Vanguard: Saga of Heroes News Update- Thursday

State of the Game
From Ryan Elam, Director of Technology:

I?m going to answer some questions here, in typical FAQ style.  It?s going to be very informal, and you MAY find yourself laughing at some point¡­ don?t worry, this is normal. 

1. Why do you have to patch so much after launch?  Shouldn?t you be done?

I often say, "We will continue to make mistakes because we?re made almost entirely out of humans."  Yes, I?m just crazy enough to admit it.

Let?s say you live in an absolutely huge house.  We?re talking 50 rooms, built-in theatre, the works.  You want to invite over a bunch of people to enjoy your house, but first you need to get it ready.  You clean, and you scrub, and you fix every little thing you possibly can before your guests arrive.  You think to yourself, "Okay, there are a few more pieces of furniture that need to be polished, and yes even some dirt shoved under the rugs, and maybe that 80?s picture of Flock of Seagulls is a little out of place, but heck other than that, I don?t think anyone is going to have a problem!" 

Then come oh... lets say....a few hundred thousand of your closest friends.  You will be shocked and amazed at the little blemishes they find!

That is why.  No matter how hard we try, we just won?t catch everything, nor will we catch everything in time. 

Another thing to remember about Vanguard and games like Vanguard is a very old adage in development, and that is that complexity is an N-squared problem.  The more complex a system is, the disproportionably greater the likelihood it catches the attention of old man Murphy and his Law.  Vanguard is a very, very complex system, made up of dozens of complex systems, each of which is made up of hundreds of complex systems, each of which is written by a bleary-eyed human being doing his or her best to make an entertaining experience for you and your friends.

2. Why did you fix Bug03 but you still haven?t fixed Bug01?!

The most humbly simple reason is that we are a company of a hundred people, each of which has certain talents, and not all of which share those talents.  Trust me, if I have spare time in the next six months, you don?t want me fixing the look of your dark elf?s hair!   Nor would you want Jeff Butler jumping into the code to increase the speed of your rogue attack.  There IS a prioritized list of tasks to be done, and those tasks are handed out to people to fix, and those people fix them as fast as possible, because if they don¡¯t they have to sleep in the Llama pen.

3. Why is my client performance so bad?

Honest answer is because we made a game with a ton of graphics.  Check your hard drive; it?s got a lot of Vanguard on it!  Almost any given area of the game has potentially several gigabytes of geometry and textures to render, and we use every trick in the book to manage that memory and get it to your video card as fast as we possibly can.  We also did our best to make sure that when the game came out, you could spend ?150 on a video card that would run the game, and I think we did pretty good.  We certainly don¡¯t run at the same frame rates as some MMOGs that have 1/16^th the graphics to render that we do, but with a few more weeks we should be able to run on most machines fairly well.

I can promise you, we will continue to optimize the client.  You will see frame rates improve over time, and at the same time you?ll be exposed to less and less expensive hardware to run the game.  If you are seeing Vanguard in low performance, do yourself a favor and look at the game on a system that runs it in Highest Quality.  THAT is where we think people will be in another year, and we want the graphics environment of Vanguard to be your home for many years to come.

Item Loss Bugs

As of 5am PST Thursday morning, the item loss bugs revolving around bags should be resolved. While the fixes should prevent any new cases from arising, many instances where an item was already lost may be unresolved. We are still looking into a fix for this and will post updates as we have them.

Disciple Balance

Disciples were given some balance updates with the last patch to get them more in line with where they should be. Prior to yesterday¡¯s patch, disciples could sometimes score critical hits upwards of 60% of the time. Obviously, that was not intended and it has been brought to a more appropriate percentage. We apologize that this did not make it into the patch notes.

[Editor: Jason]