Pamela David
My "main" character is now level 35, and starting to hit group-oriented content. As usual I'm lagging behind the main wave of power-levelers, many of whom are already at the level 80 cap. The idiots. It sounds like there are some gaps in questing content at higher levels and that it requires a bit of grind to advance, but that's something the devs have already acknowledged, and I suspect some of those holes will have been plugged by the time I get there. Which is a big advantage of adopting a more leisurely pace. Let the hardcore be the testers. It's what they should have been doing during the actual beta tests rather than trying to get a head start on everyone else.
What's interesting is that the 80's haven't been spending their time complaining about the lack of high-end content so much because they've been busy power-farming lower-level areas for money and gear. So when the devs recently implemented what seems to be an anti-gold-farming measure where bosses that are too far below your level actually scale to your level and are no longer farmable, the roar of disapproval in the official forums was deafening.
I'm all for the nerf, of course. Stick to level-appropriate content and you'll be fine. It only hurts people who are exploiting areas or power-leveling their noob mates. Those sorts of people have been bleating about how it "reduces content", means you can't complete every single quest because you out-level them too quickly, or even more laughably, "it's up to me how I want to play the game".
It only reduces content that isn't appropriate for your level. Awww, so you can't farm it and make big money for zero effort? Good, because then neither can the gold farmers. Out-leveled the quests? That's a shame, but there's no rule that says you must be able to complete every quest in the game on a single character. Maybe you should have done that group quest in an appropriate-level group rather than assuming you could simply level past it then go back at your leisure and then sleepwalk it solo.
"It's up to me how I want to play the game". That sentiment, which I'm paraphrasing from actual, real posts on the official forums and not just making up, blows my mind. It's not up to you at all, it's up to the developers. They designed the game, they decide what is and isn't acceptable. It's not up to some jumped-up little fuckwit who has played a dozen MMOs and has come to think they're some sort of elite player who knows better than the developers. Threaten to quit the game in protest? Or, as one moron put it "move on". Yeah? Move on to what? In any case, fuck off, no one will miss you.
What's sadly amusing is how I've come to appreciate some of Vanguard's mechanics now that there's something shiny and new to compare them with. Firstly there was the realisation that in a highly-zoned world such as in AoC, sailing will never be a practical reality. That was one of several advantages to Vanguard's unified, open world design. And yes I know chunking was buggy as hell but that's what happens when a game is programmed by educationally-challenged monkeys. AoC has little in the way of coastlines, certainly not complete oceans surrounding continents, and while there are lots of rivers they're often interrupted by waterfalls or other features that would make sailing impractical. I think more involved sailing, including fishing and maybe some exploration could be something that would tempt me back to Vanguard.
More recently I've started "gathering", or "harvesting" as it was known in Vanguard. Harvesting was actually one of my favourite pass times in Vanguard, and was again enhanced by the large open world where there were any number of areas you might never visit in the course of questing. This meant you could often charge off into the wilds and discover your own little harvesting heaven off the beaten track. Exploration was an integral part of harvesting, assuming you didn't just use one of the map mods or some web guide to lead you to the prime spots.
AoC, in contrast, tends not to have any "dead space" on it's maps, because everything is much more compact and enclosed.
Critically, Vanguard's implementation of rare and ultra-rare harvesting nodes was like a devastatingly addictive drug. "I would quit, but maybe the next node will be a rare!". Maybe the next node... maybe the next node. I would harvest a circuit and wait until every node was a common before leaving, just to be on the safe side.
I've only just started gathering so I'm not sure how rarity will come into play, but there are certainly fewer nodes than in Vanguard and more often that not you'll find one that's virtually exhausted rather than primed and ready for action. In AoC they seem to have health bars that are depleted as you gather and then gradually recover over time. In Vanguard you find a node, harvest it and it vanishes, only reappearing at 100% capacity after some given respawn time.
In AoC you can gather every type of resource. In Vanguard you are limited to choosing 2 per character. I prefer Vanguard's method because it means you'll never be entirely self-sufficient on a single character. It seems to me that that's better for the economy although admittedly it's fairly painless to level up a character in a given discipline. I know I had everything max'ed out except skinning (because I never had a high enough level character to take down the high-tier skinnable creatures).
Yet another factor in Vanguard's favour was gear. There was (is, I suppose) a whole inventory page specifically dedicated to harvesting gear. Better gear, often obtained from player crafters, could be used to improve harvesting yields. This includes clothing, and the actual tools. And your tools had to be a sufficient level for the tier of resource you were harvesting. Improved yields might look slight, but at the high end where ultra-rare resources were extortionately expensive it could make a massive difference. In AoC, the gear is non-existent, or at least so it seems. "Use" a gathering node and your axe or whatever is just magic'd out of thin air on demand.
Finally, Vanguard had a system where you get higher yields if you harvest as a group. Not by a factor of the number of harvesters, but certainly you'd get more from a given node as a group than you would alone and again at the high end it could make a serious difference, even split two or three ways. It was quite common to find myself working a given circuit and see someone else doing the same, and we'd end up grouping and splitting the resources because that way you're both better off than if you work in competition. It was a subtle mechanic, but a social one too.
So it doesn't appear as if I will achieve the same satisfaction from gathering in AoC that I did from harvesting, which is a shame. And it sounds like crafting, which I never bothered with in Vanguard because it was even more grind-tastic than adventuring, is suffering some teething troubles. But you can't even start crafting until you hit level 40 I think, and at my casual rate of play that's still a week or two away.
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