VGOEmulator.net

Hi all,

Spent most of the day yesterday testing the game in it's current state, and thought I should share my observations. Both as a sort of feedback to the awesome people behind this project, but also as a "Here's what you get" to new players wanting to get the Vanguard feel back...if only for a brief time.

Stability
First of all, I must say that I am impresse by the stability of the game. I went into this with a measure of trepidation, but my fears were quickly laid to rest. Not a single crash over an entire day spent playing. Almost no server side lag to speak of. Client side lag feels exactly as it did back in Vanguard live days. Impressive.

Ambiance and feel
But did it "feel" like Vanguard? Did it take me back to those long nights back in 2007, 08 and 09 when I practically lived more in Telon than I did in the real world? Yes...it damn well did. Complete with buggy character animations and all

For all that the project is still lacking, I want to give big kudos to the team behind. What you have achieved so far is quite a feat. I have no idea what you had to work with when you started...if you had complete databases or if you had to recreate everything from scratch, but what you have done until now? You have done Vanguard!

Observations
I want to include a list of some of the things I observed. I know you have covered a number of them in various posts on these forums, but I include them anyway, for new players/testers who may happen to stumble onto this thread.

Mob spawning:
Too fast at the moment. Sometimes you barely have time to kill the next mob and move out of aggro range of the one you just killed before it respawns. I know I could just turn aggro off, but I wanted to "play" This was especially noticeable in Gwartak Stronghold and actually cause me to die once.

Harvesting node spawning:
First of all, I loooove the fact that you have managed to bring harvesting and crafting back into the project. The harvesting/crafting part of Vanguard was IMHO hands down the best of any MMO ever. Period.

Harvesting node spawning also feels too fast at the moment. I don't actually know if that is on purpose, or if my observations are just skewed by the fack that I didn't compete with other players for nodes.

Mob behavior:
Mobs - especially in caves tend to spawn slightly underground. Mobs also tend to walk freely in and out of walls etc. Also targeting mobs...particularly with ranged abilities can be tricky. I really can't remember if this was the case during live, but sometimes I had to move quite a bit around to find a spot, where I was able to target a mob with a ranged ability.

Questing:
Questing feels right. Yes there is the odd quest description missing, but I did the dwarf starting area up to level 8, and quest XP plus kill XP seems right on the money. I was done with Gwartak Stronghold right with almost no XP left to ding 9.

Overall, it was great to get the Vanguard feeling back. Now...obviously the game isn't done yet. It's not even close to almost done. But what IS done is a lot of the groundwork to create an awesome project. Thank you to the developers and project lead for that.

And please let me know if I can support your efforts in any way. I know you can't take my money. But if there is any way I can assist (I can't code) feel free to reach out.

Cheers from Hargir

Thanks for the Feedback. It's very appreciated to help us get things the way it should be.

Mob/NPC/Object spawning is intentionally fast right now for easier testing purposes. This is also for the sanity of the designers, you don't want them standing around waiting for respawns when they're trying to set up stuff. That's a waste of our precious free time to work on the project. This is why we ask players to ignore the mob respawn speed at the moment. If it gets overwhelming, you can turn your aggro off with /say .aggro off

Mob behavior is extremely rudimentary right now and doesn't need to be reported. Xinux only recently edited the random movement scripts so that they don't walk through the geometry as much though it doesn't always work. As for the targeting, that's also a recent side effect of a geolocation system that the devs are trying to get working. Again, we're set up on a rudimentary level so things will improve with time but it does take time.

In short, we're aware of the way things should be, but we're still poking the client to try to figure out what it wants to make things work the way we want. This is a long, ongoing process with many growing pains. If we could just set it up like live we would have already.

We do have a list of what we're looking for in regards to testing available here viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3002 We're not comparable to Live VG yet, and we know this. So we're asking players to test certain specifics that we can control, not the things still being figured out.

Hi Hargir! Thank you for your nice feedback.
Just would like to comment only one thing - mob behavior. The problem is that when we use random movement on a group of the same mobs (one chunk), those inside the dungeons tend to walk through the walls (unless they have an individual path set). The situation is similar outside, where mobs can walk through hills and buildings, for example. We solve this so that every single mob has to be set manually in those places where it could go through obstacles, which is extremely time consuming, or disable the movement at all, which is boring :-/. In addition, we need to go back to the chunks that were completed first to fix this, if this is a really annoying problem reported by our players/testers. Anyway, feel free to contact me via Discord PM and I can fix the place, where you feel that the movement of mobs, for example, makes it difficult to complete a quest or the impression of a game.