Between LFG tools and VOIP? I’d go with LFG tools. Between auction houses and VOIP? I’d go with auctions. Between content and VOIP? I’d go content. See a pattern yet?

I use VOIP constantly in LOTRO because I group a lot for instances, etc. Even when I’m not in the mood to turn on the mic and talk, I’ll listen because it’s just easier to give vocal instructions than to type. Especially in PvP, which is what WAR is focused on.

Teamspeak and Ventrilo are only “easily available” when you have someone willing to pony up and pay the bill for the server.

Turbine has done it…but, really…how many others have launched with it?
Tabula Rasa? DDO, LOTRO?
But, that’s about it in a nutshell.

When companies try to add the whole shebang, you get companies like…
Microsoft.
The “cornering” the market issue is a problem.

Teamspeak, Xfire, Vent…all easily available..

And does everyone use VOIP?
I do not, and I have had many a guild not use it either.

But, then I would argue that WAR’s type of gameplay is more conducive to VOIP than LOTRO (why it even exists in LOTRO still baffles me, with it’s PvE centric bent, is kind of silly…RP’ers don’t use VOIP) and as such, WAR really requires it.
Thanks to the strategic layout of DDO, it works great there also.
I DO agree that WAR should have included it.

But it may have ended up being cut due to time concerns..

Keep up the reports and thanks

Sorry that the Shift +Z isn’t toggling for you currently. I just hit them and it makes things go away and I don’t have to hold them down. It might be an issue with your current keyboard not sure.

I understand the range pull your speaking of and I tried that a bit, but just running in and laying waste to all things for me was just fun. When I played the Tank I didn’t have a lot of issues needing a healer in the early levels, I pretty much mowed through everything and still survived. But if you need a healer to help, just let me know, I’ve got a level 8 Shammy on the Destruction server named, Orksnout, just let me know and I’ll give you a hand.

The game isn’t perfect for sure. They still have a lot of bugs and lag to fix. Just last night we tried to take a few keeps from the Destruction side on Averheim and with 40 or more players in the area my game just stuttered the whole time. I’m hoping that the lag issue gets fixed soon because the whole point of doing Keep sieges is to do it with tons of people and if the server can’t take the load or you keep getting poor frame rates it won’t keep people interested for long. But with all its current bugs, the game is more enjoyable to me that AoC was. I’m sure that WoW and other had their fair share of bugs the first month so I’m not going to really do much complaining. If I don’t see any significant fixes in the next few months, I’ll probably be limiting my play till they do, but for now, the joy of playing out weights the bugs.

Only reason I was using the axe is to pull a mob to me rather than running in and body-pulling several. Sure, I’m a tank and can take some hits, but there are no healers at all. Tanks kinda need healers.

I’m avoiding Lua addons right now. I don’t want to get back into that habit, and Lua’s stack and garbage collection uses up RAM and doesn’t release it, forcing an actual reboot to refresh the RAM. I’m already noticing that WAR is showing the exact same behavior as a couple other games with well-known memory leaks, so I’m not going to add extra Lua code on top of it to compound the problem.

As for adding VOIP in later, it’s too late. If you don’t launch with something like that, it gets ignored later. In WoW’s case, I hear it’s just not very good but even something like the LFG tool added so late to the game, no one will use it. Same with LOTRO, their LFG tool doesn’t work great and is a bit hidden and unintuitive but the game didn’t launch with it so by default players just use the LFG chat.

For the FSAA, I’m no video tech guru but from the little I think I understand (vague enough?) the engine itself has to support it even if the game doesn’t actually have an option to select it. I have a handful of games I can use the drivers to forcefully enable FSAA but I’m told that’s because the engine (or whatever) will support it. Vanguard, on the other hand does not have any FSAA ability so I can turn on every driver setting I want and it won’t make a bit of difference.

In Game VOIP is something that even WoW didn’t have till just this year and its aweful, so that technology just needs to improve a bit. I still use Vent and Teamspeak because they are just better in most reguards.

Just give it some time, I’m sure you will like the game.

Trust me, the Axe attack is something you will learn to love. Yes it takes a few secs to use it, but at the higher levels it does some serous damage to fleeing enemies, I know, I’ve been killed a few times by chosen tossing axes before.

When your grouped with people, it will show you what career they are playing, but it will never show you the career of your opponent in RVR or the people that aren’t grouped with you. But I’ve never found a need for that information anyway. I think not knowing that what your facing in combat is what makes this game interesting. After a while, you’ll learn what each enemy class looks like. The healers are the only ones you need to learn first anyway.

Also, Tanks are Tanks so forget about any range attacks besides the Axe. I’m surprised they even have that available to the Tank Careers. I played a Chosen in the first Preview Weekend and all you have to do is get in the enemies face and pound away. Eventually, you’ll get a slowing attack so they can’t run far and after that you get a crippling effect that will root them, I think.

You can down load mods to help with global cool downs and out of range attacks. There are several good ones out already, like Auto loot and junk seller that help with inventory problems.

You can also que up your attacks similar to CoH, which helps with any cool down issues.

I think you have a legitimate grip about a few things, but I think you need to give it a bit more time before rushing to judgement. It’s hard to enjoy a new game when your spending your time comparing it to another game, which is what I did with LOTRO and CoH, but I did give them both a good month to annoy me first lol.

* No integrated VOIP

It’s one of those features that are “would be nice to have” when it comes down to hitting a release or releasing before the money is gone. This is why most games release then add it in. DDO was the exception, but we know how awesome and content filled that game was now don’t we? (Oh, yeah you’re still playing it sorry!)

* No key bind to toggle names.
* UI toggle only works while held.

First of all, I didn’t know there was a UI toggle – which key is it? Second, yeah, no key bind to toggle names. There are a number of things missing that I hope they put in soon.

* The awesome font doesn’t scale well. It’s extremely difficult to actually read names over NPC heads until pretty close to them.

Don’t forget it’s somewhat buggy when you try to adjust the UI Scale. For some reason I was stuck with larger fonts in one chat window then the other when they were both set to be the same thing.

Oh and resizing the chat windows? WTH?

* No FSAA.

Yeah, it was likely a “do we enable it knowing people will complain if they lag during RVR or do we do something else instead?”. Can’t you force it with your video drivers?

* Tooltips do not give class information.

Yeah, I thought that was weird too. Even in the Guild panel, the class icons don’t give tooltips on what they are. I can tell you what is what by looking at them but I can’t remember half of what the icons are. (Frisbee surfers are Magus btw).

* Global cooldowns.

EQ2 actually did away with global re-user timers. Have you played it? As a melee type (i.e. no casting times for abilities) you can burn through your energy in no time at all. It sort of stops being about picking which ability to use and more like which ability is up so I can whack-a-mole it.

Not that I don’t disagree with you.

* Progress bar casting.

LOL Um… I don’t think you get any other ranged ability. My Witch Elf has only had Throw Dagger for 16 levels now. I think it’s one of the few non-spell spells. Honestly, I don’t know why they put a cast bar in there.

As a melee class, I only have one other ability that triggers a casting bar; it’s a finisher that performs a series of strikes over a short time. The casting bar lets me know if it is interrupted, doesn’t fire or the target moves out of reach.

Ideally, they’d use some sort of animation to indicate a casting and when it’s done but animations can get lost in the thick of things and things get pretty thick in the game. It’s an obvious indication of an ongoing action and it’s completion.

* Exit Game… doesn’t. Well, it does, but it logs out first. 20 seconds.

WAR is horribly slow at logging out and it is just as bad for exiting the game. I noticed they didn’t have a “Exit now” option.

Another thing is that they don’t have a built in clock anywhere that is obvious. Oh sure, you can enable timestamps in the chat, but then you have to say something to get the time. I suspect they have a /time command. (There is a clock addon…)

Oh, to add to your cons (I think Blackguard ranted about this), the mail system in game is horrid. It doesn’t have any type ahead for names your going to send something to. You’re limited to one send item slot and you can only send mail every 20 seconds. All this adds up to making it really frustrating to send people things.

I think there was another gripe but I can’t remember it at the moment. I’m complaining about the lack of LOS on turrets and player blocking seeming to effect your allies more than enemies on my blog… among some other things.

@Tipa – WAR will tell you in a tooltip how much XP you’ll get from quests as well. There are some exceptions like the Kill Collector who doesn’t give you any advance quests, instead it rewards you with XP and Gold.