VGOEmulator.net

I had a long post that got eaten by my browser, so I'll keep this one short.

I'd like to see Vanguard mostly as she was in Beta 4/5 with some significant caveats below.

This means removing all 51+ content for later (bringing back APW and the post 51 content retuned to level 50/Tiered Armor as suggested by others).

Returning the Pantheon of the Ancients and all other re-tuned/level changed dungeons back to their original levels.
Removing IoD and the later uber-quest lines such as the Hunter's Quest, whose loot >> standard loot.
Bringing back original Racial Starting Areas.
Brining back the original XP Curve - Mobs like the low-level sorta-Raid Mob Dailuk and the long quest chains for CIS weapons or original Pantheon weapons are pointless with the current Curve. As others have stated, the game was designed for slow leveling.
Bring back the more difficult quest lines at places like Lord Tseng's Tomb
Bring back the charm: Vampire Curse (mentioned in detail in another thread), Mothra, KOS factions and other things that made Vanguard feel more like a cohesive world and less like various disconnected theme parks.

The Big Caveat

I say mostly because I'd like to see it with fixes to the original content/design:

Vanguard had issues at launch, which were never fixed or made worse by SOE.

I Multi Quest Problems.
-Multi-quests. A multi-quest is a tiered questline that requires you to complete Quest A before getting Quest B and completing Quest B before Quest C. Multi-questing is a huge problem in every MMO except EQ. What happens with multi-questing is you spend far too much time back-flagging friends/new folks or far too much time running back and forth between a quest giver who is nowhere near the questing area for turn-ins. Not all multi-questing is bad: Unicorn/Flying Mount quests should be long, involved and grindy.

But they should be the exception to the rule. Multi-questing, especially back-flagging, is a BAD THING (tm) because it leads groups with open spots to refuse to add new players who are LFG because they are on Quest B or Quest C and they don't want to back-flag a new player. The Run from Town to Dungeon back to Town is a bad thing because it is needlessly boring (see my comment) and makes no sense. If tiered Quests A,B,C are all in the same place. The questgiver should give ALL three quests to the players who then can go and work through the quests without having to run back to Town (unless necessary for other reasons: healing, level advancement, etc).

EQ figured out the solution in 1999 to the back-flagging problem: all quest mobs should drop their quest objects whether or not you're on the quest. So if the Quest C requires the Head of the Giant Frog. That head drops for all people in a group. This means groups do not have to backflag, if 5 members are on Quest C and they bring on a 6 member they can go kill the Giant Frog. Everyone, including #6 gets the Frog head and the 5 players can go on their way. #6 can look for groups to complete Quests A,B at his leisure, once he completes B he has an autocomplete for C (since he has the heads).

II Loot Pinata.
Another problem with Vanguard, was intentionally or not, at times it was a loot piñata. Fast respawn on a lot of named critters meant that lots of magical items flowed into the world. Something needs to be heavily toned down: either lower respawn rates, or lower chances of magical item drop, or some combination of the two.

III Find Your Buddies/Giant World Problem

The Rift system was a bad fix, cheap flying mounts was worse. Again, EQ solved this problem with Druid/Wizard ports - the Emu would need something similar.

My basic philosophy (insert scene from Fight Club here) is that guys want to face something that will punch them in the face, but not all the time, and only if they have a chance to fight back. So slow leveling, and tough monsters are a good thing, but the reward has to be worth the risk and investment of time. That's why it doesn't work to slow leveling but leave in the IOD/Hunter Uber items, as it blows the risk/reward ratio for early itemization.

Similar, having to run everywhere, all the time, is too much getting punched in the face, not enough getting to fight back: so there need to be some options to get places more quickly, given the right party makeup, or help from a friendly Druid.

IV Broken Systems

Enough has been said on this below: things like Rogue Poisons needed to work from the get-go but didn't.

V Continuity

Not much to say on this - but one thing lacking in Telon was continuity of lore - it'd be nice if things like CIS lore existed outside (even if just a bit) the CIS areas. It's the little details that make a world: like a member of CIS trying to recruit new followers in Khal.

Anyway, back to studying.

P.S. Bring back the ol' Hound of Gorm.

Tad, well spoken and I am in agreement with mostly all of it. The one place where I lose you is the "find a friendly druid" scenario. While it is my biggest hope and dream that VGOEmulator becomes a behemoth of happy players in the 100's if not more, chances are populations will be low. You may not find players to port you around, or even get a group strong enough to defeat the "challenging content we all miss". It will be our job (on the official server at least) to try and find a happy medium for all these things. While I do NOT want Vanguard to be a soloists dream, we have to think about that - just in case. Even if it's solved by creating custom speed/port pots and clickies.

But I'm with you. I really want the non-gimped VG back, too... and this is the secondary goal of the main project.

Hey all! Just recently found you all making this amazing opportunity to relive some fantastic VG times just would like to chime in with some thoughts!

I can def see why riftways should be brought back in since we have no idea how many people will be on the server at any given time.

Regarding experience, over time as you all know they increased the gain of xp ( or lowered the amount needed to lvl ). I would like if we could go back to some older times when it took longer to level. There were so many times when just doing a questline you would out lvl the area before even completing it. However, if that is not an option perhaps make those longer questlines have higher drop rates to make sense with how quickly leveling is for the area.

Also maybe take out rented flying mounts for x amount of time to make the actual flying mount quest a huge achievement.

Im sure i could think of more thoughts down the line! Sorry if these have been answered already.

-Jaz

Welcome, Jaz

We're going to attempt to fix the XP curve, yes. When content design starts, we'll get a better handle on what we need to change to bring back the normal "flow" of player progression. It will be a careful balance.

For things like allowing Riftways or providing rented mounts; that will be server-by-server, offered through our VGO Rules System. For the Official Server, it depends on the feedback we get from our Polls once we get near our Beta phase (which will be quite a while from now).

I can't imagine logging into Telon without the diverse raid content that PoTA has to offer as well as the other 51+ content. I played before and after its release and while i enjoyed both tremendously, leaving out the 51+ content is limiting what Vanguard has to offer its player base.

[quote="John Adams"]Welcome, Jaz

We're going to attempt to fix the XP curve, yes. When content design starts, we'll get a better handle on what we need to change to bring back the normal "flow" of player progression. It will be a careful balance.

For things like allowing Riftways or providing rented mounts; that will be server-by-server, offered through our VGO Rules System. For the Official Server, it depends on the feedback we get from our Polls once we get near our Beta phase (which will be quite a while from now).[/quote]

I am hoping a lot of things are server by server. I'm hoping, for example, that the XP curve is somewhere in the database. Likewise, how many items you need for quest X, or the reward (XP, gear, title, or whatever) for quest Y, is database driven.

[quote="shargash"]I am hoping a lot of things are server by server. I'm hoping, for example, that the XP curve is somewhere in the database. Likewise, how many items you need for quest X, or the reward (XP, gear, title, or whatever) for quest Y, is database driven.[/quote]
If I have my way, absolutely. You may have noticed around the forums, the devs are wary of using terms like "hard-coding" around me Forcing our decisions on others is not how I feel an "emulator" should be, so at least as often as we can things will be made dynamic. The Rules System will help with things like XP mods, and as the server matures, we can literally add anything in the way of customization (server-side calculation-wise)

For Quests/Loot/Rewards, that is all DB/LUA Script driven, yes. Our set of data and LUA Scripts will be "Live-Like", and anyone can download them and modify them to their hearts content. Meaning, none of it is in C++ code except the delivery of said data to the client.

Hope that addresses your wishes.

[quote="gibbed"]I can't imagine logging into Telon without the diverse raid content that PoTA has to offer as well as the other 51+ content. I played before and after its release and while i enjoyed both tremendously, leaving out the 51+ content is limiting what Vanguard has to offer its player base.[/quote]

I always felt that post-50 Vanguard was borked. They waited too long to raise the level cap, and there was too much compression at the high end. At level 55 characters advanced significantly in power without advancing in level. This distorted the game from about level 48 through level 54, or even into 55 if you weren't POTA geared.

What I would like to see is to release the emulator capped at 50. With a slower XP progression, the developers should have a while before they have to worry about too many people piling up at level 50, maybe a year. During that time, I'd like to see the post 50 game unborked a bit. I'm not sure how feasible this is, but it might be possible to raise the level cap to 60, tweak the level of some of the higher-end mobs, and wind up with a smoother progression towards the top. Obviously, there is a limit to this, since there are only so many chunks and mob models to deal with.

In any case, if the emulator faithfully reflects the released Vanguard post-50, I will probably do what I did in released Vanguard -- stop playing characters that reach level 50 and start over again.

BTW, at least in some cases it should be possible to bring back the old versions of dungeons without wrecking the new. I know that the original POTA chunk and the new POTA chunk are both still there. I found the old POTA chunk while .rifting to every chunk by number. Now, of course, there are not packet traces to the old POTA, but it should be possible to recreate what was there using online resources, at least while they last.

I tried to bring this up a few times in game, but it seemed to me that 50+, levels don't do very much for you. 50 opens some quests, but unless you are making the 51+ spells, not much happens. I saw multiple 50s come out of retirement who had completed their Griffon sets, and they were significantly more powerful than fresh 55s who mostly did Wardship and then power leveled with nothing really to show from Swamp or APW.

Post-Magi Hold, there was not a whole lot you could spontaneously play, I thought OT was an offering in this direction, but then it gave out too much xp and the gear set was really hard to get. There became this debate if APW gear = PotA 2.5 and OT was something like 1.5, and then if people focus their time on working for this set, then it pretty much snuffs Swamp and APW anyway and this content dries up. I never did it, but I understand that if one person keyed Mercaius then the whole raid could go--perhaps making this an individual requirement could be the "point" of the dungeon and this would keep it in perspective.

Agree that some of the quest back-flagging is a bit of a headache, for example if you want to do TK6 chances are you'll get groups for 1-3 until you outlevel the place, but some of this I'm willing to live with. The "uber set" gear pathing thing does make it close to where Hunter's League and then Wardship are the only things played. Even though item-wise I could show people good stuff I had got off Baelthom or out of Karrus Hakrel, people would toss me in a CW group and not even say anything.

Overall while 50+ you will start completing things you can solo or easily small group for, the game does lend itself toward rolling an alt to solo and level in some other way. Actually, I level locked half my toons because I found having a relevant character (well, eventually 30+) for anything, really opened up the arsenal. Overall I definitely spent most of the game not working on my highest progress. While this has its own issues, in terms of value, it means I can enjoy almost the whole game, for years.

Necro'ing this post since i just recently joined up.
I dont see any real reason to keep the 50+ content as it was. To me it was really disjointed and made almost no sense past 50. You worked on PoTA while you tried to finish Magi Hold while you hoped to get in on a raid that you were probably undergeared for since the bulk of people skipped right to grinding PoTA gear at 48. Then they threw OT into the mix and everything went totally haywire. I know people will miss the raid encounters from 50+ content, but there is no reason to think that those wont make it into the game eventually. They werent there for the first 3 years or so on live and that was honestly the best time in VG history. I completely agree with capping at 50 for now, and customizing the 50+ content in the future.