VGOEmulator.net

As I see this project progress, I think I speak for a lot of us that I'm getting more and more excited at the idea of being able to re-enter Telon and re-live a lot of great memories from this game. I played it from Beta up until late 2008, and then started back a few months before the Sunset, only to quit again about a month before the announcement.

Sorry in advance for the long post, but I wanted to dump my thoughts/questions, and get others' as well. We can probably mostly agree that the main game failed for numerous reasons, but the good news is that I feel this Emulator project will take care of most, if not all of those issues. That would make this project potentially an amazing place that could thrive with more players than the original game had (at least I hope that will be the case!).

Issues listed below. These are not intended to be comprehensive, but I think they encompass a lot of what went wrong:

1) Bugs - from what I understand, we (I say "we" as if I'm part of the dev team, but I am generalizing "we" as the community) will have complete control over fixing bug, etc. At least I think that's correct? For example, the Xennumet/All-Father event was one of the most amazing questlines and encounters of any MMO. But, to my knowledge, it was never fixed properly, and it was HORRIBLY bugged. So it really made it not worth going deep in there for it. I know it may depend on the specific bugs, but is it safe to say that we will have the ability to fix these event-type bugs? Or is there a chance that there may be bugs wrapped up in the client, which are absolutely un-fixable with no workaround?

2) Grinds- I think we all can agree that the game had too much grinding in places. I would think this is completely controllable on our part, as we control the quest requirements, etc? I know a lot of this grinding can and should stay in place, as it adds a great sense of accomplishment for some quests. But some places absolutely need this to be reduced, IMO. I'm sure we, as a community, can determine and agree on those places when the time comes.

3) Introduction of the Cash Shop - This obviously won't be a problem, since there will be no Cash Shop

4) Level 51-55 content making previous (awesome) endgame content pointless - I think the dev-team agreed in a previous thread that (at least at first), we will cap it at 50 on New Telon, so that the original game can be preserved with APW as the endgame content, along with the Griffon Quest, etc. Is that accurate?

5) Poor management and lack of listening from the dev team - I can already tell this will DEFINITELY not be an issue.

6) Lack of Players for Grouping / Lack of Good players for grouping - This was a big one for me, and in all honesty, it's what made me quit the game..twice. However, it never seems to be mentioned in any thread for some reason.. Let me give some examples. For the Griffon Questline, I worked to get all the way to the Akande fight in Old Targ.. I'm sure the old-school players remember how initially ridiculously difficult this fight was. I think they may have nerfed it later, but in the beginning, it was close to impossible, and you had to be extremely lucky to pass it. You had to have a TOP notch group as well. I spent weeks and weeks on these attempts, until the stars finally aligned and I did it. My frustration level was high, but I was not quite burned out yet. Then a few steps later, I got to the CHATH encounter. At that point, I was a bit burned out on begging my guild for help, as most of them had already gotten their griffons during times when I couldn't play. I spammed "LFG Chath" for days, posted on forums. Occasionally would find a decent group in-guild and PUG, but sometimes the quest would bug, and other times we would just wipe and people would rage quit group. I finally said I'm done with this and quit the game; never got my flying mount.

In looking back, I found that many times I would have to just sit there and spam "Pally LFG for XYZ", with no responses for days at a time. It seems that other quest I ran into, I would be like, "omg.. this is going to require me to find a group again.. UGHHH".

Vanguard seemingly setup its quests to be about 60-70% requiring at least 2-3 people, and the rest solo-able.. At least if my memory serves me correctly. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is a bad thing - it's actually one thing that makes the game great, as it is the sole reason for many memories I have of the game, finding groups and making friends, conquering tough material, etc..

BUT the world is so huge with so many questlines, and with the lack of players, it was rare to find others that are on the EXACT same part of a questline that you are on. So it results in having to beg people/guildies for help. Most people are friendly and don't mind, but I hate having to do that over and over again. For instance, when I joined back a few months before sunset, I quickly found a guild, and they were kind enough to run me through some low level questlines that (yep you guessed it) require a group to complete. I would find myself again "LFG" around every corner. I could complete the first few parts of questlines, but it would get deeper and deeper until I realized that I need others to continue this (I obviously was not a fan of dropping a questline once deep into it). I got to the Trengel Keep questline, and I found a group for TK1 and TK2.. But then the group disbanded, so I found myself "LFG TK3" for hours. Finally found a group that was on TK2, so I backtracked a bit in the hopes of them wanting to continue with TK3. No dice, the group disbanded after TK2, and I was back to "LFG TK3". I could never time it so that I was online when a group had an open slot and was specifically running TK3...and knowing that there were 6 parts to that questline, I couldn't imagine how it would ever be possible to complete it, unless I had 5 other people who were on the EXACT same schedule every day for playing, hours and hours at a time (these types of quests were not quick to get through).

Anyway, that was my main issue with the game, and I quit again shortly after the above. I don't know that there is a fix to this outside of a strong player base and friendly community willing to come together to help out, etc. Maybe I was going about it wrong, dunno. I know I'll get responses saying things like "You just didn't find the right guild", etc, but it still came down to having to beg for help around every corner of the game. Luckily my first time through the game with my first character, I played nightly with a RL friend, so we were able to get through a lot of material duo'ing content as a pally and ranger. It almost seems like this is a requirement for Vanguard, otherwise you're stuck begging for groups.

Those are my thoughts, feel free to share yours.

As to old Vanguard bugs, I don't think there is much that can be done. We do not have the code for the client, so whatever bugs it has we're going to have to live with unless there is a way to work around the bug with server code. As to the old server, well, we don't have that code either. So the only bugs in the new server code are the ones the developers put there.

The other points you've raised have generated a fair amount of discussion already. There is a "Game Features" forum to discuss the things we liked about VG to make sure they make it into the emulator, and a "Wish List" forum to discuss the things we didn't like.

I think you'll find most of us on board with most of your points.

The ability to get a group remains completely up in the air, as we have no idea how many players there will be, nor even how many servers those players will be spread across. There has been some discussion as to what to do about that, but I think that will probably have to wait to see what we've got for a player base.

IMO, Vanguard's biggest problem (after we got past the rocky release) was post-50 content. For a long time I thought that VG needed its version of the "Ruins of Kunark" expansion. However we know now that SOE was never going to release an expansion to VG. They just kept piling more stuff into the same 5 levels, eventually distorting the game beyond recognition and, IMO, making it unfixable.

I'm not sure what options we have post 50, given that we're working with the old client. I can imagine that we could raise the level cap somewhat above 55, but eventually we'll run out of areas, and we're already out of unused models for monsters.

In any case, the focus now is getting 1-50 working, and then the real arguments discussions will start.

Thanks for the reply, shargash, and agreed across all fronts. I didn't expect this to be a thread that solves all of our problems or gets all questions answered, nor did I really intend it to be a "Wish List" kind of thing for the emulator. Just simply some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for awhile now that I wanted to get out there.

Thanks for letting me know about the client-side bugs; that makes sense. I think it shouldn't be too big of an issue, as it seems most of the major questlines were working fine with bugs that were just small annoyances more than anything (I'm sure there are exceptions there, of course). As weird as it may sound, I very rarely found the bugs off-putting to the point where they made me want to quit the game. It still baffles me that the #1 reason that people list why Vanguard failed is because of the number of bugs. Again, I played since beta, experienced numerous bugs, but the content and playerbase were WAY strong enough to overcome those bugs. I vehemently disagree that it's the #1 reason why the game failed.

Anyway - looking forward to continued progress, and still very excited. Thanks!

While I certainly understand your frustration about finding groups. I also think your mentality has changed or you never played older mmorpgs. At that stage I would just do something else, join a complete random group and do something, anything. We're so stuck upon these damn quests.

I spent way more time soloing than grouped. Ended up with all those half-finished quests too, but hey, here I am doing my part to get VG back!

Hi Crispin!

[quote="Crispin"]While I certainly understand your frustration about finding groups. I also think your mentality has changed or you never played older mmorpgs. At that stage I would just do something else, join a complete random group and do something, anything. We're so stuck upon these damn quests.[/quote]

Yes, admittedly so, Vanguard was my first MMORPG. But since then, I've played just about every single (popular) MMO in the market, and I never even remotely reached those levels of frustration. The solution of "joining a different/random group" and doing "something else" wasn't exactly at the top of my priority list when I was 1 step away from completing the Griffon Quest, for example. Especially after many months of working on it, and also since I'd burned through much of the other content on the server after painstakingly finding groups to get through it. But anyway, this goes to show that my frustrations are another person's desires, so I don't argue to change it.. Especially since it's never mentioned in any threads about the game's demise. Just something I wanted to bring up.

Probably more of a personal thing, since I don't like to leave questlines unfinished, while many others are fine with it.

[quote="Moldew"]I spent way more time soloing than grouped. Ended up with all those half-finished quests too, but hey, here I am doing my part to get VG back!

Hi Crispin! [/quote]

Yep, I'll take the sunset-Vanguard game, even if I have ZERO possibilities of grouping and can only solo.. over having no Vanguard at all. That's what I'm most excited about - just getting back into the game period!

Your comments about the griffon quest was very similar to my experience. That's why I started running "Get Your Griffon". I will probably do that again on New Telon.

But definitely the thing about grouping is on our mind. We've had many discussions about it. John's probably sick of me bringing it up.

I want the game to be challenging, but not frustrating.

[quote="Jakkal"]Your comments about the griffon quest was very similar to my experience. That's why I started running "Get Your Griffon". I will probably do that again on New Telon.

But definitely the thing about grouping is on our mind. We've had many discussions about it. John's probably sick of me bringing it up.

I want the game to be challenging, but not frustrating.[/quote]

Thanks Jakkal! It's relieving to know there are others that share my experiences as well. I wouldn't do anything to take away the challenges of Vanguard. I fought through all of them (for example, I was actually one of the only people on my server to go through the grind of getting the Red Necklace from the Temples area, which was a feat in itself - I won't bore you with other ridiculously time-consuming things I did in the game to achieve some goals of my own, but believe me, I spent many many hours in this game fighting through challenges).

So don't get me wrong, I don't want to reduce the challenge.. I just want to relieve the frustrations, as you mentioned. If we can accomplish that, this will be one of the best MMOs in the market, no doubt.