Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Vanguard had an exploit which if you opened the trade window while crafting it didn't consume materials. People made insane stuff over and over with ultra rare components and basically killed the crafting market within a week. The reason crafted armor was so strong originally was because of +endurance regen essentially letting you keep full endurance and spam high cost abilities you werent able to spam. Like for DK it let you spam the AE lifetap which was enough with a fast weapon to outheal any damage in the game.

Rezz said:

APW wasn't in at release, at least not itemized. I forget exactly when they added it, but until then I'm fairly sure that people were making insanely OP crafted gear due to some bug or other with the way gathering worked. I think it was that they could effectively chain farm the legendary crap, so there was a boatload of people in legendary gear at cap pretty close to release. Not quite the same as the intended itemization stuff like EQ and WoW, but it was definitely a grip of the endgame gear until the actual raid content came out.

Granted, this was literally a decade ago and I quit shortly after hitting 50 when there was effectively nothing between level 40 and cap. Then they sorta itemized stuff, and I think it was right around when they added that farmable armor token stuff in the swamp, before APW came out.

Click to expand...

Raids in Vanguard were added like a year after release and were horribly bugged and exploitable. Before that like you mentioned the Swamp Tree Boss and Insect Queen Boss + Hegnarian were basically the end game.

Korrupt said:

Vanguard had an exploit which if you opened the trade window while crafting it didn't consume materials. People made insane stuff over and over with ultra rare components and basically killed the crafting market within a week. The reason crafted armor was so strong originally was because of +endurance regen essentially letting you keep full endurance and spam high cost abilities you werent able to spam. Like for DK it let you spam the AE lifetap which was enough with a fast weapon to outheal any damage in the game.



Raids in Vanguard were added like a year after release and were horribly bugged and exploitable. Before that like you mentioned the Swamp Tree Boss and Insect Queen Boss + Hegnarian were basically the end game.

Click to expand...

Exploits and cheating are one reason I think Pantheon will suck quickly even if there is a game there. I just can't believe they'll have the resources or skill to even come close to battling it, let alone tooling to do so. Huge game companies struggle mightily with it.

Is it sad that Vanguard came out 11 years ago and is still the best MMO I've played since EQ?

etchazz said:

Is it sad that Vanguard came out 11 years ago and is still the best MMO I've played since EQ?

Click to expand...

Not sure which you have played man...but there were at least 5 I can name that were better than Vanguard.

Wow
Tera
Rift
FF11
FFIV

I visit this thread every 3-4 months and read the past 4-5 pages and for over a year now I still don't know any more now than I did years ago.
It appears the fallen is taking its sweet time getting up. See ya in May.

Korrupt said:

Vanguard had an exploit which if you opened the trade window while crafting it didn't consume materials. People made insane stuff over and over with ultra rare components and basically killed the crafting market within a week. The reason crafted armor was so strong originally was because of +endurance regen essentially letting you keep full endurance and spam high cost abilities you werent able to spam. Like for DK it let you spam the AE lifetap which was enough with a fast weapon to outheal any damage in the game.



Raids in Vanguard were added like a year after release and were horribly bugged and exploitable. Before that like you mentioned the Swamp Tree Boss and Insect Queen Boss + Hegnarian were basically the end game.

Click to expand...

Worked for the cash-in-mail system too. Could send unlimited platinum.

Made about 10k a piece with my partner through a chong distributor before the staff cracked down on it. It was surprising to us that everyone knew the exploit yet nobody else was supplying these chongs. I chalk that up to the size of the community being so small and a lack of WoW-kiddies (besides us of course!) The chongs were smart too they started to inquire about a dupe after just a few transactions. We told them yes and they never asked anything else about it or about purchasing the information though. The staff cleared our stockpiles out after 2-3 months, but I was thinking in my head that was our fault. We set all our cash to the maximum of 30 plat. So it was easy to run through the database and check for mailboxes full of plat with max values. Weird thing is, they left every mule with at least 1 envelope of 30 plat. Very shoddy work.

Oh also, just remembered this little detail-- they banned none of our mules. Not a single mule was suspended or banned. I guess that says a lot about the state of the game.

Plat selling is cumbersome work. Have to be on-call to the chongs 24/7. Maintain ledgers and full sheets of mules account info and plat balances. Game cards, opening and maintaining trial accounts, hunting for more account keys. One of us had to be awake and at a computer 24 hours a day. The chongs wouldn't purchase stockpiles of plat from us they would only call us when they needed to fill an order. I guess they knew Vanguard's population was too low to invest in. There was a little bit of backstabbing too. Whoever was online controlled the transaction payment and the ledgers were on the honest system, so you just had to take their word for it. I hedged a few transactions towards the end of our run because I got paranoid I had already been getting backstabbed this whole time. Healthy greed-- of which the real world is no different in that regard.

Hegnarian runs bring back memories. We never saw much of APW as our guild disbanded during the Heg era. You say a year...but I feel it was well over a year before VG saw raids. I recall way too many people quitting for it to have been within a year.

Brahma said:

Not sure which you have played man...but there were at least 5 I can name that were better than Vanguard.

Wow
Tera
Rift
FF11
FFIV

Click to expand...

Tried every one on that list except FF11. WoW was cool for the first year, then I got bored. The rest of them felt like WoW ripoffs and were extremely hollow. Wound up playing each of them for about a month and left.

Yeah I do agree that certain slots being crafted best-as worked in EQ, at least for things like 55/5 HP/AC rings, Bule Diamond resist gear in Velious, shit like that. At least there was no item decay. UO had a great crafting system but everything decayed in UO, which was unfortunate but did make for a healthy crafting population. It worked in UO though because corpse looting and full pvp meant you shouldn't get attached to gear anyway.

I guess we'll eventually get to see a Pantheon livestream on crafting... lol

If there's a stream on crafting in Pantheon, the game's DOA already.

Locnar said:

(slow) item decay is necessary for long term economy health. I liked the Shadowbane system where your items had a chance to decay some on each death. Added more to the death penalty and made items and resources more meaningful.

As for exploiting, they got to ban the individual (based on personal info), not random mules. Exploit: you are out of the community. its also why a subscription system is required and why "free trials" must be segregated off on a "trial isle" with no contact allowed with the rest of the server.

Click to expand...

Still think a system where items age and eventually become no trade would be awesome for economy. It doesn't have to be a fast process, but without something like that in place, you eventually end up with 40,000 fungi tunics on a server of 1500 people. That also leads to old content becoming irrelevant, and items completely losing their value.

I really enjoyed the way EQ did it, with having extremely rare drops in the game, but that were still tradable (at least in vanilla). I know a lot of people hated the rare drops, but it was great for keeping old content from dying off completely, and made for some awesome twinkage. Really hated it when they put no drop on shit, and made level requirements on items. Having a BOC on my twink warrior and raping faces was good times. Really think the restrictions games nowadays put on trading items with things like BOP take a lot of the fun out of it.

etchazz said:

I really enjoyed the way EQ did it, with having extremely rare drops in the game, but that were still tradable (at least in vanilla). I know a lot of people hated the rare drops, but it was great for keeping old content from dying off completely, and made for some awesome twinkage. Really hated it when they put no drop on shit, and made level requirements on items. Having a BOC on my twink warrior and raping faces was good times. Really think the restrictions games nowadays put on trading items with things like BOP take a lot of the fun out of it.

Click to expand...

Agreed. The "reasons" I always heard for BOP items were less RMT of items and protecting of the crafting economy. I always thought that crafters could be part of the process if the drops were upgradeable via crafters or the drops were materials for items though that could take away that instant gratification piece.

pharmakos said:

Somewhere between orange and yellow imho

Click to expand...

Gold Level: Dirt bikes on the weekend~

Brahma said:

Not sure which you have played man...but there were at least 5 I can name that were better than Vanguard.

Wow
Tera
Rift
FF11
FFIV

Click to expand...

Agree with everything but Tera and Rift.

Rift was great, just all the cool world invasion stuff got toned way down cuz of cry bebbies taking a no penalty death when afking in towns.

Nirgon said:

Rift was great, just all the cool world invasion stuff got toned way down cuz of cry bebbies taking a no penalty death when afking in towns.

Click to expand...

I always felt the combat was really bland and stiff (entirely too macroable). The world was really fucking boring too. None of the lore characters or stories stood out. It just felt very hub-ish and sluggish.

Nirgon said:

Rift was great, just all the cool world invasion stuff got toned way down cuz of cry bebbies taking a no penalty death when afking in towns.

Click to expand...

Rift in beta was leaps and bounds better than it was at release. Somehow

Flobee said:

Rift in beta was leaps and bounds better than it was at release. Somehow

Click to expand...

Because it wasn't toned down and you had to stop and think about your build and group at certain dungeon bosses. Just like Vanguard though Rift was full of bugged raids, skills, and gear which all of the test guilds mostly took advantage of. Once the raid content gets decimated in days after release it leaves raiders pretty bored the next few months. I cant even count the number of raid exploits like being able to use reflect on any major boss ability was GG. This is the kind of stuff IMO you always see in any game with private raid testing. From my perspective thats what for raiders at least makes a game stale quick. I def kept some shit that helped us private also in those games from raid testing also.