Southern Armada Beta Diary

Southern Armada Beta Diary

Well its been 6 months or so since the first of us ex-SA found each other in VG beta. It started , as it often does, in a rather innocuous fashion.

Let me set the scene.
Its the middle of winter in New Zealand and its fucking freezing. Now in NZ we get winters as cold as you get them in places like the UK, but New Zealanders have never really taken to that wonderful invention known as insulation. We build our houses entirely out of wood with only a thin wooden skin between us and the outside 0C and 60Kph winds. Insulation is for "Poofs and whinging Poms" *poke Wolfe*.

So anyway, there I am huddling in my study, leaning into the warmth generated by my LCD monitor, logged in on one screen to VG Beta 2. 0 and on the other screen to my Cisco study material. Guess which one is being ignored :), when I get a /tell from some one called Durak.
"Oi are you a kiwi from Prexus eq server?"
"yup, whos this?"
"Alltear"
"Maaaaaaaate!!"

About 5 minutes later we were sick to death of /tell and we had decided to form a version of Southern Armada on the beta Server. Now I dunno about Allty but I had no intention of joining all the beta guilds that had started to up all over the place. I was happy to wear the SA tag for 3 years in EQ and a year in WoW and had every intention of continuing. I figured I should ask permission of the powers that be so I shot Kez a quick mail asking if it would be cool if we started an SA chapter and he said go for it. So I flicked an email to a GM and within a couple of days SA was born.

As soon as I logged in with the tag I got hold of Durak and invited him. It turns out that one of the advantages of having a guild with a very long term membership roster is that we all generally use the same names across all the games we play. So very quickly, Durak, Feninine (I can never spell that right) Qualm, Red, Pinkie and myself were all happily chatting away in /gu. After a while I began to realise that there was no way I could sustain a decent beta test schedule and pass my exams so I pretty much dropped out of Beta for several months. I kept up to date with the ongoing issues of beta and logged on occasionally but simply couldn't spend the amount of time the game deserved to be a good tester.

In the meantime the guys invited a few people from outside the guild and couple of others from SA started to pop up and the numbers started to flesh out a bit. There are about 20 people in SA right now including alts. For those from EQ we currently have Roottouch as a member :) Every day there a few more joining us in the beta experience and the SA spirit grows back just a little bit more.

I have now finished my exams and I'm back in playing as much as Telecoms shitty ADSL network and a random reboot from my PC will allow me to. It actually really hard to write anything about beta because it changes so damn much. To give you a couple of examples of how much it can change, I have now been through 3 complete rebuilds of the combat system and I don't know how many incremental changes. Diplomacy has been totally rebuilt twice and so has harvesting. Each Class is now on its 3rd complete rebuild, major systems can change at the drop of a hat and be tweaked, learned and gone again by the next patch. Every patch brings new sounds, new spells and abilities, new animations, new game systems

Having said that, the game is a lot of fun. I can see myself in VG for many years to come simply because its a tough game to master. I know that many people are out their bitching about Vanguard but I honestly think most of those people think they are going to experience that first time you logged into EQ again.

lets face it, when EQ first started it was not a good game. They couldn't keep the damn servers up for longer than about four hours a week for the first month. Crashes and item loss were constant. No one had a clue how to get around, Humans couldn't see in the dark and would spend hours running randomly with a completely black screen hoping for a light in the distance. No one understood aggro and Monks spent a LOT of time dying until the players figured out how it worked.

There were no pages long in-depth analysis of game play, class interaction or why the Devs hate . Crafting was broken for about a year and SOE denied there was anything at all wrong with it. They hired an absolute fucking moron as the player community person (To this day, 6 years later, I still hate Abashi) There was NO information outside the game, no eqmaps, no eqnecro, no steelwarrior, no database driven fansites of any sort. All of that in depth stuff came later and yet people seem to have this idea that all of those sites came with the game, that they evolved full blown from the brow of Aradune.

In fact the question is not "Is this game as good as EQ, will it hold my attention like EQ did?" because depending on your personal experience with EQ and why you left, that's a next to impossible question to answer.

The best question to ask is:
Will this game be as Good as EQ?, does it have the potential to evolve and develop in the same way that EQ did.

The unequivocal answer to that question is Yes, yes it does.

Beta: What it is, what it isnt

What is Beta?

Many many people seem to be under the impression that being in a Beta is an excuse to get 12 months worth of play time in for free before anyone else can play. Many seem to think that when they logon to Vanguard for the first time they will experience one of two things:

1. A finished game with only light polishing to complete it. These people become very upset with graphics bugs, disk transfer hitching, unfinished quests etc. Generally they will post one giant "fuck you all this game sucks, you bastards lied to me all along, another crappy SOE product!." in the beta forums. They then proceed to head on over to the Fires of Heaven Boards and break NDA left and right about how crap the game is and they know cause 'they are in beta'.

2. The other type of disappointed Beta player is the one who thought that being in beta was like the WoW public Beta, again a largely finished game. These players will generally whine on the Beta forums about how its not like WOW and how WOW "was a much better game at the same point". They will complain that this game will be a complete failure because its "not like WOW" and it wont get as many people as WOW". They miss the point co9mpletely that the game isn't and never wanted wanted to be WOW.

It is unfortunately very obvious that a lot of morons have applied to play the Beta. Sigil seems to be very adept at finding them out of the tens of thousands who are registered on the Vangaurd forums.

For those who do get into the beta with the right attitude they will find the early under-pinnings of a good game. The basic mechanics are in place but there is a long way to go. There are LOTS of bugs, everything from spelling mistakes in Quests and item descriptions out to crashes to desktop with programming errors. I have had 2 characters I have had to abandon completely as they were too buggy to logon to. I spent 3 weeks with an average fps of 5-10 until they found a graphics driver bug and squashed it.

The good Beta player submits every bug they can find, I would probably average 3 bugs submitted per play session, some days more, some days less.

However, despite the bugs, the falling through the world, the flawed game mechanics, the testing of some horrible game play there are definite benefits to being a beta tester. One thing Ive been told is a benefit is "getting a head start on other players". Honestly I don't believe that mainly because I have no idea what the game will look like live. So far the Dev's have moved around the racial starter towns, major cities, dungeons, Castles etc I have little idea what the final geography will look like, although it does feel like it will start to solidify now.

It has also been said that although we may be testing the mechanics of the Game a lot of it wont be put in till they go live. We will have tested the basics, but they wont put the polish in until the final master goes gold. So there will be content in the final version that I wont have seen.






To the left you will note an Ogre. He is big, ugly and hits like a Girl. Early level damage tweaking is going on right now. At the moment you can completely breeze through the early levels with no real danger of dieing. The Ogres are east of Martok (I wrote about them in my last Blog) and are a really fun quest line. As you can see from my tag Southern Armada is live and well in Vanguard Saga of Heroes Beta. I started playing in late Beta 1.5 and almost as soon as I logged into Beta 2.0 I got a tell.
Is that Ulaa from Prexus?
I replied it was and I found a fellow SA member, Alltear. We got to chatting and I found out from Allty there were another 2 SA in beta as well. We figured what the hell and started an SA chapter.

We quickly found our numbers around 10 fairly regular players and it stayed at that level well into beta 3.0. Around that point, suddenly we had a flood of SA getting into VG and we expanded rapidly. Its amazing what people remember, Alltear started getting requests to join the guild from people outside of SA who knew our reputation from either EQ or WOW. I started to get tells from people asking;

"Is that the original SA?, the Aussies from Prexus?"

When I replied that it was, mostly they were really happy to see us still in existence and still playing as a guild. They were largely people who had had good experiences with us in various other games and were glad to see solid, quality players coming online.






The entrance to Hathor Zhi