little "grinding" through hundreds of junk items just to level up your skill. You can do work for taskmasters where they'll provide most of the hard to get stuff then you buy the rest of the components and make the results for them. It's not a "gold sink". You actually MAKE money crafting from the very first time you do it through the end and the exp/loot rewards from this depend upon the quality of the materials you made for them -- D = failed, A = top of the line so best rewards and bonus loot.
2) Diplomacy -- a game within the game that has its own level system and gear to play it and, again goes up to 50th level in and of itself. Again, this isn't some "waste of time" gig. You make money and have loot rewards just like adventuring and crafting.
3) Adventuring -- Risk and rewards. If you get wooped, you won't spend vast amounts on repairs but you will lose experience and will need to get your corpse back, though you can summon it to you at your bounce spot -- you'll lose all the xp from doing that so it's better to go back and get your corpse to regain most of the exp from being wooped. You won't find yourself running naked there, most of your equipped gear is "soulbound" so stays with you but all your loot items are sitting on that corpse so you'll want to get it.
1) I'll grant that the crafting is harder than most other games and I overlooked that. It is harder in a sense that the player actually has to do something other than watch a progress bar and do nothing else. It is possible to get bad random numbers and produce a weaker product. Most of the "hard" comes from the waiting portion of the crafting process though. Personally I don't think the system is hard, but it does take some effort where most other games do not so point made.
2) Diplomacy is one of Vanguards potential areas, but it is anything but hard. It is so easy to see the crystal clear patterns in the discussions that it gets to the point where a player already knows the exact card by card play of the duel before it even happens. If I recall right the devs promised a diplomacy revamp a long time ago (right around when sigil failed? Anyone recall when that was?), because diplomacy was far to easy.
3) Adventuring is the same as any other game. Not one bit harder and actually a bit easier due to the early access to mounts. Mounts and instant travel can trivialize much of the danger in exploration, especially if you can outpace the danger. Losing experience doesn't make something hard, it just makes it penalized. I't charges the player an amount of time to recoup that experience in the same way a gold repair death penalty does. The results of a failed adventure or combat have no direct effect on the difficulty of those tasks.
For example it is no hard to park in a parking structure that costs $10 versus one that costs $3 is it? A 10 minute walk from your car to your destination is no harder than a 3 minute walk and doesn't make the action of parking any harder.
Most of what you wrote seems to be reasons why you like the game and not reasons this game is harder than anything else on the market as Loke666 suggests.
Most of what you wrote seems to be reasons why you like the game and not reasons this game is harder than anything else on the market as Loke666 suggests.
I did not say that it is harder than anything else on the market, I did even say that Guildwars is a lot harder. I did however say that it is harder than Wow.
And lets face it, it is. Blizzard have made Wow so easy that you dont have to have full concentration when you are playing, do that in VG and you die.
Killing a mob that is just above you is harder in VG than Wow or EQ2 for that matter and deffinatly harder than AoC.
Leveling is harder also, or at least takes more time and work. Crafting is really much harder in VG than Wow.
Most of what you wrote seems to be reasons why you like the game and not reasons this game is harder than anything else on the market as Loke666 suggests.
I did not say that it is harder than anything else on the market, I did even say that Guildwars is a lot harder. I did however say that it is harder than Wow.
And lets face it, it is. Blizzard have made Wow so easy that you dont have to have full concentration when you are playing, do that in VG and you die.
Killing a mob that is just above you is harder in VG than Wow or EQ2 for that matter and deffinatly harder than AoC.
Leveling is harder also, or at least takes more time and work. Crafting is really much harder in VG than Wow.
(Edited a spelling error)
You are correct, you didn't say it was harder than anything else on the market, but your comment was directed towards that end. I slightly overstated your comment, but not by much. Your comparison was not VG against WoW, it was VG in comparison to the rest of the market.
What you said earlier
Vanguard is way harder than Wow. Of course, so is any other game too now.
Still Vanguard is slightly harder tham most MMOs, it is harder than AoC, EQ2, WAR (PvE part), LOTRO, but not that much.
You want to say vanguard is hard in comparison to wow? Leveling is just as easy, there is little difference. Requiring extra time is not difficult, that is a misconception as it doesn't make the actions required to level one bit more difficult. It just requires more repetition.
Give me a full group of players in VG at the appropriate dungeon level and it is auto pilot. Blizzard screwed the pooch with all the changes they made in the lich king expansion, but I don't think it was intentional.
The "con" systems vary from game to game, but they all boil down to mob dps vs player dps (and player healing). Thats it. It doesn't matter what level a monster is that you fight, because there is a curve to every games difficulty rating system. Look beyond the level identification system a company puts on its monsters and you see what I mean. For example: take that mob in your example and change its level to 10 less levels than yours. Is it now easier? If all the numerical levels of wow monsters were raised 10 levels (and nothing but the displayed level), would that make wow a harder game than vanguard? Don't let the perception of a con system influence the reality of how difficult a combat is. It is a formula that is fairly identical from game to game with the only difference being the amount of experience awarded. Every game is going to have a sweet spot where players can kill mobs in succession with low downtime and decent experience gain.
Vanguard is no harder than any other game on the market.
Originally posted by Xeonsoldier If VG challenges you in anything its patience... Sorry, VG is just as easy as any other MMO out there.
Vanguard is way harder than Wow. Of course, so is any other game too now.
Still Vanguard is slightly harder tham most MMOs, it is harder than AoC, EQ2, WAR (PvE part), LOTRO, but not that much.
It is nowhere near playing Guildwars in hardmode however.
In what way is it harder?
I'm new to this game so I'll explain a bit.
1) Crafting -- one of the most complex systems I've seen in a game and very little "grinding" through hundreds of junk items just to level up your skill. You can do work for taskmasters where they'll provide most of the hard to get stuff then you buy the rest of the components and make the results for them. It's not a "gold sink". You actually MAKE money crafting from the very first time you do it through the end and the exp/loot rewards from this depend upon the quality of the materials you made for them -- D = failed, A = top of the line so best rewards and bonus loot.
Very little grinding, are you smoking?? The whole system is based around grinding out countless work orders. It's painfully boring. Sure the system seems robust...at first, then it becomes a mindless game of click this click this click this in this order and poof your done. It's most tedious and unfun grind in the game. I grinded out 47 levels and for months dreaded going near a crafting station afterwards even tho i only had 3 lvls to go.
2) Diplomacy -- a game within the game that has its own level system and gear to play it and, again goes up to 50th level in and of itself. Again, this isn't some "waste of time" gig. You make money and have loot rewards just like adventuring and crafting.
I read they changed something about it, but once you get around 20 and have your strat and deck worked out, it becomes as mindless as crafting
3) Adventuring -- Risk and rewards. If you get wooped, you won't spend vast amounts on repairs but you will lose experience and will need to get your corpse back, though you can summon it to you at your bounce spot -- you'll lose all the xp from doing that so it's better to go back and get your corpse to regain most of the exp from being wooped. You won't find yourself running naked there, most of your equipped gear is "soulbound" so stays with you but all your loot items are sitting on that corpse so you'll want to get it.
Travel comes in 4 flavors: Foot, Mounted (starting at level 10), air (rentable before level 10, getting your own mount later on), by ship (craftable ships in the game too). It takes a bit to learn how to fly a mount but there are quests to scout locations that give you a bit of practice with this. One that I like is where I had to scout 6 "safe spots" within an enemy camp where they had nets up to block the flying mounts from getting into their camp so you fly over these nets, under those, land on the top of this building so a short 'runway' to get airborn again, etc...
The only thing mounts are used for are riding/flying to the next rift. The instant travel riftway systems SOE added eliminated whatever purpose/asethic the variety of transportaion modes were intended to add. And Boats are just for show and hardly ever used except for the quick sail to APW.
Lots of little things like that.
If you're looking at just the "combat" aspects of the game, you'll probably find it to be little different than many other games. Hotbar with buttons you hit to launch attacks. Reaction buttons that light up so you click them when you can, etc... That's how most MMO's work. Outside of that, the AI isn't too bad. The quest system... Learn to READ the text and you shouldn't have too many problems with it but the world is HUGE and you'll stumble over things in the wilds as you move around. It can be a bit frustrating to get a quest to go to this or that outpost but no idea where it's at and the map gets cluttered with "points of interest", as you build up quests and the like, so you may find you'll need to ask a few questions of others until you learn your way around the world.
you dont need to read the text to do quests. accept it and a marker tells you exactly where to go, text on the screen tells you exactly what kill and how many, if you need to collect something, it fuckin glows on the ground so you cant miss it. People would just run to a quest hub, pick up all quests ignoring lore and text, knock em out quickly and move on. Most of these easy quest systems were compliments of SOE.
Solo? It's there through 50.
Group? You can start with these under level 10 and do nothing but group content if you want.
only if your in the right area becuase despite the 40 different adventure zones at any given lvl, everyone congregates at the areas which drop the best loot and have the easiest risk vs reward quest lines (hunter league ring a bell). so tough luck finding a group for anywhere else. about 75% of the game world goes untouched by the average player.
Raids? My guys aren't big enough to go there yet so I don't know much about those aspects of the game.
i can't begin to list all the bugs
-------
Population issues:
Those that think the game is dead, I have to snicker about. I played EQ from about a week after it's launch up to when I switched to the new WoW game at its first day of release for that game. I switched to LoTRO shortly after TBC in WoW, right when they started nerfing the hard mode content in WoW and played LoTRO up until about 2 weeks ago when I started up with Vanguard.
Now the snicker about it all: The few servers in Vanguard have populations about even with an average WoW server. Having played a variety of games, one thing remains constant. It doesn't matter how many play the game but how many play on the server you're playing on. If your server has a decent population then you'll be able to do well. If your server has a low pop, then you'll hit issues. etc...
So having a few servers, with decent population levels, is little different than having many servers with decent population levels. The main difference being you can be a mouthy puke on a server and just switch to a different on to start up again but with only a few... If you're a rude prick, there's little room for you to "go hide and start over".
I kind of like that. It keeps the jackass portion of the population to a minimum so I really don't mind playing the game with fewer servers, as long as there are enough folks to do the content with that I get along with and the community in Vanguard reminds me a lot of the community in LoTRO -- a bit more mature with massively less punk attitudes.
At the time when i quit, sartok had 50-70 players during peak hours on the weekend. Seradon had around 800. if these are the same as WoW servers (i quit right after they added b lack wing layer) then WoW is dieing too. But ill give credit where credit is due, the ingame community was the best of any MMO i ever played. the forum community however, is full of assholes.
For me the 3 main points for a game are:
1) Overall Game play.
2) Community -- being stuck in a group of moronic jerks... You can have the best game play in a game but that'll trash it fast.
3) Eye Candy and "bugless" environment.
bugless?? fuck outta here
Well the overall gameplay is diverse and offers content for soloing -- from crafting and diplomacy through mass adventuring solo quests -- group and raid content. It's got that covered and in a huge spread out world. The community is helpful and I've rarely seen someone chewed out for asking "stupid" questions (such as the newbie area -- "where's the farm? That's where you started." without the "you idiot" attached like you'll find in some games.).
The graphics are steep enough that I ordered up a new video card to enjoy it more. I checked out the differences between performance and highest quality and I like the higher quality but my video isn't up to snuff so I'm addressing that.
Bugs... I've hit a few glitches here or there but no more nor less than I've hit in most other games. UI extensions I have issues with at times but I saw that with stacking UI extensions in WoW at times too but the UI extensions here don't seem to break with every patch like they did in WoW where you'd be back to default until your extensions were updated or hack the files to change version info just to find that something *DID* break... Not quite that bad here.
So... If you want to try it out, give it a shot. I wouldn't recommend it to some folks I've gamed with but for many others, I'd say they might find this game rather interesting -- especially those into crafting for craftings sake and those who enjoy having a variety of interesting things to do solo but get into doing group stuff. Use the trial and give it a shot. If someone likes it -- good deal. If they don't... No big, there are plenty of other games out there to check out but this is a good one in its own way.
bigpooh, i would hug u if i could.
VG is a "thinking" man's game? LOL anyone who think this game requires any thinking must be smoking some good stuff or must be an amateur at gaming. The only true difficult MMO was EQ1. Since then there has nothing that met the challenging level that EQ1 did. Maybe because we were all inexperienced then but the devs aren't keeping up with the fact that gamers are simply smarter now.
I loved EQ1, that is why Vanguard is so appealing to me. But EQ1 was simple, and only difficult in terms of brute force. Tough experience grind, big death penalty, lost corpses, etc. Vanguard is difficult in a different way and that is that it requires more thought than other MMOs. I've played many, and there is a significant difference between VG and the other cookie-cutter MMOs.
I could go on and on. But It's these very things that make the game fun because a lesser gear group of adventurers and raiders can be much more successful that others with superior gear. It actually matters how well someone understands their class and how well they can play them in VG.
Originally posted by boojiboy I loved EQ1, that is why Vanguard is so appealing to me. But EQ1 was simple, and only difficult in terms of brute force. Tough experience grind, big death penalty, lost corpses, etc. Vanguard is difficult in a different way and that is that it requires more thought than other MMOs. I've played many, and there is a significant difference between VG and the other cookie-cutter MMOs. I could go on and on. But It's these very things that make the game fun because a lesser gear group of adventurers and raiders can be much more successful that others with superior gear. It actually matters how well someone understands their class and how well they can play them in VG.
I agree with your view of EQ and that it was mainly difficult due to brute force. That is a great way to describe it.
Also that Vanguard is the spiritual successor to everquest in just about every way. Leaps and bounds beyond what the actual sequel was to everquest. I am still very bummed that this game has turned out the way it has and still keep a little hope alive that somehow it will get more resources.
However I disagree that this game takes more thought than any other game. The gameplay it pretty much identical to every other mmo in almost every regard. A few things are a little more difficult and some things are a lot easier. Overall nothing that would require more thought than the next game though.
Originally posted by Xeonsoldier If VG challenges you in anything its patience... Sorry, VG is just as easy as any other MMO out there.
Vanguard is way harder than Wow. Of course, so is any other game too now.
Still Vanguard is slightly harder tham most MMOs, it is harder than AoC, EQ2, WAR (PvE part), LOTRO, but not that much.
It is nowhere near playing Guildwars in hardmode however.
In what way is it harder?
I'm new to this game so I'll explain a bit.
1) Crafting -- one of the most complex systems I've seen in a game and very little "grinding" through hundreds of junk items just to level up your skill. You can do work for taskmasters where they'll provide most of the hard to get stuff then you buy the rest of the components and make the results for them. It's not a "gold sink". You actually MAKE money crafting from the very first time you do it through the end and the exp/loot rewards from this depend upon the quality of the materials you made for them -- D = failed, A = top of the line so best rewards and bonus loot.
Very little grinding, are you smoking?? The whole system is based around grinding out countless work orders. It's painfully boring. Sure the system seems robust...at first, then it becomes a mindless game of click this click this click this in this order and poof your done. It's most tedious and unfun grind in the game. I grinded out 47 levels and for months dreaded going near a crafting station afterwards even tho i only had 3 lvls to go.
2) Diplomacy -- a game within the game that has its own level system and gear to play it and, again goes up to 50th level in and of itself. Again, this isn't some "waste of time" gig. You make money and have loot rewards just like adventuring and crafting.
I read they changed something about it, but once you get around 20 and have your strat and deck worked out, it becomes as mindless as crafting
3) Adventuring -- Risk and rewards. If you get wooped, you won't spend vast amounts on repairs but you will lose experience and will need to get your corpse back, though you can summon it to you at your bounce spot -- you'll lose all the xp from doing that so it's better to go back and get your corpse to regain most of the exp from being wooped. You won't find yourself running naked there, most of your equipped gear is "soulbound" so stays with you but all your loot items are sitting on that corpse so you'll want to get it.
Travel comes in 4 flavors: Foot, Mounted (starting at level 10), air (rentable before level 10, getting your own mount later on), by ship (craftable ships in the game too). It takes a bit to learn how to fly a mount but there are quests to scout locations that give you a bit of practice with this. One that I like is where I had to scout 6 "safe spots" within an enemy camp where they had nets up to block the flying mounts from getting into their camp so you fly over these nets, under those, land on the top of this building so a short 'runway' to get airborn again, etc...
The only thing mounts are used for are riding/flying to the next rift. The instant travel riftway systems SOE added eliminated whatever purpose/asethic the variety of transportaion modes were intended to add. And Boats are just for show and hardly ever used except for the quick sail to APW.
Lots of little things like that.
If you're looking at just the "combat" aspects of the game, you'll probably find it to be little different than many other games. Hotbar with buttons you hit to launch attacks. Reaction buttons that light up so you click them when you can, etc... That's how most MMO's work. Outside of that, the AI isn't too bad. The quest system... Learn to READ the text and you shouldn't have too many problems with it but the world is HUGE and you'll stumble over things in the wilds as you move around. It can be a bit frustrating to get a quest to go to this or that outpost but no idea where it's at and the map gets cluttered with "points of interest", as you build up quests and the like, so you may find you'll need to ask a few questions of others until you learn your way around the world.
you dont need to read the text to do quests. accept it and a marker tells you exactly where to go, text on the screen tells you exactly what kill and how many, if you need to collect something, it fuckin glows on the ground so you cant miss it. People would just run to a quest hub, pick up all quests ignoring lore and text, knock em out quickly and move on. Most of these easy quest systems were compliments of SOE.
Solo? It's there through 50.
Group? You can start with these under level 10 and do nothing but group content if you want.
only if your in the right area becuase despite the 40 different adventure zones at any given lvl, everyone congregates at the areas which drop the best loot and have the easiest risk vs reward quest lines (hunter league ring a bell). so tough luck finding a group for anywhere else. about 75% of the game world goes untouched by the average player.
Raids? My guys aren't big enough to go there yet so I don't know much about those aspects of the game.
i can't begin to list all the bugs
-------
Population issues:
Those that think the game is dead, I have to snicker about. I played EQ from about a week after it's launch up to when I switched to the new WoW game at its first day of release for that game. I switched to LoTRO shortly after TBC in WoW, right when they started nerfing the hard mode content in WoW and played LoTRO up until about 2 weeks ago when I started up with Vanguard.
Now the snicker about it all: The few servers in Vanguard have populations about even with an average WoW server. Having played a variety of games, one thing remains constant. It doesn't matter how many play the game but how many play on the server you're playing on. If your server has a decent population then you'll be able to do well. If your server has a low pop, then you'll hit issues. etc...
So having a few servers, with decent population levels, is little different than having many servers with decent population levels. The main difference being you can be a mouthy puke on a server and just switch to a different on to start up again but with only a few... If you're a rude prick, there's little room for you to "go hide and start over".
I kind of like that. It keeps the jackass portion of the population to a minimum so I really don't mind playing the game with fewer servers, as long as there are enough folks to do the content with that I get along with and the community in Vanguard reminds me a lot of the community in LoTRO -- a bit more mature with massively less punk attitudes.
At the time when i quit, sartok had 50-70 players during peak hours on the weekend. Seradon had around 800. if these are the same as WoW servers (i quit right after they added b lack wing layer) then WoW is dieing too. But ill give credit where credit is due, the ingame community was the best of any MMO i ever played. the forum community however, is full of assholes.
For me the 3 main points for a game are:
1) Overall Game play.
2) Community -- being stuck in a group of moronic jerks... You can have the best game play in a game but that'll trash it fast.
3) Eye Candy and "bugless" environment.
bugless?? fuck outta here
Well the overall gameplay is diverse and offers content for soloing -- from crafting and diplomacy through mass adventuring solo quests -- group and raid content. It's got that covered and in a huge spread out world. The community is helpful and I've rarely seen someone chewed out for asking "stupid" questions (such as the newbie area -- "where's the farm? That's where you started." without the "you idiot" attached like you'll find in some games.).
The graphics are steep enough that I ordered up a new video card to enjoy it more. I checked out the differences between performance and highest quality and I like the higher quality but my video isn't up to snuff so I'm addressing that.
Bugs... I've hit a few glitches here or there but no more nor less than I've hit in most other games. UI extensions I have issues with at times but I saw that with stacking UI extensions in WoW at times too but the UI extensions here don't seem to break with every patch like they did in WoW where you'd be back to default until your extensions were updated or hack the files to change version info just to find that something *DID* break... Not quite that bad here.
So... If you want to try it out, give it a shot. I wouldn't recommend it to some folks I've gamed with but for many others, I'd say they might find this game rather interesting -- especially those into crafting for craftings sake and those who enjoy having a variety of interesting things to do solo but get into doing group stuff. Use the trial and give it a shot. If someone likes it -- good deal. If they don't... No big, there are plenty of other games out there to check out but this is a good one in its own way.
First, the "bugless" was explained a bit further in. Bad wording on my part but "less bugs" doesn't quite fit either. I suppose "relatively clean" environment might work but, again that doesn't cover the meaning... I think it was explained a bit better further in.
"When I played..." -- your words. Past tense.
I can't blame you for so much negativity from when you played -- back then, the entire time you played, the population was shrinking. Less folks, collect in fewer areas so you have enough people to actually do things. Few players would be willing to go outside of a select few places so...
Yeah, I can see the problems there.
You had more guts than I did to play it back then. I wasn't into even trying it.
SOE game -- In EQ GM's were needed quite often/all the time and customer service was gutted in the game. Why play a SOE game where that is needed but unavailable?
Bugs from hell -- ranging from performance through crashes on around to things just not working. Not "a few" but MASS quantities that would trash your game play. No thanks.
So the fact you were even willing to try it back then shows a bit more guts than I had. Then again, I was playing back then -- WoW then LoTRO and I generally don't "switch games" that easily nor frequently so I was also "busy" playing.
I could go point by point down the list of issues you brought up but let's just cluster them together a bit.
Adventuring: Solo, group raid.
Crafting: Solo
Diplomacy Solo
Workorders are the equivalent of soloing a single mob. They require nothing you can't get from a vendor (cleaners, water, solvents, etc...) to do them so they are "fast and easy" to get done. Doing the same 10 workorders, at an outpost, in a loop is the same as doing the same 10 mobs at a camp. If you didn't go brain dead from doing it, you'd be an exception and not necessarily in a positive way.
"grind" through that and you'll go nuts but doing them mixed with the quests and making items... Not bad. Short bursts of grinding them and, again, not bad at all.
Civic Diplomacy is the equivalent of soloing a single mob but where there is only that 1 mob standing there. If you get your butt kicked by a single mob you pulled on purpose, while adventuring... What would that say about your "ability" to play your class? So yeah, once you get far enough along, and know how to play this portion of the game well enough, you really shouldn't "lose". It's a fun side bar and has some neat things for someone into collecting stuff -- rare books to summon NPC help, improve your mount, summon a vendor to you, etc...
For soloing activities across all 3 spheres (adventuring, crafting, diplomacy), you have a good deal of options. You have quests for them and "gearing up" to do better but if you want group activities and/or "risk" situations, you go adventuring. What's the worst thing that can happen while crafting? "ouch! I pricked my finger with a needle!" -- and filing to make an item. At least this game has that pin-prick gig to it. Most don't.
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Riftways... In a world as HUGE as this one, try getting a group from distant areas together in a single spot to do a run without them. You're familiar with the world so saying that you can literally fly across the continent for 40 minutes to an hour isn't a shocker to you. Now try and get a group to come from "all 4 corners" when they'll be spending that much time in transit.
A lot of your statements are based upon your background with the game -- AS THE GAME WAS. Your entire time playing, the population was shrinking. When it went live, there were thousands of players on each server and over your 'leveling up' time, you found less and less to do in smaller and smaller areas of the game as people "clustered" together.
Well -- a bit has changed and the more that play, the more you find going to those "out of the way places". What you bring up as issues about "grinding" the solo activities such as crafting and your comments on diplomacy... What else did you have to do as fewer and fewer folks were around? So you focused on grinding through stuff solo...
You talk about the PvP server as well as one of the PvE servers. Either environment is best when you mix soloing with group stuff but you pretty much describe your "commentary" as strictely solo time. I think I'd go brain dead nuts in a game built around Multi-user interaction where I was spending more and more time soloing and fewer and fewere were around too.
So no... I don't "disagree" with your assertions about the past. I do disagree with your claims that, if played fully and in a "rounded" fashion (a bit of crafting, a bit of diplo, a bit of adventuring, maybe some expore time at sea, across land and via flying)... That your personal "old" experience with the game would fit how it seems to be working now. Even your comments about how the crafting system seems "robust" shows that you held a bit of respect for it. That simply changed as your other options were reduced.
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Honestly, what you faced 'back then" and how things are now... If you went to do the same activities, in the same way you did them back in those days... I wouldn't see you finding the environement any different. If you did get into it with the slow growth going on that is happening now. I think you'd find the game far more interesting "building up" versus the way you played as it was "collapsing".
So yeah -- I disagree with your assertions from "now" versus "then".
Comments
I'm new to this game so I'll explain a bit.
1) Crafting -- one of the most complex systems I've seen in a game and very little "grinding" through hundreds of junk items just to level up your skill. You can do work for taskmasters where they'll provide most of the hard to get stuff then you buy the rest of the components and make the results for them. It's not a "gold sink". You actually MAKE money crafting from the very first time you do it through the end and the exp/loot rewards from this depend upon the quality of the materials you made for them -- D = failed, A = top of the line so best rewards and bonus loot.
2) Diplomacy -- a game within the game that has its own level system and gear to play it and, again goes up to 50th level in and of itself. Again, this isn't some "waste of time" gig. You make money and have loot rewards just like adventuring and crafting.
3) Adventuring -- Risk and rewards. If you get wooped, you won't spend vast amounts on repairs but you will lose experience and will need to get your corpse back, though you can summon it to you at your bounce spot -- you'll lose all the xp from doing that so it's better to go back and get your corpse to regain most of the exp from being wooped. You won't find yourself running naked there, most of your equipped gear is "soulbound" so stays with you but all your loot items are sitting on that corpse so you'll want to get it.
1) I'll grant that the crafting is harder than most other games and I overlooked that. It is harder in a sense that the player actually has to do something other than watch a progress bar and do nothing else. It is possible to get bad random numbers and produce a weaker product. Most of the "hard" comes from the waiting portion of the crafting process though. Personally I don't think the system is hard, but it does take some effort where most other games do not so point made.
2) Diplomacy is one of Vanguards potential areas, but it is anything but hard. It is so easy to see the crystal clear patterns in the discussions that it gets to the point where a player already knows the exact card by card play of the duel before it even happens. If I recall right the devs promised a diplomacy revamp a long time ago (right around when sigil failed? Anyone recall when that was?), because diplomacy was far to easy.
3) Adventuring is the same as any other game. Not one bit harder and actually a bit easier due to the early access to mounts. Mounts and instant travel can trivialize much of the danger in exploration, especially if you can outpace the danger. Losing experience doesn't make something hard, it just makes it penalized. I't charges the player an amount of time to recoup that experience in the same way a gold repair death penalty does. The results of a failed adventure or combat have no direct effect on the difficulty of those tasks.
For example it is no hard to park in a parking structure that costs $10 versus one that costs $3 is it? A 10 minute walk from your car to your destination is no harder than a 3 minute walk and doesn't make the action of parking any harder.
Most of what you wrote seems to be reasons why you like the game and not reasons this game is harder than anything else on the market as Loke666 suggests.
I did not say that it is harder than anything else on the market, I did even say that Guildwars is a lot harder. I did however say that it is harder than Wow.
And lets face it, it is. Blizzard have made Wow so easy that you dont have to have full concentration when you are playing, do that in VG and you die.
Killing a mob that is just above you is harder in VG than Wow or EQ2 for that matter and deffinatly harder than AoC.
Leveling is harder also, or at least takes more time and work. Crafting is really much harder in VG than Wow.
(Edited a spelling error)
I did not say that it is harder than anything else on the market, I did even say that Guildwars is a lot harder. I did however say that it is harder than Wow.
And lets face it, it is. Blizzard have made Wow so easy that you dont have to have full concentration when you are playing, do that in VG and you die.
Killing a mob that is just above you is harder in VG than Wow or EQ2 for that matter and deffinatly harder than AoC.
Leveling is harder also, or at least takes more time and work. Crafting is really much harder in VG than Wow.
(Edited a spelling error)
You are correct, you didn't say it was harder than anything else on the market, but your comment was directed towards that end. I slightly overstated your comment, but not by much. Your comparison was not VG against WoW, it was VG in comparison to the rest of the market.
What you said earlier
Vanguard is way harder than Wow. Of course, so is any other game too now.
Still Vanguard is slightly harder tham most MMOs, it is harder than AoC, EQ2, WAR (PvE part), LOTRO, but not that much.
You want to say vanguard is hard in comparison to wow? Leveling is just as easy, there is little difference. Requiring extra time is not difficult, that is a misconception as it doesn't make the actions required to level one bit more difficult. It just requires more repetition.
Give me a full group of players in VG at the appropriate dungeon level and it is auto pilot. Blizzard screwed the pooch with all the changes they made in the lich king expansion, but I don't think it was intentional.
The "con" systems vary from game to game, but they all boil down to mob dps vs player dps (and player healing). Thats it. It doesn't matter what level a monster is that you fight, because there is a curve to every games difficulty rating system. Look beyond the level identification system a company puts on its monsters and you see what I mean. For example: take that mob in your example and change its level to 10 less levels than yours. Is it now easier? If all the numerical levels of wow monsters were raised 10 levels (and nothing but the displayed level), would that make wow a harder game than vanguard? Don't let the perception of a con system influence the reality of how difficult a combat is. It is a formula that is fairly identical from game to game with the only difference being the amount of experience awarded. Every game is going to have a sweet spot where players can kill mobs in succession with low downtime and decent experience gain.
Vanguard is no harder than any other game on the market.
Vanguard is way harder than Wow. Of course, so is any other game too now.
Still Vanguard is slightly harder tham most MMOs, it is harder than AoC, EQ2, WAR (PvE part), LOTRO, but not that much.
It is nowhere near playing Guildwars in hardmode however.
In what way is it harder?
I'm new to this game so I'll explain a bit.
1) Crafting -- one of the most complex systems I've seen in a game and very little "grinding" through hundreds of junk items just to level up your skill. You can do work for taskmasters where they'll provide most of the hard to get stuff then you buy the rest of the components and make the results for them. It's not a "gold sink". You actually MAKE money crafting from the very first time you do it through the end and the exp/loot rewards from this depend upon the quality of the materials you made for them -- D = failed, A = top of the line so best rewards and bonus loot.
Very little grinding, are you smoking?? The whole system is based around grinding out countless work orders. It's painfully boring. Sure the system seems robust...at first, then it becomes a mindless game of click this click this click this in this order and poof your done. It's most tedious and unfun grind in the game. I grinded out 47 levels and for months dreaded going near a crafting station afterwards even tho i only had 3 lvls to go.
2) Diplomacy -- a game within the game that has its own level system and gear to play it and, again goes up to 50th level in and of itself. Again, this isn't some "waste of time" gig. You make money and have loot rewards just like adventuring and crafting.
I read they changed something about it, but once you get around 20 and have your strat and deck worked out, it becomes as mindless as crafting
3) Adventuring -- Risk and rewards. If you get wooped, you won't spend vast amounts on repairs but you will lose experience and will need to get your corpse back, though you can summon it to you at your bounce spot -- you'll lose all the xp from doing that so it's better to go back and get your corpse to regain most of the exp from being wooped. You won't find yourself running naked there, most of your equipped gear is "soulbound" so stays with you but all your loot items are sitting on that corpse so you'll want to get it.
Travel comes in 4 flavors: Foot, Mounted (starting at level 10), air (rentable before level 10, getting your own mount later on), by ship (craftable ships in the game too). It takes a bit to learn how to fly a mount but there are quests to scout locations that give you a bit of practice with this. One that I like is where I had to scout 6 "safe spots" within an enemy camp where they had nets up to block the flying mounts from getting into their camp so you fly over these nets, under those, land on the top of this building so a short 'runway' to get airborn again, etc...
The only thing mounts are used for are riding/flying to the next rift. The instant travel riftway systems SOE added eliminated whatever purpose/asethic the variety of transportaion modes were intended to add. And Boats are just for show and hardly ever used except for the quick sail to APW.
Lots of little things like that.
If you're looking at just the "combat" aspects of the game, you'll probably find it to be little different than many other games. Hotbar with buttons you hit to launch attacks. Reaction buttons that light up so you click them when you can, etc... That's how most MMO's work. Outside of that, the AI isn't too bad. The quest system... Learn to READ the text and you shouldn't have too many problems with it but the world is HUGE and you'll stumble over things in the wilds as you move around. It can be a bit frustrating to get a quest to go to this or that outpost but no idea where it's at and the map gets cluttered with "points of interest", as you build up quests and the like, so you may find you'll need to ask a few questions of others until you learn your way around the world.
you dont need to read the text to do quests. accept it and a marker tells you exactly where to go, text on the screen tells you exactly what kill and how many, if you need to collect something, it fuckin glows on the ground so you cant miss it. People would just run to a quest hub, pick up all quests ignoring lore and text, knock em out quickly and move on. Most of these easy quest systems were compliments of SOE.
Solo? It's there through 50.
Group? You can start with these under level 10 and do nothing but group content if you want.
only if your in the right area becuase despite the 40 different adventure zones at any given lvl, everyone congregates at the areas which drop the best loot and have the easiest risk vs reward quest lines (hunter league ring a bell). so tough luck finding a group for anywhere else. about 75% of the game world goes untouched by the average player.
Raids? My guys aren't big enough to go there yet so I don't know much about those aspects of the game.
i can't begin to list all the bugs
-------
Population issues:
Those that think the game is dead, I have to snicker about. I played EQ from about a week after it's launch up to when I switched to the new WoW game at its first day of release for that game. I switched to LoTRO shortly after TBC in WoW, right when they started nerfing the hard mode content in WoW and played LoTRO up until about 2 weeks ago when I started up with Vanguard.
Now the snicker about it all: The few servers in Vanguard have populations about even with an average WoW server. Having played a variety of games, one thing remains constant. It doesn't matter how many play the game but how many play on the server you're playing on. If your server has a decent population then you'll be able to do well. If your server has a low pop, then you'll hit issues. etc...
So having a few servers, with decent population levels, is little different than having many servers with decent population levels. The main difference being you can be a mouthy puke on a server and just switch to a different on to start up again but with only a few... If you're a rude prick, there's little room for you to "go hide and start over".
I kind of like that. It keeps the jackass portion of the population to a minimum so I really don't mind playing the game with fewer servers, as long as there are enough folks to do the content with that I get along with and the community in Vanguard reminds me a lot of the community in LoTRO -- a bit more mature with massively less punk attitudes.
At the time when i quit, sartok had 50-70 players during peak hours on the weekend. Seradon had around 800. if these are the same as WoW servers (i quit right after they added b lack wing layer) then WoW is dieing too. But ill give credit where credit is due, the ingame community was the best of any MMO i ever played. the forum community however, is full of assholes.
For me the 3 main points for a game are:
1) Overall Game play.
2) Community -- being stuck in a group of moronic jerks... You can have the best game play in a game but that'll trash it fast.
3) Eye Candy and "bugless" environment.
bugless?? fuck outta here
Well the overall gameplay is diverse and offers content for soloing -- from crafting and diplomacy through mass adventuring solo quests -- group and raid content. It's got that covered and in a huge spread out world. The community is helpful and I've rarely seen someone chewed out for asking "stupid" questions (such as the newbie area -- "where's the farm? That's where you started." without the "you idiot" attached like you'll find in some games.).
The graphics are steep enough that I ordered up a new video card to enjoy it more. I checked out the differences between performance and highest quality and I like the higher quality but my video isn't up to snuff so I'm addressing that.
Bugs... I've hit a few glitches here or there but no more nor less than I've hit in most other games. UI extensions I have issues with at times but I saw that with stacking UI extensions in WoW at times too but the UI extensions here don't seem to break with every patch like they did in WoW where you'd be back to default until your extensions were updated or hack the files to change version info just to find that something *DID* break... Not quite that bad here.
So... If you want to try it out, give it a shot. I wouldn't recommend it to some folks I've gamed with but for many others, I'd say they might find this game rather interesting -- especially those into crafting for craftings sake and those who enjoy having a variety of interesting things to do solo but get into doing group stuff. Use the trial and give it a shot. If someone likes it -- good deal. If they don't... No big, there are plenty of other games out there to check out but this is a good one in its own way.
bigpooh, i would hug u if i could.
VG is a "thinking" man's game? LOL anyone who think this game requires any thinking must be smoking some good stuff or must be an amateur at gaming. The only true difficult MMO was EQ1. Since then there has nothing that met the challenging level that EQ1 did. Maybe because we were all inexperienced then but the devs aren't keeping up with the fact that gamers are simply smarter now.
I loved EQ1, that is why Vanguard is so appealing to me. But EQ1 was simple, and only difficult in terms of brute force. Tough experience grind, big death penalty, lost corpses, etc. Vanguard is difficult in a different way and that is that it requires more thought than other MMOs. I've played many, and there is a significant difference between VG and the other cookie-cutter MMOs.
I could go on and on. But It's these very things that make the game fun because a lesser gear group of adventurers and raiders can be much more successful that others with superior gear. It actually matters how well someone understands their class and how well they can play them in VG.
I agree with your view of EQ and that it was mainly difficult due to brute force. That is a great way to describe it.
Also that Vanguard is the spiritual successor to everquest in just about every way. Leaps and bounds beyond what the actual sequel was to everquest. I am still very bummed that this game has turned out the way it has and still keep a little hope alive that somehow it will get more resources.
However I disagree that this game takes more thought than any other game. The gameplay it pretty much identical to every other mmo in almost every regard. A few things are a little more difficult and some things are a lot easier. Overall nothing that would require more thought than the next game though.
Vanguard is way harder than Wow. Of course, so is any other game too now.
Still Vanguard is slightly harder tham most MMOs, it is harder than AoC, EQ2, WAR (PvE part), LOTRO, but not that much.
It is nowhere near playing Guildwars in hardmode however.
In what way is it harder?
I'm new to this game so I'll explain a bit.
1) Crafting -- one of the most complex systems I've seen in a game and very little "grinding" through hundreds of junk items just to level up your skill. You can do work for taskmasters where they'll provide most of the hard to get stuff then you buy the rest of the components and make the results for them. It's not a "gold sink". You actually MAKE money crafting from the very first time you do it through the end and the exp/loot rewards from this depend upon the quality of the materials you made for them -- D = failed, A = top of the line so best rewards and bonus loot.
Very little grinding, are you smoking?? The whole system is based around grinding out countless work orders. It's painfully boring. Sure the system seems robust...at first, then it becomes a mindless game of click this click this click this in this order and poof your done. It's most tedious and unfun grind in the game. I grinded out 47 levels and for months dreaded going near a crafting station afterwards even tho i only had 3 lvls to go.
2) Diplomacy -- a game within the game that has its own level system and gear to play it and, again goes up to 50th level in and of itself. Again, this isn't some "waste of time" gig. You make money and have loot rewards just like adventuring and crafting.
I read they changed something about it, but once you get around 20 and have your strat and deck worked out, it becomes as mindless as crafting
3) Adventuring -- Risk and rewards. If you get wooped, you won't spend vast amounts on repairs but you will lose experience and will need to get your corpse back, though you can summon it to you at your bounce spot -- you'll lose all the xp from doing that so it's better to go back and get your corpse to regain most of the exp from being wooped. You won't find yourself running naked there, most of your equipped gear is "soulbound" so stays with you but all your loot items are sitting on that corpse so you'll want to get it.
Travel comes in 4 flavors: Foot, Mounted (starting at level 10), air (rentable before level 10, getting your own mount later on), by ship (craftable ships in the game too). It takes a bit to learn how to fly a mount but there are quests to scout locations that give you a bit of practice with this. One that I like is where I had to scout 6 "safe spots" within an enemy camp where they had nets up to block the flying mounts from getting into their camp so you fly over these nets, under those, land on the top of this building so a short 'runway' to get airborn again, etc...
The only thing mounts are used for are riding/flying to the next rift. The instant travel riftway systems SOE added eliminated whatever purpose/asethic the variety of transportaion modes were intended to add. And Boats are just for show and hardly ever used except for the quick sail to APW.
Lots of little things like that.
If you're looking at just the "combat" aspects of the game, you'll probably find it to be little different than many other games. Hotbar with buttons you hit to launch attacks. Reaction buttons that light up so you click them when you can, etc... That's how most MMO's work. Outside of that, the AI isn't too bad. The quest system... Learn to READ the text and you shouldn't have too many problems with it but the world is HUGE and you'll stumble over things in the wilds as you move around. It can be a bit frustrating to get a quest to go to this or that outpost but no idea where it's at and the map gets cluttered with "points of interest", as you build up quests and the like, so you may find you'll need to ask a few questions of others until you learn your way around the world.
you dont need to read the text to do quests. accept it and a marker tells you exactly where to go, text on the screen tells you exactly what kill and how many, if you need to collect something, it fuckin glows on the ground so you cant miss it. People would just run to a quest hub, pick up all quests ignoring lore and text, knock em out quickly and move on. Most of these easy quest systems were compliments of SOE.
Solo? It's there through 50.
Group? You can start with these under level 10 and do nothing but group content if you want.
only if your in the right area becuase despite the 40 different adventure zones at any given lvl, everyone congregates at the areas which drop the best loot and have the easiest risk vs reward quest lines (hunter league ring a bell). so tough luck finding a group for anywhere else. about 75% of the game world goes untouched by the average player.
Raids? My guys aren't big enough to go there yet so I don't know much about those aspects of the game.
i can't begin to list all the bugs
-------
Population issues:
Those that think the game is dead, I have to snicker about. I played EQ from about a week after it's launch up to when I switched to the new WoW game at its first day of release for that game. I switched to LoTRO shortly after TBC in WoW, right when they started nerfing the hard mode content in WoW and played LoTRO up until about 2 weeks ago when I started up with Vanguard.
Now the snicker about it all: The few servers in Vanguard have populations about even with an average WoW server. Having played a variety of games, one thing remains constant. It doesn't matter how many play the game but how many play on the server you're playing on. If your server has a decent population then you'll be able to do well. If your server has a low pop, then you'll hit issues. etc...
So having a few servers, with decent population levels, is little different than having many servers with decent population levels. The main difference being you can be a mouthy puke on a server and just switch to a different on to start up again but with only a few... If you're a rude prick, there's little room for you to "go hide and start over".
I kind of like that. It keeps the jackass portion of the population to a minimum so I really don't mind playing the game with fewer servers, as long as there are enough folks to do the content with that I get along with and the community in Vanguard reminds me a lot of the community in LoTRO -- a bit more mature with massively less punk attitudes.
At the time when i quit, sartok had 50-70 players during peak hours on the weekend. Seradon had around 800. if these are the same as WoW servers (i quit right after they added b lack wing layer) then WoW is dieing too. But ill give credit where credit is due, the ingame community was the best of any MMO i ever played. the forum community however, is full of assholes.
For me the 3 main points for a game are:
1) Overall Game play.
2) Community -- being stuck in a group of moronic jerks... You can have the best game play in a game but that'll trash it fast.
3) Eye Candy and "bugless" environment.
bugless?? fuck outta here
Well the overall gameplay is diverse and offers content for soloing -- from crafting and diplomacy through mass adventuring solo quests -- group and raid content. It's got that covered and in a huge spread out world. The community is helpful and I've rarely seen someone chewed out for asking "stupid" questions (such as the newbie area -- "where's the farm? That's where you started." without the "you idiot" attached like you'll find in some games.).
The graphics are steep enough that I ordered up a new video card to enjoy it more. I checked out the differences between performance and highest quality and I like the higher quality but my video isn't up to snuff so I'm addressing that.
Bugs... I've hit a few glitches here or there but no more nor less than I've hit in most other games. UI extensions I have issues with at times but I saw that with stacking UI extensions in WoW at times too but the UI extensions here don't seem to break with every patch like they did in WoW where you'd be back to default until your extensions were updated or hack the files to change version info just to find that something *DID* break... Not quite that bad here.
So... If you want to try it out, give it a shot. I wouldn't recommend it to some folks I've gamed with but for many others, I'd say they might find this game rather interesting -- especially those into crafting for craftings sake and those who enjoy having a variety of interesting things to do solo but get into doing group stuff. Use the trial and give it a shot. If someone likes it -- good deal. If they don't... No big, there are plenty of other games out there to check out but this is a good one in its own way.
First, the "bugless" was explained a bit further in. Bad wording on my part but "less bugs" doesn't quite fit either. I suppose "relatively clean" environment might work but, again that doesn't cover the meaning... I think it was explained a bit better further in.
"When I played..." -- your words. Past tense.
I can't blame you for so much negativity from when you played -- back then, the entire time you played, the population was shrinking. Less folks, collect in fewer areas so you have enough people to actually do things. Few players would be willing to go outside of a select few places so...
Yeah, I can see the problems there.
You had more guts than I did to play it back then. I wasn't into even trying it.
So the fact you were even willing to try it back then shows a bit more guts than I had. Then again, I was playing back then -- WoW then LoTRO and I generally don't "switch games" that easily nor frequently so I was also "busy" playing.
I could go point by point down the list of issues you brought up but let's just cluster them together a bit.
Adventuring: Solo, group raid.
Crafting: Solo
Diplomacy Solo
Workorders are the equivalent of soloing a single mob. They require nothing you can't get from a vendor (cleaners, water, solvents, etc...) to do them so they are "fast and easy" to get done. Doing the same 10 workorders, at an outpost, in a loop is the same as doing the same 10 mobs at a camp. If you didn't go brain dead from doing it, you'd be an exception and not necessarily in a positive way.
"grind" through that and you'll go nuts but doing them mixed with the quests and making items... Not bad. Short bursts of grinding them and, again, not bad at all.
Civic Diplomacy is the equivalent of soloing a single mob but where there is only that 1 mob standing there. If you get your butt kicked by a single mob you pulled on purpose, while adventuring... What would that say about your "ability" to play your class? So yeah, once you get far enough along, and know how to play this portion of the game well enough, you really shouldn't "lose". It's a fun side bar and has some neat things for someone into collecting stuff -- rare books to summon NPC help, improve your mount, summon a vendor to you, etc...
For soloing activities across all 3 spheres (adventuring, crafting, diplomacy), you have a good deal of options. You have quests for them and "gearing up" to do better but if you want group activities and/or "risk" situations, you go adventuring. What's the worst thing that can happen while crafting? "ouch! I pricked my finger with a needle!" -- and filing to make an item. At least this game has that pin-prick gig to it. Most don't.
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Riftways... In a world as HUGE as this one, try getting a group from distant areas together in a single spot to do a run without them. You're familiar with the world so saying that you can literally fly across the continent for 40 minutes to an hour isn't a shocker to you. Now try and get a group to come from "all 4 corners" when they'll be spending that much time in transit.
A lot of your statements are based upon your background with the game -- AS THE GAME WAS. Your entire time playing, the population was shrinking. When it went live, there were thousands of players on each server and over your 'leveling up' time, you found less and less to do in smaller and smaller areas of the game as people "clustered" together.
Well -- a bit has changed and the more that play, the more you find going to those "out of the way places". What you bring up as issues about "grinding" the solo activities such as crafting and your comments on diplomacy... What else did you have to do as fewer and fewer folks were around? So you focused on grinding through stuff solo...
You talk about the PvP server as well as one of the PvE servers. Either environment is best when you mix soloing with group stuff but you pretty much describe your "commentary" as strictely solo time. I think I'd go brain dead nuts in a game built around Multi-user interaction where I was spending more and more time soloing and fewer and fewere were around too.
So no... I don't "disagree" with your assertions about the past. I do disagree with your claims that, if played fully and in a "rounded" fashion (a bit of crafting, a bit of diplo, a bit of adventuring, maybe some expore time at sea, across land and via flying)... That your personal "old" experience with the game would fit how it seems to be working now. Even your comments about how the crafting system seems "robust" shows that you held a bit of respect for it. That simply changed as your other options were reduced.
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Honestly, what you faced 'back then" and how things are now... If you went to do the same activities, in the same way you did them back in those days... I wouldn't see you finding the environement any different. If you did get into it with the slow growth going on that is happening now. I think you'd find the game far more interesting "building up" versus the way you played as it was "collapsing".
So yeah -- I disagree with your assertions from "now" versus "then".