Vanguard - I don't give a fuck if it's dead, It's still brown as fuck (Download link in 1st post)

gogojira_sl said:

Not much crashing for me, but massive group chat issues and falling through terrain.

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Every goddamn chunk. Kojan was brutal about this, especially that island in the middle of the map. Lots of named spawn there, just useless for doing anything because for some reason it was put in the middle of 4 separate squares.

I tried at the F2P launch, and a second attempt (which after about 2 weeks of that they announced the sunset). I would crash in an empty chunk trying to do WOs repeatedly. Could only lose my mats so many times in a row before saying FUCK IT.

Other bugs were pretty prevalent too. A few times I grouped up with random people out and about, but we'd often run into shit like mobs going under the world, hitting us, and not letting us get out of combat.

Yeah, Vanguard being buggy is like saying the ocean is a little moist. I played very lightly during beta (it was a bear that my machine could only barely handle. Built a new PC just to see what the former EQ-fuss was about for release) and there was just a lot of broken stuff. From abilities not triggering, to nodes despawning mid-collection, to falling through the environment, to mobs (and key mobs at that) becoming stuck inside of objects and be unattackable, etc. Add in the chunking issues and it was just a mess. Not to mention that there wasn't really any actual content past level 40 or so at release. Very much like Silithus in WoW was for awhile with no quests, mobs dropped no loot, and there weren't any npcs aside from monsters. They added in content for that stuff eventually, but if you were ahead of the curve near release, you were just grinding or waiting for content to show up. Also, the xp gain and rare mob spawning to complete certain dungeon quests were way out of whack. My static group and I started Dargun's Tomb (giants cave in Thestra built for the early-late 30s) and we were literally only getting xp for every 4th mob or so by the time we finished it, in one session. Had cleared the entire place, but the triggered mob wouldn't spawn to finish up the "Red" quality Dwarven Weapon quest. Started out with most of the place either white or yellow conning. Some dungeon called "Hakrel" was very similar, in that the level range went by too fast to complete the quests and stuff inside.

Had xp been slower overall, maybe some of us bleeding edge folks at release wouldn't have hit the contentless wall before it was rectified. Probably not, though.

I didn't experience many crashes. Lots of annoying issues though like stairs which were impossible to run up. Strangely enough what finally killed it for me was ridiculous pvp imbalances that they wouldnt fix - such as losing target on bard invis pulsing even though you've got see invis.

Rezz_sl said:

Yeah, Vanguard being buggy is like saying the ocean is a little moist. I played very lightly during beta (it was a bear that my machine could only barely handle. Built a new PC just to see what the former EQ-fuss was about for release) and there was just a lot of broken stuff.

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I think there's a difference too in "rushed shitty launch" and "the experience you got after the game has been out for years". I think if they had fixed a lot of the long-standing issues, it would have had a chance at finally finding its niche. The F2P transition was a good investment from SOE, but they didn't focus on the tech problems first, so it flopped just as hard yet again.

sakkath_sl said:

I didn't experience many crashes. Lots of annoying issues though like stairs which were impossible to run up. Strangely enough what finally killed it for me was ridiculous pvp imbalances that they wouldnt fix - such as losing target on bard invis pulsing even though you've got see invis.

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Yes the damn stairs lol

i bought the vanguard kool aid. Not gonna lie. I built a new PC to run it. it had SLI and everything, which was pretty awesome for its time. It ran vanguard terribly, and would only run half decent if I disabled SLI. And even then it would glitch, crash, and you would fall through the world. Still, even then it was a pretty fun game. My first time I fully explored zihurr mound I was impressed.

Japanfour_sl said:

i bought the vanguard kool aid. Not gonna lie. I built a new PC to run it. it had SLI and everything, which was pretty awesome for its time. It ran vanguard terribly, and would only run half decent if I disabled SLI. And even then it would glitch, crash, and you would fall through the world. Still, even then it was a pretty fun game. My first time I fully explored zihurr mound I was impressed.

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I did the same thing, over time I noticed performance got worse.

Couple things that helped:

Mapping shaders and other parts of vg to a ram-drive.

./flush all

Flushed shaders, cleaned up hitching

shabushabu_sl said:

I did the same thing, over time I noticed performance got worse.

Couple things that helped:

Mapping shaders and other parts of vg to a ram-drive.

./flush all

Flushed shaders, cleaned up hitching

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Damn /flush command!! Sign of a tightly coded game....

RoyalAssassin_sl said:

Damn /flush command!! Sign of a tightly coded game....

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/rope, pls halp

Most people just /exit and never came back.

Scratch_sl said:

I almost never crashed playing Vanguard from release. However I remember groups being buggy as fuck for like 6 months and kicking people anytime someone would chunk.

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Hella nod. Was pretty standard early on to form a group, run to the chunk you want to actually play in solo, everyone relog, then form the group. That usually bought you an hour or two before someone would crash and it would bug the group.

So many strange bugs and weird coding. I remember how as a Blood Mage with there being no range limit on the lifetap heal as long as you were in the same zone. Was funny dying and then the group is confused as hell why they didn't all wipe as the BMG is still healing the group from outside the dungeon. There were of course a ton of BMG related bugs and quirks that weren't nearly as fun or beneficial, though. And I'm still disappointed I could never round up a full group of BMGs to see what we could kill, because I think it would have been lol worthy.

Heallun_sl said:

/rope, pls halp

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Rope was cool though and I felt it part of the game even though it was likely intended to be a bug tool , there were times in Vg where navigating a dungeon included some tricky moves to avoid mobs.

popsicledeath_sl said:

Hella nod. Was pretty standard early on to form a group, run to the chunk you want to actually play in solo, everyone relog, then form the group. That usually bought you an hour or two before someone would crash and it would bug the group.

So many strange bugs and weird coding. I remember how as a Blood Mage with there being no range limit on the lifetap heal as long as you were in the same zone. Was funny dying and then the group is confused as hell why they didn't all wipe as the BMG is still healing the group from outside the dungeon. There were of course a ton of BMG related bugs and quirks that weren't nearly as fun or beneficial, though. And I'm still disappointed I could never round up a full group of BMGs to see what we could kill, because I think it would have been lol worthy.

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Omg! I remember that bmg thing, I healed many a person from long distance with that ha.

Those grouping bugs were horrid, we used to use a chat channel ( guild or other ) and reform when we all got to the chunk.. That was quite a PiTA

Later in the game they introduced a bug with BMGs Aoe heal. Instead of healing it would one shot your entire group. It was glorious.

Didn't try this game until it was already a ghost town and didn't get why it failed so hard, but god damn it sounds like it was an absolute train wreck when it was released

Hah, having to set up the planned disband was hilarious for groups, because you -knew- there were going to be problems. I had totally forgotten that until you guys brought it up. Goddamn this game was a mess at release. A lot of good ideas marred by absolutely turd-tastic execution.

sakkath_sl said:

I didn't experience many crashes. Lots of annoying issues though like stairs which were impossible to run up. Strangely enough what finally killed it for me was ridiculous pvp imbalances that they wouldnt fix - such as losing target on bard invis pulsing even though you've got see invis.

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I was one of the few in the company fighting for pvp fixes. We just didn't have the time/funding/manpower. After doing some testing on the live pvp server, I came up with a list of the top ten issues and the bard invis thing was near the top. When I went to management, they were so overwhelmed by other stuff that all they could give me was one junior programmer (can't remember his name) to do the fixes. We only got a few nailed down before the whole thing went belly up.