Slashdot Mirror
Vanguard Producer Wants Second Chance for First Impression
Allakhazam is featuring an interview with Vanguard producer Thom Terrazas where he addresses some of the early issues that made Vanguard so slow out of the gates. "Performance; Optimization; High System Requirements. Everyone may have a different name for it but at the end of the day, optimization challenges were the biggest hurdle faced at launch. We lost too many customers at launch due to the inability to run the game smoothly and we have been making huge improvements in this area in every update since. I can speak to this first hand actually: When I started playing at launch, I experienced some horrible "hitching" while moving from one area to another on what I consider an average gamers' computer. When I began to play more extensively a couple months later, I noticed some considerable improvements to my frame rate. Today, it is night and day superior than it was at launch. Optimizing the game has been one of our top priorities and in the last six months, we have made some considerable strides in improving the player's experience. If you haven't logged in recently or if you gave us a look in the beginning and haven't been back since, check it out now - I'll even flag your account for free for a period of time if you want to go in and prove me wrong."
A company spokesperson is also promising fixes for the multitude of problems in "Star Wars Galaxies" that have plagued the MMORPG for the last five years. "This time you can trust us," said SOE director Constance Phuckup, citing the company's extensive experience in dealing with glitchey, poorly implmented, unbalanced MMORPG's.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Next time, optimize first, release second.
This offer would have been a lot more attractive before Age of Conan released this weekend/yesterday. A little bit too late now, since anyone in the MMO scene who was looking for a new game is now busy running around AoC.
Besides that, there are a couple of reasons why you're not likely to see downloadable demos for live MMOs:
First off, they want to move as many boxes as they can. That initial $50 outlay, when you take into account the tens of thousands of fanboys hoping to grab prime virtual land, loot or names, goes a long, long way to paying off development costs or server leases. That $50 also lets the ol' Sunk Costs fallacy come out to play. You can't return the game, so you're more likely to play the whole month, so you're more likely to climb over the learning curve and UI/AI quirks.
Second, when you start offering free trials of the live game, the gold farmers really start to come out of the woodwork. Between rotating IPs, MAC spoofing and proxies, nothing will block them for long. If you let them in with the rest of the players, your in-game economy is fucked from the very beginning. Free trials tend to manifest when the player-base has stabilized, or when the publisher's absolutely desperate for players, and the risk of disruptive farmers becomes tolerable or necessary.
Korean-style MMOs are a different matter, because they operate on a totally different sort of revenue model. Most of them are dedicated to coaxing real money out of the player for in-game items, and the actual in-game currency allows for little more than subsistence.
I've noticed that, with few exceptions (such as a new release), games with good gameplay, high popularity, and rare technical issues have long free trials (WoW has two weeks last time I checked.) Tabula Rasa just gave me a 3 day free trial. Vanguard has no free trial whatsoever.
I'd ask what games with short or nonexistent trials have to hide, but I think the answer is obvious. If Vanguard's producers really believe in their product, they should have no problem with letting folks play for free for a couple of weeks - get them involved, attached and hooked. If, on the other hand, they're afraid people will see the game in a bad light after playing that long, I guess a short trial (or none) makes sense.