Brad is a jackass who can’t even remotely control his team and makes proclamations with no substance. If Vanguard fails, the reasons for it will be obvious: He refused to listen to anyone but the “hardcore,” which is a painfully small subset of game players (and the team’s refusal to listen to anyone else went so far as to ignore/wipe/lock any discussion on this subject), and he allowed his various developers to “test” complex mechanics they knew were never going to work instead of focusing on ideas that might make it into the final product.

Some of us knew what was coming when, in November of ‘06, the release date was announced and the Crafting and Harvesting mechanics were ripped out and entirely replaced.

A few more people woke up around December, when they stated that they were “beginning” to balance Adventuring (combat and loot).

The final death-knell was in late-January, when numerous new systems were introduced. Item decay being chief among them, they were concepts that should have existed since the beginning of development, or not at all. To even think for a moment that such a complex game mechanic as item decay and repair could be fully rolled out and tested in less than a month requires astonishing levels of either hubris or idiocy, and I know which one I’m leaning towards.

The trouble is that McQuaid was dishonest with his userbase prior to launch with his spins of it won’t release until it’s ready. His new comments are just another spin.

New crafting… I don’t even know what to say to that comment. It is simply a different crafting system… far from new. I was playing crafting systems like VG’s back in the early 90’s in the halcyon days of MUDS.

You sir are fooled. What VG has done is make a frustrating, painful, and time-consuming game to play. It requires no more thinking than any other MMORPG on the market. It only requires more time to be wasted on meaningless tasks.

What are you talking about? Lack of originality? Are we talking about the same game? I wonder what is your definition of “originality”? A few examples:

- A new sphere – Diplomacy. Never attempted before. It’s definitely not *polished*, yet completely new.

- A completely new crafting system. Yep, finally we don’t need to harvest for hours nor flood the market with tons of useless exp items. We can just go in with zero cash and zero harvests and start gaining crafting exp. And we have to decide whether we want to make stuff to sell and get rich or use the time to gain more exp. Again, completely unpolished, yet very original in my book.
(and “3 hours to get from lvl 6 to 7″? please. I was getting almost half a level past 20 in that time)

- Heck, even if I hate the non-instanced dungeons concept, in this day and age I’d say it is novel .

Now, I still have unsubscribed. I don’t play for the future potential, I play to have fun right now. I couldn’t bear anymore to have my client crash every hour or after 3-4 zone/chunk changes whichever comes first, due to out of memory errors, five weeks after release. Then there is nothing more immersion-breaking graphics-wise than to see horribly jaggy fences/houses/whatever, anti-aliasing was already a must years ago afaic.

Then, as another poster above said, the game was not designed to be fun but to be frustrating. Simple minds often confuse the concepts of ‘frustrating’ and ‘difficult’, and apparently quite a few fans are delighted. Almost every little feature that has the potential to be fun has to be spoiled by a generous helping of suck.

An example. A very item-centric game like VG has a very limited banking and carrying capacity. This is very strongly felt by diplomats who need to store and carry dozens of items of clothing with various +effects and dozens of information papers (diplo loot). Sigil’s answer: we heard you; we still won’t allow containers into bank slots, but we will soon patch in a special bigger container for diplo stuff. A normal dev house would have stopped there and made a lot of diplomats happy.

But the Sigil Touch had to be added: players won’t be able to store all of their diplomacy stuff in every container, they will have to choose between diplo clothes or diplo loot (and of course only one such container can be equipped). How do I compensate for that? The way we’ve been doing it so far, by making more frequent trips to the bank and storing more on storage alts (with no sharable bank slots as in EQ2). Can I quickly swap a diplo bag full of clothes for one full of loot? Nope, since the bank can’t store non-empty containers, one will have to do the swapping item by item. Does it make the game more ‘challenging’? No, only more time consuming. Aren’t these ‘palliative activities’ immersion-breaking? IMO yes, a lot. Do I have time for that? hehe, no.