Yea...day of release, and guess what? Sony's shit ass station crap is already choking. 30 seconds per page load as I'm trying to get my damn account activated.

FUCK SOE

Heh...did you get in yesterday after all? Pev was already terrorizing the lands.

heh, yea. The servers came back up probably within 30 minutes. I finally found the official SOE Vanguard forums...the thread where people were bitching had gotten to 6 pages long when the logons started working again. :p

I got in before the outage, created my character, got him to level 2, then realized that...hey...this isn't a freakin' cleric. Somehow I managed to create a ranger. So I deleted him and made my cleric... he's no level 4 I think.

So far, the game's pretty cool. Spawn rates are HIGH. Honestly, it reminds me alot of WoW without the shitty graphics, though it also has aspects of various other MMOs I've played. That's not really a bad thing, though. It's looking pretty good overall. Though the game is BUGGY.

Anyway, I had to dial down the graphics. It's about time for me to start seriously considering building a new gaming box.

lol. I remember someone else doing the same thing with the graphics. And lmao @ ranger...so eager to play the game that you didn't even check what class you were eh?

Anyway, I'll be awaiting any reports. And I'm disappointed in you, I had expected a blood mage. They're healers too, apparently.

I'm a blood mage and my character kicks the crap out of Satis' when it comes to damage - /cheer I agree that this is very wow like with the quests and such but much better graphics - I am excited - I may have found another game I will enjoy as much well not as much but close to what was SWG. SWG will always rule because Star Wars Rocks!

hehe I made a blood mage, not played him yet though.

This game gets more and more gorgeous, came over a hill last night and it was night in the game, was suddenly met by the sea with moonlight rippling over it and the masts of ships in the distance. Was truly beautiful, I'd say this game is on a par with Oblivion tbh in some of the landscapes.

edit:
http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/chara ... 4424523287
Thats my pevil, check out her 3 server discoveries and 1 world one! Go me!

gives restricted access response

keep trying, its sony. sometimes it doesn't display all the stats either.

well, Shiny and I are probably pretty thoroughly addicted now. Played it most of the weekend...I'm up to level 12 and she's at 11. My cleric kicks serious ass. I can tank like a mofo and I do very decent damage...shiny just does mad damage but can't take hits at all. I tend to rez her alot. It's nice to be able to rez, though. and I just unlocked a blade barrier type spell, which is quite nice.

My page is here:
http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/blog. ... 7244665620

not all my /blogs appear to be showing up, but whatever...the cool one with the weird glowing crystal thing works. Shiny and I just moved from our starting town (Leth Narae) to some dwarven outpost so we could get more missions...the rock above is near it.

Anyway, it's buggy as HELL, but very fun and very pretty. And very heavy on teh system. Regular reboots are a must as the game leaks memory bad. Shiny had to deal everything down to minimal graphics settings to play. :p

Sad thing is I am on minimal graphic and all and my graphic card (although was not top of the line) was just bought a month ago.

I am actually a lvl 12 bloodmage now /cheer so now I do even more damage

I have found some really nice people in the game already - although some jerks spawn camping someone I needed for 2 hours too..

Now I just have to figure out how to get good sleep and still play the game.

Thanks to a certain evil someone who shall remain unnamed I'm actually playing the game as well, for now. Got a week or so to go (I think), so what servers are you guys on? Might make a char on that one just for fun.

My main character on the other server (Targonor) is a Dwarven warrior named Rinox Terriblis (can't use The Terrible ). I would have chosen a dreadknight if it weren't for the fact that dwarves can't choose that class. Ah well.

I'm lvl 7 so far and having fun. The game looks great but I agree, there are a lot of bugs and it's darn heavy on the ole' pc. Last night I had it happen that I was "already looting a body" and couldn't loot anything anymore. Only logging out changed it. Another thing is that there's no message about the rules for dying changing at lvl 7, so I was running around panicking about losing my gear.

And I stopped playing for last night when the game crashed as I opened a door. But overall: great stuff!

What races are you guys btw? I know your classes are cleric and blood mage but I don't know about the races.

heh I already have 7 of my 8 char limit (2 thanks to making chars to play with Ox and another mate I have given a key to). Haven't played any others yet really, my ranger is still great fun, particularly now I bought her 2 daggers that give extra chance for crit hit, so she does some very nice damage (highest being about 450 so far at lvl 8.5). I haven't really been doing much fighting with her though; in Tursh the quests are a bit sparse for me, I need to start grouping (and shock! I will group in this game, I've only seen one jerk so far).

The other char I've played a little is my Druid, another Thestran human who I got to level 5 last night. She's fun, good damage and she has some minor healing (HoTs rather than full heals) and also my pally which I played with Ox, who got to level 4 I think. Again he's not bad, too early to truly tell, and he so far has a big heal thats got a 5min cooldown and a smaller heal on a 15s cooldown.

Also got a Dreadknight, a Rogue, a Bloodmage and a Psyionist waiting to go, though I may also have to get a Sorcerer in there somewhere. I'm mainly enjoying exploring the places right now; so far I've started in the rolling green hills of Tursh and the snowy mountains of Bordinars Cleft, but I've also travelled through Leth Nurae (sp?) over to Halgarad and even to the other 2 continents (only seen the dock towns there though) and every new area is amazing.

On bugs, only ones I've had are when the map/interface sometimes goes pixellated or huge, but it then fixes itself in 10seconds or so. My mate last night was getting pissed off, everytime he cast a spell it would send his screen black for a second or two.

My class is a high elf. And for the record I am irritated - someone is making chars on other servers with my tag name. I mean really who else would go by something like shiny as a name? POsers!

Hehehe, Rinox was taken as a login too. Bizarro, I only met one other 'Rinox' in my entire gaming career.

Played some more today, and I have to admit that some aspects of the game have started to bother me. One thing is the losing XP when dying and/or running back to my body etc. Running back always takes a lot of time and if you're unlucky 3 enemies are alreading camping your corpse. And the system seems bugged...i've had it happen that i ran back to my corpse, reached it, only to find that my inventory items were simply nowhere to be found. I had to die again on purpose, rez at the shrine and lose xp to get it back again. I don't mind the running back to my corpse most of the time, but if it's -say- accros a mountain range you need to run around it. very annoying. (I know this is the case in WoW too but I don't like it there either...and you don't lose xp there afaik)


Other things that bother me are more technical: fell through the earth again 10 minutes ago, had to ctrl-alt-del the game to get out. And for a while the 'cooldown' on the icons was just gone...I couldn't see when a skill had recharged! Made it a little hard to fight.

Oh and I don't understand a lot of the stuff in-game like the chat channels (I think I 'broke' them ), harvesting/crafting (where do i find someone who'll teach me to mine?), the map (sometimes targets show, sometimes they don't - the same for the direction marker), the friends system, etc etc.

My failure to grasp all these things is my own fault, but the bugs are kinda annoying.

Satis's list of vanguard tricks:

1. Ignore the maps. Other than just general direction, they're useless. Turn off the minimap, it sucks.
2. Vanguard leaks memory bad. Increase your window pagefile size and maybe get more RAM. Then be prepared to exit the game every hour or two. Maybe even reboot your computer. Sorry, it sucks.
3. If you get slowdowns, jerkiness, and especially any kind of graphical errors like cooldown timers not playing, map not opening or is distorted, etc, type this on the command line: /flush It dumps all your textures and everything else and reloads. Takes a few seconds, so don't be doing it in combat.
4. Corpse runs are great....don't die! :p If you soul-bind something, it'll respawn with you when you die...so if you die alot and don't know a rezzer, soul bind some of your armor and your weapon. You can get soul-binding crystals at general vendors, typically. Alternately, team with a rezer. My cleric and shiny's blood mage gained a rez ability at level 10.
5. If you get stuck looting (you're already looting a corpse!) there's a / command to end looting. I think it's /endloot or something. You can get command lists by first doing /help commandlist and get the categories. Then do /commandlist [category] to get the actual commands. eg; /commandlist emote gives you a list of all emotes.
6. If you try to join a group (or invite someone else) and it says you/they are already in a group and you aren't, you probably quit the game while in a group. It's a bug. Just type /groupleave and /groupdisband (I think that's the right command do disband a group), then try again.
7. To trade, highlight a person and do /trade
8. To mess with chat settings, right-click on the chat tab you want to mess with. Tons of options, including what channels to listen to.
9. Want more room on the default UI for skills? Go into your settings..there's an interface tab with check boxes to enable more skill bars. Alot more. You can also check an interface button toward the top that lets you move EVERYTHING around, kind of like the customize option in guild wars. Or you can reset defaults if you screwed something up real bad.
10. There's a profanity filter. It's in the settings.
11. There are trainers for everything. There's a harvesting trainer...at least in the elf area he gives a quest where you chop down trees...you have to complete the quest line in order to start harvesting. After you chop down so many trees, you get to choose what kind of stuff you want to harvest...I chose skinning and reaping.
12. When you hit ~100 in your harvest skill, you have to "train" it by reading a book. The harvest guy sells the book. The one to read at a 100 skill is the amateur book.
13. You can't get a horse until level 10. You can then get a free one by becoming level 10 in diplomacy (I believe) or you can buy one from the horse mechant. The first horse is 12 silver for elves, so save your money.
14. Crafting is complicated. So is diplomacy. Don't expect to learn it in 2 minutes.
15. The crafting and diplomacy trainers are in the major cities. The harvesting trainer for high elves was on the road just outside the main city.
16. KOS...some races don't like each other and their NPCs will KOS (kill on site) anyone of a disliked race. IE, dwarves hate half-giants. If you want to socialize, you have to hang around the boundaries and gain faction (500 I believe)....once you do that, they'll stop KOSing you. The interactions are complex.
17. The horse vendor is in the city.
18. The horse vendor doesn't sell saddle bags. There's a saddle bag vendor.
19. There IS an auction house. it's called the broker (exchange broker).
20. To make bags, you have to be a level 8 outfitter. Sorry, I'm only level 3.

Ok, enough for now.