Keepers of Fortitude - Saryrn / Bertoxxulous

i log in every few days to delete the spam registrations and make sure the site is still available.

whoa!

Quote from: Saiferus on February 13, 2008, 04:31:38 AM
Hi ching what you up to now adays?

I'm back on the road to recovery after several years of unpleasantness.  Working again, moved back to Chicago, where I bombed out a few years ago.

I spend more time reading forums about EQ, WoW, and other games than I do actually playing them.  There's no way I'll let myself go back to the craziness of needing to be home at ~7pm every day for 4-5 hours of gaming.

me!

i don't think sony is purging characters, so aire should be wherever you last left her.

after a long time, this site finally comes up top on google when searching for 'keepers of fortitude'

Quote from: Zaxboan on March 01, 2007, 02:14:30 PM
And how is the WoW expansion? I would imagine you have made some headway into it by now?

wow certainly fits my needs for play time right now. i leveled my priest from 60 to 70 and putz around a bit doing quests and such. luckily, working at fedex with a 3am start time makes the temptation to plunge into raiding an easy thing to avoid.  i like to think that i'm done making the time commitment required for raiding in these games. there's just too much extracurricular time involved beyond the 3-4 hour segments of actual raid play.  i did it seriously from may 2002 until december (with several months of overlapping wow/eq raiding) and it's just too much.  i'm old!

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/30435

i see the patch notes and take it another way.  they are still making beta style changes to a game that is already in full production.  the changes aren't fully tested, and just upset people who are in the process of making serious choices about classes. not a unique thing in the genre, but brad and co. are the masters of bait and switch.

from http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=1946

this is typical of brad and the old eq. post launch, big changes that aren't fully tested.  how does he get away with doing things like this with people paying subscription fees?  in beta, you could break a class and  ignore the inevitable whines because they were guests playing for free, but now people have money at stake.

quoted here because it probably won't last on official boards.

QuoteIt's quite funny for me to post here since it looks like this forum is not for gameplay feedback, although the GM who answered my petition sent me there. So now i'm here i post anyway, mainly because i prefer to post on an official forum instead of a fan site, even if Sigil doesn't want to and prefer to close the forum.

Well, first, let me point out that english is not my main language so, my apologies if i make too much grammar/spelling mistakes.

Now let's move to the subject of the topic. As usual, we had a broadcast message saying they will patch and the server will be down, during peaktime of course (for US players this time). Not a big deal, since almost every patches are either during european or US peak times.

Then i just read the patch notes, with the hope to see any important bug fixed (invisible mobs, mobs that flee through walls or half the chunk, crashes, and any of the other 14963872 bugs that we can meet everyday (this number is not accurate, i probably forgot one or two of them :p ). But nothing, instead, they began to swing the nerf bat and of course it went on the disciple.

I expected that, we were too poxerful, so i was quite happy and hoped the game would be more balanced. Then i logged in.

Oh. My. God.

These changes are probably the worst thing that has been done for a while. Not only did it remove all the fun of the class itself, it didn't remove the ability to solo 4 dots mobs or purple con mobs.

Let's explain that a bit for all non disciple here (and probably the dev who made that, i doubt he logged in a disciple for 5Min to see how broken it is now).

The gameplay before was based on the critical hits while bare handed. With them we could get our chains off, mainly Falling petal that proc a 5Min buff that adds to healing on target, as well as doing fair damage. It's in fact our only offensive skill that is worth the effort to use. Our base melee attack, sadly, has no anim nor does it display damage from the first upgrade to the last one i got (lvl 17 on my first disciple, lvl 13 on my second). The others are a detaunt (poor damage, but low end, used for jin mainly and, well, detaunt), a kick that used jin, and our Blessed wind that does poor damage but proc a heal over time on us. Well, it should be on our defensive target but it works only on us, quite worthless for a healer unless when soloing.

Now, critical hits are gone, not a "slight" decrease, as stated in the patch note, but more of a 50% decrease based on what i can see in facts. I now barely crit every 3 or 4 fights, yay ! I can't even keep the falling petal buff on my defensive target.

That alone cuts our dps A LOT. Fine, i'm a healer, i didn't play this class for dps, ok.

But on top of that, our heals were nerfed too. Our chain is now pointless, by the time it gets off, if my target needed a heal, it's now dead, and the heal itself is barealy enough to help anyway. Blessed wind is the best: end cost increased, healing descreased. Great ! It's now totally useless. It costs half my end for a heal that will do nothing at all, and that only works on me.

If that wasn't enough, i now miss a lot more.

So the result is there. I can still kill a purple 2 dot mob or a white 4 dot mobs, but now even a botting program could do it since i only need to use 2 or 3 skills to win. it went from a fun class to play, with many different styles and chain, to just turn on auto attack, then spam detaunt for jin, heal sometimes, and that's it. The only challenging thing now is trying not to fall asleep with fights, because even on a blue 2 dot mobs, it takes a while to kill. I mean it's long. Try killing anything with auto attack only. See ? That's it ! Simply because all my skills are broken or do LESS damage than my auto attack. And it's not the crit that happens every 50 hits that will make a difference.

Now i would like the dev who made this change, to seriously, i mean, seriously, try to play the game right now as a disciple. And maybe, try to think that sometimes, a little change in an excel file makes a HUGE difference in game. A difference that should be tested, by internal testers as well as players, then only if it's ok, should be pushed on live server. Because this stupid (and i try to stay polite) lack of any testing or thinking when doing change, just broke a class that was overpowered, i admit it, to what ? The same overpowered class, except now it's not FUN at all.

So yes, i can say that here, you totally missed your point with this patch. You can nerf again disciple. HEY ! I'm still soloing 4 dots. Guess what ? It's not a challenge, it's not fun, it's time consuming, but i can do it and realize every day i log in how this game is now bugged, not balanced, and not fun at all.

If you want to live the bugs as they are (i report the same bugs for one month now, 3 of them on my disciple skills), then it's ok. Balance is what it is and should have some minor tweaks. But if you now want to remove the rare things that made this game enjoyable through its current early beta stage, then i hope you're ready to lose some of your paying beta tes... i mean, customers.

started a staggering rant here.

Starting a new thread because i might ramble on a bit!

My decision to hold off on Vanguard wasn't made with a great deal of personal experience with it. I logged on during the last few weeks of beta and it was sluggish on my system. Slow enough that I didn't care to go beyond level 3.  Video lag in the newbie are is just not acceptable.  I think Brad has great goals with the look of his game, but it's just unbelievable that something 1 week from release would have choppy audio playback at the character CREATION screens.

While I didn't play the beta all that much, I've kept up with some forums that tend to be more critical of Brad, and every other new game, but the forum crowd is something that should be used as a guideline more than something used as a final arbitor on a purchasing decision.  FoH is one of those communities that has been around for years, and is filled with posters that cross the spectrum of gaming, from jaded EQ beta types who learned to love/hate Brad in 1999, to the relatively new group that got into the market because of SWG/WoW and now Vanguard.  The general tone of the threads there is usually mature and honest criticism, but the modern gaming/internet world is filled with people (or pseudo people) that have an agenda behind their words.  It's good to read just to get an idea of what to look out for as you play, especially from a non-company source.

I have conflicting emotions about Brad and what he's done in EQ (and EQ2 to a lesser extent), and what he thinks about this sort of game.  I'm sure we all remember "The Vision" and how it's a great thing in press releases and web site blurbs, but how unfun it is to live under it in a virtual world.  When most of us started playing EQ, we were not trailblazers who consumed content at breakneck speed.  I started in March 2001, three months after Velious hit the market.  The journey from level 1 was fun, and most of us didn't care all that much about levelling as fast as possible, because the guild connection and a relatively plentiful server population made the slow level curve bearable.  We played in blissful ignorance not knowing that much of the high end raid content in Velious wasn't ready for players.

A great thing about these games is that the definition of 'beginning' and 'end' are left entirely to the player.  For the most part, someone can start years later and each game is new and fresh.  I've repeatedly read that Vanguard eventually takes away the ability to progress without grouping, and I think that's a tragic miscalculation based on what I saw happen in EQ.  Sometime in Luclin, EQ added the soulbinders in the original starting towns because they were mostly abandoned as people relocated to the moon. With Luclin self contained, nobody had much reason to visit the old towns besides the North Freeport market, and what was killed off with the bazaar.  My point about this is that over 5 years ago, EQ was forced to put features into the game to accomodate the new player, and that forced interdependence (getting a caster class to travel out of their way to the West Freeport gate to give a level 5 a bind) just isn't viable on a long term basis.  It's a lofty goal, but as we move forward in gaming, it just doesn't hold up.  Populations shift, newbie areas initially overrun with hundreds of people are empty, leaving the true newbie frustrated that they can't progress.  The average gamer is not some teenager with the free time to stand around sending tells to random strangers in order to beg for help.

Vanguard's initial design and early beta had all of the worst that EQ had to offer. Key highlights were corpse runs, lack of solo or small group options for tangible advancement, lengthy travel, and did I mention corpse runs?! I think Brad's ideas make for great copy, but fail to translate into an environment where people go to escape difficulty, and to be 'heroic' for a time.  There is nothing heroic in mechanisms that frustrate the player.  Corpse runs might have some rewarding factor, but I think it's a mechanic that should stay in our collective pasts, where EQ players can remind the new punks about their 'wasted' hours on Saturday afternoons rebreaking the Plane of Hate because some fool went too close to the north wall of the entry room.

Whoa, be glad I had to go visit someone in the hospital, or this might have been much longer!

Ultimately, players have demonstrated a willingness to tolerate some seriously flawed releases from Brad in the past.  My brief flirtation with beta was enough to tell me that he was going to do more fixing with subscription revenues rather than deliver a more polished product.  I understand that these online games are never done, but with 4 years of development, the people who pre-ordered the game shouldn't be getting screwed with server bugs and daily restarts.  What a great benefit for the early access they were given before the official 1/30 release date.

I'd wager that Vanguard will only get better as it ages, and might replace EQ2 as the best game of the genre that I'll never play.

i bought the wow expansion and decided to skip vanguard.

vanguard needs a sturdy computer. that's about all i know so far from first hand experience. they've definitely made a game that will look good in a few years, once people have hardware that can display it at the highest settings.  this is different from eq, which looked poor when compared to other games at release, and for the years after. can you believe they still haven't addressed the horrible luclin models?

everything else in vanguard is just going to be brad compromising on his crazy ideals. just browsing on forums shows that he's caved in on some of his "vision" ideas.  these things just aren't fun, so it's glad that they go away.

i think beta is about to go fully open, so everyone will be able to play it in the next few weeks.  like all games, some of it will be garbage, some will be fun, but if you have some friends along the way, the game will be tolerable.

playing warcraft certainly didn't foster much community spirit in me. the game was solo for the most part, and people only grouped to finish off the elite dungeon parts of their solo quest arcs.

i'm rambling, but i'll start a vanguard thread here once i get outta the newbie area and get an understanding of what's going on.

in the admin interface, looking at the login names sorted by last activity going back nearly 5 years is a wacky trip in a time machine.