Private/Custom Server question

[John Adams]

Cyrcle, I never played 51-55 so I have no first-hand experience... and maybe this isn't the place to hash this out, but the way it was explained to me is that if we (VGO) axe 51+ it will upset the balance of the game - based on the content/data we are rebuilding it with.

Is it not possible that we could incorporate 51+, better? Pretty sure it's all just math. But, you experienced players tell me.

[Jakkal]

We can impliment 51+, definitely. I actually enjoyed 51+ as much as the rest of the game. It was grindy, but it got better. Originally the grind was to slow down the players.

But the raids were excellent. A lot of the overland 51+ raids were my favorites (Shendu, Karax, etc)

I know for a fact that we as a community can make it better. The biggest gripes were the faction (give higher faction rewards), the number of cords needed (give more slivers as quest rewards/drops), and the prices (reduce the cost). Other than that, it wasn't really all that bad.

The other gripe was the 51+ spell components. That can be easily solved by putting them on the trainers.

[Cyrcle]

I had a decently long post set up for this, but I somehow managed to close the tab out and lose it all before I posted it.

Anyways, I will just summarize it.

• I may not be as experienced as most of the people here. I quit when SoD/55 increase came out. I came back when F2P was announced and subbed for a year. I have not done PoTA or any 55 raids.
  [/*1cxi0ebs]
• 51+ sucked. It was a boring grind. To go from 51-55 took easily as long as 1-50. There are not very many ways to go from 50-55.
  [/*1cxi0ebs]
• Areas of the game were made obsolete with the level cap increase. Also, seeing Kotasoth drop in a mere minute and a half when we were doing final raids before sunset just saddened me. I remember learning that fight. It was made to take around ~10 minutes.
  [/*1cxi0ebs]
• The gear gap from APW to the socketted gear is insane. I don't even want to get into that right now.[/*1cxi0ebs][/list:u]
  
  From what I understand, we only have mobs levels, dots, and maybe hp. We do not have attributes, armor, resists, etc. We are basically building these encounters from the ground up. Why can't they be adjusted from 51+ to 50 then? The only thing that would need adjusted is the 51+ gear to a 50 requirement. Maybe adjust stats if many felt it was needed. I know this isn't the place to hash this all out, but it will be the reason if I run a private server or not.

[Kilsin]

[quote="Cyrcle"]I had a decently long post set up for this, but I somehow managed to close the tab out and lose it all before I posted it.

Anyways, I will just summarize it.

• I may not be as experienced as most of the people here. I quit when SoD/55 increase came out. I came back when F2P was announced and subbed for a year. I have not done PoTA or any 55 raids.
  [/*14dli394]
• 51+ sucked. It was a boring grind. To go from 51-55 took easily as long as 1-50. There are not very many ways to go from 50-55.
  [/*14dli394]
• Areas of the game were made obsolete with the level cap increase. Also, seeing Kotasoth drop in a mere minute and a half when we were doing final raids before sunset just saddened me. I remember learning that fight. It was made to take around ~10 minutes.
  [/*14dli394]
• The gear gap from APW to the socketted gear is insane. I don't even want to get into that right now.[/*14dli394][/list:u]
  
  From what I understand, we only have mobs levels, dots, and maybe hp. We do not have attributes, armor, resists, etc. We are basically building these encounters from the ground up. Why can't they be adjusted from 51+ to 50 then? The only thing that would need adjusted is the 51+ gear to a 50 requirement. Maybe adjust stats if many felt it was needed. I know this isn't the place to hash this all out, but it will be the reason if I run a private server or not.[/quote]
  
  While I have my beef with 51+ content I also like Jak and many others played that content for years, invested a huge chunk of my time into grinding for epics and T3 on multiple characters of mine and not to mention all the SoD named runs and Overland Raids I ran for Reverence and our PUG.
  
  I do not want to lose that 51+ content, I would like it tweaked to be a bit more player and time friendly but not to the extent that everyone runs around with epics but if we were to not include anything 51+ we would lose a lot of content, spells/abilities and memories, I don;t want to see that happen either.
  
  I think the faction gains, experience gains and cost of items need to be balanced better and I also think the itemisation needs to be reversed completely or removed, I would even care if they removed all augs/sockets as I believe we were way too powerful which is what caused the imbalance in the first place but I don't want to see the levels and content removed, it played a big part in end game and those of us who stuck around and played for those years will not want to lose it.
  
  1-50 was my favorite part of VG but I also had some great memories and experience with the 51+ content too being part of a hardcore raiding guild that turned casual towards the end to survive. A lot of that tough content brought the community together, as people needed help completing it (named runs, PotA entry quests, SoD dailies, PotA trials etc.)
  
  I think it's important to keep that 51+ content but it definitely needs balancing.

[Cyrcle]

I never said to get rid of it. I simply stated to adjust it to be level 50 tiered content. For example, at 45 you would head to Swamps/Rhaz/ToT to get geared up for level 50. At level 50, you do your griffon quests & raid APW. Once you are APW geared, you do SoD/Pantheon. Once you are Pantheon geared, you do CoW. Once you are CoW geared, you do Stiirhad. The way the end game is set up currently, you can skip half of the content. It is obsolete. Hence the reason I still disagree with 51+. Since everything is being built from the ground up, I don't see why it shouldn't be adjusted to level 50.

[John Adams]

[quote="Kilsin"]I also think the itemisation needs to be reversed completely or removed[/quote]
If you (or anyone) has time, can you elaborate on this a little? I've heard of itemization a few times, but never really understood what it meant. I assume it means SOE globally changed stats on a bunch of stuff. Is there a site or post(s) with details of what this was, and became? It would go a long way towards "fixing" it if we all know definitively what was changed.

To the former topic, I'm not keen on altering content from VG Sunset at least in our official database, and at least until we have the world built. I do not want to encounter confusions between collected reference data and "tweaked VGO Content" data, during our learning and building phase. Thus, tweaking it while you're building it is likely not an option. But, we'll see how it goes when that starts; we all might learn something along the way.

Keep in mind, the collected/parsed data is "base data" for the most part. LUA and Rules can alter things dramatically for us at runtime and not affect the database at all. That's my hope anyway.

[Cyrcle]

[quote="John Adams"][quote="Kilsin"]I also think the itemisation needs to be reversed completely or removed[/quote]
If you (or anyone) has time, can you elaborate on this a little? I've heard of itemization a few times, but never really understood what it meant. I assume it means SOE globally changed stats on a bunch of stuff. Is there a site or post(s) with details of what this was, and became? It would go a long way towards "fixing" it if we all know definitively what was changed.

To the former topic, I'm not keen on altering content from VG Sunset at least in our official database, and at least until we have the world built. I do not want to encounter confusions between collected reference data and "tweaked VGO Content" data, during our learning and building phase. Thus, tweaking it while you're building it is likely not an option. But, we'll see how it goes when that starts; we all might learn something along the way.

Keep in mind, the collected/parsed data is "base data" for the most part. LUA and Rules can alter things dramatically for us at runtime and not affect the database at all. That's my hope anyway.[/quote]
I believe a majority of it was done when the game went F2P, along with a lot of chunks getting revamps:
https://forums.station.sony.com/vg/inde ... 7-2012.21/

For example, you could get some killer items in Island of Madness (~level 38) area, which were just as good or better than some level 50+ gear.

Also, I understand we are shooting for sunset. I just feel there is not enough (useful) content for leveling from 51-55. Not to mention, it makes some level 50 content obsolete. The game needs a lot of re-balancing. This is especially true if we plan on adding additional content down the line such as Cave of Wonders, Stiirhad, Nexus, etc.

[Apaelias]

To me there were multiple problems with 51+ content. For a frame of reference that was typical to VG when you hit around 45 you had multiple choices to choose from in terms of leveling: Tricksters starting out, RI later on, the multiple ToT chunks, Nusibe Necropolis, all the swamp armor grinds, Hegnerian gear, and i'm sure i missed a few. Once you gained 5 levels and you hit 50. You had a single place to go: Shores of Darkness (and the surrounding chunks), if you played the content as it was released or pretty much anytime after this was the problem. Every new piece of content sent you back to SoD. Oh you want to level from 50-55, go do SoD. oh you want your T2 gear? Go do more SoD. Oh you want T3 gear? Go do more SoD? Oh you want epics? You guessed it: More SoD!! The options that were so prevalent at every level in VG were gone at 50. You no long had the choice of going the cragwind or the northern giant place (i'm bad with names) on CW armor, or the other multiple choices that were presented. It was all narrowed to 1.

Or at least that is how I was presented with the content. Until CoB and then CoW when everythign went to hell with buffs and gear and whatnot.

Oh yeah and the spells sucked. What happened to out naturally leveling spells that suddenly ended at 50?

Don't get me wrong. I loved doing a lot of the 51+ content. I just think it could be implented better. I also think the best course of action would be to release VG emu live at levels 1 -50 and lock anything 50+ until it can be "fixed" which i'm sure will take some time.


And yes Jakkal nobody likes your filthy Rogues!! You too Kilsin!!!

[Cyrcle]

[quote="Apaelias"]To me there were multiple problems with 51+ content. For a frame of reference that was typical to VG when you hit around 45 you had multiple choices to choose from in terms of leveling: Tricksters starting out, RI later on, the multiple ToT chunks, Nusibe Necropolis, all the swamp armor grinds, Hegnerian gear, and i'm sure i missed a few. Once you gained 5 levels and you hit 50. You had a single place to go: Shores of Darkness (and the surrounding chunks), if you played the content as it was released or pretty much anytime after this was the problem. Every new piece of content sent you back to SoD. Oh you want to level from 50-55, go do SoD. oh you want your T2 gear? Go do more SoD. Oh you want T3 gear? Go do more SoD? Oh you want epics? You guessed it: More SoD!! The options that were so prevalent at every level in VG were gone at 50. You no long had the choice of going the cragwind or the northern giant place (i'm bad with names) on CW armor, or the other multiple choices that were presented. It was all narrowed to 1.

Or at least that is how I was presented with the content. Until CoB and then CoW when everythign went to hell with buffs and gear and whatnot.

Oh yeah and the spells sucked. What happened to out naturally leveling spells that suddenly ended at 50?

Don't get me wrong. I loved doing a lot of the 51+ content. I just think it could be implented better. I also think the best course of action would be to release VG emu live at levels 1 -50 and lock anything 50+ until it can be "fixed" which i'm sure will take some time.


And yes Jakkal nobody likes your filthy Rogues!! You too Kilsin!!! [/quote]
Right, but before SoD & 51+ existed, it was get 45, do any of the following while leveling to 50: Swamp, Heg, ToT/NN, RI. Get gear to be able to do APW. SoD came out and there were a few rare drops that were good there. Some capes or whatever. I quit not long after. When Pantheon released, it was said by the devs you could go a head and start Pantheon with Swamp gear. Not sure if it's true, but if so forget APW. The content needs re-balanced either to 50 content or in a way that you don't NEED to grind to 55 before you can do the content. Also, most of the gear will need re-balanced if we do plan on adding new content such as Stiirhad - because where can we go from where they were? Some gear with augments literally took up the entire vertical section of a screen. It was ridiculous. Once gear is re-balanced, content and encounters will need to be re-balanced because they will likely be impossible if gear is nerfed.

I'm starting to see a reason why Vanguard was shut down. Once that SoD/51+ increase was released, shit was piled on top of shit on top of shit. Things became a pain to fix for future content to work. Which is probably why they went with some whack ass augment gear for CoW and that stupid new broken buff system in an attempt to fix it. Trying to undo several years worth of shit, they realized it was just too much and shut it down. Holy shit, I got way off topic. Haha.

[Jakkal]

I don't know what the devs were smoking, but you absolutely could not do POTA in Swamp Gear when it first came out (if your entire group was swamp geared.) Safe Haven tried that for several, very frustrating months, and we couldn't get but about half of the trials done. Once you got APW Gear, it became a lot easier to do those trials.

I don't know if they made POTA easier as time went on, but I always recommended to guilds starting out to continue doing APW first, then work on POTA.

I know during the Sunset version, it was a lot easier to get from 51-55. You could do it in a couple of hours if you knew how. When 51+ originally came out, the XP curve was really really steep, the punishments for death severe, but also you couldn't use XP pots. That was the big thing. But then they made it easier to get XP, and allowed stacking XP pots to work. So by the time sunset rolled around it was really easy to get to 55.