Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard

A lot of the haters gave up well before the last month of beta when the whole game came together. I played all of a couple hours in beta 2, it was horrible. I tried again in beta 3 and gave up again. I decided to give it one more try a couple weeks before release and it had gotten much better but greatly improved even over the course of those last 2 weeks.

I still think they should of held off a few months. There are some stupid bugs in grouping and even the chat channels(How hard can it be to program chat? Seriously) but they did what they had to do.

Quel said:

I still think they should of held off a few months. There are some stupid bugs in grouping and even the chat channels(How hard can it be to program chat? Seriously) but they did what they had to do.

Click to expand...

didnt they run out of money or something? as much as i like vanguard right now, i wont be getting it. for me to truly capture that eq feeling id have to wait a while. i started in velious, not at the beginning of eq when things were still rough around the edges.

Yeah, they pretty much came out and said they ran out of money.

Ravensign said:

There were times when the game seemed like a complete train wreck. People that broke NDA then were truthful in reporting that it was a mess and also different than what the FAQ/Brad had said some of the things would be like.

The game improved alot and found itself in the later stages of beta, and now the released version is just plain better than what people had expected based on what they were looking at.

Click to expand...

That"s a perfect summary.

Lyrical said:

Title says it all. There has been so much vitriol against Vanguard. It is like when some products get launched with a ton of hype, but the opposite. I have never seen an MMO launched with so much negative-hype. Lately many people on these boards have stated that they hate VG because they want it to bring them back to the glory days. I am not sure if that comparison will ever make sense. Eq1 was my first game, and while I have fond memories of being in a virtual world for the first time, I have since then played just about every MMO launched, and have become a jaded gamer. The n00b sense of wonder is never going to come back, so why look for it? Its like the song by Sade called "It"s Never as Good as the First Time." But it seems like many want it to be like that Madonna song called "Touched for the Very First Time." That"s not going to happen again.

This game is nowhere near as bad as many people on this board are saying. To me, it has a very Velious like feel to it. Alot of the old mechanics in Eq1 (like kiting but with more risk) are back in VG. The gameplay seems a bit more free than we are getting in other MMO"s (like Eq2). The classes are fresh, and we are either seeing new classes or new takes on classes.

The only two things I don"t like about this game are TLC and performance. TLC is self-explanatory.As far as performance goes, it was so bad in beta that I deleted my VG off of my hard drive. With a medium level comp (3200 Athlon, ATI 9950 graphics card and 1 gig ram) I was only getting a pathetic 5 fps. However, since launch, I decided to give VG a second try. I added a gig of ram and put an NVIDIA 7800 GS OC, and am getting 25 to 30 fps with the graphics reso on the highest setting and the display set to balanced (and this is while fighting in the city). My new rig is hardly state of the art, but is running VG fine. I played for four hours last night with no probs until midnight where the server started glitching. Assuming they fix this, I think VG will be fine.

I started playing VG with very low expectations for it,other than I could add it to my Station Access and play it with Eq2 (and I planned on adding the DC MMO and other upcoming MMOs for a flat fee). The posters on this board lowered my expectations on the game with their rants on how VG sucked. I am finding this game to be much better than they said, and am wondering how many others of you think that VG has been better than the poor word of mouth it received throughout beta.

Click to expand...

The game's performance is better than in beta no doubt, but I think you answered your own question as to why people had negative comments about the game before release.

There is not anyone (not one) who can honestly say this game does not still need polish and could have stood a bit more time in beta (we all know why it did not get that time).

Also I want to add going into beta my expectations for the game were much higher, coming out of beta, my expectations were "just let the damn thing run" which it does better than I thought it would.

IMO VG has benefited from these lower expectations.

I was a half wow fan but anti vanguard type...

I wanted something different like player house, AA"s, flying mounts that wow didn"t have at the time but I wanted those things in WOW not another mmo..

I wanted the economy of EVE in wow to but one can only dream..

As the vanguard beta sucked I was still able to play decently with my monster machine but it just felt boring to me. It wasn"t "too brown" it was to.... un-fantasy for me.

It has the different classes and some different lore but it didn"t make me feel like I was really in a different world like say when I would play baulders gate or nwn. Like when I would read a book in the Drizzit series and laugh, and get pissed off etc.

I just felt like i was going through the motions. I HATE games with a grind if I notice the grind. I don"t care if it takes me 1 day or 400 days to make one level if I am having fun the entire time but if I"m just flat out grinding the same mob or same dungeon and barely anything changes for the 300th run hrough it then im pissed bored...

I like games to give me some helpful direction but not to obvious... i don"t want search the entire countryside for 5 hours searching for those rare 5 bear rabbit ears but I sure wouldn"t mind a creative and fun quest that took me 5 hours to solve...


I wanted vanguard to be Oblivion ONLINE.... I wanted it to have badass graphics and a fun as class system with decent challenges and some minor handholding where neccssary but I sure didn"t want NEW IMPROVED GRAPHICS MMO 00002343


Diplomacy is a nice step in the right direction and the blood mage class is creative but everything has been done already and feels like every other fantasy mmo out there and why anyone would go play a new game that only does a few new things right/better (in my opinion) is beyond me..

WoW does it right and it is missing some elements I want but it DOES draw me into the world and I DO find my time missing when I look up from the game. I don"t like the no housing , I HATE THAT THERE ARE NO AA"s, and good what I would do for some EvE style economy.. but you know what..


The world is beatiful.. the zones are fantastic... The HUMOR refrences make me laugh, those close call intense battles make me pissed...

Vanguard didn"t draw me in and hold me... I wanted to play a necro class and it was just another hunter.. I didn"t get permanet dead pets or revive type shit.... I didn"t get baddass diseases spells or anything that was just fun...

And I"m not asking for stuff hats OMGWTFBBQ overpowered just plain fun.... fuck that grind shit everyone hails as the next coming of jesus christ I want shit thats just fun..

Like the Paladin in wow protecion questing... mabye its not as efficient and mabye it is but its god damn fun...


And I know some of you say that all that comes later in the game but I can gogue my eyes out for 1301091 levels waiting for that last 10 levels where it finally becomes fun for me...

WoW starts fun... empowers you early... and then at the end you can master your class...

Vanguard starts off hard... makes you pay for every step then if your good enough (read: have enough time to grind endlessly) you get the sweet stuff

Sure some people like punishment before reward but this is a game.. I"m not playing it to punish myself before I"m rewared I"m playing it to enjoy it first and master it when I"m good...


Vanguard is just another mmo... its unique features are nut-busting graphics, punishing grind ->reward, diplomacy
Its differences from WoW, player housing/ships, AA"s i think?/ graphical structuring, classes


Not bad differences but not just quite enough to make me switch from wow... if the grind wasn"t a grind but fun then it probably would be enough but then it would be wow.5 in terms of subscriber numbers

Sharmai said:

Vanguard is just another mmo... its unique features are nut-busting graphics, punishing grind ->reward, diplomacy
Its differences from WoW, player housing/ships, AA"s i think?/ graphical structuring, classes

Click to expand...

there is one thing that almost every overlooks when they compare mmos (you did this and thats why im bringing it up of course). community. ive met cool and mature people (age doesnt mean maturity btw) but for the most part people are dicks that i wanna track down and give them a kick to the face. the kind of people that eq/swg/vg/hell even eq2 attracted are people i get along with. of course there will be the elitist players/ninja looters/1337 kiddies in both games, but vg has a better community.

i do like grouping alot, and if you think grouping instead of soloing your way to the max level is punishment well then vg isnt for you. it doesnt mean that vg is bad, it just means its not your cup of tea. i dont like wow but im not gonna badmouth the game too much.

Not bad differences but not just quite enough to make me switch from wow... if the grind wasn"t a grind but fun then it probably would be enough but then it would be wow.5 in terms of subscriber numbers

Click to expand...

i think the biggest difference for me is that the vg world pulls you in. it has nothing to do with graphics, you feel like youre in there. the game wasnt me checking my minimap and world map, it was keeping my eyes open to dodge mobs and taking a safe path because dying does count after 7.

at the same time im not going into vg right now because i think its going to be a hell of alot better in a few months (as long as smed doesnt give the game his STDs like he did to my beloved swg)

Who didn"t?

Click to expand...

I think I"m pretty much the only one. That posted, anyways.

Perhaps I missed Lyrical"s intention, though. However, to me, this thread wasn"t supposed to be an argument about VG"s merits in general, or in comparison to any other game (WoW of course). Rather, it was to understand why people who dislike a particular game, in this case VG, spend so much time and effort telling everyone why they don"t like it.

Take me for example. I was really looking forward to the game. I jumped at the chance to get into the friends and family beta when I was offered a chance. Upon first logging in, I found that the game world seemed to have a lot of potential, but that pretty much everything else was quite obviously in a state of huge flux, and the gameplay was overall nothing new or even that fun. I played a few characters to their teens, and that was about it. People were posting here about how bad the game sucked, it took a super computer to run, and so on. I corrected some misconceptions about performance and the state of the game, not really defending it just keeping people honest.

Then I was booted from the beta cause people over at the beta boards complained. Fair enough, I"d definitely violated the NDA, and I wasn"t all that enamoured with the game anyways. Did I come here and bitch incessantly about the game? Did I rage about Brad supposedly lying about the game or acting like a used car salesman (which I totally disagree with, but nice work, notice he hasn"t posted in months?)? No, I didn"t do any of that. Why?Because I quite honestly didn"t give a shit.The game wasn"t what I was hoping it would be at that point, so my interests turned elsewhere.

And that"s the crux of the issue: if the game"s so terribly awful that you can"t even play it, why would you persist in posting about it for weeks, months, or years? Why wouldn"t you just move onto something that you enjoyed and were interested in? And to those saying "well it"s because I had such high hopes", I still don"t think that it makes any sense to continue hobby horsing on the game to the extent that some do. It makes little rational sense. Your posts on a well-read and respected MMOG forum are going to do nothing to change the game itself, and subsequently if you honestly dislike the game, you will continue to do so.

So why bang your head on the wall? As I posted earlier in the thread, this behaviour is not limited to VG, or to video games in general, but pretty much all parts of our society. And it just makes little sense to me. I mean, when I was 13 I "hated" Offspring as much as the next angst filled teenager because they were too "mainstream", but as I grew up, I just learned to not give a shit. I wish a lot of the anti-VG/WoW/PS3/360/whatever people here and all over the net/world would learn to do the same.

Although I suppose I could have just saved myself a lot of typing and agree with FuckYou: people are stupid.

Eomer said:

What Eomer said.

Click to expand...

I agree with you whole-heartedly. Alot of threads could have been saved if we didn"t have so many people who "don"t care" about Vanguard chuggin" on that bottle of Rageohol, spitting out insults and just shitting up the games reputation.

The thing is - is that its hard to come back from a bad first impression. A lot of people tried out VG in beta, and IMO it was awful. It was buggy, clunky, laggy, and had zero direction whatsoever. Even a month ago the game was still nothing special whatsoever. Has it improved? Oh I"m sure it has. I can"t tell you from personal experience because I"m still getting the same shitty performance and my highest character is level 4. Regardless, a game better improve from beta to retail otherwise the beta served no purpose. Especially one that was under NDA for so long.

Honestly, a lot of people are going to jump on the hater "bandwagon" because they did try the game. One month, three months, six months ago. The game sucked. After betaing VG, it was honestly hard for me to buy the box. I wanted to give it a fair chance, but I know a lot of people wouldn"t consider it after what they experienced of the game firsthand in beta. Bottom line is - its like EQ2. EQ2 now = great game. EQ2 in beta and for the first year after release = Awful. Maybe VG isn"t awful right now, but its less-than-mediocrity has left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.

Cuppycake said:

The thing is - is that its hard to come back from a bad first impression. A lot of people tried out VG in beta, and IMO it was awful. It was buggy, clunky, laggy, and had zero direction whatsoever. Even a month ago the game was still nothing special whatsoever. Has it improved? Oh I"m sure it has. I can"t tell you from personal experience because I"m still getting the same shitty performance and my highest character is level 4. Regardless, a game better improve from beta to retail otherwise the beta served no purpose. Especially one that was under NDA for so long.

Honestly, a lot of people are going to jump on the hater "bandwagon" because they did try the game. One month, three months, six months ago. The game sucked. After betaing VG, it was honestly hard for me to buy the box. I wanted to give it a fair chance, but I know a lot of people wouldn"t consider it after what they experienced of the game firsthand in beta. Bottom line is - its like EQ2. EQ2 now = great game. EQ2 in beta and for the first year after release = Awful. Maybe VG isn"t awful right now, but its less-than-mediocrity has left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.

Click to expand...

from what ive heard they literally pulled a miracle out of their asses

Agree with Eomer and FY. Most people act like this is a sports game, where you have to "represent" your game, or something. I played VG in beta briefly, I also kept in mind that it was in fact IN BETA. I enjoyed well enough.

I was able to get the gist of what I needed to do, starting in the newbie area. The quests given were your standard "this is how combat works", "this is how you use an item", etc etc. Graphics were awesome, game chugged a few times (no big deal), granted I never really got out of the "newbie" areas, but I walked away from the beta considering I would purchase this game. I havent as of yet, but ONLY because I am having a good time playing TBC. In my life as it stands currently, I have just enough time to dedicate to 1 MMO (definitely not 2).

Why people want VG to fail is utterly beyond me. Some people on this board act like scorned lovers, except we are talking about video game hobbies. Sigil makes the game, Sony provides the publishing/hardware support. This isnt another Sony game.

And for people trying to compare WoW to VG, is like apples to oranges. We all know VG isnt going to get WoW numbers, but IMO that is only because they dont have the name "Blizzard" attached to their game. I garuantee you that if Blizzard came out with VG, most of this board would be extolling the virtues of VG instead of trying to bring them down.

Seriously, having another MMO is a GOOD THING people. It means that more companies will get money to develop more MMOs, which means possibly someone looking outside of the box or doing something ground breaking (maybe BioWare?). I hope VG does well, I think they still have a lot of "fixing" to do, but hopefully they can keep ahead of the "hardcore" and maintain an open dialogue with their community, otherwise it might get nasty.

radyvix said:

I would play it. WoW was just so boring and repetitive (find giant yellow !, do X, get Y) by December I just decided to stop playing forever (not to mention that it seriously interfered with "family time").

The only reasons I am not playing Vanguard include the system requirements and the time requirement. I don"t want to go out and essentially buy a new computer just so I can play one game and enjoy it. Nor do I want to waste my time on a new mmo, though it looks like it a very enjoyable game.

I"m envious of all you 15-19 year olds able to while away your high school and college days playing a game of this ginormity.

Click to expand...

Haha same here. I just can"t drop over $1,000 for 1 video game. As of now with my older system I can play anything that I want to just fine and enjoy it. If someone gave me a free $1,500 computer that I couldn"t sell, I"d play it. If someone gave me $1,500, I sure as hell wouldn"t spend it on a computer for 1 video game.

I miss the EQ days, being 15 and being able to play as much as I wanted whenever I wanted, not feeling guilty at all. At least I can be grateful I had the best game for the best age. But it"ll never happen again. I will never undrestand the 20+ year olds that play 4+ hours a day.

FuckYou said:

> Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard?

because people are stupid. thread over.

Click to expand...

I actually happily await every new girl you put into your sig.

I"m stilll in a bit of shock here myself, reading all these positive reviews. Even MMORPG.com has VG as there top rated MMO, two days after release, after the obvious expections of a huge crash and burn....I have a hard time with it all. I"m happy for an "upset" and yet I"m not sold yet.

As for all the vitrol, I think half of it is to be entertained. Why act rationally when people come here for the hate? It all still feels pretty strange to me, not seeing Neric/Ut all over these threads saying "I TOLD YOU SO", though.

Maybe that"s next week.

I think the question being asked here tho, is why was there so much hating done when it was just in Beta? I mean, the new Barbie Dreamhouse game blows donkey nuts, but you don"t see near the kind of negative feedback it deserves.

EQ looked like garbage in Beta also, yet had the majority of us not ignored the doubt and naysaying, well...needless to say none of us would be here having this conversation right now.

The answer is expectations. People had such gigantic, unearthly, retardedly-huge expectations for this game, that when it came time to deliver, which in Beta few games do, the Nerd Rage reaction caused rivaled that of Chernobyl.

Now, I propose a new question. Why did people expect so much out of this game? What caused their expectations to be so ungodly high? I played the Beta, and fully enjoyed it; course then again I didn"t go into the Beta expecting the next end-all be-all MMO of the new generation. Why did everyone else?

Asmadai said:

Now, I propose a new question. Why did people expect so much out of this game? What caused their expectations to be so ungodly high? I played the Beta, and fully enjoyed it; course then again I didn"t go into the Beta expecting the next end-all be-all MMO of the new generation. Why did everyone else?

Click to expand...

i think its because they miss eq so much, which is the case with me. im not a vg hater though, although this isnt exactly what I expected

Lyrical said:

Foh is my number one website to go for unbiased information.I base almost 100% of my buying decisions for MMO"s, video games, books, movies as well as visit the TV house for ideas on new TV shows to watch.

Click to expand...

I think that"s your problem. These boards are a great place to come for opinions on games, movies, books, music, tv. I certainly wouldn"t want anyone here to take my opinion for more than just that: my thoughts and feelings on the current subject at hand. You can"t have an entertainment website such as this and expect to read wholly objective information. Everything you read here is going to be opinion when we"re talking about reviews of either a game in beta or a game that just went retail.

If you take the question - "Is Vanguard a good game?" you"re going to get 150 different answers. Personally - I didn"t care one bit for EVE. Is it a good game? Well - according to a lot of posters here it is. This is an opinion based discussion board...please take what the posters say as just that, not fact.