Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard

Why all the nerd rage against VG? Because it was hyped more on this board than any other game -- excluding WoW. And when it not only didn"t meet its expectations, but also looked to be in a sorry state of affairs as crunch time got closer, people jumped on that like a shark smells blood (sharks jump, right?).

So, yeah, coming out with a somewhat mediocre game when it was supposed to be the next MMO Jesus can certainly make some people angry. Then again, the angriest, I think, are the people who fell for Brad"s spin and all the castles in the air he promised them.

Anyway, I don"t hate the game and I don"t like the game -- but I would have probably ended up playing retail if I hadn"t sworn off paying for MMOs forever.

PS: For everyone who says, "ZOMG!1, this game has TEH POTENTIALZ!"... yeah, so did Horizons, and Shadow Bane and about a million other failed MMOs. Having potential means exactly jack shit -- otherwise we"d all be superstar millionaires sleeping with a different hot babe every night.

The number one reason Vanguard had all the bad hype? They started beta way too early.

Potential in this case is very fuckin different from shadowbane. Potential in this game means you are having a blast and your group starts bugging out. Potential in this game means that when you are crawling through your 3rd dungeon by level 13, and having wiped several times already to bad pulls, your group members are already starting to figure out the mechanics of the game and seem to have a clue. Potential is having the best MMO world to ever be created, absolutely gorgeous and huge and feature packed, but you occasionally fall through it and need to be unstuck.

Yeah, it"s a bit rough around the edges, but it"s very playable and fun.

PS the power curve for players and NPC"s in this game is insane. between every level there"s a huge jump. At one level you can barely kill something, the next it can barely touch you.

What the hell is up with all 06er"s with less than 50 posts praising the shit out of this game?

Seriously, if there was ever a case for a shill attack you people are making a person wonder.

Clug said:

What the hell is up with all 06er"s with less than 50 posts praising the shit out of this game?

Seriously, if there was ever a case for a shill attack you people are making a person wonder.

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ok, here is a 02"er and i am having a blast with the game. I really enjoy it. So far i think its awesome and i cannot wait to try some dungeons.

Clug said:

What the hell is up with all 06er"s with less than 50 posts praising the shit out of this game?

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I"ve been thinking the same thing -- there seems to be disproportionate amount of 06"ers praising Vanguard. My thinking is that they were all VG board members, saw links to FOH VG hate threads on the VG boards, came here and wanted to defend the game, so they registered and finally got posting rights.

Sure, there are long-time forum members that like the game, but it just seems with the 06"ers, its a disproportionate amount.

Not all "06ers are like that. I was visiting this board since Planes of Power days, under a different name and lurker, but stopped coming here for a year or 2 after quitting Everquest. Felt no desire to post before but instead came for the epic style comedy in some of the threads like "what the hoof" etc.

Yeah, with the amount of times FoH was discussed on the official VG boards it"s not surprising that a lot of them would register here.

Deris said:

You didn"t have to completely retardize combat. I liked the no auto-attack system, it was a little slow and could have used a few tweaks, but it was eons better than the current "CRIT I WIN" stuff in now.

Diplomacy is nothing but a shadow of the original design, and defeating any NPC basically means losing to him once to figure out his colors, and loading up your denail deck of that color. Hooray for autowin?

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Someone hasn"t been playing much diplomacy lately.

I tried Vanguard, it sucked hairy balls.

Now, some people actually enjoy that.

Oloh said:

The number one reason Vanguard had all the bad hype? They started beta way too early.

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I would have to agree with this. Beta wasn"t such a bad thing, it was just people not keeping their mouths shut. I was accepted in the first beta invite phase and it was pretty much unplayable. And I thought to myself "Wow, this is actually a true honest to god beta.". Everything else I"ve "beta tested" were basically nearly finished games.

Needless to say, Vanguard was the first actual game I"ve seen evolve from the ground up, and actually change dramatically through each phase. Every phase was nearly en entirely new game, bigger, better, faster. I think it worked out well, but since I think most peoples impressions of betas thus far were nearly finished products they couldn"t wait to dump on the game. The first beta group in WoW was even a pretty polished game that had been played internally for years before they let the public in.

Clug said:

What the hell is up with all 06er"s with less than 50 posts praising the shit out of this game?

Seriously, if there was ever a case for a shill attack you people are making a person wonder.

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Some of us "06ers have been lurking since we wanted to be in FoH while playing with some of them on Veeshan and only just recently decided to sign up in order to voice some opinions so we didn"t have to see the same 3 people bad mouthing a game that isn"t nearly as bad as some people have made it out to be.

kcxiv said:

ok, here is a 02"er and i am having a blast with the game. I really enjoy it. So far i think its awesome and i cannot wait to try some dungeons.

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agreed, my opinion is, having a metric fuckton more fun then I did in WoW, and the complexity, thus far, is looking to overtake EQ2. I am not in my EQ1 fevor to max out, I"m here at the beginning, my guildmates are here and I am going to play the game like an oldschooler should, take my time, absorb the atmosphere (and it does have atmosphere) and form an opinion from there.

So far I"m pleased.

Guiness said:

agreed, my opinion is, having a metric fuckton more fun then I did in WoW, and the complexity, thus far, is looking to overtake EQ2. I am not in my EQ1 fevor to max out, I"m here at the beginning, my guildmates are here and I am going to play the game like an oldschooler should, take my time, absorb the atmosphere (and it does have atmosphere) and form an opinion from there.

So far I"m pleased.

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I just don"t see how people can be on such completely polar opposite sides of this...

For MY opinion, I cannot see, in the slightest, what you consider fun in this game. Is it the lackluster combat? Is it the flat grey textures on everything? Is it the low FPS? Or maybe just the hitching every 10 feet?

See, it works it both ways... you should not have to WORK at tyring to like the game and pick it up like you are some kind of oldschool holy roller who "understands" what"s going on.

The game absolutely fails at being fun during the "out of the box" experience, especially if one was to compare it to WoW (or virtually any other game that has ANY level of polish and quality to it at all).

I always have such vivid image of an angry nerd when some one says "nerd rage".

I am having fun, out of the box. Moreso than WoW. By far.

This is a true haters board, that"s for sure. And I was hating on Vanguard, based on my experiences in Beta 2 and 3. Then I did the final days of the pre-order to goof of with my buddy, and uh oh, looks like I can eat a plate of crow.

The game is fun as hell. It"s massive, gorgeous, and nowhere the nightmare that I, or any other hater, had promised. Do I get a hitch here and there? Yep, but not enough that it matters. Are there some glitches that still need worked out? Yep, and myself and every other player /bugs it as soon as we find it, and fixes are happening within 24-48 hours.

No MMO out of the gate ever had so much to offer. Period. It may not be 100% rock solid, but Vanguard"s 95% is better than any other game"s 100% at launch, at least of the 6 MMOs I have played at launch, including World of Warcraft.

And on that note - I keep reading about system specs and VG "forcing" upgrades and all that. Doesn"t anyone remember the WoW launch? WoW didn"t run stable on my machine for the first month, between Blizzard"s and my fixes, and I had to add RAM and upgrade my video card to get decent performance. The tech forums were packed with people getting sound crashes, unable to load the game from CD, blah blah. It took several weeks to get it corrected. The game, contrary to popular myth, was not perfect at launch. Better than most, and worse than some, but not perfect by any stretch.

Vanguard is a great game. WoW is a great, but altogether different game. Play what you like. For the next 6 months easy, Sigil/SOE get my money. Individual results may vary.

Oloh said:

The number one reason Vanguard had all the bad hype? They started beta way too early.

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I think it was more that beta didn"t change from 2 to 4. Heavy duty changes didn"t really start getting done, fixed, upgraded, and imporved until beta 5. Way too late in the game. IMHO, the massive upgrades and changes that happened in beta 5 should have started a couple of phases earlier. I think that if the changes had been coming in as fast and as significantly in beta 2 - 4, the 8000+ beta testers from those phases would have been praising the Dev teams work and dedication, rather then feeling crapped on and not bothering to keep testing since is was apparent that they weren"t solving performance issuse and game breaking bugs.

Hearing Brad finally admit he knew they had pretty much lost the 8k+ testers (and potential players) from beta 2 - 4, and seemingly not caring, pretty much sealed the deal for me. Closing the forums was the final nail.

The whole time I was in beta it almost seemed like we were dealing with a used car salesman trying to tell us what a great deal that "74 Pinto with the broken headlamps, flat tires and missing seats was. It didn"t start getting repaired until he realized that no one was biting on that "great deal". We"ll see if they can get it running and fixed now that they have some people behind it pushing it down the road.