I tried vanguard, I liked the game but trialled it and Eve and Eve won, I like the graphics in Vanguard, especially the night and day dynamic, night time has a great murky creepy feel, very atmospheric.
Sad thing is that SOE never advertised it nor really finished the game...
It would have been the summum of hardcore MMO's if it ever could have been finished by the orriginal crew.
SoE DID 'finish' it. They put a tremendous amount of effort into the game, fixing it from the awful mess that sigil left it on to what it is today. It was ALL SoE. And all a gigantic money sink.
I'm currently playing with a dedicated group of friends and, I must say, we're all just having a lot of fun.
From what I hear this is the best way, if not the only way to play this game anymore. It's tempting in this respect. If VG ever goes F2P with cash shop they probably could make more money off group oriented, friends leveling together types of things like summoning scrolls, group bonuses (dmg, exp, regen), group mobility (mounts or whatever), or anything else around this concept. It's still gotta be one of the best group-oriented games out there with EQ.
I second the posts above; VG could be a great small group/small guild game. If they took a drastic change in their operational model, I think they could breathe some life into the game, but SoE just doesn't appear to be willing to invest into the game. I hate to even write this, but perhaps sending the game to one of the larger F2P vendors to integrate a cash shop model would pay off.
but SoE just doesn't appear to be willing to invest into the game. I hate
you mean re-invest.
After the amount of money SoE lost (granted Im assuming this, but that 18 months of fairly heavy bug squashing, optimizing, and adding content could not have been cheap) why should they invest again?
Put yourself in SoE's shoes on this one. They read post after post after post of 'great potential, too many bugs and performance issues. Fix that and Ill come back'. So they fixed it and no one came back. They added the end game content people wanted. People didnt come back. Nothing that has been done has brought people back. If you are SoE, what makes this batch of 'people will come/come back' any different than any other? Why should you believe it this time?
I stopped reading when the reviewer said Vanguard wasn't as pretty as Rift, AoC, or LotRO. I mean, AoC is debatable, and Rift might have better lighting in some cases. LotRO though? lmao, this site really plugs that game.
The lotro environment is about as photorealitic as you can get. The animations are horrible. The environment is probably the best you can get.
I stopped reading when the reviewer said Vanguard wasn't as pretty as Rift, AoC, or LotRO. I mean, AoC is debatable, and Rift might have better lighting in some cases. LotRO though? lmao, this site really plugs that game.
The lotro environment is about as photorealitic as you can get. The animations are horrible. The environment is probably the best you can get.
Lotro, photorealistic...? For me it looks rather like a cartoon, the scenery is unrealistic, not even close to VG landscape.
My response to Vanguard over the years has always been the same: Refund me the box price from buying it the day it launched and give me an entire month free and I might check it out. Since that is not going to happen, I will never set foot in that world again.
I played the day it launched and it was literally the worst launch I have ever seen. The world crashed every hour and reset the saved data (both character and the landmarks that were supposed to be marked forever by the first person to find them). There were bugs all over the place. And, even though it was brand new, there wasn't a big population which was likely due to people trying to log in, seeing the game crashing a couple times and saying the hell with it.
You can't do a launch like that and expect all of those people you burned on the box price to ever come back and give you another shot. Even Final Fantasy gets that and gave people months worth of free time for how awful and unfinished their game was. But Vanguard? No, they just took everyon'e money and didn't give out and compensation for the massive unfinished, bug filled, crashing mess they released.
I stopped reading when the reviewer said Vanguard wasn't as pretty as Rift, AoC, or LotRO. I mean, AoC is debatable, and Rift might have better lighting in some cases. LotRO though? lmao, this site really plugs that game.
The lotro environment is about as photorealitic as you can get. The animations are horrible. The environment is probably the best you can get.
When was the last time you looked at a photo of a real landscape? You should maybe go out and have a quick look, LotrO is far from beeing anything but an upgraded WoW.
"Give players systems and tools instead of rails and rules"
+1 and then they wouldnt be talking about population issues **being low** and pvp makes everything better ...sortta like bacon
They had a full world PvP server at launch. I played it for a little while. The rules were silly (you could be in town next to guards doing the mini-game crafting and someone could kill you with no response from the guards or anything else). They also didn't add any PvP goals and essentially said they didn't plan on supporting it or tweaking the system/rules for it.
Also, due to the rule system, the game bugs, and the crashing no one played it. After the first week or two it was empty (of course so were most of the other servers).
In other words, I don't think that readding the PvP server will bring people back.
I stopped reading when the reviewer said Vanguard wasn't as pretty as Rift, AoC, or LotRO. I mean, AoC is debatable, and Rift might have better lighting in some cases. LotRO though? lmao, this site really plugs that game.
The lotro environment is about as photorealitic as you can get. The animations are horrible. The environment is probably the best you can get.
When was the last time you looked at a photo of a real landscape? You should maybe go out and have a quick look, LotrO is far from beeing anything but an upgraded WoW.
Im confidant that anyone playing the game would see Im right.
My response to Vanguard over the years has always been the same: Refund me the box price from buying it the day it launched and give me an entire month free and I might check it out. Since that is not going to happen, I will never set foot in that world again.
I played the day it launched and it was literally the worst launch I have ever seen. The world crashed every hour and reset the saved data (both character and the landmarks that were supposed to be marked forever by the first person to find them). There were bugs all over the place. And, even though it was brand new, there wasn't a big population which was likely due to people trying to log in, seeing the game crashing a couple times and saying the hell with it.
You can't do a launch like that and expect all of those people you burned on the box price to ever come back and give you another shot. Even Final Fantasy gets that and gave people months worth of free time for how awful and unfinished their game was. But Vanguard? No, they just took everyon'e money and didn't give out and compensation for the massive unfinished, bug filled, crashing mess they released.
Its funny how people had different experiances. I played from launch as well. Yes it was laggy at times. I remember crashing maybe 3 times in the first week or 2 of the game... The game did give me a few graphical anomalies as well which I would volunteerily restart my computer because of. Not sure what server you were on. Mine was the RP server. It apparently wasnt as bad there. Played from launch up untill 2 years out.
Yes they did Optimize it considerably, and improve performance drastically. I do remember one bug fix which did cause a major memory leak along the way which did cause nonstop crashing. That came later though. Took them about 2 or 3 weeks to track it down and fix it.
All this being said. The reviewer of the game did an excellent job though in his review. The game has come a long way. It also looks as if SOE IS starting to re invest in this game. Which might make it even more worth while. All the people on these forums claiming they are wanting something different, than just another WOW clone. They could benifit from this review. Sure they might have played it before, and turned there backs at what it was like. However its changed. If you hate the game that much, then you will not have to worry one bit about it anymore because most likely you will never play again. Thats your decision. There are MANY new MMOers around. This game might be the game for them as well.
However for all of you that have played WOW or any of the WOW clones out there, and claim to be looking for a new game. This game is different than what you may have ever experianced. It is more involved. It is more open. It is more challenging. The game was not designed to hand you things on a silver platter. It takes longer to make it to the top, but the trip there is as fun as getting there. Also it was meant to be played with a group. Can you solo? Sure you can. But your not going to get anywhere near the experiance by soloing.
For all those that say they will never come back, I can understand that. I feel the same way with WOW... The funny thing is I actually liked WOW. I played it for almost 2 years. However after years of WOW clones some that I actually liked better than WOW, and that also looked better than wow graphically WOW... Why would I want to go back to the it? Tired of the design of the game is really the reason.
I stopped reading when the reviewer said Vanguard wasn't as pretty as Rift, AoC, or LotRO. I mean, AoC is debatable, and Rift might have better lighting in some cases. LotRO though? lmao, this site really plugs that game.
The lotro environment is about as photorealitic as you can get. The animations are horrible. The environment is probably the best you can get.
Lotro, photorealistic...? For me it looks rather like a cartoon, the scenery is unrealistic, not even close to VG landscape.
to me, LotRO is somewhere in between the cartoony nature of WoW and the realism of Vanguard. Now I will say that there are a lot of areas in VG that look flat out unfinished and bad (seems to be a theme with the game), but I think if you were to compare some of the most impressive areas in each game, Vanguard will win hands down.
If you were to compare things like textures, lighting effects, and the like, Vanguard wins without quesiton. LotRO was designed to run on mid-range machines in 2007, so you won't see a lot of detailed texures. LotRO does a good job at tricking people into thinking the game is better looking than it is thanks to its impressive draw distance. Vanguard was designed with the future in mind (big mistake honestly) and it shows as most games still do not have the level of graphical complexity of that game, especially given that it's open world.
I really enjoy vanguard. However, i would warn ithose looking for instant flashy action to probably look elsewhere. Not sure why some are talking down about the graphics. I find the enviroment gfx to be quite good. The biggest downside i see are the quests dull at best. Highly recommended to pve fans looking for a massive open world to explore.
The environments sometimes look stunning sometimes look like a childs paintings but there are some lovely parts to find if you explore. I do like that part, however the characters are another matter all together, they might look ok in still screenshots but the animations are still clunky and feel unresponsive.
for someone who gave it a month and a half it appears you never really came to understand the basis of the is *not* grind to cap then the game begins. while someone can do either with any game, Vanguard is terrific because it encourages slow, long play, enjoy while you play, not enjoy only once youre done grinding.
You are right, playing it for 4-5 hours a night for 45 days which estimates at a total of 225 hours of gameplay is simply not enough to give a game like Vanguard a real good ole college try.
those kinds of games rule the market right now. which is fine, people seem to enjoy them.
Sadly, true, but not all. Most games have a certain progression mechanic built in, however the rise of the endgame raider has caused many developer to take this new approach. I believe that its not the finish line, but enjoy the ride. I simply did not enjoy the ride with Vanguard.
and clearly no game w/o pvp can have longevity, i mean look at FFXI ... oh wait.
FFXI simply is not a game about pvp, its built around people helping each other. They added pvp to it, but it never took off. If PvP was something that a person was looking for, I wouldn't have recommended Rift. There are other games for that.
and i wholeheartedly support your reccomendation that folks looking for a WoW experience, look elsewhere, particularly at Rift. you'll find Rift to be a great game for you. and you'll stay away from crying about Vanguard not being what you were looking for ~ a grindtocapandthenthefunbegins kind of game.
I am really sorry that you took for sharing my opinion as crying, I was really trying to share my experience about the game and add the conversation. It is funny that if anyone has anything negative to say its labeled as crying. FYI: Its called having a conflicting point of view.
i play Vanguard because my ideas of fun do not include waiting in queues to grind the same battlefield over and over, or pugging the same raid over and over, hoping to gahd someone doesn't act like a complete jerkoff and ruin the run. because if we kick them, we then have to wait even longer for someone to fill the whole they left.
Awesome, I am glad someone is enjoying it.
as for the graphics the only thing i hear ingame is people being amazed. i dont know what youre settings were at or what youre standards are but seeing as most forums are mostly for complainers, i'm sure youll agree having played WoW and Rift as i have, its unusual that no one says this.
I played all three games and more...Graphically, I enjoyed Rifts layout, UI, animations and varied color scheme except for the armor animation were lacking to some extent. I felt as if they should have gone more to a realistic feel.
either there is a gfx hard/software issue going on here or what would be even more fascinating for me a psychological mindset that attributes certain turns of movement, or curves of features which alerts someone to say, OMG that sux! or OMG thats awesome!
I think the real point that as missed was how he could make that statement and then still give the category an 8/10. If I were to write a review, which I have written a few. I would not give a game a category score of 80% (because thats how metacritic looks at those scores too) unless it was...really good.
I've seen this in a few threads today, I'll close it up with this: Its simply a matter of taste. Some people like pizza with anchovies, some hate it, some people like pizza with bacon and mushrooms, some don't. At the end of the day, it comes down to personal preference, taste and experience value.
Normally, I would take it as a challenge and reinstall the Vanguard software off my shelf, or download it. Reinstate my account and give it another month, writing my own review at the end of it. Right now I am in-between games until Skyrim. Anyone want to take me up on it?
I left the game right after I had built my own house and a boat. Which at the time was a huge investment in resources. Too bad I cannot get Sony to unlock my account after it was hacked, I would love to go back and see what has been improved.
too many quality F2P games out therenow. I liked vanguard played it for 5-6 months right around launch and survived all the bugs and problems, but no population kills a game with as huge a land mass as that one has. Only way to get bodies playing it is to go free to play in some way. While people think that kills games if done in a way that is hybrid it can work. EvE is basically free to play if you play enough. So somethinglike that where you can buy game time with in game money, points, whatever.
And the list of free games just keeps growing so while some peopel might go back and try it they dont usually all go back at once. So even having some free to play week or even month and have a massive campaign to see just how big numbers could be would be a start.
Good game but it needs a larger population than most because it is so big. Problem is the people just arent there.
Vanguard is an amazing game with lots of potential. I just could not justify investing my time and money in a game that had a questionable future.
I left after a developer news update a year (or more) ago that effectively cancelled a highly anticipated content update and stipulated that future updates would be limited to bug and balancing patches. They also made apologies for the lack of staff assigned to the game who had the potential to do little more than keep the lights on. This all sounded a lot like a "swan song" to me.
This games is so well regarded within the MMO community. If SOE showed even a modest interest in reviving Vanguard I am fairly confident their efforts would be well rewarded.
Del Cabon A US Army ('Just Cause') Vet and MMORPG Native formerly of Trinsic, Norath and Dereth. Currently playing LOTRO.
B: place the building plots in and around the towns and cities
C: create naval weapon's and naval content for the boat's (pirate ships and sea monsters that take multible ships to take down would be so cool)
make it F2P for 3 months and advertise the hell out of it
E: have an active suggestions forum, let the playerbase know what your working on, keep them informed, make them feel that it's as much their game as it is your's
This games is so well regarded within the MMO community. If SOE showed even a modest interest in reviving Vanguard I am fairly confident their efforts would be well rewarded.
If its so well regarded then how come no one plays it? And Im talking 18 months ago when it was in a very similar state to it is now,w ith the same positive aura, and SoE was doing regular content updates and basically completely turned the game from unplayable to what it is now.
Im sure if players showed a modest interest in playing the game their efforts would be rewarded. In fact, SoE is satrting to do bug squashes and such again for the game as reports are that numbers are on the rise.
And unlike many, I dont feel f2p is the way to go. What model could they possibly use? The flow of the game is too non linear to use the Turbine model. The EQ2 model was a failure. Plus, while f2p has worked better than expected in LOTRO and DDO, the type of player Vanguard attracts is less likely to be a f2per. vanguard is a deep, vast game and not for the impatient. The instant gratifcation factor just isnt as high.
Now if you want to say maybe make a 60 day trial period or something like that, perhaps they could do that, but thats an awfully big monetary risk for a game that really shows no signs that a big retention is likely.
If its so well regarded then how come no one plays it? And Im talking 18 months ago when it was in a very similar state to it is now,w ith the same positive aura, and SoE was doing regular content updates and basically completely turned the game from unplayable to what it is now.
I'm sorry but that is incorrect.
I was playing during the period when SOE made a sort of game relaunch, and I must say the servers (please note not only one server, but at least 3 servers) were very well populated. Never I had any difficulty in finding a group during those days.
When most people (including me) quit the game was when Sony basically stated that development for the game would have been stopped. But again, when content kept coming, population was on the rise.
There is a direct connection between updates flow and population in a MMORPG, but the first input must come from the developers. After all, they are supply, we are demand.
And one more consideration: in a huge and open world like Vanguards' you have to take into account two basic points about population:
1) non-instanced world doesn't cope well with very high population. Do you really want to compete with 3 other groups for the same mobs you need to complete a quest?
2) the world is huge, thus meaning that, apart from main hubs, you will rarely have the impression of over-crowding. I dare to say that is also part of the beauty of this game, not to feel like you are in a crowded themepark on saturday afternoon.
hmm review and coments got me interested ... downloaded installer, then it asked for 18GB of free space. no thanks ... unless I find an offline installer this game is not for me.
I absolutely agree, loads of people saying they wished the population was higher but won't re-sub because it is too low... catch22. I have thought about the same thing and as soon as I get home I am going to re-sub and at least give it a chance.
Comments
Sad thing is that SOE never advertised it nor really finished the game...
It would have been the summum of hardcore MMO's if it ever could have been finished by the orriginal crew.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
SoE DID 'finish' it. They put a tremendous amount of effort into the game, fixing it from the awful mess that sigil left it on to what it is today. It was ALL SoE. And all a gigantic money sink.
I second the posts above; VG could be a great small group/small guild game. If they took a drastic change in their operational model, I think they could breathe some life into the game, but SoE just doesn't appear to be willing to invest into the game. I hate to even write this, but perhaps sending the game to one of the larger F2P vendors to integrate a cash shop model would pay off.
you mean re-invest.
After the amount of money SoE lost (granted Im assuming this, but that 18 months of fairly heavy bug squashing, optimizing, and adding content could not have been cheap) why should they invest again?
Put yourself in SoE's shoes on this one. They read post after post after post of 'great potential, too many bugs and performance issues. Fix that and Ill come back'. So they fixed it and no one came back. They added the end game content people wanted. People didnt come back. Nothing that has been done has brought people back. If you are SoE, what makes this batch of 'people will come/come back' any different than any other? Why should you believe it this time?
+1 and then they wouldnt be talking about population issues **being low** and pvp makes everything better ...sortta like bacon
They had pvp FFA servers..
Trust me ,you don't want a Bard kiting your ass.
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Misc/Jesus/Jesus.htm
The lotro environment is about as photorealitic as you can get. The animations are horrible. The environment is probably the best you can get.
Lotro, photorealistic...? For me it looks rather like a cartoon, the scenery is unrealistic, not even close to VG landscape.
REALITY CHECK
My response to Vanguard over the years has always been the same: Refund me the box price from buying it the day it launched and give me an entire month free and I might check it out. Since that is not going to happen, I will never set foot in that world again.
I played the day it launched and it was literally the worst launch I have ever seen. The world crashed every hour and reset the saved data (both character and the landmarks that were supposed to be marked forever by the first person to find them). There were bugs all over the place. And, even though it was brand new, there wasn't a big population which was likely due to people trying to log in, seeing the game crashing a couple times and saying the hell with it.
You can't do a launch like that and expect all of those people you burned on the box price to ever come back and give you another shot. Even Final Fantasy gets that and gave people months worth of free time for how awful and unfinished their game was. But Vanguard? No, they just took everyon'e money and didn't give out and compensation for the massive unfinished, bug filled, crashing mess they released.
When was the last time you looked at a photo of a real landscape? You should maybe go out and have a quick look, LotrO is far from beeing anything but an upgraded WoW.
They had a full world PvP server at launch. I played it for a little while. The rules were silly (you could be in town next to guards doing the mini-game crafting and someone could kill you with no response from the guards or anything else). They also didn't add any PvP goals and essentially said they didn't plan on supporting it or tweaking the system/rules for it.
Also, due to the rule system, the game bugs, and the crashing no one played it. After the first week or two it was empty (of course so were most of the other servers).
In other words, I don't think that readding the PvP server will bring people back.
Im confidant that anyone playing the game would see Im right.
Its funny how people had different experiances. I played from launch as well. Yes it was laggy at times. I remember crashing maybe 3 times in the first week or 2 of the game... The game did give me a few graphical anomalies as well which I would volunteerily restart my computer because of. Not sure what server you were on. Mine was the RP server. It apparently wasnt as bad there. Played from launch up untill 2 years out.
Yes they did Optimize it considerably, and improve performance drastically. I do remember one bug fix which did cause a major memory leak along the way which did cause nonstop crashing. That came later though. Took them about 2 or 3 weeks to track it down and fix it.
All this being said. The reviewer of the game did an excellent job though in his review. The game has come a long way. It also looks as if SOE IS starting to re invest in this game. Which might make it even more worth while. All the people on these forums claiming they are wanting something different, than just another WOW clone. They could benifit from this review. Sure they might have played it before, and turned there backs at what it was like. However its changed. If you hate the game that much, then you will not have to worry one bit about it anymore because most likely you will never play again. Thats your decision. There are MANY new MMOers around. This game might be the game for them as well.
However for all of you that have played WOW or any of the WOW clones out there, and claim to be looking for a new game. This game is different than what you may have ever experianced. It is more involved. It is more open. It is more challenging. The game was not designed to hand you things on a silver platter. It takes longer to make it to the top, but the trip there is as fun as getting there. Also it was meant to be played with a group. Can you solo? Sure you can. But your not going to get anywhere near the experiance by soloing.
For all those that say they will never come back, I can understand that. I feel the same way with WOW... The funny thing is I actually liked WOW. I played it for almost 2 years. However after years of WOW clones some that I actually liked better than WOW, and that also looked better than wow graphically WOW... Why would I want to go back to the it? Tired of the design of the game is really the reason.
to me, LotRO is somewhere in between the cartoony nature of WoW and the realism of Vanguard. Now I will say that there are a lot of areas in VG that look flat out unfinished and bad (seems to be a theme with the game), but I think if you were to compare some of the most impressive areas in each game, Vanguard will win hands down.
If you were to compare things like textures, lighting effects, and the like, Vanguard wins without quesiton. LotRO was designed to run on mid-range machines in 2007, so you won't see a lot of detailed texures. LotRO does a good job at tricking people into thinking the game is better looking than it is thanks to its impressive draw distance. Vanguard was designed with the future in mind (big mistake honestly) and it shows as most games still do not have the level of graphical complexity of that game, especially given that it's open world.
The environments sometimes look stunning sometimes look like a childs paintings but there are some lovely parts to find if you explore. I do like that part, however the characters are another matter all together, they might look ok in still screenshots but the animations are still clunky and feel unresponsive.
I think the real point that as missed was how he could make that statement and then still give the category an 8/10. If I were to write a review, which I have written a few. I would not give a game a category score of 80% (because thats how metacritic looks at those scores too) unless it was...really good.
I've seen this in a few threads today, I'll close it up with this: Its simply a matter of taste. Some people like pizza with anchovies, some hate it, some people like pizza with bacon and mushrooms, some don't. At the end of the day, it comes down to personal preference, taste and experience value.
Normally, I would take it as a challenge and reinstall the Vanguard software off my shelf, or download it. Reinstate my account and give it another month, writing my own review at the end of it. Right now I am in-between games until Skyrim. Anyone want to take me up on it?
I left the game right after I had built my own house and a boat. Which at the time was a huge investment in resources. Too bad I cannot get Sony to unlock my account after it was hacked, I would love to go back and see what has been improved.
too many quality F2P games out therenow. I liked vanguard played it for 5-6 months right around launch and survived all the bugs and problems, but no population kills a game with as huge a land mass as that one has. Only way to get bodies playing it is to go free to play in some way. While people think that kills games if done in a way that is hybrid it can work. EvE is basically free to play if you play enough. So somethinglike that where you can buy game time with in game money, points, whatever.
And the list of free games just keeps growing so while some peopel might go back and try it they dont usually all go back at once. So even having some free to play week or even month and have a massive campaign to see just how big numbers could be would be a start.
Good game but it needs a larger population than most because it is so big. Problem is the people just arent there.
Vanguard is an amazing game with lots of potential. I just could not justify investing my time and money in a game that had a questionable future.
I left after a developer news update a year (or more) ago that effectively cancelled a highly anticipated content update and stipulated that future updates would be limited to bug and balancing patches. They also made apologies for the lack of staff assigned to the game who had the potential to do little more than keep the lights on. This all sounded a lot like a "swan song" to me.
This games is so well regarded within the MMO community. If SOE showed even a modest interest in reviving Vanguard I am fairly confident their efforts would be well rewarded.
Del Cabon
A US Army ('Just Cause') Vet and MMORPG Native formerly of Trinsic, Norath and Dereth. Currently playing LOTRO.
Vanguard is such a shame...
All the building blocks are there.
If I could be boss for a day (lol a year)
I would
A: rework the character models and animations
B: place the building plots in and around the towns and cities
C: create naval weapon's and naval content for the boat's (pirate ships and sea monsters that take multible ships to take down would be so cool)
E: have an active suggestions forum, let the playerbase know what your working on, keep them informed, make them feel that it's as much their game as it is your's
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
If its so well regarded then how come no one plays it? And Im talking 18 months ago when it was in a very similar state to it is now,w ith the same positive aura, and SoE was doing regular content updates and basically completely turned the game from unplayable to what it is now.
Im sure if players showed a modest interest in playing the game their efforts would be rewarded. In fact, SoE is satrting to do bug squashes and such again for the game as reports are that numbers are on the rise.
And unlike many, I dont feel f2p is the way to go. What model could they possibly use? The flow of the game is too non linear to use the Turbine model. The EQ2 model was a failure. Plus, while f2p has worked better than expected in LOTRO and DDO, the type of player Vanguard attracts is less likely to be a f2per. vanguard is a deep, vast game and not for the impatient. The instant gratifcation factor just isnt as high.
Now if you want to say maybe make a 60 day trial period or something like that, perhaps they could do that, but thats an awfully big monetary risk for a game that really shows no signs that a big retention is likely.
hmm review and coments got me interested ... downloaded installer, then it asked for 18GB of free space. no thanks ... unless I find an offline installer this game is not for me.
I absolutely agree, loads of people saying they wished the population was higher but won't re-sub because it is too low... catch22. I have thought about the same thing and as soon as I get home I am going to re-sub and at least give it a chance.