So is Vanguard Dead?

[Bateluer]

Skacer is definitely a WoW fanboy. I never once knocked WoW for its graphics, in fact, I've called them very good on several occasions. By going with the cartoony graphics, they ensure that 1)WoW will be playable a wide range of systems and 2)They won't look dated as quickly, and 3) They are very distinctly Warcraft visuals inline with previous Warcraft titles.

I never played EQ1, so I can't comment on anything there.

These bugs with the EQ2 engine you bring up, the only one that actually existed was the unoptimized engine. They definitely needed to to optimize the engine before release, and their argument of 'designing it for future hardware' didn't really hold water when powerful systems at the time couldn't play the game. Today, however, optimizations have been added, refinements have been made, and the game is very playable on medium to low end systems, and maxing out the graphics is easy enough on top end systems.

I'm also unsure where you are knocking the EQ2 UI. The UI is the best out of box UI hands down, bar none, in ANY MMO ever released. Because it can be customized pretty much anyway the user wants. Any combination and location of chat windows, tabbed chat windows, and hotbars is possible. Any combination of chat channels within the aforementioned chat windows is also possible. If that doesn't suit you, there are plenty of 3rd party UI mods tailored to specific users such as the raider or the crafter.

I was also on the Stress Test for WoW, and saw Blizzard essentially toss all the results from the Stress test into the trash bin and claim ignorance of how many servers they would need at launch. The lines clamoring to get into the stress test, the overloaded download servers of it, the extremely over loaded game servers, etc. All of these things should have told Blizzard that WoW was going to be super popular and tell them what their servers could handle. They knew what their systems could handle and that popularity that would follow and did nothing until a few months after release. They did the same thing with the Diablo 2 beta stress test. Damn thing lagged on 10M LANS at release, and people still call it a classic and one of the best.

But, back to the topic of Vanguard. It was definitely a premature release and likely fell victim to a common sickness in today's MMOs: The WoW Clone. This happens whenever an immensely successful game is launched. Remember Diablo 1? Remember Warcraft 2? There's always the deluge of 'Me too!' developers. I had hoped Sigil would be above that, but they weren't.

I dabbled in a bit of the crafting in VG, and my only real gripe with it was that leveling the crafting levels didn't require resources. You could simply get a work order and craft it using cheap merchant bought materials and provided materials, and get Exp for it. When I'm out soloing, I gather everything I can. What I can use, I use, what I can sell, I sell. In VG, even top tier resources were essentially worthless.

 

[TheUnk]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
I dabbled in a bit of the crafting in VG, and my only real gripe with it was that leveling the crafting levels didn't require resources. You could simply get a work order and craft it using cheap merchant bought materials and provided materials, and get Exp for it. When I'm out soloing, I gather everything I can. What I can use, I use, what I can sell, I sell. In VG, even top tier resources were essentially worthless.

You dabbled a very tiny bit.. It is good that leveling did not require resources, they were optional for quality bonuses (which gave you a slight increase in exp) but not required. This allowed players to be just crafters and not have to rely on other spheres to continue leveling, just like the adventure does not have to rely on crafters, or buy items from them to continue leveling. It also prevents someone who goes and buys tons of money @ IGE or some sort to gain an advantage over the real gamer.

Top tier resources worthless? lol if only that was the case. The biggest problem with top tier crafting was that the resources were too expensive and making a profit from the item crafted from them was hard to do. That is for rare and ultra-rares at least. The common resource pricing was fine.

I reached crafting lvl cap in beta and live. I was the wealthiest player on my server. I quit when all my money became worthless due to a gold dupe that went unfixed for weeks and weeks, that amongst several other issues with crafting that were not being addressed and the sphere only being crippled more and more each patch by that Silius fellow and his horrible decisions.

 

[KMFJD]

It seems the only resources that sell are the Rare and Ultra Rare ones, i end up selling all my normal t5 hides/cloth to a vendor since no one will buy it off the auction house. I've gone back to DAOC on a free shard for now.