Vanguard’s Beta Break AND the Chamber of Leaks

If you been keeping up on the vanguard with Vanguard, double take, most of you have probably already read the leaked beta newsletters a hundred times over until your brain started to rot for Vanguard. I recently rambled thoughts on mmo marketing and developers utilizing FilePlanet is a smart move because it’s a good tool for exposure and distribution, even if the service does get a bad wrap from the playerbase like being the devil and how buggy downloads devour newborn babies through a intraweb continuum. In Vanguard’s recent intentional beta leaks, you bet your ass the leaks were intentional, the gaming public and current testers discover Vanguard is partnering with FilePlanet and preparing and ramping up the hype for future beta phases.

File Planet

We’ve got some rather big changes coming up in the next week, concerning how the Vanguard beta client is distributed and accessed. Beginning next week, the Vanguard beta will be hosted exclusively by FilePlanet.

The Bad: Sometime next week, your Vanguard login client will become invalid and you will need to re-download and reinstall the game.

The Good: The reason for this is that we are working to streamline beta and make it a much easier process for both the user AND the Sigil and Microsoft teams as we gear up for phase 3 and beyond.

FilePlanet contacted us a while ago and asked what they could do to be involved with the project, even graciously offering to host our beta client (I bet next time they ask how big it is first!). As this move will free up more of our resources for actual development (a very good thing), we agreed.

You will need to have a FilePlanet account to download the game. You will not need a premium account, though if you already have one or want to get one that is perfectly fine too. We know many folks have had issues with slow download speeds and excessive queues in the past but we have been assured steps have been taken to prevent this.

Surprise, surprise! The funny thing about this particular announcement is that I swear I can remember Brad McQuaid promising over a year ago Sigil wouldn’t partner with any outside service like FilePlanet because Microsoft already had such an infrastructure in place. Not a big deal, I’m not going to spend the next several hours digging up the post and I could very well be wrong, but the proof is in the pudding. FilePlanet has the eyeballs, it ranks high on Alexa in the two thousand range, a much higher ranking than Vanguard’s official website. This upcoming transition is partially a marketing move despite what their marketing shills may tell the public.

This signals several assumptions. The newsletter leaks were intentional, but it’s not a big deal, on various forums there have been Vanguard beta testers breaking the NDA, most of Vanguard’s leaks I’ve come across that don’t resonate from Silky Venom are negative in nature and Vanguard desperately needed a positive viral spin as a defense maneuver. I have gleaned and included one of the recent negative reviews about the Vanguard beta.

From eqnecro.net…

Because my beta account is worthless now anyway.

“I laugh at games like Vanguard calling themselves “next generation” mmorpgs. There hasn’t been a “next generation” mmorpg ever, since they all revolve around leveling treadmills and the endless pursuit of new loot until you eBay out of boredom. The real hillarity in this game is just how blatant the leveling treadmill/timesinks are.

There’s 3 Leveling treadmills in the game, and all of them are equal in lack of fun.

Combat
You’d think this is fun but it really isn’t. They talked up a huge game about how Vanguard’s combat involves more than just hitting Auto-Attack and hoping the monster runs out of Hitpoints before you do. You get to see a monsters attack ahead of time, and simply choose whatever button is flashing to deflect it. That’s it, that’s their huge “next generation” improvement to the boredom of playing a melee: waiting for icons to flash and then click on them hoping the server lag doesn’t cause the spells to timeout.

Solo’ing is non-existant. You can solo for hours and you won’t come near the exp you get if you wait around for a group. Solo’ing is immensely boring, since every tactic involves spamming your direct damage spell while tanking. Deaths are harsh, you lose exp, you’re naked, and you have to run back to your corpse. Usually you’ll die on the way since monsters hit you from far away with their extendo arms of death. There’s also this hillarious bug right now where the guards assist the monster its fighting and will kill you.

Tradeskills

I’ve only tried tradeskilling once, and was amazed at the time involvement. According to the forums, it takes just as long as combat leveling to level while tradeskilling. Apparently its like EQ2, you sit there and some bars go up and down and you have to mash flashing buttons until you “finish” a product. Apparently some guy did this for days and days and is level five and makes “Grade D table legs”.

Harvesting takes for fucking ever. You have to group with other harvesters and you fight trees like you would a monster. Thats right, you need to get certain harvesting classes too, like “gleaners” and “refiners” in your group, and you sit around wacking some tree until the tree dies and then you get some loot. You then have to rest, since you get “tired” while wacking trees all day.

Want to solo while harvesting? Oh no you can’t, because solo’ing doesn’t exist at all in this game, if you solo it will A) take forever B) not get you anything meaningful C) you’ll fail alot.

Parley..or the worst thing ever invented and is made fun of constantly on the beta forums

This is the best new “feature” of this great “next generation mmorpg”. You have to parley with the npcs to get your quests. This is yet another ridiculous time sink. Thats right, when you want to talk to a npc about a quest, it opens a parley window where you fight the npc like a monster using arguments. You have the “dirty joke” spell, which lowers his liking of you, so then you have to reply with a “nice compliment” which then makes him like you more but then you have to keep the conversation interesting so you attack using a “interesting story”…I’m not making this shit up, you basically hammer keys until the conversation bar reaches the end(without other bars getting too low, its exactly like EQ2’s crafting system) and you win the “parley”.

Here’s what is so great about it. EVERY SINGLE NPC makes you parley with him to get quest info. What is funny about it is that 95% of them have no quests or interesting info to give you, so you go from npc to npc parleying, mashing keys, until you “win” the “encounter” and you get nothing from it.

Overall

This game just fucking blows. There’s nothing positive I can say about it, it is that bad. I’ve beta’ed alot of video games and this one is fundamentally fucked. I don’t think I could come up with a worse video game if I tried. I’m amazed the login screen doesn’t have some sort of time sink or if I want to customize my UI I don’t have to parley it with “witty jokes”. LONG LIVE EVERQUEST BEFORE LUCLIN!!”

I don’t know this person, so I’m not going to this person’s opinion high in regard, this person laughs, well I guffaw when I read about how everyone on the internet who has an opinion about some game has somehow magically been a beta tester for every single mmo ever released, “I have the most impressive beta testing resume and am single handedly smarter than the developers and I also have illuminated lighting in my parent’s basement” /cockwave. This former beta tester comes off as a forum troll more than anything else. However, there are a few points in their tirade worth addressing.

All mmogs, next-generation or not, and I do get tired of developers babbling about how their game is truly next-generation, will involve a time investment, in order to play any game, no matter the leveling or adventuring curve will require a time investment, a time sink, even a mmog that gives players everything in the beginning, the repetition involved in learning how to play those characters will be the time sink. There will always be some leveling time sink, even if the levels are incognito.

Too begin with Vanguard was proposed as a tedious difficult game, learn 2 read the faq next time you sign up for a beta. Vanguard has been promised to be a group oriented game ever since McQuaid started talking about plans for the game on the forums. For me, I prefer a mixed bag, I prefer soloing when I can’t get a group, but I’m also not one of those mmo players that has it ingrained in my mind that there should only be one mmo as if it were the one ring, to rule them all, and how everything else should fail or already is a failure. I want the genre to see numerous successes, I appreciate the mmo landscape as a whole and I want a myriad of options for us players. Hell yes, I am biased and have my own personal preferences, but the above mongrel was warned ahead of time that Vanguard was not going to be a solo accessible game.

From most breaking-the-law reports I have read the parley implementation of the last several months is complete and utter donkey ass, on paper the system was an excellent idea, even if similar systems have already been developed before in a non mmog fashion, making the idea and implementation not revolutionary, but certainly evolutionary. The problems remain in how the developers implement such a system and I’m assuming the current parley system is train-wrecked. I would rather see the system implemented for special quests and those players who are more social in nature taking advantage of parley, reward these players for fitting into a socializing playtype instead of punishing everyone who isn’t. I posted some ideas for Vanguard’s parley system over a year ago, ideas are a dime a dozen, but if Vanguard seriously wants to piss off a lot of players by forcing everyone to trash talk or picking up npcs for quests, the developers must be accomplishing their goal!

Socializer, Killer, Achiever, Explorer.

All of these playstyles blur the lines and some players do not specifically fit into one role. With that said, most quests we see in mmorpgs offer all of these very basic elements in some form, but what I think we will see with future quest systems, such as the one in Vanguard is more detailed and specific ways of the above types when completing an objective, giving those player(s) several paths and more player driven type content.

A quest may want the player to go kill X amount of mobs in order to get to X point in the quest line before expanding on the rest of the quest, this is usually done after they bring back those ears, heads, etc, from X npcs. (killer)

After the player kills a mob on that same quest, it could branch out and the player can take an item that mob dropped, equip it and gain enough faction, allowing them to enter the cave or what have you and bypass the majority of the killing and be presented with another explorer type only quest for completion. (explorer)

Where the player originally obtained the quest or task, the npc may of gave the player an option or another hint on where to go and instead of killing X amount of npcs, they will have to complete several small objectives that primarily revolve around delivery, killing, and some exploring. You can do this in a variety of ways and not only by using npcs, developers can set up certain clues along the way with objects instead. With these branches the reward may be shown in some form or hinted at. (achiever)

As for socializer, a bit harder to come up with actual quests that just strictly revolve around socializing and giving those players a good reward for their efforts, (sadly in fault to spoiler sites), but maybe not necessairly that hard to implement some socialistic concepts directly integrated into the quest system. Allow socializers to fish out other clues and hints or back stories from npc’s. Also, implement this into the rumor system where socializers can earn hidden levels that will deter the other types from obtaining a higher level branched quest that only a true-socializer can acquire. (socializer)

I would think that it’s hard to balance all types into one quest, especially if the ending is the same, if the ending of each branch is somewhat different than it’s not as hard imo. And I must point out, this type of system requires even more hand crafted–placed content, which means more development costs in the end, but who doesn’t like a good challenge.

I don’t think all quests will offer all these detailed paths and different methods of completion, (after all, there are more players that fit under the killing-achiever types) but I’m sure some quests–task will and once the substance is applied (actual content) I’m sure we will see some real exciting content and choices for the above play-types. (including crafters) It’s a safe assumption that we will see quests that require several of the above playstyles all at once or in order, creating an interdependency for some quests. What, I really would like to see is more content for larger based encounters that integrate more exploring and socialistic content (puzzle solving within objects in the world found by explorers) instead of the strictly standard killing–achievement playstyles players encounter in most mmo’s today.

More Vanguard secrets promised this week, I’ll also rehash a Vanguard beta leak from a familiar name I’ve recognized for the last five years, an opinion I somewhat trust that holds some substance.