Operation Avalon - Vanguard Feedback

Vanguard Feature Feedback
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Hi,

Thought I would make a new thread to continue sharing my experience with Vanguard in the new ‘Operation Avalon’ event. Similar to before, my context of not playing FPS video games (previous vanguard event was my first time in 10-15 years) will heavily colour my experience. The intention for this is to again provide feedback from someone not a dedicated (or particularly skilled) player of this genre, hoping that this perspective assists in development. I haven’t posted on the discord program (suggested by a reply on my previous thread) as I don’t have an account, it may be something I investigate further but one thing at a time for me!

Operation Avalon, 1st experience: Having the data files pre-installed I quickly completed my eve dailies and was ready to go just after reset, unfortunately I ran into an error with ‘easy anticheat’ not being installed/detected. This was thankfully resolved after some search engine usage and one or a combination of the following - verification of local game files, manual check for updates and running the EasyAntiCheat_EOS_Setup.exe in administrator mode.

Once the game booted I was back to a similar viewscreen and took a few moments to re-familiarise myself - options to choose from ‘Avalon’ (appear to be details on the main storyline missions?), expeditions (where I could select from Avalon or empire faction missions like previous), loadout (where I could move things into and out of my backpack and weapon slots, unfortunately no suit selection yet!), manufacturing and market. Of them all I was most interested in the market, there was now different sections relating to Gailens Armoury (weapons and modules, sadly no melee or shield type weapons I could see a choice of a shotgun, smg and ‘pulse rifle’ with some upgrades premade), Laudines Tools (blueprints and crafter programs, not sure about these – the crafting looks complex and different than before, something I may investigate later) and Jessiks exchange (the laser graffiti tool could be purchased here along with some mining items). The name were a nice touch and made me wonder more about who these people were and their interactions with me on this station – I could definitely see some simple animated storekeeper models and basic soundbytes from these people enriching the ‘shopping’ and living on-station experience. There was also a handy question mark icon in the top right of screen – this brought up a handy 3 page graphical summary reminding me of who I was and what I was doing.

Selecting the easiest ‘Avalon Rises’ mission I deployed down to the planet to begin my new adventure! The deployment was much much quicker than previous and showing the simple 20m drop of the character to the ground was much appreciated this time round. The map was quite beautiful – a crashed ship on the side of a valley with an installation rising up into the map, atmospherics were neat and there was even red grass on the ground (although some areas of the grass were ‘floating’ in mid air and needed to be glued back down to the ground, this was in the SE portion of the map a think). I proceeded to get used to first person view and walk around the map (thankfully, escape menu, key bindings section was a handy refresher), one thing I did notice was that moving around the map had much heavier rubber banding than before – particularly when the last few seconds of movement involved walking/running around an object in my path. I’m not sure if things have changed in the client/server side coding for movement but this was a little difficult to deal with at times and resulted in my death when I continually rubber banded on some ground that proved to be caustic when I was attempting to open crates. I investigated this further by activating ‘show performance stats in the options menu to check my ping, this was showing ~400 for backend ping and <100 for server ping, something for me to watch in the future and may prove a significantly limiting faction to others outside of the main European and North American regions if this wasn’t an issue with my ISP. Expecting many more deaths I re-deployed again and continued my search for the mission objectives – 6 crates to open and 3 mordu legion troopers to kill. This time I kept in the open, away from objects that would cross my path (and result in rubber banding trapping me), in hindsight this probably had the unfortunate effect of making me easier for other players to see – I was walking towards and then opening a crate when my screen started flashing and I heard gunfire, looking around I couldn’t spot my assailant (well played!) before I fell to the ground reaching my hand out as the give up message appeared. Not one to admit defeat I held off and appear to have been ‘revived’ by my assailant and then ‘downed’ again, and then finished. Like my previous experience in 2025 a text chat to message the other player to say something from ‘gf’ to ‘want to team up?’ would have been nice and hopefully makes it into the final game.

Knowing there was another player out there I decided to avoid that area and race to the location marked mordu barracks or such on the map in the hope of killing 3 and finding the remaining crates to loot. Outside of being killed when a countdown on screen dropped to 0 (not sure what happened there, it was at 16min when I started, although makes sense if the missions are timed). I continued on, figuring out how to jump stab with the v and space key to attack some fly like drones and dealing with some other latency related issues in activating crates with ‘e’ when the server and my client appeared to disagree on where I was in time and space. Three or so deaths later I completed the mission and returned to the space station with a small amount of loot and some credits that I was excited to use to acquire the graffiti/mining laser tool again.

That marked the end of my first evenings escapades. I had fun and am looking forward to trying it further, curious on how future interactions with other players could go with regards to exploring and working together. I believe I’ll set the goal for myself to climb the big tower on the map, and may even break my previous self imposed limitation on using ranged weapons (yet to fire a bullet in vanguard.. I wonder if crystals in the pulse rifle would count.. something to sleep on I think).

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I appreciate the sharing of your experience. Thank you.
Yet, I suspect that CCP Potty Mouth (i.e. the main Vanguard guy) chose to not use the Eve Forums for a reason(s). One of those reasons might be the lack of nested comments.

For some reason, on the eve of the latest Vanguard launch, I decided to run the old Vanguard installation files which I had a back-up of. Easy Anti-Cheat was problematic but an update to Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC seems to have resolved it. The old launcher worked fine and gave me a pre-war barge / locker room count-down screen indicating that the game would start in about six hours. I then exited Vanguard and noted that the Eve Launcher had begun downloading the Vanguard stuff.

Once the servers were up, I sent one of my alts to check things out. Observations follow.
Some “Rubber-banding” and dying upon initial drop-in due to “fall” were noted.
I found it to be annoying, being forced to examine my rifle every single time I dropped in.
One thing I was impressed by was the apparent ability of the Unreal Engine to make use of multiple GPUs (at least two GPUs anyway). (While monitoring GPU performance via ProcessLasso, I noted that the A770 was doing substantially more work than the 1660 Super. Yet, the game image was being displayed via the 1660 Super which sits in an x16 PCI Gen 4 socket. The other GPU, an Arc A770 sits in an x8 PCI Gen 4 socket. If Unreal Engine could make use of the the third installed GPU… also an Arc A770 in another x8 PCI Gen 4 socket, that would be most cool. I believe that’s mostly a challenge for Intel to figure out though. I should note that AMD’s version of Resizable Bar is enabled and working. The play experience was acceptable. I had reduced the resolution to 1080p, made sure that no graphics settings were set above “Medium”, and set the display mode to fixed window.

The CPU I’m using is a 16-core AM4 socket variety. Not that it was a problem, but I’ve never seen so much activity out of the cores as when running the Unreal Engine. There was a usage spike across most (or all) of the cores initially and then things calmed down.

I made it through the Avalon campaign but have not participated in any empire specific campaign.

So far I’ve only played solo -not waiting for a squad to be filled. This play style seems no longer viable since Vanguard has turned into a total extraction shooter Sh*t Show. What I mean by this is that the dominant play style is to ignore the civilizational plight of war clones in favor of an every-clone-for-himself loot and piracy model. Players are spending more time camping extraction points, killing each other, and lootinh each other’s corpses than they are of advancing the War Clone cause. It’s a Big disappointment.

I will likely not participate any more unless the Vanguard team figures out a way to balance such crappy player behavior. I might suggest a war clone police force -similar to what Concord is to gate campers. Additionally, every time a war clone kills another war clone, a notable standings loss should occur which, will eventually cause the war clone to be expelled from the society and targeted by the whole, for destruction.

I did the main Avalon tasks but none of the empire-specific campaigns.
I might try waiting for a squad to fill up and try the Avalon experience some more.

Lastly, I’ve been following the lore a bit. Yet, am perplexed as to why the war clones are an enemy of Mordu’s Legion. I don’t think Mordu’s legion should be singled out and that the corporations should be free to hire any mercenary faction they wish for the protection of their clone research activities.

Edit: Perhaps “termination” is too drastic and inhumane of a solution to the rogue war clone problem. In hind-sight, perhaps ex-communication would be a better way of dealing with War Clones who have gone astray -turning against their own kind. Let the ex-communicated enjoy a standings gain with Mordu’s Legion and let them figure out their own means of stealing Nexus technology. They must not be allowed to continue using the facilities and services of the War Clones whom they have turned against.

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hmmm… but what can they do?

Brainwash the players?

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Thanks Rock Zappa, I enjoyed reading your journey and there are elements in your experience which I can definitely empathise with after my second go at it. I’m comfortable sharing here even if it means the developers don’t end up seeing this J

Operation Avalon 2nd Experience: Shirking both responsibilities and sleep I hopped on again for another explore of operation Avalon. My goal this time was to execute 10 mordu legion troopers and extract 7 implants (a drop from said trooper corpses) off the planet, while also remembering that screenshots are a thing. I used my now somewhat more flush wallet to purchase the graffiti gun after figuring out how to drag it into my primary weapon slot I dropped back planet side.

Similar to the previous night the movement rubber banding proved a significant obstacle in my play through, most notably when running to and from the opponents, where if I was shot I would constantly appear to be teleporting backwards every few seconds- as if the server was moving me back to where it detected a ‘collision/bullet impact’ similar to when I was running and rapidly changed direction to move around an object – the server detects me walking into the object while my client thought I was on the other side of it (some of the screenshots below have the performance stats turned on for interest, the hardware was built for things other than gaming but runs Vanguard fine on high).

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Figure 1: Hi I’m Phillepe and your probably wondering how I ended up here..

Prowling through the map on the hunt for Mordu’s legionnaires I took a brief detour to try the mining out. Compared to the previous bubble placeholder assets this was much more improved visually, but like the general scatter rock/cliff geometry and textures these still had elements present or missing that my instincts labelled as ‘unrealistic’ (this is also likely a ‘me’ thing and others may not notice or fixate on – subtle things like rock and soil granularity/mineral traces/deposition presences and absences/wind effects on grass noting smoke and atmospheric movements etc).

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Figure 2: More grass-glue required..

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Figure 3: A bit more sci-fi than the old Estwing pick but she’ll do fine on these giant quartz crystals.

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Figure 4: 1st death for the night. This shows the detailed opponent assets and self-shadowing from a light source to the right. Also the nice fog and cloud in the atmosphere.

My second death occurred when I arrived at the portal with my loot ready to teleport back to the station, I activated the portal before being ambushed by another player hiding behind the gate (gg well played ‘CrzZxx’), I’m sure they appreciated my efforts in delivering goodies directly to them. I found the increased prevalence of other players shaped my playstyle greatly over the next hour compared to my more solo prior experiences. Without a chat function it was more of a “♪ shoot you in the face and I’m sure you’ll understaaand.. ♫” vibe whenever bumping into others. I tended to skirt the map finding small pickings and quickly rushing to nearby extraction portals whenever I had collected one of the required implant modules to extract it.

One of the gameplay elements that became clearer to me is the deliberate funnelling of players from around the map. Only rarely will I spawn on a ‘new’ map with the full 30min timer with ~5 extraction points. Mostly I would deploy onto maps in progress where the outer portals appeared to burn out as someone used one until only the inner remained, this concentrated returning players resulting in more likely loss and conflict between them. I did find some players working together (like TurtleNabber and wint3rmunt below) .. I just ended up on the receiving end!

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Figure5&6: TurtleNabber and wint3rmunt showing me that “♫ killing is just a meannnnns of communication ♪”, we had all been funnelled to an extraction portal.

While my high latency rubber banding was definitely difficult to handle I also wonder if it resulted in issues for my opponents? I was able to dispatch two other players with my stabby knife after having them acting in a confused manner on my screen. They were either still shooting where I had come from.. or completely facing away from me as I circled around. I also found myself hesitant to purchase and try the pulse laser or any other any weapon/upgrade with the amount I was dying, the full equipment loss/cost on death and the cost to repurchase anything (other than default armament and the cheap mining laser graffiti tool). I wonder if others also came to a similar conclusion? All my player caused kill mails showed the same default weapon (M247 bolt carbine as above) as cause.

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Figure7: Phillepe’s first space friend. Name unknown…

After a much more frenetic hour of of collect → die or collect ->kill ->extract I was finally able to hand in the required 7 implants and I called it a night. I also experienced multiple disconnects and crashes back to the station with “Network Event Online play stopped for following reasons..” messages, I will hold off posting the two I screenshot publicly on here as they appear to reference IP address info.

I intend to play Vanguard again, try the pulse laser weapon and explore the new map(s?) further, particularly looking for more lore snippets. Also worth noting is that at time of posting there is a new 6gb update occurring on my screen and some contents may have changed, but I will likely have to wait for a while due to real life commitments. This second go was a fun experience, and felt very eve to me.

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Knowing some lore is helpful but freedom of choice is important.
Just like with Eve Online, there are consequences for actions. Primarily this pertains to standings gains and hits. My suggestion would be to gradually force war clones out of the privilege of using “The Garden” resources for deployment if they persist on terminating fellow war clones. I would suggest that such players be forced to use faction resources for deployment (e.g. resources of the four empires or Mordu’s Legion.

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How do I pick up and / or discard a weapon while on deployment?
How do I resuscitate another player?

Thank you to the developers for making use of Intel XeSS in their implementation of Unreal Engine 5.6.1. That allows me to make better use of my existing hardware which I’ll now be testing by increasing the “Quality” settings.

Thank you to the developers for providing a melee option which I finally had to use against another player who was blasting me with a pulse rifle from behind a pillar.

Some requests for the developers:

  1. Make the deployment summary accessible from the war barge -not just upon death. In that summary, players should not only be able to see who inflicted the most harm but also who provided resuscitations and assists. This will be valuable to players who want to form teams with other players.
  2. Tag players in game with a status marker -just like in Eve Online. For example, give them a suspect tag or marker, and 3) Tag players with their names so that other teammates or opponents can identify them while on deployment. Teammates / squad members should (if not already) should be tagged just as a fleet member would be in Eve Online. (I haven’t joined any squads yet. So, I don’t know if this is already implemented.) For war clones who have assassinated other war clones, their ability to use the jump bridges / extraction points should be degraded based upon their status with The Garden. For example, give them a longer timer before extraction /up-link happens… a longer time to defend or survive at the extraction point.

As for problems with the alpha release which I have not yet mentioned, one point of frustration is with drones (and possibly turrets) which disappear while engaging the player. If line of sight is blocked by an object such as a wall, that’s fine. Yet, it seems that drones are disappearing from view when they should not. It’s as if the objects are not meshing with the non-player characters (or drones) in this case. I’ll mess with the “View Distance” to see if that helps.