Vanguard Beta in early January

[roadrunner]

The game is growing on me a little bit. At least on the surface the depth is greater than what was available in WoW in terms of areas such as crafting and things like diplomacy. I can accept the death penalty better now since I know I can summon my tombstone (at the expense of XP) for those times you die somewhere nasty. You can also bind you really the good stuff to yourself so that it will be there after you die. I also like the fact that you get a good array of spells other than just higher levels of existing abilities as I found leveling my priest in WoW. Performance is bad at times for me but it is beta so I put little weight into it.

I am up for grouping anytime for those who have it. I don't mind creating alts so we can all play together. I really like my gnome blood mage (level 9 now) and would like to try the "hive" which sounds like a instance from WoW (but not sure if they have instances). I think for it you need characters level 10+.

[Tackalt]

Any updates on the game? I've been trying to get into the beta, but alas no luck as of yet. And my PayPal account is still waiting verification from the bank.

Browsing EB Games, I saw that there's a massive Collector's Edition being sold. I just got a $600 check that I need to cash and if there's going to bed a strong Enforcer presence in the game, I may as well invest in it.

Some of the bonuses are insane. It's utterly ridiculous. 3 months free and a shit load of in-game stuff.

[roadrunner]

I guess if you count Rhonnin, Floobie, and I as a strong presence then yes =]. I like the game so far as it is more challenging than WoW and has more depth in many areas. The abilities/spells in vanguard have a greater variation than wow and the effects have a lot more thought in them than WoW. After a certain point in WoW you just get higher levels of the same abilities but nothing new. They have some of that in Vanguard but you will definitely have a much larger set of abilities to pick from when you hit level cap than in WoW.

The servers can get laggy but it is beta so I am not very concerned with that. WoW played like crap during beta and the initial release so it is nothing new when releasing a MMO.

The visual environment is much nicer if you machine supports running it at medium to high settings. This game will be a bit of a resource hog if you want it to look as pretty as it can.

I have not done crafting yet but from what I hear it has a bit of randomness in it and deeper than what you see in WoW.

The number of races/classes is nice for people who like alts. Floobie and I created orcs last night.

The death system turned me off at first but after playing with it a bit it is fair and adds some challenge. WoW system or lack of one makes it really too easy.

That was some good info on the collector's edition. Not sure what the monthly fee is but it sounds like it would not be that much of a premium over the regular edition when you factor that in. Don't know which I will go with.

[Tackalt]

Vanguard is definitely not as popular around here as WoW was when it was released. I bet I can get to that Software Etc to get the CE if I must.

Still not sure if I'll pick it up. Not too much into games that require lots of resources to look good. I really don't want to be playing a game that makes my eyes water because it's blurry. I played WoW like that for too long before I got a computer worthwhile.

We'll see, though.

[rhonnin]

Even at the high performance setting the game still looks very good, of course at highest performance it looks like crap but I think any reasonably current rig should be able to play it at balanced without too much trouble. The big thing is to have a decent video card and I recommend 2 gigs of ram.

As for the subscription...

[roadrunner]

Rhonnin is right that it runs ok at the medium-high settings with a average machine. I am currently running at the balanced setting with a few items such as shadows turned off but I did increase the viewing distance. My FPS is good and the only time I see bad lag (not sure if it is video) is in cities. What I was referring to is if you crank up the settings to high it does hit your machine. My current specs include a AGP Nvidia 6800 GT card, 3200+ AMD64 processor, and 2 gigs of RAM.

I am also encourage with the fact that the performance is getting better as they patch beta.

[rhonnin]

I have seen performance get better too. My machine is a bit sub par with one gig of ram and an ati 9600 with 128mb ram. I can run it on balanced with quite a bit of lag, like single digit fps in most spots, high performance is much better though and I get about 40 fps at the lowest setting.

[roadrunner]

I found this posted by a Sigil representative in a thread regarding servers coming down for a patch. I was in response to a post asking why the skip some build numbers for the beta servers. Thought it was funny

Here at Sigil, we are truly revolutionary and believe that the strongest should survive. So, every morning, we pit 4-6 hamsters against each other in the rodent gladiator arena I built, each wearing a build number, and the one left standing is the build we push out to you all.

[rhonnin]

This is one of the things I always liked in EQ1 too, the Dev crew had a great sense of humor. The loading screen quotes and bits of humor in patch notes were nice touches.

[roadrunner]

I think Sigil does a pretty good job in their responses within the beta forum.

Even if only a few of us play I would hope we can start a guild so we have access to guild chat and such. From what Rhonnin says we only need a full group (I think six) to start a guild. If we need to we can convince some random people us form it. As for recruiting I say if we find good people that want to be a part of us we invite them but we should avoid inviting random people in general.

Like I said before I am pretty impressed in the thought put into the quests. In WoW the quests were basically collect x number of drops or kill x number of mobs. Yesterday I had a quest where I had to circle a horse racetrack in a set amount of time. Pretty easy on my tripped out mount but still shows creativity. Oh yeah beginner mounts are pretty cheap and you can get them anytime. My lvl 11 doesn't need to run around anymore which is so nice.

I am thinking about picking up the station pass as then I can play PS if I get the urge.