Vanguard Beta in early January

[roadrunner]

looks like there are two beta servers. I am going to make a blood mage gnome on server two after work.

[rhonnin]

server 2 was the pvp beta server, they took it down to tinker with the ruleset and will be putting it back up as a third server.

[Gunther]

I have a key. patching now!

[Pilsner]

I downloaded it, patched it up logged in and found out that the video card on my laptop is not supported and I cant play.

In any event it a 17gig file. I dont even have that much porn on my computer...anymore

[Gunther]

Last night Roadruner, Rhonnin and I grouped up in the Kura starting area. At first glance it is a cross between EQ2 and WoW. I found the character creating to be a bit tedious. Probably go with average settings for every toon I make.

I logged in for a bit this morning and got my Kura DK to Lv6. I tried to work on Diplomacy but had to leave before I got anything done.

Rhonnin is there a database like Allakhazam for VG yet? Allakhazam doesn't have a VG link yet.

[rhonnin]

I would hope not seeing that the NDA was only lifted 2 days ago.

[roadrunner]

Gunther and I were playing last night on our level 7+ characters and found that neither of us were liking the death penalty system. I like a challenge but at level 7-8 the corpse runs get a bit old when it takes 40 minutes just to fight back to your tombstone. We did find that we could recover our tombstone from the graveyard but lose the XP. This made it a bit easier to swallow but I still think WoW is too easy and Vanguard seems a bit steep.

I kind of like the way CoV did it where when you died you incur debt. You will still earn XP but half of it will go to pay off the debt. If you die again it would just add to the amount of debt you had. You never go back in XP just earn at a slower rate until you are out of debt.

It is quickly becoming obvious that teaming will be required in vanguard. The quests I am getting now will be pretty rough solo. I am still holding out final judgment because I really like how they have create a pretty unique set of powers so far for the blood mage I am playing. WoW's powersets are pretty boring and not very creative.

Rhonnin is there the concept of specialization in you characters like how WoW has talents or do all characters of a certain class get the same stuff?

[rhonnin]

I think at around lvl 15 you get specialization stuff.
I actually really like the death penalty system they have, it's not as harsh as in EQ1 but still makes you have to use some tactics to avoid it as much as possible. If you recover your corpse then you lose no exp and if you have to summon it out and take the hit it's hardly painful and with how easily exp comes you have anything you lost back in short order. EQ2 used the same system as you describe and it basically made death nothing to worry about.

Grouping is definitely required for many things past lvl 8 or so but that's not a bad thing, it is a multiplayer game after all, a lot of things can be done with a group of two or three though unlike in EQ1, but in VG there are other things you can do if your partner isn't online, like diplomacy which is pretty fun.

[Droxor]

My questions are

1) What about the Player Housing and Player cities that they promised and SWG delivered.
2) Player Shipping? True or False
3) Diplomacy, is it possible to be just a polotician like in SWG?

[rhonnin]

There is player housing though it's not like SWG where you can just plop a house down anywhere, I believe the player cities are possible now but I can't say for sure because I didn't really follow the housing testing.
I haven't seen any player owned ships so I can't say for sure that it has been fully implemented, I do know that it was being actively tested though.
Diplomacy is quite a bit different than politics in SWG, it is fun to do though so I guess you could just play as a diplomat if you like, it does have city wide benefits and my insider source with the diplomacy guy was saying they'll be adding a pvp component to it after launch.