Stevon said:
I disagree that making a game solo friendly is dumbing it down. What I think Sigil forgot, or didn"t "realize", is that you can have both group and solo content in the game. The problem with Vanguard (well one of them) is that by forcing group only advancement (and anyone who thinks it"s not group only, or damn close, is fooling themselves) you end up splitting up people over time. You end up with this endless feeling grind, and friends fall behind friends with a general feeling that they can never really catch up. All it takes is a week away from the game, and bam, that"s it you"re through.
Add to that all the other issues and you have nothing but frustration and boredom. It was very apparent in Vanguard 2 weeks into launch, and maybe even sooner. People were quitting left and right and I"m sure it hasn"t stopped.
There"s a solution to the problem but certain people are too stubborn and have too much pride to admit it.
As for playing WoW, no thanks. The cartoony graphics just kill it for me. The art quality is good, but I keep feeling like I"m playing back with an EQ level graphics engine. But the gameplay of WoW is fantastic. After over 2 years and at least a year in alpha/beta I"m tired of it anyway.
We certainly did not forget that casual, core, and hard core players can and should co-exist in Vanguard. Originally we planned for 20% casual content, 60% core, and 20% raid. Turns out based on beta that we needed more casual and actually, especially at lower levels, there is a LOT more casual content than, say, group.
Now, that doesn"t mean we can"t make it more fun. I want to see more compelling areas for solo/casual players so it"s not so much about just grinding on 2 and 3 dot mobs. I get bored of that as well (although I am a group player mostly, but then I do log on and either can"t find a group, or they are too far away, or I don"t have a lot of time, at which point I solo mobs).
And no, people aren"t leaving left and right. Sales continue to grow and churn is very low (we just went through our first billing cycle where a lot of people had used up their first month (mostly the people who bought the game right away or soon after release). And, much to our happiness, we had relatively very few cancelations.
I"m not saying everything is hunky dory -- we have a LOT of work to do, both in fixing things and also adding new things, updating things, tweaking things. More so than we would have liked in that we had to launch a bit early, but the team is working extra hard to make up for that. They didn"t go on vacations or return to working regular hours after the game was released -- they kept on crunching and I"m very proud of the team -- they are extremely committed to Vanguard, love to play it (many more devs are playing the game than back when we released EQ, which is very helpful because we encounter issues or bugs ourselves or imbalances, etc. and that combined with feedback helps us fix things quicker). I know a bunch of devs who have level 20+ and even level 30+ characters (and at least one who is 40+).
