Pumping Irony

I mentioned recently I was taking a break from Vanguard until my friend Daniel gets to a level where we can duo and group. Vanguard was included in my Station Access, which I canceled recently, and SOE advised that I needed to allow the Station Access to expire before I could renew Vanguard on its own. Station Access expired a few days ago, but I’m going to hold off re-subscribing to Vanguard just to make sure I give Daniel time to get his cleric leveled up. Otherwise, I’ve got Dolndruth right in the middle of the CIS chain and it’s just damn fun so I’d be tempted to keep at it and perpetually out-level Dan’s cleric. Having an inactive account rather forces the issue.

So, that leaves me with only DDO and LOTRO as active accounts, though it’s debatable if I should count LOTRO since I’m a lifetime member.

Speaking of DDO, I did get to participate in the final event in the 2nd Anniversary last night. My guild set up a raid in the marketplace. That was the first time I’d ever been grouped with more than a single guild member in DDO, and I have to say even though I don’t know most of them very well yet, seeing all of us banded together did instill a sense of pride and of family. It was a nice feeling; a bit surprising yet very satisfying and welcome. I have screen shots of various times during the event but didn’t get time to resize and upload them to my gallery before I had to leave on this trip. When I get home I’ll either just upload them to the DDO gallery or perhaps edit this post with a few screen shots. Otherwise, I’ll defer to DDOcast where stories were posted, many with screen shots and videos, with each change that occurred during the past week of the Shavarath invasion!

Synopsis: Devils from the plane of Shavarath instigated an invasion of Stormreach. Random portals appeared in the marketplace and small bands of devils attacked every few hours. A few days later a huge swirling portal appeared over the Bazaar tent. Soon all the NPC vendors moved out of the Bazaar and into the Rusty Nail tavern near the bank. A floating citadel appeared between the bank and the Bazaar tent, with platforms to climb to the top and meet Veheer F’Nord who is leading the research team to discover the devils’ intentions and a way to defend Stormreach. The vortex over the Bazaar grew in power and the tent flailed helplessly in its wake. Devils took up residence and posted guard at each entrance to the Bazaar and a magical force field emanated from the portal, protecting the devils from further attack. Last night the Stormreach wizards set up a counter assault, firing magical beams into the portal from points along the tent’s perimeter. The beams coalesced into a single beacon of power which succeeded in destroying the portal to Shavarath! However the ensuing explosion also destroyed the Bazaar as well, leaving a debris-filled crater in the center of the city! A quest is now available to defend from four waves of increasingly difficult devils, minions, and bosses.

This is my first live event in an MMO and I must say, the whole counter-attack thing was really cool and immersive to watch and experience. Seeing the magical blasts go up in sequence, merge, then get out of the mages’ control, destroying both the portal and the tent was awesome to say the least. The “Devil Assault” quest… much less so. The whole thing consists of two rooms, the second of which the group gets locked into as waves of devils, hell-hounds, etc. appear from three portals. I expected much more out of that. Some of the NPC dialogue over the past week makes it sound like we’ll eventually take the battle to Shavarath itself, so I hope more is coming and that simple portal room wasn’t the extent of this event.

Aside from the DDO event, I’ve spent time in LOTRO as well. I mentioned some potential kinship drama recently. Still not totally sure what was behind it all, other than the bottom line was both Exodus and Swifty & Hammo wanted more members available for raids. Why not simply create an alliance? I’ve been told that it was Swifty & Hammo’s idea for the two kinships to merge, though in reality it seemed more like an acquisition where Swifty & Hammo remains with the name and leadership intact, and simply absorb Exodus members. Whatever. It seems most of Exodus stayed and I’m now hearing it was mainly the upper echelon of (former) Exodus “management” who wanted to be in S&H. Regardless, all of us are welcome in Swifty & Hammo, though I still have to ask why there’s no Exodus-S&H alliance?

Anyway, my original “rule” (and we know the rule about rules…) in LOTRO was that I would have two “mains” and each would get equal time. I did great with that up until the low twenties where I wound up taking the Lore-master out more. She is now level 33, and had a great time last night (stayed up way too late though) with a group in Garth Agarwen, an instanced outdoor dungeon in the Lone Lands. She’ll need to go in at least once more to get a few more quests complete, and she’ll also need to get a group to complete some quests that are outside the instance but still in that general area, where all mobs are elite. She also has her first quest from Radagast the Brown to get non-combat pets, so I am very much looking forward to getting those completed. I also spent some time with my Captain, Gared, who’s been stuck at level 24 for some time. I thought I’d get him through some quests and up to level 25 where he could ride the Bree-horse he was given as a holiday gift from Turbine. We did that, and got a few groups in the Lone Lands and Gared is already level 26! Thankfully, one or two of the quests also rewarded a piece of heavy armor. Gared is woefully outfitted with a smattering of both heavy and medium armor. He’s a prospector so I’ll need to take him out gathering rich iron and ask a kinsman armorsmith to hook him up with a full set of heavy armor. Gared fellowed with a kinswoman, Elibeth, who was also level 24 at the time, who had crafted her own set of heavy armor appropriate for that level and she graciously offered to make Gared a set as well if Gared provides the materials, so that will be his mission next week, provided Arwellyn doesn’t take all my LOTRO time.

Thankfully, I’m a Founder on LOTRO with a Lifetime membership, so that’s working out great. My super-awesome kinship has been very understanding that I didn’t want to get sucked into the “must.play.all.day.and.night” rut that I found myself in with WoW. I want to do the dungeons and raids with them badly, but I want to make sure I can keep things casual so I’ve been on break from LOTRO.

Turbine recently announced a special $9.99 per month plan for DDO which I jumped on. I’m also in a super-cool casual family-style guild in DDO and, while I love the adventures in the game, the problem with a totally group-focused game is that if I can’t find a group, I can’t play the game. I do look forward to playing the high-end content, and it sounds like some amazing and awesome content is coming this year. In the meantime, if I can save $5 per month to keep the subscription active and pop into Stormreach anytime I want, sounds great to me.

My final subscription was the SOE Station Access, where I have Everquest II, Vanguard, Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside active.

However…

I haven’t bothered to play Planetside in months because I never saw more than 10 players on a server and it has an atrocious UI along with horribly flaky mouse movement in the menus. I understand it was great in its day, but apparently that day has come and gone so even as a curiosity, Planetside was a failed venture for me.

SWG. Whoah. Not that I necessarily mind adding quests and all but SOE did such a poor job of it in their misguided NGE overhaul. I could even adapt to that but, much like Planetside, the game has serious population issues. To date, I’ve encountered a grand total of six players and have seen not a single line of chat from anyone. The graphics are badly dated and I truly resent being hard-locked at 30 fps when I could be having a much smoother experience. SWG was my first MMO and I have fond memories that nothing else will ever replace, but I guess it’s true: sometimes you just can’t go home again.

EQ2. I have created several characters of different races and classes and the farthest I’ve managed to advance any is level 9. Other than the random bit of music, I have struggled to find even a single enjoyable element to the game. EQ2 is quite popular and arguably has more content than any other MMORPG on the market. Originally, I decided I would put up the fight and work my way towards whatever quality content surely must be out there, but I finally had to be honest with myself. With other games out there willing to “show me the money” with quality content from Moment One, why should I have to punish myself wading through this muck? It’s a shame, and I wanted to like EQ2 but it just wasn’t in the cards.

Vanguard, surprisingly, I’m having a blast with and I’m in a friendly, fun and helpful guild. Even though Karen has abandoned us like red-headed step-children to go adventure in Norrath. Grouping has been incredibly fun as well as challenging, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being the “Rock Star Tank” again. Actually, I may be enjoying tanking more in Vanguard than I did in WoW, because the Dread Knight class simply oozes coolness and I enjoy the challenges it presents. I also have a real-life friend playing Vanguard now (also a new guild-mate, yay!) so that’s an additional compelling reason to play. Well-known population problems aside, I can honestly say I’ve seen quite an influx of brand-new players over the past few weeks since GU3 was released, and it’s been wonderful. I’m seeing players in nearly every town I visit, the chats are active, friendly, and Chuck Norris-free (well, mostly).

I wasn’t having any financial issues, but I finally had to come to terms that I was paying an extra $15 per month to play Vanguard, because as wistfully nostalgic as I may have been, I’m not going to return to SWG, nor can I tolerate being logged into EQ2 for more than a few minutes, so it’s wasted money.

So, as of a few minutes ago logging out of the Java chat with an SOE customer service rep (thanks for the help, by the way, Eric) I am now left with only a normal monthly subscription to Vanguard and the new 33% discounted subscription to DDO. Should another game roll down the pike, I can add it without batting an eyelash as the total cost would be close to what I’ve been paying anyway with the Station Access and full-price DDO, but right now there are no titles current or in the immediate future that are piquing my interest whatsoever.

Poor Dolndruth has been in an utterly foul mood of late. See, I’ve left him camped way out on Skawlra Rock for four weeks attempting to find a group for the final Hunter’s League quest. He complains there’s not enough shade and he’s tired of eating nothing but those giant crabs. Tonight, Dolndruth and I have huge smiles on our faces — it’s done! The Chaotica’s Greataxe of Protection is ours!

Heads up: this is just a ranting bitch-fest, nothing of “relevance.”

Playing Vanguard the past few days, re-familiarizing myself with the game and re-learning how to play my Dread Knight. Even learned a new trick: I never bothered fully reading the description of Harrow. Turns out, Harrow is one of my self-heals, not just a shadow step damage skill.

So, I remembered a warrior friend a few months ago introduced me to a couple NPC’s from the Hunter’s League who reward some really great gear. I’d completed the first quest or two and noticed my other gear was, well, pathetic. So off I went getting groups for the Hunter’s League quests. These quests are very grindy as well. (Oh wait, you EQ guys call it “hunting.” Hunter’s League. Ah! I see what they did there… ) They’re all “collect N body parts of mob X” and of course not every mob drops that particular body part, and to make matters worse if it does drop only one person in the group gets it. Needless to say, it’s a lot of killing but at least our groups were able to continue at a decent pace with very little downtime. Until… a quest called “No Rest for the Weary” which I had the displeasure of completing last night. The Hunter’s League NPC wants 10 Cyclops Eyes which were easily obtainable from a nearby location, and then 10 Patches of Zombie Flesh. Ah yes, the zombie flesh… Now, to obtain this zombie flesh we had to travel to a small area across the mountain from Upside Defense Garrison and find a hole in the ground which leads to a small underground dungeon. These zombies only spawn in one room, and the Hunter’s League quest line is very popular for the gear rewards so it’s normal to have multiple groups working on them. We showed up in the room to find another group already working on it. Ok, guess we’ll get in line. Now, these zombies only spawn every five or ten (seemed more like ten) minutes, and only in groups of 3-5 per spawn session. Most one at a time; the most we ever saw all night was two simultaneously. So… full group of 6 each needing 10 patches of flesh which don’t drop from every mob… Two hours after getting in line they finally got all their patches and it was our turn, which took another three hours. Of course, another group was in line after us, and I think one was coming in as we were leaving.

It goes without saying that this particular room needs its spawn timers significantly decreased. Regardless, while in many ways I enjoy the wide open and non-instanced world of Vanguard, in situations like that where multiple groups are doing nothing but waiting for hours for their chance to kill the same mobs, I honestly have to question anyone who dislikes instances. Five hours of my night to collect 10 body parts of a mob. Five hours is longer than it ever took to complete a WoW raid pre-TBC. Instances gets rid of the whole waiting in line business. Sure, I’ll admit that in this particular case simply having the mobs spawn faster and make the drop available to each person in the group would solve this particular problem, multiple groups or not. But as top-heavy as Vanguard is, I can’t say I have high hopes of being able to run the Ancient Port Warehouse raid with multiple guilds being in there at once and having no issues, despite the Vanguard team’s claim to the contrary.

There comes a point where we, the collective community of both players and developers, need to realize that despite all the extraneous bits sewn in to build a virtual world, in the end it’s the game play that matters. Instances have their trade-offs, although I don’t for a second buy into the “it breaks my immersion” routine I hear too often, but non-instancing popular content also takes a huge hit on game play. Maybe you guys are able to don your rose-colored glasses and over-romanticize your “good ol’ days” of EQ spawn camps, etc. but I cannot fathom telling a potential new Vanguard customer — even if I had the enthusiasm of Paul Barnett hyping up Warhammer Online — this same story of having to travel quite some time to arrive at the quest location, wait for everyone in the group to arrive, fight our way to the zombie room then sit for over two hours waiting our turn and then expecting my listener to have any interest in the game.

The industry has evolved and moved on from EQ’s mechanics for many reasons, but here’s #1 on my list: we expect our games now to be games. A few years ago we heard the phrase “graphical MUD” being tossed around liberally to describe MMORPG’s but of all the old-school titles, that most describes EQ. Most of the guys I grouped with for the zombie flesh were EQ players as well, and one described EQ as “more hardcore.” I disagree. EQ was simply more primitive (first of its kind, after all) and bottom line: more cumbersome. Text input? Give me a break already, like anyone these days can bother taking the time to type correctly, much less learn to spell correctly. I doubt anyone thinks to include leet-speak and chat-speak into text parsers either so the impatient kids can continue their game once they tire of reading line after line of irrelevant quest dialogue and tell the NPC to “stfu n00b i pwn j00!”

In other Vanguard non-news, yet another alleged former Sigil employee aired some dirty laundry on the FOH forums today. Fun read, and I can actually believe most, if not all, of what was said whether it was true or not. Much of it we knew already but it’s still an eye-opener in places. Brad McQuaid addicted to opium? Explains much of his behavior, that’s for certain. Ego + Drugs = Failure.

Oh and for the record, Vanguard’s “bonus xp” boost sucks! My Dread Knight gained 5 levels doing 3 group quests. Utterly ridiculous! Rest xp is bad enough, though fairly mild overall in Vanguard but this bonus xp boost is causing me to out-level whatever content I wanted to do. Why rush us to level cap when there’s only the single just-released raid chunk?

Ok, the good news: Game Update #3 Phase 1 is being implemented as I write this!

UPDATE 3 – PHASE 1

· Ksaravi Gulch
· Guild Hall Trophies
· Player Housing / Guild Housing
· Optimizations/Bug Fixes
· Spam Filter

1. Ksaravi Gulch
The low to high teens adventuring area of Ksaravi Gulch in Qalia has been revamped. It now features new group and solo content, with many quest lines for either type of player as well as an enhanced storyline, additional items and the chance to fly into battle on an elite black wyvern mount.

* 3 all new solo quest lines offering 20 new quests
* 12 group quests in an exciting new group quest line
* Fly into battle on an elite black wyvern
* All-new rewards, like Coronarian Gloves and Ice Ember poison

2. Guild Hall Trophies
The Guild Hall Trophy item can now be placed in a house or any Guild Headquarters. The buff from the trophy will be shared by all guild members that are online. There will be three trophies to choose from (one for each of Vanguard’s icon characters).

The Guild Hall Trophy can only be picked up by the person who placed it.

3. Player Housing / Guild Housing
All player housing areas should have a crafting center within one chunk’s distance. You will find crafting trainers, vendors, taskmasters, and stations. In addition, a few select areas (including all of the islands) have had flying mount renters added.

In addition to that, Guildhall adventuring drops should now be much easier to obtain. Mnalus Fungus will now rarely drop off most mobs in Lair of the Mnalus. Mummy Dust will now rarely drop off most mobs in Nusibe. Fiend Blood will now rarely drop off most mobs in Rhaz Inkur.

4. Optimizations / Bug Fixes
Fixing bugs and optimizing the game have been a big priority for us. We’ve put in fixes for over a dozen high-profile client crash fixes as well as hundreds of bugs. We’ve fixed a major memory leak and even made some sound optimizations. On the whole, a lot of players’ performance should improve with this patch.

With this patch, we’re also laying the groundwork to start implementing optimized NPC models. You should see them start showing up in the near future (likely in Qalia first).

5. Spam Filter
Ask, and you shall receive! It’s been in the works for quite some time, but Game Update 3 unleashes the code that should help eliminate a lot of the spam you may receive in-game. The code works similarly to those featured in other SOE games, in that it automatically filters messages flagged as spam, and reports them to Customer Service.

Source: VGPlayers.com

When I first saw the bit about the black wyvern, I got all excited, hoping they’d completed the first true flying mount quest ahead of schedule, but as it turns out, the black wyvern is a temporary mount in the Ksaravi Gulch zone which they had mentioned in a post I’d skipped over a few days earlier.

Now for the bad news:

Vanguard Development Moves to the San Diego Studio

The Vanguard development team is relocating its offices to SOE’s San Diego campus effective Monday, October 15, 2007. As part of the integration into the SOE family, the developers will benefit from having access to shared resources and the combined experience of SOE’s other game development teams. As a result, not every Carlsbad employee has been invited to stay with the development team.

Under the new leadership of Thom Terrazas, an eight-year SOE veteran, SOE will continue its commitment to Vanguard and its players. The remaining Vanguard team members are going to continue to deliver on an exceptional product. They are a creative force in the online games space and we look forward to continuing the vision for Vanguard and to continue to deliver groundbreaking game play. SOE remains committed to seeing Vanguard grow and prosper.

Source: VGPlayers.com

That’s right, SOE is integrating the Vanguard team yet again and letting go more developers. This time the axe has fallen on Director of Development David “Hasium” Gilbertson and Steve “Aruspex” Williams, who was interviewed in Episode 17 of the Voyages of Vanguard podcast.

Forum links courtesy of Jaye:

Hasium’s goodbye post
PhAtHoM’s hello post

Ok, now that I’ve got my über-esque gaming rig working again, I installed Vanguard a few days ago. I actually picked up Vanguard and Everquest 2 on the same day, but I’ll be honest: EQ2 is really struggling to hold my interest. I’m rather shocked that I am so far enjoying Vanguard so much, however. I didn’t expect to; I got it more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. I was aware of the game while it was in development (who wasn’t?) though I can’t say much of what little hype I actually read was appealing. Some was, some was not. I’ve never seen non-instanced content done right so I’m definitely interested in seeing how the (former) Sigil team decided to handle it. Of course, I’m quite well aware of how the game has been bashed over performance, crashes, and so forth. I’m obviously coming into the game post-Game Update 2, which claims to have improved performance a bit. Using both the in-game fps meter and Fraps, I’m getting anywhere from 25+ in cities to 40-50 in the wilderness and just experienced my first CTD which gave me the opportunity to write this.Now, as evidenced in my recent Bartle test, I’m a huge fan of exploration. The little I’ve seen of Telon so far has been a blast to explore and find new things. Telon, as with LOTRO’s Middle Earth, feels more natural. I grew up in the country and when I went hiking or exploring I didn’t run into mobs every 50 feet like we do in Azeroth, which gets aggravating. I’m also attempting to pay attention to the little bit of lore I’ve been exposed to so far.

While I don’t think Vanguard ended up as the “hardcore” game it was originally lauded as by used car salesman extraordinaire hype-master Brad McQuaid, there is a distinct lack of hand-holding in Vanguard. Even in areas where I didn’t even feel I was being hand-held in other games, Vanguard leaves me hanging to find my own way. Which is not a bad thing. Sometimes I’m given a direct location to go to, other times I’m pointed in the general direction, more or less. I can chalk that up to “exploration” as well, trying to find the NPC I need to find.

Without further ado, here is my Orc Dread Knight, Dolndruth! He just reached level 11 this morning, and is level 3 in Crafting (smithing) and level 4 in Diplomacy. Before I continue, I would like to add that I absolutely love that we get mounts at level 10! Developers of future games, pay attention here! The hardcore players begged for “meaningful travel” (I’ll have to write a post someday exploring just what the hell that means) and rallied when McQuaid promised just that, but of course the hardcore are only hardcore in forums. Once they actually had to deal with “meaningful travel” they changed their tune and asked for faster means of travel. But I digress. Making us run all over your landscapes does not make us appreciate your hard work any more or less. It does, however, annoy us when it takes too long to complete Fedex quests or worse, when players have to wait on each other to travel. Our enjoyment (and annoyance) is more “meaningful” than forcing us to walk for nearly an hour to talk to some NPC who sends us walking an hour right back to where we started.

Unlike WoW, which is the most recent MMORPG I played that let the player choose a faction, I have no clue what faction Dolndruth is a member of, if any. Is he “evil” or at least “bad” simply by virtue of being an orc like WoW would have us? Do I get to choose via repuation grinding which faction I am a member of? I have no idea what races Troy and Jaye have, but if I ever met them in-game can I group with them? I have no friggin clue. So perhaps either a little hand-holding could be in order, or at least have the NPC’s teach me in-game with some engaging dialogue because it would be a shame for newcomers like myself to enjoy working up a given character only to discover that character is unable to group, communicate with, or otherwise play the game with other players or friends. I think the character creation screen should definitely go into the background of the races you can choose as well as the nations. Orcs start on Kojan and I don’t recall at any time seeing any description of what it means to be a Kojan native. Some of the names and descriptions I’ve seen so far appear to have an Asian influence, but again Dolndruth is only 11 so he and I have not yet learned much about the part of Telon we’re adventuring in.

Crafting is interesting, if a bit confusing. It’s much more hands-on than your WoW or LOTRO style “set it and forget it” crafting. It’s not quite up to pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies crafting though (at least what I can remember of it). Dolndruth reached level 3 smithing this morning, but not without a few questions in the Kojan chat. He’s got three 3-slot tool belts. Off the top of my head, I’ve encountered situations where at least four tools are needed due to the actual crafting process plus dealing with complications. I bought every noob tool the vendor offered, they are in the tool belts but the game only pays attention to a single belt and does not let you change equipment while crafting. Some helpful players instructed me to use the Tool Belts button on the crafting frame rather than the character sheet and left click the tool belt I want to use (gotta remember which belt I stored which tool in…) to make that belt active (green check mark indication). Maybe that’s a “hardcore” aspect? It seems like a bit too much work to me. I’m getting the hang of it anyway and I’ve got all the tools I’ve used so far for smithing in two belts so I can quickly swap between the two but still… I guess technically I can only wear one belt so perhaps it’s just being realistic. But it was very confusing and I’m thankful that Vanguard players have been pretty helpful and encouraging of new players. Did the crafting tutorial cover changing belts? If it did, I completely missed it. In fact, I don’t even think I had multiple belts and tools when I did the tutorial.

Diplomacy is another interesting sphere of advancement. When I first read about how diplomacy would be a card game, I’ll admit I was beyond skeptical. After playing it a bit and giving it consideration, real-life diplomacy and negotiations is very much like a poker game. You have to know when to bluff, when to show your game-face, when to compromise or concede and when to go in for the kill. Or [Cheese Factor Alert!] as Kenny Rogers so aptly put it:

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.
Know when to walk away, and know when to run.
You never count your money, when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’, when the dealin’s done.

Once again, confusion has run rampant with diplomacy. Learning the cost of each card was the easiest step but I haven’t quite figured out if the diplomacy quest description is giving me hints which cards I should be taking aside from informing me which colors will be used, so don’t choose cards of a color that isn’t used in that negotiation. So often, though I’ll load up on card colors the description says I can spend but the NPC never plays cards which arms me with enough dots to spend my cards on. (Sorry, I haven’t quite learned the correct phraseology yet for the different aspects of diplomacy.) Which, I suppose, is ultimately how to win: if you’re able to spend your own cards without giving your opponent any quarter to spend his own. Like everything else so far, it’s very much a learning experience; trial and error are ruling the day in Vanguard.

Yes, Vanguard still has some issues, many of which I haven’t even seen yet. The major one is Vanguard has the worst map ever. Ever. In the history of humankind. Ever. Minor issues that lower my immersion are aesthetic in nature. Many textures are just… weird and jarring to look at. The Unreal engine tends to make things too shiny, which is all good and fine in Gears of War but when I’m looking at Dolndruth wearing his cloth diplomacy outfit, I should not be seeing cloth shine and glisten. I have volumetric clouds turned off to boost my framerate, but honestly didn’t see much difference with them. Telon only has a single sky, it’s always filled with the exact same high thinly broken cloud layer. When it rains (and it does quite often) I look up at the clouds and think “uh… it should not be raining.” But then Turbine takes top honors when it comes to crafting a believable virtual world. Their Middle Earth has all the various day cycles; various cloud cover; when it rains it might drizzle or downpour, complete with the occasional thunderstorm. We can see the clouds rolling in on a sunny day so we’ll know in advance when it’s going to rain and the clouds will darken if a storm comes in. But… Vanguard released way too early and Sigil admitted it. It’s still essentially in beta today. Someday it will be release-ready and perhaps they’ll add the extra “fluff” to make Telon a believable world. But in the meantime I’m still enjoying my experiences there and look forward to more!