The wait is over.. Preorder Vanguard.

[Devek]

I was really looking forward to this for awhile, then I read in a PC Gamer that the Dev's for it did not want to have any instances, at all. As well as something about thinking groups of players meeting in a dungeon and teaming up to kill a named mob, or gasp maybe even fighting over it, and all I could think of at that point was Fafnir or Ulli.

That pretty much right then and there killed my desire to ever play the game.

It's called conflict and interaction, something a MMO should have.

WoW dodges this aspect and becomes a communityless game... which is well ? boring. I bet you can name a lot more people on your FFXI server then you could ever on your WoW Server.

If you actually think things like Ulli and Fafnir are the basis for the FFXI community you're an idiot. Refusing to even think about instances for part of the game just screams, to me, that the game will turn out almost exactly like FFXI. A game with a good community(maybe, pretty much depends on how much you can solo imho), with a totally fucked up and broken end game. Which is something I don't care to try again.

If FFXI had more of its endgame instanced and added content much faster it would be the best MMORPG out there, as it stands its not and it is solely the fault of the Dev team failing to understand that camping for 8 hours for no gain is not fun, as well as seeming to be the only people in the world that actually work less than congress. And to me all that I have read about the game's Devs leads me to believe that it too will never reach its potential.

Read the FAQ

4. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(This applies to a great many things, but in general to the recent reactionary trend to respond to traditional MMOG mechanics that have had some problems by completely removing them as opposed to fixing them. Travel is tedious? Remove travel! People are camping and ninja looting and being rotten to each other in a dungeon? Remove the other people! (Instancing). Sigil, rather, is intent on fixing and tweaking traditional MUD/MMOG mechanics that have existed for so long, not throwing them out).

Secondly, you're stuck with a situation wherein, if you want to curtail the activity, you have to balance it against a player that is playing in excess of 20 hours in a day -- you're shifting the rate of acquisition curve to the right, substantially.. And what does that do to the people on the left of the curve? It short changes them, and in order to stay competetive, they participate in the secondary market -- congratulations, you've just created your own problem.

As a potential solution to problem #1, some people suggest instancing. Hey, there's no competition if you don't see those people. Well, that's true. However, basic economics tells us that the value of any given thing is relative to both its supply and demand. If any given item has an uncontrolled supply, demand will decrease and its value decreases. Rare items are no longer rare if their rate of entry into the world is not controlled.

So if you spawn an instance any time someone, or a group, enters, and any rare tradeable (or even non-tradeable if you can just run someone through the instance to get the loot at the end) loot then drops, you have a situation where you have mass currency deflation. It’s akin to printing money whenever the supply runs low – countries like Argentina have tried this with decidedly poor results. When this happens enough, you have situations like occured in Asherons Call (or Ultima Online, I don't remember which one), where the players create their own currency -- the currency had deflated to a point of being near worthless and the players found a reagent that had a given fixed rarity that they then used as currency.

If you cede control of drop rate to an uncontrollable mechanic, you cede control of your economy.

....snip...

In the end, this is a social problem, it's a game mechanic and balance problem, it's an ownership of IP problem, it's a game enjoyment problem, it's a community problem, and it's also partially a problem of enforcement.

As far as the whole SoE thing, ya.. that creeps me out too.. a lot. I was more pumped about this game when Microsoft was the published and I hate Microsoft, lol.

They say

As co-publishers of Vanguard and with Sigil owning both the IP and publishing rights for the game, we have an unprecedented degree of autonomy over the game. While we look forward to and appreciate SOE's input, we retain complete creative control over the game.

They do say that Sigil owns all the IP and SoE will just be hosting the game, but I haven't seen any answers to questions like.. "Will the GMs be the same min wage high school drop outs we deal with in FFXI?"

If SoE is only hosting the game that isn't bad.. I mean how often do you have about huge outages of SoE related products compared to other games? They may destroy games like planetside, but their hosting and uptime of the game is pretty top-notch.

[Kyreth]

I absolutely loved EQ back when Kunark was a new expansion and shadows of luclin was "holy shit" for an MMO. However, EQ has aged horribly, SOE gives SE a running for shitty customer service and support. Is the DMA for Vanguard over? I remember people saying to stay away.

I won't fanboy for Vanguard, but I will say SOE didn't do jack shit for developing this one. Until recently, Vanguard was Microsoft's bitch, but either way the dev team belonged to neither, being led by the oldschool EQ dev Aradune.

They're distributing the game, though- and I bet they're handling the customer "service".

(Amusing enough, IIRC SOE handles some of the FFXI CS here in the US as well- which probably explains the super-stupid. $10/hr, lol.)