There were some people who suffered from server buggy to crowded stuff when WoW launched. I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues. There were little things here and there and a small percentage of WoWs playerbase had issues longer.
Small percentage.
In Vanguard there is a small percentage of people who post that they have no issues; most - but not all - have top notch rigs. (There is clearly more to it). After a week hundreds of bugs, pages of them have been fixed. Huge numbers when compared to WoW. Even more followed and guess what - there are pages and pages and pages of outstanding gameplay, quest, technical, database, graphical, you name it we have it bugs.
Get real, get over it, stop trying to pretend that this is a normal launch. Even Brad posted it had pre-launch issues an indication of how bag it was going to be on reflection.
If you enjoy it continue. But don't call Vanguard anything but what it is. Unfinished and bug ridden - but. but there is this 1 bug, or even 10, hell even 100 bugs in game X/Y/Z so there. There is no comparison - even to AO. It is worse than ToA. and that is saying something. I think it is even worse than Horizons and as bad as DnL - which didn't claim to be finished when it came out.
Let me start by saying I have NOT played Vanguard, so excuse me if I'm way off with anything I say. But, I would like to touch base on the fact that this game IS NOT World of Warcraft. It is not any other game either, it is VANGUARD. There is no reason to compare it to World of Warcraft which was released over 2 years ago. Another point, of course there is bugs. To be completly bold, this is the only other thing I would like to say - If you don't like it, quit. Play again after its "open public beta" stage. Likewise, if you are enjoying it, continue to. Lets let go of this subject.
Tweaking the .ini file isn't as big a deal as most want others to believe.
In the .ini file are options that are not yet available through the UI. Things like Vsync, triple buffering and such. These are much the same EXACT options that weren't available when WoW was released. If your system is having trouble running VG then tweaking the .ini file MIGHT help. The magority of performance problems aren't VG's fault, it's the systems trying to run the game.
UO did not require me to make changes to my swap file, virtual memory or anything of that nature. Neither did EQ, neither did WoW, or any other MMORPG I have played. This is nothing more than VG being pushed out the door before the interface could be cleaned up - forcing you to have to make these adjusts manually.
I do believe Mcquaid explains why the game is so demanding on the system. It's not that VG has state of the art graphics. It's because VG has to load gigs of information onto your system and process it as well as render it at any given time. The world is HUGE and seemless and that means that slower systems will feel the brunt of it.
VG isn't the only game that is demanding on your PC. Wanna play the latest rainbow six game? Guess what? You have to have a vid card that supports shader model 3.0. Know how many cards support that? One, and it's $400 on the low end.
It's your responcibility to upgrade your system if you want to continue playing the lastest games; not the job of software developers to ensure that the game runs on every system. You can disagree with that FACT all you want, but it's an undeniable TRUTH about PC gaming. Upgrading is REQUIRED to keep up with the games. Just as the consoles upgrade so to must your PC.
What you are saying has NOTHING to do with VG. VG runs like crap because it has not been properly optimized due to being shoved out the door too soon.
If VG was broken then no one would be able to play it. It's no more broken then WoW was at release or Lineage 2 or EQ2.
ROFL. This is comedy gold. What planet do you live on? WoW had virtually NO technical problems on release. The main issue WoW had was server capacity - and that issue didn't even affect everyone. For those that were, Blizzard quickly added more servers and ultimately upgraded the hardware on ALL of the servers. I have not even seen a queue since the expansion. My wife and I saw ZERO load/server problems from day 1.
Guess what else? We sent in ONE bug report for a bugged quest. ONE. How many bugs do you think VG players are suffering from on average in a given hour of play?
If the game runs for the magority of people playing it then it wouldn't be broken, and that's were VG is at. The few people that post about the game being broken here represent the smallest fraction of people who experience VG. Unfortunetly you people are also some of the most vocal, and some of you the most unreasonable even.
Keep telling yourself that. The friends of mine who tried VG, even the most patient supporters of the game, conceded immediately that the game needed months of bug fixing before it was ready for Prime Time. Beta is over. It's now going into the hands of paying customers, many of whom will not stay after their 1st month is done.
Sometimes reality sets in and Capitol lenders start to demand a return for thier investments. Sometimes those lenders aren't very flexible and may not be willing to wait. Sometimes you have to release or find another solution to making your lenders happy. In a lot of cases when it comes to games and dept the IP will get sold off and someone else will take over production, or eventualy sell themselves or just squash the IP altogether.
Why is this the problem of the playerbase? Brad mis-managing the project is not my concern. I don't want to hear a bunch of excuses about lenders or money running out because frankly the huge amount of time Brad had - he should have had a lot more to show for it.
At least Mcquaid was man enough to say the game was released early because money ran out.
Can you even see what you are typing here? How can you sit here and say that WoW/EQ/VG release are all the same and yet you admit the game was shoved out the door early because "money ran out". How is Brad "man enough" to admit this? You don't think people can open their f*cking eyes and see for themselves how unfinished the game is? You think we need to have Brad tell us this?
And he's right. No mmo is ever finished. They all Nerf, buff, bug fix, add content, and when they stop doing most of these things it ususally means the game is dead.
This is politic-speak. This is the kind of crap I would expect to hear during a Presidential debate. MMO's evolve over time that much is true. However, MMOs also have to obey the same basic principles of any other game and that is that when they are released to the public, there needs to be a minimum level of quality and VG fell WAY short in that regard.
The saddest thing here is that all of your excuse-mongering won't help the problem, because as days, weeks and month pass and more people say "screw this - its not worth my time" - that is less and less people to fill that gaming world.
There were some people who suffered from server buggy to crowded stuff when WoW launched. I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues. There were little things here and there and a small percentage of WoWs playerbase had issues longer. Small percentage. In Vanguard there is a small percentage of people who post that they have no issues; most - but not all - have top notch rigs. (There is clearly more to it). After a week hundreds of bugs, pages of them have been fixed. Huge numbers when compared to WoW. Even more followed and guess what - there are pages and pages and pages of outstanding gameplay, quest, technical, database, graphical, you name it we have it bugs. Get real, get over it, stop trying to pretend that this is a normal launch. Even Brad posted it had pre-launch issues an indication of how bag it was going to be on reflection. If you enjoy it continue. But don't call Vanguard anything but what it is. Unfinished and bug ridden - but. but there is this 1 bug, or even 10, hell even 100 bugs in game X/Y/Z so there. There is no comparison - even to AO. It is worse than ToA. and that is saying something. I think it is even worse than Horizons and as bad as DnL - which didn't claim to be finished when it came out.
And yet I played WoW from release and ran into bugs daily; most of wich forced me to shut the game down with task manager. After less then a month I have encountered one, maybe two bugs in VG, and neither of wich required me to shut the game down.
Are you implying that the posts made here represent a large part of the VG player base, and that the post here are a valid statement of the experience everyone is having in VG as a whole?
Are you implying that if you do not experience a bug then the game is bug free, and I quote, "I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues." No problems huh? How about some of those many, many new servers being attached to the PTS and near unplayable whenever the PTS was open. Would you say that wasn't a bug that didn't effect a "vast magority" of the people playing on those servers.
Huge numbers compared to WoW? I'm going to assume you've never visited that Tech/ support forums over thier at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10023&sid=1. If you didn't click the link and look, thier up to 125 pages. Now I can't tell you how many pages it was a month after release, but I can say that the forums over there at WoW were wiped a couple months ago so that they could put up the new forums. Also please try and keep in mind that WoW has only a fraction of the stuff that is in VG as far as world, races, classes, and gameplay elements go. I would expect them to have fewer bugs.
Bugs not being fixed in VG? Games been out less then a month, and WoW in that time fixed very few of the bugs they had in that period as well. Most of the time they coded around what they could, it's called a "work around". They didn't really fix the bugs, just added more coded to bypass the bug and make parts of the game unatainable until they could find a real fix for it.
Someone else earlier also tried to use the point that VG is missing content or that parts of the world are blocked off. Hmmm, that's wierd, there were parts of Azeroth that weren't even populated with ANYTHING. Just bits of land mass with a crappy dirt texture laid across it that could get you banned for stepping foot on. This isn't a VG thing, it's a MMO thing. Not all content is going to be available at release. Just for the, "they said this would be in and it's not responce." EVERY MMO I've played had content they said would be there at release and it wasn't. Nothing new there.
In fact, the only thing new I'm seeing from the state of VG is the honesty of the guy in charge.
Edit: For the guy above me. WORD, BFG put out a card that's only like 4 generations bihind the latest cards and supports shader model 3.0, yeah man that's gonna run rainbow six vegas real well. Get a grip.
UO is your argument for a system running a game well? Yeah, that's a valid point. A 20 year old game.
System upgrade has nothing to do with VG? There is another great point. Game doesn't run well for you and a few people you know so it must not run well for anyone else. I must be imagining the 15-30 FPS I'm getting with my crappy x1300.
Your right I am golden, I'm also not going to repeat whats been said a hundred times already about WoW, I will say that if you think server problems aren't a problem of an MMO then what world are you from?
I will keep telling myself that if the game works for the magority of the people playing then it must not be broken because I don't like to lie to myself.
You worked at Sigil? No Brad on a personall level that you would know if he mismanaged something. Wich MMO did you release?
I can see what I wrote, the bigger question is can you? I'm guessing no or you would have understood what I wrote.
Maybe you should set down the minimum guidlines for all MMO developers, or any game devs for that matter, to follow. What minimums are you refering to. VG is playable, as far as I'm conscerned that's all it need to be. Sorry it didnt meet YOUR expectations.
Excuse mongering? OK. I gotta ask though, were'd you get the crystal ball.
There were some people who suffered from server buggy to crowded stuff when WoW launched. I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues. There were little things here and there and a small percentage of WoWs playerbase had issues longer. Small percentage. In Vanguard there is a small percentage of people who post that they have no issues; most - but not all - have top notch rigs. (There is clearly more to it). After a week hundreds of bugs, pages of them have been fixed. Huge numbers when compared to WoW. Even more followed and guess what - there are pages and pages and pages of outstanding gameplay, quest, technical, database, graphical, you name it we have it bugs. Get real, get over it, stop trying to pretend that this is a normal launch. Even Brad posted it had pre-launch issues an indication of how bag it was going to be on reflection. If you enjoy it continue. But don't call Vanguard anything but what it is. Unfinished and bug ridden - but. but there is this 1 bug, or even 10, hell even 100 bugs in game X/Y/Z so there. There is no comparison - even to AO. It is worse than ToA. and that is saying something. I think it is even worse than Horizons and as bad as DnL - which didn't claim to be finished when it came out.
And yet I played WoW from release and ran into bugs daily; most of wich forced me to shut the game down with task manager. After less then a month I have encountered one, maybe two bugs in VG, and neither of wich required me to shut the game down.
Are you implying that the posts made here represent a large part of the VG player base, and that the post here are a valid statement of the experience everyone is having in VG as a whole?
Are you implying that if you do not experience a bug then the game is bug free, and I quote, "I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues." No problems huh? How about some of those many, many new servers being attached to the PTS and near unplayable whenever the PTS was open. Would you say that wasn't a bug that didn't effect a "vast magority" of the people playing on those servers.
Huge numbers compared to WoW? I'm going to assume you've never visited that Tech/ support forums over thier at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10023&sid=1. If you didn't click the link and look, thier up to 125 pages. Now I can't tell you how many pages it was a month after release, but I can say that the forums over there at WoW were wiped a couple months ago so that they could put up the new forums. Also please try and keep in mind that WoW has only a fraction of the stuff that is in VG as far as world, races, classes, and gameplay elements go. I would expect them to have fewer bugs.
Bugs not being fixed in VG? Games been out less then a month, and WoW in that time fixed very few of the bugs they had in that period as well. Most of the time they coded around what they could, it's called a "work around". They didn't really fix the bugs, just added more coded to bypass the bug and make parts of the game unatainable until they could find a real fix for it.
Someone else earlier also tried to use the point that VG is missing content or that parts of the world are blocked off. Hmmm, that's wierd, there were parts of Azeroth that weren't even populated with ANYTHING. Just bits of land mass with a crappy dirt texture laid across it that could get you banned for stepping foot on. This isn't a VG thing, it's a MMO thing. Not all content is going to be available at release. Just for the, "they said this would be in and it's not responce." EVERY MMO I've played had content they said would be there at release and it wasn't. Nothing new there.
In fact, the only thing new I'm seeing from the state of VG is the honesty of the guy in charge.
I played on Argent Dawn at launch, popular through being one of the two RP servers available at that time, and continued on it for the year and a half that I played. I was one of the people too stubborn to reroll on one of the new servers, so I dealt with the initial server problems. Anyone who had server issues were probably just the same as me, and didn't want to switch servers. There was a way to play the game without problems at WoW's launch, but completely understandable that no one would want to start over.
I don't remember having any issues at all pass the first week with server problems anyway as much as people try and convince me WoW was unplayable for months. And in retrospect, kind of silly to complain about WoW's server issues at launch, isn't it? I mean it was due to their success...so many people wanted to play that they had to double and triple the amount of initial servers and pull boxes off the shelves.
But we as consumers shouldn't care WHAT the problem is, right? We just want our product to work. I wholeheartedly believe in that, so I won't discriminate between WoW and Vanguard in the reasons why...but the reality of the differences will pan out the two MMOs' respective fates a tad differently depending on what exactly caused their initial hiccups. While ol' Brad is lamenting the reasons for Vanguard's problems, I somehow doubt Pardo was shedding tears over the reasons WoW's servers were suffering.
One thing awesome that Blizzard did was crediting free days to your account on days that it was unplayable for some. I ended up with a lot of free play time even though I was logged in playing just fine every day anyway. Blizzard understood that we were consumers paying for a service; at the heart of the matter this is all about our dollars. We wouldn't be complaining if Vanguard was free.
There were some people who suffered from server buggy to crowded stuff when WoW launched. I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues. There were little things here and there and a small percentage of WoWs playerbase had issues longer. Small percentage. In Vanguard there is a small percentage of people who post that they have no issues; most - but not all - have top notch rigs. (There is clearly more to it). After a week hundreds of bugs, pages of them have been fixed. Huge numbers when compared to WoW. Even more followed and guess what - there are pages and pages and pages of outstanding gameplay, quest, technical, database, graphical, you name it we have it bugs. Get real, get over it, stop trying to pretend that this is a normal launch. Even Brad posted it had pre-launch issues an indication of how bag it was going to be on reflection. If you enjoy it continue. But don't call Vanguard anything but what it is. Unfinished and bug ridden - but. but there is this 1 bug, or even 10, hell even 100 bugs in game X/Y/Z so there. There is no comparison - even to AO. It is worse than ToA. and that is saying something. I think it is even worse than Horizons and as bad as DnL - which didn't claim to be finished when it came out.
And yet I played WoW from release and ran into bugs daily; most of wich forced me to shut the game down with task manager. After less then a month I have encountered one, maybe two bugs in VG, and neither of wich required me to shut the game down.
Are you implying that the posts made here represent a large part of the VG player base, and that the post here are a valid statement of the experience everyone is having in VG as a whole?
Are you implying that if you do not experience a bug then the game is bug free, and I quote, "I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues." No problems huh? How about some of those many, many new servers being attached to the PTS and near unplayable whenever the PTS was open. Would you say that wasn't a bug that didn't effect a "vast magority" of the people playing on those servers.
Huge numbers compared to WoW? I'm going to assume you've never visited that Tech/ support forums over thier at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10023&sid=1. If you didn't click the link and look, thier up to 125 pages. Now I can't tell you how many pages it was a month after release, but I can say that the forums over there at WoW were wiped a couple months ago so that they could put up the new forums. Also please try and keep in mind that WoW has only a fraction of the stuff that is in VG as far as world, races, classes, and gameplay elements go. I would expect them to have fewer bugs.
Bugs not being fixed in VG? Games been out less then a month, and WoW in that time fixed very few of the bugs they had in that period as well. Most of the time they coded around what they could, it's called a "work around". They didn't really fix the bugs, just added more coded to bypass the bug and make parts of the game unatainable until they could find a real fix for it.
Someone else earlier also tried to use the point that VG is missing content or that parts of the world are blocked off. Hmmm, that's wierd, there were parts of Azeroth that weren't even populated with ANYTHING. Just bits of land mass with a crappy dirt texture laid across it that could get you banned for stepping foot on. This isn't a VG thing, it's a MMO thing. Not all content is going to be available at release. Just for the, "they said this would be in and it's not responce." EVERY MMO I've played had content they said would be there at release and it wasn't. Nothing new there.
In fact, the only thing new I'm seeing from the state of VG is the honesty of the guy in charge.
I played on Argent Dawn at launch, popular through being one of the two RP servers available at that time, and continued on it for the year and a half that I played. I was one of the people too stubborn to reroll on one of the new servers, so I dealt with the initial server problems. Anyone who had server issues were probably just the same as me, and didn't want to switch servers. There was a way to play the game without problems at WoW's launch, but completely understandable that no one would want to start over.
I don't remember having any issues at all pass the first week with server problems anyway as much as people try and convince me WoW was unplayable for months. And in retrospect, kind of silly to complain about WoW's server issues at launch, isn't it? I mean it was due to their success...so many people wanted to play that they had to double and triple the amount of initial servers and pull boxes off the shelves.
But we as consumers shouldn't care WHAT the problem is, right? We just want our product to work. I wholeheartedly believe in that, so I won't discriminate between WoW and Vanguard in the reasons why...but the reality of the differences will pan out the two MMOs' respective fates a tad differently depending on what exactly caused their initial hiccups. While ol' Brad is lamenting the reasons for Vanguard's problems, I somehow doubt Pardo was shedding tears over the reasons WoW's servers were suffering.
One thing awesome that Blizzard did was crediting free days to your account on days that it was unplayable for some. I ended up with a lot of free play time even though I was logged in playing just fine every day anyway. Blizzard understood that we were consumers paying for a service; at the heart of the matter this is all about our dollars. We wouldn't be complaining if Vanguard was free.
I was on Eldre thalas and Smolderthorn, both of wich were connected to the PTS. Everytime the PTS went up the game was near unplayable on those servers for the first couple of days. Whatever, didn't really bother me, I never complained or asked for my money back; it's the nature of the beast. MMO's have trouble, and I don't care what MMO it is.
I don't like using WoW as a reference for bugs or performance, but I also don't like to see other people use it as a measuring stick because WoW wasn't perfect either. Just silly trying to compair a two year old game to one that's not even a month old.
I think in all I've ended up with well over a weeks worth of credited play time. And just to make a point of emphasis, I wouldn't have got that if there wasn't a problem, and some of it I got before E'T was beyond medium load. Heavy servers weren't always the problem, it was the hardware Blizzard used.
Most of what I try to get at here is that one persons experience is going to be anothers, but most of the bad posts I see are saying just that.
Not everyone is having a problem, not everyone is unhappy, not everyone is posting on these boards; hell most people that play any MMO prolly don't visit forums at all.
Trying to use the negetive posts here as proof that the game is borked is stupid. The few people that post are the furthest thing from the magority of people playing the game and in no way a valid representation of mass experiences had in VG.
it is not about comparing WoW and VG's launch. It is about trying to get the 'haters' to step back and see that VG isn't an exception to the rule. However after I read Godpuppet's reply to my wow bug list, I realize that they don't want to admit it and therefore won't. They see what they want to see.
To Godpuppet: Apparetnly you missed the 10 or so instances of crashes or disconnects. While you call that 'laggy', I call that gamebreaking. Apparently since just random DC's and Crashes are just minor for you so I guess we can take client instability off of you list of complaints about VG. That pretty much leaves the Performance (which is most likely your computer), lost corpses (yes this is a big one never said it wasn't), random XP loss (which I am almost positive they fixed already), and lost items (Wait, you said it was just part of 'lag' when I showed an instance of that in WoW so must not be that bad).
To everyone who is upset about their computers not handling the game well:
EQ 2 (which is now the highest ranked game on this site) requires a huge amount of computer resources. When that game came out, only the best of the best could play that game. My computer still can't run that game at High Quality settings. Even in WoW, my Fiance's computer couldn't handle large raid events like MC and I had to upgrade her video card to make it playable. Just because your system is outdated and you refuse to look into either the tweaks or upgrading doesn't make the game suck.
I was on Eldre thalas and Smolderthorn, both of wich were connected to the PTS. Everytime the PTS went up the game was near unplayable on those servers for the first couple of days. Whatever, didn't really bother me, I never complained or asked for my money back; it's the nature of the beast. MMO's have trouble, and I don't care what MMO it is.
I don't like using WoW as a reference for bugs or performance, but I also don't like to see other people use it as a measuring stick because WoW wasn't perfect either. Just silly trying to compair a two year old game to one that's not even a month old. I think in all I've ended up with well over a weeks worth of credited play time. And just to make a point of emphasis, I wouldn't have got that if there wasn't a problem, and some of it I got before E'T was beyond medium load. Heavy servers weren't always the problem, it was the hardware Blizzard used. Most of what I try to get at here is that one persons experience is going to be anothers, but most of the bad posts I see are saying just that. Not everyone is having a problem, not everyone is unhappy, not everyone is posting on these boards; hell most people that play any MMO prolly don't visit forums at all. Trying to use the negetive posts here as proof that the game is borked is stupid. The few people that post are the furthest thing from the magority of people playing the game and in no way a valid representation of mass experiences had in VG.
I for one wasn't comparing WoW as it is today, versus what Vanguard is today. I was comparing WoW as it was at launch, with Vanguard as it is right now during it's launch.
I agree with you that one person's play experience, or even ten isn't going to be the same as the next person in any given MMO launch. No doubt the person who was victimized the most by bugs during WoW's launch had it way worse than the person who has been playing the most bug-free in Vanguard right now.
You're thinking too shallowly about the issue though, and the purpose of the comparisons.
Just because I myself had a bug-free time at WoW's launch doesn't mean it was a bug-free game. Just because you or whoever else is having a bug-free time in Vanguard doesn't mean it's a bug-free game.
But when you go beyond posting with just yourself in mind, and forming opinions beyond your own play experience and what's readily there in front of your eyes...it's clear that Vanguard is the buggiest of two games at launch.
Now what do I base that on?
The fact that it was purposefully (not maliciously) released prematurely, the fact that I'm spammed in-game by GMs complaining about a service crippling amount of /bug reports, the fact that the -systemic-, not personal, but SYSTEMIC issues that bring the servers down for emergency maintenance due to bugs like level and item losses; all of it tells me that this is a pretty buggy game without me even inserting my own personal bias from what's occurred to me.
A much easier route of determining that Vanguard is a buggy game though is not to be so confrontational and alienated by my peers and believe their own horror stories, to believe the reviewers on websites and podcasts who're relaying similar concerns to players. I'm not the type to isolate myself to my own opinion; and if I do, I'm not so stubborn that I'll try to assert my opinions as fact.
You can have a bug-free time in Vanguard, and it be factual that you are. But that isn't the same as Vanguard being a bug-free game, similarly, you having a worse time in WoW than you are in Vanguard at comparable time periods doesn't mean Vanguard is less buggy than WoW.
Again, what you're implying is that so long as 1 bug exists in WoW, it was a buggy game. All buggy games are of the same quality, so all must be regarded just the same and forgiven the same. There is no gray area, there are no lines to draw, either it's all good or none of it is good.
Not so though, there's many subjective factors that go into deciding what's acceptable and what's not. They're all intangibles, such as me being able to say WoW's bugs meant nothing to me because I was having so much fun I deal with them. Instantly you're able to verbally parry with the fact that you didn't have fun at WoW's launch, and that you're having fun in Vanguard.
Why bother with all that? Just be reasonable with the facts. Vanguard is more buggy, thus it failed the standard set by WoW; the incredibly most popular and subscription-filled game in the MMO market.
You have to compare these products to something. Nothing at all wrong with expecting your Gothic 3 to follow the quality of Oblivion, your new car to come increasingly safe from crash testing, your Cable service to increase the quality of channels and speed of your bandwidth..so on and so on.
In the absence of increasingly setting the bar of quality higher, the masses will react accordingly in not poising an inferior product as something acceptable. Don't you think?
Let me start by saying I have NOT played Vanguard, so excuse me if I'm way off with anything I say. But, I would like to touch base on the fact that this game IS NOT World of Warcraft. It is not any other game either, it is VANGUARD. There is no reason to compare it to World of Warcraft which was released over 2 years ago. Another point, of course there is bugs. To be completly bold, this is the only other thing I would like to say - If you don't like it, quit. Play again after its "open public beta" stage. Likewise, if you are enjoying it, continue to. Lets let go of this subject.
Comparing VG to WoW is inevitable. They're both of the same genre, they have alot of similarities. VG took many ideas from WoW, such as the mailing system, the interface, the quest system, flying mounts etc. Nothing wrong with that, grab what works, but you can't say there's no reason to compare them. VG has a bigger world, more classes & races and more harsher death penalty but think about it they're pretty much the same only VG has some more features. The core gameplay is virtually the same; go around killing things and delivering things and gaining levels as you do so. And alot of people have already quit...they're just expressing their dissatisfaction of the game. I mean its natural right? You pay 60 bucks and the game didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be.
Let me start by saying I have NOT played Vanguard, so excuse me if I'm way off with anything I say. But, I would like to touch base on the fact that this game IS NOT World of Warcraft. It is not any other game either, it is VANGUARD. There is no reason to compare it to World of Warcraft which was released over 2 years ago. Another point, of course there is bugs. To be completly bold, this is the only other thing I would like to say - If you don't like it, quit. Play again after its "open public beta" stage. Likewise, if you are enjoying it, continue to. Lets let go of this subject.
Comparing VG to WoW is inevitable. They're both of the same genre, they have alot of similarities. VG took many ideas from WoW, such as the mailing system, the interface, the quest system, flying mounts etc. Nothing wrong with that, grab what works, but you can't say there's no reason to compare them. VG has a bigger world, more classes & races and more harsher death penalty but think about it they're pretty much the same only VG has some more features. The core gameplay is virtually the same; go around killing things and delivering things and gaining levels as you do so. And alot of people have already quit...they're just expressing their dissatisfaction of the game. I mean its natural right? You pay 60 bucks and the game didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be.
Just a correction, Vanguard didn't take the flying mount idea from WoW. Vangaurd was designed for them from the ground up... 5 years ago. But i have to agree, the two will be compared forever. I just can't wait to see the AoC/LoTRO/Warhammer comparisons, talk about similarities. =P
Let me start by saying I have NOT played Vanguard, so excuse me if I'm way off with anything I say. But, I would like to touch base on the fact that this game IS NOT World of Warcraft. It is not any other game either, it is VANGUARD. There is no reason to compare it to World of Warcraft which was released over 2 years ago. Another point, of course there is bugs. To be completly bold, this is the only other thing I would like to say - If you don't like it, quit. Play again after its "open public beta" stage. Likewise, if you are enjoying it, continue to. Lets let go of this subject.
Comparing VG to WoW is inevitable. They're both of the same genre, they have alot of similarities. VG took many ideas from WoW, such as the mailing system, the interface, the quest system, flying mounts etc. Nothing wrong with that, grab what works, but you can't say there's no reason to compare them. VG has a bigger world, more classes & races and more harsher death penalty but think about it they're pretty much the same only VG has some more features. The core gameplay is virtually the same; go around killing things and delivering things and gaining levels as you do so. And alot of people have already quit...they're just expressing their dissatisfaction of the game. I mean its natural right? You pay 60 bucks and the game didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be.
I agree, WoW (at release) was the most polished game ever (IMO) so no wonder people will compare other games to it. We compare to the best, not to the average game. VG is bigger, deeper, with many more features, so it is normal to have more bugs, more balancing issues. I dont mind the bugs so far, they are annoying but not annoying enough to make me stop playing. But I do mind at what seems to be slow patching and bug fixing.
I was on Eldre thalas and Smolderthorn, both of wich were connected to the PTS. Everytime the PTS went up the game was near unplayable on those servers for the first couple of days. Whatever, didn't really bother me, I never complained or asked for my money back; it's the nature of the beast. MMO's have trouble, and I don't care what MMO it is.
I don't like using WoW as a reference for bugs or performance, but I also don't like to see other people use it as a measuring stick because WoW wasn't perfect either. Just silly trying to compair a two year old game to one that's not even a month old. I think in all I've ended up with well over a weeks worth of credited play time. And just to make a point of emphasis, I wouldn't have got that if there wasn't a problem, and some of it I got before E'T was beyond medium load. Heavy servers weren't always the problem, it was the hardware Blizzard used. Most of what I try to get at here is that one persons experience is going to be anothers, but most of the bad posts I see are saying just that. Not everyone is having a problem, not everyone is unhappy, not everyone is posting on these boards; hell most people that play any MMO prolly don't visit forums at all. Trying to use the negetive posts here as proof that the game is borked is stupid. The few people that post are the furthest thing from the magority of people playing the game and in no way a valid representation of mass experiences had in VG.
I for one wasn't comparing WoW as it is today, versus what Vanguard is today. I was comparing WoW as it was at launch, with Vanguard as it is right now during it's launch.
I agree with you that one person's play experience, or even ten isn't going to be the same as the next person in any given MMO launch. No doubt the person who was victimized the most by bugs during WoW's launch had it way worse than the person who has been playing the most bug-free in Vanguard right now.
You're thinking too shallowly about the issue though, and the purpose of the comparisons.
Just because I myself had a bug-free time at WoW's launch doesn't mean it was a bug-free game. Just because you or whoever else is having a bug-free time in Vanguard doesn't mean it's a bug-free game.
But when you go beyond posting with just yourself in mind, and forming opinions beyond your own play experience and what's readily there in front of your eyes...it's clear that Vanguard is the buggiest of two games at launch.
Now what do I base that on?
The fact that it was purposefully (not maliciously) released prematurely, the fact that I'm spammed in-game by GMs complaining about a service crippling amount of /bug reports, the fact that the -systemic-, not personal, but SYSTEMIC issues that bring the servers down for emergency maintenance due to bugs like level and item losses; all of it tells me that this is a pretty buggy game without me even inserting my own personal bias from what's occurred to me.
A much easier route of determining that Vanguard is a buggy game though is not to be so confrontational and alienated by my peers and believe their own horror stories, to believe the reviewers on websites and podcasts who're relaying similar concerns to players. I'm not the type to isolate myself to my own opinion; and if I do, I'm not so stubborn that I'll try to assert my opinions as fact.
You can have a bug-free time in Vanguard, and it be factual that you are. But that isn't the same as Vanguard being a bug-free game, similarly, you having a worse time in WoW than you are in Vanguard at comparable time periods doesn't mean Vanguard is less buggy than WoW.
Again, what you're implying is that so long as 1 bug exists in WoW, it was a buggy game. All buggy games are of the same quality, so all must be regarded just the same and forgiven the same. There is no gray area, there are no lines to draw, either it's all good or none of it is good.
Not so though, there's many subjective factors that go into deciding what's acceptable and what's not. They're all intangibles, such as me being able to say WoW's bugs meant nothing to me because I was having so much fun I deal with them. Instantly you're able to verbally parry with the fact that you didn't have fun at WoW's launch, and that you're having fun in Vanguard.
Why bother with all that? Just be reasonable with the facts. Vanguard is more buggy, thus it failed the standard set by WoW; the incredibly most popular and subscription-filled game in the MMO market.
You have to compare these products to something. Nothing at all wrong with expecting your Gothic 3 to follow the quality of Oblivion, your new car to come increasingly safe from crash testing, your Cable service to increase the quality of channels and speed of your bandwidth..so on and so on.
In the absence of increasingly setting the bar of quality higher, the masses will react accordingly in not poising an inferior product as something acceptable. Don't you think?
Accually I thought I was pretty clear in just about every post I've made on this subject. My experience in VG has been NO different then any other MMO I've played.
I've never seen GM spam about the number of petitions they've gotten. I have however seen the system messages about closing resolved petitions, something apparently people aren't doing or they wouldn't be asking for it to be done. I won't say that it's complete bs that a GM was spamming on your server that they have to many petitions, but I will say that I think you may have been exagerating the system message a bit. I would also point out that if they didn't have the money to continue in developement then It would make sence if they don't have many GM"s at this point, and they will hire more as time goes by, just like WoW.
I'm not being shallow, just like to point out that the doom and gloom posts here are no different then what WoW got, and still gets. The only difference is you can post the doom and gloom posts on the WoW forums were they erase them. May I point out here that WoW's success had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the game at launch. Nope, not a bit. Had to do with the 10 years of fans they built up, but this tends to get overlooked here as eveyone claiming VG to be less inferior to WoW had something to do with the playability of either game at launch. You don't have to take my word for it though, just look at how many top selling games made really bad sequels that sold through the roof. Personally I think WoW is a great game that would have had a lot of success even if no one had heard of Warcraft before, just not from the start.
I would also say that if there had never been a Warcraft series and WoW came out that people would have been MUCH harsher on the game then they were or are today. As it is you're talking about a game built off of a proven IP that an awfull lot of people loved; can you see what I'm getting at?
Have you encountered all of the bugs present in VG and the ones that were present in WoW when it was released? Sounds like you accuse me of being biased based on my experience between the two games, neither of wich I claimed to be buggier then the other, and then make a claim yourself that VG is buggier; based on what? Your play experience between the two?
No you don't have to compare this game to anything else; especially not WoW. The differences between the two games go far beyond just thier titles. You're talking about two entirely different kinds of MMO"s. Theme doesn't matter here. WoW is considerably smaller, instanced, and non seemless with only a fraction of the different content available, and this amounts to far fewer coding issues that would result in bugs. It's not apples and oranges here, it's apples and watermellon.
Lineage 2 had the EXACT same problems at launch that VG is having. Memory leaks resulting in crashes, holes in the world, bugged qeusts and mobs, graphical anomolies, chunking, etc., etc. and NCsoft didn't have money problems. To say that issues with money aren't the player bases problem isn't really right. There are very few options a software company has when they run out of money and releasing early is one of them; another is killing the project or selling it to someone who might have a different view of what the game should be. In the end it does impact the player base and become thier problem. Would the game never making retail have pleased everyone more? Would selling it off to someone else been better? Would you have wanted Sigil to sell the rights to the game to Sony and thus allowing them to do as they wanted to it, or would you rather have the game release in an effort to build some revenue so that they can finish what they started.
In the end I harbor no ill will toward Sigil for doing wha they thought was in thier best interest to save the game. Id rather be able to play it then not, and if they could have got the money to keep it in develoement longer they already stated they would have, but they couldn't. I take thier word for that and am gratefull that the game was able to be released, because never having gotten to play the game woud have been much worse as far as I'm concerned.
But no one critisising Sigil thinks like that. They have this idea that they could have just kept it in developement and the early release is some sort of conspiracy. As an artist that takes pride in his work I know that I would much rather produce an unfinished piece then have to destroy it because I ran out of money for more paint. And no amount of, "use more paint!" is going to change the fact that without money I can't.
As far as WoW setting the bar. The only bar they set was the revenue producing capabilities of an MMO.
Accually I thought I was pretty clear in just about every post I've made on this subject. My experience in VG has been NO different then any other MMO I've played. I've never seen GM spam about the number of petitions they've gotten. I have however seen the system messages about closing resolved petitions, something apparently people aren't doing or they wouldn't be asking for it to be done. I won't say that it's complete bs that a GM was spamming on your server that they have to many petitions, but I will say that I think you may have been exagerating the system message a bit. I would also point out that if they didn't have the money to continue in developement then It would make sence if they don't have many GM"s at this point, and they will hire more as time goes by, just like WoW. I'm not being shallow, just like to point out that the doom and gloom posts here are no different then what WoW got, and still gets. The only difference is you can post the doom and gloom posts on the WoW forums were they erase them. May I point out here that WoW's success had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the game at launch. Nope, not a bit. Had to do with the 10 years of fans they built up, but this tends to get overlooked here as eveyone claiming VG to be less inferior to WoW had something to do with the playability of either game at launch. You don't have to take my word for it though, just look at how many top selling games made really bad sequels that sold through the roof. Personally I think WoW is a great game that would have had a lot of success even if no one had heard of Warcraft before, just not from the start. I would also say that if there had never been a Warcraft series and WoW came out that people would have been MUCH harsher on the game then they were or are today. As it is you're talking about a game built off of a proven IP that an awfull lot of people loved; can you see what I'm getting at?
I'd agree that WoW's polish at launch didn't have everything to do with it's success, but nothing? A polished launch is a hallmark for any game and especially those of the MMO genre, anything less than polished is seen as negative. Polished or bug-infested makes a difference in long term success.
Certainly having a known IP will lend to the success of your title; thus the purpose of companies shelling out big bucks for movie, book, and pen and paper IPs. Or translating existing game IPs into the MMO genre.
But you can't credit WoW's success solely to the simple fact Warcraft 3 and it's predecessors were great, can you?
By your logic, Everquest 2 and Asheron's Call 2 were supposed to see successes just as great as their predecessors simply because of pre-existing fans. The Matrix Online was supposed to fall into the hands of everyone that purchased movie tickets and DVDs of the trilogy.
Not the case, if your game sucks, then it's going to do bad. If it's good, then it's going to do good. Don't disjoint the meaning of a 'launch' from the livelihood of a game; a launch is the opening of a game and it's most important time period. Day 1 means much more than Day 1,339. The first month means much more than the thirty-seventh month.
I don't mean to offend, but I still say you're thinking shallowly. You're excusing all of Vanguard's shortcomings because of crazy ideas like this; that WoW was successful for every reason but being an enjoyable and fairly bug-free game. You're basically erasing the premises for WoW's success, and other MMOs downfall, because you feel Vanguard teeters a bit towards the latter?
Go on and credit WoW's success to whatever you want though, whether its my saying World of Warcraft was exceedingly polished in comparison to other MMOs at launch among other things, or you saying it was based solely on having a pre-existing fanbase; they're both things Vanguard is without.
Have you encountered all of the bugs present in VG and the ones that were present in WoW when it was released? Sounds like you accuse me of being biased based on my experience between the two games, neither of wich I claimed to be buggier then the other, and then make a claim yourself that VG is buggier; based on what? Your play experience between the two?
I wasn't talking to just you, I might've quoted just you. There are people in this thread who keep saying "I haven't experienced any bugs in Vanguard", but will go on and compile lists from old patch notes in WoW and proclaim therefore WoW was as buggy, or buggier than Vanguard in launch.
I'm just saying Vanguard is buggier than World of Warcraft was at launch, simply because it is. As I've said time and time again, even if Vanguard has just one more bug than WoW did, then it falls beneath the standards bar.
Of course what you call 'doom and gloom' posts would be overly harsh if Vanguard had just one more bug...but the doom and gloom posts are about more plentiful, and more severe bugs than this Vanish, Arcane Missiles, whatever else that's being dredged up. It's about losing levels, losing items, dying due to crashes and suffering unjust penalties that can't occur in WoW.
No you don't have to compare this game to anything else; especially not WoW. The differences between the two games go far beyond just thier titles. You're talking about two entirely different kinds of MMO"s. Theme doesn't matter here. WoW is considerably smaller, instanced, and non seemless with only a fraction of the different content available, and this amounts to far fewer coding issues that would result in bugs. It's not apples and oranges here, it's apples and watermellon.
To you they may be entirely different. To others who start the game, pick a race, pick a class, start in front of an NPC with a quest indicator over their head, get the quest, look in their quest log, go and kill 10 things nearby and loot some body part, take it back to an NPC...rinse wash and repeat step step 3 through 6. They're pretty much the same thing and deserve comparisons.
And you're being a bit lenient on WoW there actually; instancing had its own set of problems. Raid lockouts, instance server being too busy or somesuch, and so on.
You can't nitpick over feature lists and equate it to how much coding there is. I'm not saying WoW is a bigger game, but WoW certainly had a bigger budget and more quality of a team and it shows.
Oh, these are the exact reasons you're thinking Sigil should be judged less harshly though, right? It has less of a budget? Possible smaller team?
Well Dark Age of Camelot had something like 2.5 million bucks to make the game, couldn't even afford an Oracle database to store character data so Mythic resorted to using open source software like MySQL.
But guess what? On day one of Dark Age of Camelot I could pull a mob, and it wouldn't completely disappear until I shuffled around and it magically appeared behind me.
Most of the people complaining about issues are doing so because they have no reason to be sympathetic to Sigil's shortcomings, and every reason to expect things to work that aren't.
One could nitpick over every single issue and compare it to every MMO of the past; but the simple fact is, whether you're generalizing WoW's launch and comparing it to Vanguard's launch, or going into individual issues and comparing it to past games....Vanguard is a buggy disappointment to people and they're justified in their complaints.
We're practically doing the same things in Vanguard that we were doing in old MMOs, except old ones have either executed it better or less buggy. We have every reason to deserve these things to at LEAST work as they did in other games but EXPECT them to work even better.
Lineage 2 had the EXACT same problems at launch that VG is having. Memory leaks resulting in crashes, holes in the world, bugged qeusts and mobs, graphical anomolies, chunking, etc., etc. and NCsoft didn't have money problems. To say that issues with money aren't the player bases problem isn't really right. There are very few options a software company has when they run out of money and releasing early is one of them; another is killing the project or selling it to someone who might have a different view of what the game should be. In the end it does impact the player base and become thier problem. Would the game never making retail have pleased everyone more? Would selling it off to someone else been better? Would you have wanted Sigil to sell the rights to the game to Sony and thus allowing them to do as they wanted to it, or would you rather have the game release in an effort to build some revenue so that they can finish what they started.
Of course Sigil having money issues isn't my problem...for the exact reasons mentioned above in the Mythic/Dark Age of Camelot example. MMOs have been made with far less money, with more advanced tech and features for their time period and came out polished.
Vanguard was mismanaged if it ran out of money, simple. So it's the management fault, not my own. I don't have to be compassionate towards them, nor do I have to find it admirable that some players are compassionate. I can respect it, but I won't do it myself.
If you go to Dairy Queen and order a Cookie 'n Creme Blizzard (god I'm hungry), it's not your fault if the manager ordered too much cookie dough for another variety and you're only getting the Creme. You don't say "I understand, here let me pay you full price for this dessert without the cookies in it."
NCSoft by the way did develop both Lineage games, but it was also a publisher for other projects either released or in the works. Sigil has no past products to thrive off of, so I don't really get your point about NCSoft not having money problems. Are you saying Lineage II was unacceptable because NCSoft had the money and time to release it better? I didn't play, but i'd certainly agree if that's the case. I'm sure it was a port from Korea, lending even more to idea that it should've been better.
That's exactly how you're supposed to think about these products; criticize them! Sigil is no more innocent than NCSoft. While NCSoft had money, Sigil should've managed theirs better.
In the end I harbor no ill will toward Sigil for doing wha they thought was in thier best interest to save the game. Id rather be able to play it then not, and if they could have got the money to keep it in develoement longer they already stated they would have, but they couldn't. I take thier word for that and am gratefull that the game was able to be released, because never having gotten to play the game woud have been much worse as far as I'm concerned. But no one critisising Sigil thinks like that. They have this idea that they could have just kept it in developement and the early release is some sort of conspiracy. As an artist that takes pride in his work I know that I would much rather produce an unfinished piece then have to destroy it because I ran out of money for more paint. And no amount of, "use more paint!" is going to change the fact that without money I can't. As far as WoW setting the bar. The only bar they set was the revenue producing capabilities of an MMO.
You don't have to harbor any ill-will towards Sigil to find their game unacceptable. I'm playing it and I occasionally have fun. I plan to play it right up until Warhammer Online releases, and then make a decision of whether the game has come along enough for me to continue or I jump ship.
That's kind of how you're supposed to navigate MMOs, just like any other product a business sells you. Because they're just products that businesses sell us...
No one is calling the early release a malicious act against wouldbe fans, I'm calling it mismanagement. It doesn't matter WHAT the reason was behind the early release, it resulted in an overly buggy product not acceptable for release.
I don't care that Sigil ran out of money, ok? Playing MMOs is supposed to be as simple as seeing an ad for it, going to the store, picking up the box, installing it, and playing. Much like I did with WoW, DAoC and CoH. It didn't require a forum membership to Fozzik's Hardware, digging into my .ini files, and visiting third-party sites for any relevant news about whether it's safe or not to log in-game and not be victimized by bugs in light of today's levelling and item disappearance round-ups.
Reading forum archives, FAQs and in general be given a history lesson on Sigil and Vanguard, and then deciding to be sympathetic is asking waaay too much. Can't tell you who the CEO of Cox is or even the manager of the place I pay my bills, but I've been using their service for six years. Sorry, I just don't find any reason to change my opinions about a subpar product just because it's developers are 'honest' and 'open' about their shortcomings.
I do believe WoW garnered some of thier success through good gameplay, but I also believe that the magority of the success they gained was through a 10 year IP with millions of copies sold. I also believe that without that name recognition it would have built its subs much slower.
I don't deny VG has bugs, I expect it when an MMO is released and when one is released earlier then intended I expect to find more then usual. Throw in one really big world, a lot of race/ class options, gameplay options and you compound the problem. Sencebility and patients makes me understanding of the situation.
WoW and VG aren't the same kind of MMO no matter how you slice it. They are no more alike then VG and CoH or CoH and UO. Being an MMO doesn't make them the same; nor does having a recognizable game mechanic that can be picked up on by the majority of MMO players.
My stance if very simple. VG is no more broken then WoW was. I'm not going to be blind to bugs or performance problems in VG any more then I was with WoW, L2, CoH or any of the dozen other MMO's I do or have played. At the same time I'll give counter argument whenever I see the OMG VG is bug infested and WoW was so much better at launch posts and responces. I even provided a link to WoW's tech forums where anyone can read any one of the posts on the 125 pages worth of complaints about bugs and performance issues. As well as express that in my opinion a polished game doesn't require the revamp of every class over the course of two years and presented in the form of "content additons"
Also, it's been a pleasure debating this topic with ya Sepher. It's refreshing reading something not writin by a ravid fan or discruntled hater who can articulate and be civilized. Something these particullar boards could use more of.
It's time for bed now. I've got a migraine from thinking and the nerves in my hand and arm are on fire.
Edit: Yeah the lineage 2 thing, not really sure what I was getting at. The two games seem most alike to me with the large seemless worlds and a lot of the same problems at release. Not really about money just that VG made me have flash backs to the early days of L2.
Comments
There were some people who suffered from server buggy to crowded stuff when WoW launched. I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues. There were little things here and there and a small percentage of WoWs playerbase had issues longer.
Small percentage.
In Vanguard there is a small percentage of people who post that they have no issues; most - but not all - have top notch rigs. (There is clearly more to it). After a week hundreds of bugs, pages of them have been fixed. Huge numbers when compared to WoW. Even more followed and guess what - there are pages and pages and pages of outstanding gameplay, quest, technical, database, graphical, you name it we have it bugs.
Get real, get over it, stop trying to pretend that this is a normal launch. Even Brad posted it had pre-launch issues an indication of how bag it was going to be on reflection.
If you enjoy it continue. But don't call Vanguard anything but what it is. Unfinished and bug ridden - but. but there is this 1 bug, or even 10, hell even 100 bugs in game X/Y/Z so there. There is no comparison - even to AO. It is worse than ToA. and that is saying something. I think it is even worse than Horizons and as bad as DnL - which didn't claim to be finished when it came out.
And yet I played WoW from release and ran into bugs daily; most of wich forced me to shut the game down with task manager. After less then a month I have encountered one, maybe two bugs in VG, and neither of wich required me to shut the game down.
Are you implying that the posts made here represent a large part of the VG player base, and that the post here are a valid statement of the experience everyone is having in VG as a whole?
Are you implying that if you do not experience a bug then the game is bug free, and I quote, "I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues." No problems huh? How about some of those many, many new servers being attached to the PTS and near unplayable whenever the PTS was open. Would you say that wasn't a bug that didn't effect a "vast magority" of the people playing on those servers.
Huge numbers compared to WoW? I'm going to assume you've never visited that Tech/ support forums over thier at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10023&sid=1. If you didn't click the link and look, thier up to 125 pages. Now I can't tell you how many pages it was a month after release, but I can say that the forums over there at WoW were wiped a couple months ago so that they could put up the new forums.
Also please try and keep in mind that WoW has only a fraction of the stuff that is in VG as far as world, races, classes, and gameplay elements go. I would expect them to have fewer bugs.
Bugs not being fixed in VG? Games been out less then a month, and WoW in that time fixed very few of the bugs they had in that period as well. Most of the time they coded around what they could, it's called a "work around". They didn't really fix the bugs, just added more coded to bypass the bug and make parts of the game unatainable until they could find a real fix for it.
Someone else earlier also tried to use the point that VG is missing content or that parts of the world are blocked off. Hmmm, that's wierd, there were parts of Azeroth that weren't even populated with ANYTHING. Just bits of land mass with a crappy dirt texture laid across it that could get you banned for stepping foot on. This isn't a VG thing, it's a MMO thing. Not all content is going to be available at release. Just for the, "they said this would be in and it's not responce." EVERY MMO I've played had content they said would be there at release and it wasn't. Nothing new there.
In fact, the only thing new I'm seeing from the state of VG is the honesty of the guy in charge.
Edit: For the guy above me. WORD, BFG put out a card that's only like 4 generations bihind the latest cards and supports shader model 3.0, yeah man that's gonna run rainbow six vegas real well. Get a grip.
UO is your argument for a system running a game well? Yeah, that's a valid point. A 20 year old game.
System upgrade has nothing to do with VG? There is another great point. Game doesn't run well for you and a few people you know so it must not run well for anyone else. I must be imagining the 15-30 FPS I'm getting with my crappy x1300.
Your right I am golden, I'm also not going to repeat whats been said a hundred times already about WoW, I will say that if you think server problems aren't a problem of an MMO then what world are you from?
I will keep telling myself that if the game works for the magority of the people playing then it must not be broken because I don't like to lie to myself.
You worked at Sigil? No Brad on a personall level that you would know if he mismanaged something. Wich MMO did you release?
I can see what I wrote, the bigger question is can you? I'm guessing no or you would have understood what I wrote.
Maybe you should set down the minimum guidlines for all MMO developers, or any game devs for that matter, to follow. What minimums are you refering to. VG is playable, as far as I'm conscerned that's all it need to be. Sorry it didnt meet YOUR expectations.
Excuse mongering? OK. I gotta ask though, were'd you get the crystal ball.
And yet I played WoW from release and ran into bugs daily; most of wich forced me to shut the game down with task manager. After less then a month I have encountered one, maybe two bugs in VG, and neither of wich required me to shut the game down.
Are you implying that the posts made here represent a large part of the VG player base, and that the post here are a valid statement of the experience everyone is having in VG as a whole?
Are you implying that if you do not experience a bug then the game is bug free, and I quote, "I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues." No problems huh? How about some of those many, many new servers being attached to the PTS and near unplayable whenever the PTS was open. Would you say that wasn't a bug that didn't effect a "vast magority" of the people playing on those servers.
Huge numbers compared to WoW? I'm going to assume you've never visited that Tech/ support forums over thier at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10023&sid=1. If you didn't click the link and look, thier up to 125 pages. Now I can't tell you how many pages it was a month after release, but I can say that the forums over there at WoW were wiped a couple months ago so that they could put up the new forums.
Also please try and keep in mind that WoW has only a fraction of the stuff that is in VG as far as world, races, classes, and gameplay elements go. I would expect them to have fewer bugs.
Bugs not being fixed in VG? Games been out less then a month, and WoW in that time fixed very few of the bugs they had in that period as well. Most of the time they coded around what they could, it's called a "work around". They didn't really fix the bugs, just added more coded to bypass the bug and make parts of the game unatainable until they could find a real fix for it.
Someone else earlier also tried to use the point that VG is missing content or that parts of the world are blocked off. Hmmm, that's wierd, there were parts of Azeroth that weren't even populated with ANYTHING. Just bits of land mass with a crappy dirt texture laid across it that could get you banned for stepping foot on. This isn't a VG thing, it's a MMO thing. Not all content is going to be available at release. Just for the, "they said this would be in and it's not responce." EVERY MMO I've played had content they said would be there at release and it wasn't. Nothing new there.
In fact, the only thing new I'm seeing from the state of VG is the honesty of the guy in charge.
I played on Argent Dawn at launch, popular through being one of the two RP servers available at that time, and continued on it for the year and a half that I played. I was one of the people too stubborn to reroll on one of the new servers, so I dealt with the initial server problems. Anyone who had server issues were probably just the same as me, and didn't want to switch servers. There was a way to play the game without problems at WoW's launch, but completely understandable that no one would want to start over.I don't remember having any issues at all pass the first week with server problems anyway as much as people try and convince me WoW was unplayable for months. And in retrospect, kind of silly to complain about WoW's server issues at launch, isn't it? I mean it was due to their success...so many people wanted to play that they had to double and triple the amount of initial servers and pull boxes off the shelves.
But we as consumers shouldn't care WHAT the problem is, right? We just want our product to work. I wholeheartedly believe in that, so I won't discriminate between WoW and Vanguard in the reasons why...but the reality of the differences will pan out the two MMOs' respective fates a tad differently depending on what exactly caused their initial hiccups. While ol' Brad is lamenting the reasons for Vanguard's problems, I somehow doubt Pardo was shedding tears over the reasons WoW's servers were suffering.
One thing awesome that Blizzard did was crediting free days to your account on days that it was unplayable for some. I ended up with a lot of free play time even though I was logged in playing just fine every day anyway. Blizzard understood that we were consumers paying for a service; at the heart of the matter this is all about our dollars. We wouldn't be complaining if Vanguard was free.
And yet I played WoW from release and ran into bugs daily; most of wich forced me to shut the game down with task manager. After less then a month I have encountered one, maybe two bugs in VG, and neither of wich required me to shut the game down.
Are you implying that the posts made here represent a large part of the VG player base, and that the post here are a valid statement of the experience everyone is having in VG as a whole?
Are you implying that if you do not experience a bug then the game is bug free, and I quote, "I started 5 or 6 days after launch on one of those many, many new servers. No problems; no one complained. 1 week after launch WoW - for the vast majority of people - was bug free with almost no issues." No problems huh? How about some of those many, many new servers being attached to the PTS and near unplayable whenever the PTS was open. Would you say that wasn't a bug that didn't effect a "vast magority" of the people playing on those servers.
Huge numbers compared to WoW? I'm going to assume you've never visited that Tech/ support forums over thier at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=10023&sid=1. If you didn't click the link and look, thier up to 125 pages. Now I can't tell you how many pages it was a month after release, but I can say that the forums over there at WoW were wiped a couple months ago so that they could put up the new forums.
Also please try and keep in mind that WoW has only a fraction of the stuff that is in VG as far as world, races, classes, and gameplay elements go. I would expect them to have fewer bugs.
Bugs not being fixed in VG? Games been out less then a month, and WoW in that time fixed very few of the bugs they had in that period as well. Most of the time they coded around what they could, it's called a "work around". They didn't really fix the bugs, just added more coded to bypass the bug and make parts of the game unatainable until they could find a real fix for it.
Someone else earlier also tried to use the point that VG is missing content or that parts of the world are blocked off. Hmmm, that's wierd, there were parts of Azeroth that weren't even populated with ANYTHING. Just bits of land mass with a crappy dirt texture laid across it that could get you banned for stepping foot on. This isn't a VG thing, it's a MMO thing. Not all content is going to be available at release. Just for the, "they said this would be in and it's not responce." EVERY MMO I've played had content they said would be there at release and it wasn't. Nothing new there.
In fact, the only thing new I'm seeing from the state of VG is the honesty of the guy in charge.
I played on Argent Dawn at launch, popular through being one of the two RP servers available at that time, and continued on it for the year and a half that I played. I was one of the people too stubborn to reroll on one of the new servers, so I dealt with the initial server problems. Anyone who had server issues were probably just the same as me, and didn't want to switch servers. There was a way to play the game without problems at WoW's launch, but completely understandable that no one would want to start over.I don't remember having any issues at all pass the first week with server problems anyway as much as people try and convince me WoW was unplayable for months. And in retrospect, kind of silly to complain about WoW's server issues at launch, isn't it? I mean it was due to their success...so many people wanted to play that they had to double and triple the amount of initial servers and pull boxes off the shelves.
But we as consumers shouldn't care WHAT the problem is, right? We just want our product to work. I wholeheartedly believe in that, so I won't discriminate between WoW and Vanguard in the reasons why...but the reality of the differences will pan out the two MMOs' respective fates a tad differently depending on what exactly caused their initial hiccups. While ol' Brad is lamenting the reasons for Vanguard's problems, I somehow doubt Pardo was shedding tears over the reasons WoW's servers were suffering.
One thing awesome that Blizzard did was crediting free days to your account on days that it was unplayable for some. I ended up with a lot of free play time even though I was logged in playing just fine every day anyway. Blizzard understood that we were consumers paying for a service; at the heart of the matter this is all about our dollars. We wouldn't be complaining if Vanguard was free.
I was on Eldre thalas and Smolderthorn, both of wich were connected to the PTS. Everytime the PTS went up the game was near unplayable on those servers for the first couple of days. Whatever, didn't really bother me, I never complained or asked for my money back; it's the nature of the beast. MMO's have trouble, and I don't care what MMO it is.
I don't like using WoW as a reference for bugs or performance, but I also don't like to see other people use it as a measuring stick because WoW wasn't perfect either. Just silly trying to compair a two year old game to one that's not even a month old.
I think in all I've ended up with well over a weeks worth of credited play time. And just to make a point of emphasis, I wouldn't have got that if there wasn't a problem, and some of it I got before E'T was beyond medium load. Heavy servers weren't always the problem, it was the hardware Blizzard used.
Most of what I try to get at here is that one persons experience is going to be anothers, but most of the bad posts I see are saying just that.
Not everyone is having a problem, not everyone is unhappy, not everyone is posting on these boards; hell most people that play any MMO prolly don't visit forums at all.
Trying to use the negetive posts here as proof that the game is borked is stupid. The few people that post are the furthest thing from the magority of people playing the game and in no way a valid representation of mass experiences had in VG.
it is not about comparing WoW and VG's launch. It is about trying to get the 'haters' to step back and see that VG isn't an exception to the rule. However after I read Godpuppet's reply to my wow bug list, I realize that they don't want to admit it and therefore won't. They see what they want to see.
To Godpuppet: Apparetnly you missed the 10 or so instances of crashes or disconnects. While you call that 'laggy', I call that gamebreaking. Apparently since just random DC's and Crashes are just minor for you so I guess we can take client instability off of you list of complaints about VG. That pretty much leaves the Performance (which is most likely your computer), lost corpses (yes this is a big one never said it wasn't), random XP loss (which I am almost positive they fixed already), and lost items (Wait, you said it was just part of 'lag' when I showed an instance of that in WoW so must not be that bad).
To everyone who is upset about their computers not handling the game well:
EQ 2 (which is now the highest ranked game on this site) requires a huge amount of computer resources. When that game came out, only the best of the best could play that game. My computer still can't run that game at High Quality settings. Even in WoW, my Fiance's computer couldn't handle large raid events like MC and I had to upgrade her video card to make it playable. Just because your system is outdated and you refuse to look into either the tweaks or upgrading doesn't make the game suck.
I agree with you that one person's play experience, or even ten isn't going to be the same as the next person in any given MMO launch. No doubt the person who was victimized the most by bugs during WoW's launch had it way worse than the person who has been playing the most bug-free in Vanguard right now.
You're thinking too shallowly about the issue though, and the purpose of the comparisons.
Just because I myself had a bug-free time at WoW's launch doesn't mean it was a bug-free game. Just because you or whoever else is having a bug-free time in Vanguard doesn't mean it's a bug-free game.
But when you go beyond posting with just yourself in mind, and forming opinions beyond your own play experience and what's readily there in front of your eyes...it's clear that Vanguard is the buggiest of two games at launch.
Now what do I base that on?
The fact that it was purposefully (not maliciously) released prematurely, the fact that I'm spammed in-game by GMs complaining about a service crippling amount of /bug reports, the fact that the -systemic-, not personal, but SYSTEMIC issues that bring the servers down for emergency maintenance due to bugs like level and item losses; all of it tells me that this is a pretty buggy game without me even inserting my own personal bias from what's occurred to me.
A much easier route of determining that Vanguard is a buggy game though is not to be so confrontational and alienated by my peers and believe their own horror stories, to believe the reviewers on websites and podcasts who're relaying similar concerns to players. I'm not the type to isolate myself to my own opinion; and if I do, I'm not so stubborn that I'll try to assert my opinions as fact.
You can have a bug-free time in Vanguard, and it be factual that you are. But that isn't the same as Vanguard being a bug-free game, similarly, you having a worse time in WoW than you are in Vanguard at comparable time periods doesn't mean Vanguard is less buggy than WoW.
Again, what you're implying is that so long as 1 bug exists in WoW, it was a buggy game. All buggy games are of the same quality, so all must be regarded just the same and forgiven the same. There is no gray area, there are no lines to draw, either it's all good or none of it is good.
Not so though, there's many subjective factors that go into deciding what's acceptable and what's not. They're all intangibles, such as me being able to say WoW's bugs meant nothing to me because I was having so much fun I deal with them. Instantly you're able to verbally parry with the fact that you didn't have fun at WoW's launch, and that you're having fun in Vanguard.
Why bother with all that? Just be reasonable with the facts. Vanguard is more buggy, thus it failed the standard set by WoW; the incredibly most popular and subscription-filled game in the MMO market.
You have to compare these products to something. Nothing at all wrong with expecting your Gothic 3 to follow the quality of Oblivion, your new car to come increasingly safe from crash testing, your Cable service to increase the quality of channels and speed of your bandwidth..so on and so on.
In the absence of increasingly setting the bar of quality higher, the masses will react accordingly in not poising an inferior product as something acceptable. Don't you think?
Comparing VG to WoW is inevitable. They're both of the same genre, they have alot of similarities. VG took many ideas from WoW, such as the mailing system, the interface, the quest system, flying mounts etc. Nothing wrong with that, grab what works, but you can't say there's no reason to compare them. VG has a bigger world, more classes & races and more harsher death penalty but think about it they're pretty much the same only VG has some more features. The core gameplay is virtually the same; go around killing things and delivering things and gaining levels as you do so. And alot of people have already quit...they're just expressing their dissatisfaction of the game. I mean its natural right? You pay 60 bucks and the game didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be.
Comparing VG to WoW is inevitable. They're both of the same genre, they have alot of similarities. VG took many ideas from WoW, such as the mailing system, the interface, the quest system, flying mounts etc. Nothing wrong with that, grab what works, but you can't say there's no reason to compare them. VG has a bigger world, more classes & races and more harsher death penalty but think about it they're pretty much the same only VG has some more features. The core gameplay is virtually the same; go around killing things and delivering things and gaining levels as you do so. And alot of people have already quit...they're just expressing their dissatisfaction of the game. I mean its natural right? You pay 60 bucks and the game didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be.
Just a correction, Vanguard didn't take the flying mount idea from WoW. Vangaurd was designed for them from the ground up... 5 years ago. But i have to agree, the two will be compared forever. I just can't wait to see the AoC/LoTRO/Warhammer comparisons, talk about similarities. =PComparing VG to WoW is inevitable. They're both of the same genre, they have alot of similarities. VG took many ideas from WoW, such as the mailing system, the interface, the quest system, flying mounts etc. Nothing wrong with that, grab what works, but you can't say there's no reason to compare them. VG has a bigger world, more classes & races and more harsher death penalty but think about it they're pretty much the same only VG has some more features. The core gameplay is virtually the same; go around killing things and delivering things and gaining levels as you do so. And alot of people have already quit...they're just expressing their dissatisfaction of the game. I mean its natural right? You pay 60 bucks and the game didn't turn out to be what it was supposed to be.
I agree, WoW (at release) was the most polished game ever (IMO) so no wonder people will compare other games to it. We compare to the best, not to the average game. VG is bigger, deeper, with many more features, so it is normal to have more bugs, more balancing issues. I dont mind the bugs so far, they are annoying but not annoying enough to make me stop playing. But I do mind at what seems to be slow patching and bug fixing.I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor - pre-WW2 genocide.
I agree with you that one person's play experience, or even ten isn't going to be the same as the next person in any given MMO launch. No doubt the person who was victimized the most by bugs during WoW's launch had it way worse than the person who has been playing the most bug-free in Vanguard right now.
You're thinking too shallowly about the issue though, and the purpose of the comparisons.
Just because I myself had a bug-free time at WoW's launch doesn't mean it was a bug-free game. Just because you or whoever else is having a bug-free time in Vanguard doesn't mean it's a bug-free game.
But when you go beyond posting with just yourself in mind, and forming opinions beyond your own play experience and what's readily there in front of your eyes...it's clear that Vanguard is the buggiest of two games at launch.
Now what do I base that on?
The fact that it was purposefully (not maliciously) released prematurely, the fact that I'm spammed in-game by GMs complaining about a service crippling amount of /bug reports, the fact that the -systemic-, not personal, but SYSTEMIC issues that bring the servers down for emergency maintenance due to bugs like level and item losses; all of it tells me that this is a pretty buggy game without me even inserting my own personal bias from what's occurred to me.
A much easier route of determining that Vanguard is a buggy game though is not to be so confrontational and alienated by my peers and believe their own horror stories, to believe the reviewers on websites and podcasts who're relaying similar concerns to players. I'm not the type to isolate myself to my own opinion; and if I do, I'm not so stubborn that I'll try to assert my opinions as fact.
You can have a bug-free time in Vanguard, and it be factual that you are. But that isn't the same as Vanguard being a bug-free game, similarly, you having a worse time in WoW than you are in Vanguard at comparable time periods doesn't mean Vanguard is less buggy than WoW.
Again, what you're implying is that so long as 1 bug exists in WoW, it was a buggy game. All buggy games are of the same quality, so all must be regarded just the same and forgiven the same. There is no gray area, there are no lines to draw, either it's all good or none of it is good.
Not so though, there's many subjective factors that go into deciding what's acceptable and what's not. They're all intangibles, such as me being able to say WoW's bugs meant nothing to me because I was having so much fun I deal with them. Instantly you're able to verbally parry with the fact that you didn't have fun at WoW's launch, and that you're having fun in Vanguard.
Why bother with all that? Just be reasonable with the facts. Vanguard is more buggy, thus it failed the standard set by WoW; the incredibly most popular and subscription-filled game in the MMO market.
You have to compare these products to something. Nothing at all wrong with expecting your Gothic 3 to follow the quality of Oblivion, your new car to come increasingly safe from crash testing, your Cable service to increase the quality of channels and speed of your bandwidth..so on and so on.
In the absence of increasingly setting the bar of quality higher, the masses will react accordingly in not poising an inferior product as something acceptable. Don't you think?
Accually I thought I was pretty clear in just about every post I've made on this subject. My experience in VG has been NO different then any other MMO I've played.
I've never seen GM spam about the number of petitions they've gotten. I have however seen the system messages about closing resolved petitions, something apparently people aren't doing or they wouldn't be asking for it to be done. I won't say that it's complete bs that a GM was spamming on your server that they have to many petitions, but I will say that I think you may have been exagerating the system message a bit. I would also point out that if they didn't have the money to continue in developement then It would make sence if they don't have many GM"s at this point, and they will hire more as time goes by, just like WoW.
I'm not being shallow, just like to point out that the doom and gloom posts here are no different then what WoW got, and still gets. The only difference is you can post the doom and gloom posts on the WoW forums were they erase them. May I point out here that WoW's success had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the game at launch. Nope, not a bit. Had to do with the 10 years of fans they built up, but this tends to get overlooked here as eveyone claiming VG to be less inferior to WoW had something to do with the playability of either game at launch. You don't have to take my word for it though, just look at how many top selling games made really bad sequels that sold through the roof. Personally I think WoW is a great game that would have had a lot of success even if no one had heard of Warcraft before, just not from the start.
I would also say that if there had never been a Warcraft series and WoW came out that people would have been MUCH harsher on the game then they were or are today. As it is you're talking about a game built off of a proven IP that an awfull lot of people loved; can you see what I'm getting at?
Have you encountered all of the bugs present in VG and the ones that were present in WoW when it was released? Sounds like you accuse me of being biased based on my experience between the two games, neither of wich I claimed to be buggier then the other, and then make a claim yourself that VG is buggier; based on what? Your play experience between the two?
No you don't have to compare this game to anything else; especially not WoW. The differences between the two games go far beyond just thier titles. You're talking about two entirely different kinds of MMO"s. Theme doesn't matter here. WoW is considerably smaller, instanced, and non seemless with only a fraction of the different content available, and this amounts to far fewer coding issues that would result in bugs. It's not apples and oranges here, it's apples and watermellon.
Lineage 2 had the EXACT same problems at launch that VG is having. Memory leaks resulting in crashes, holes in the world, bugged qeusts and mobs, graphical anomolies, chunking, etc., etc. and NCsoft didn't have money problems. To say that issues with money aren't the player bases problem isn't really right. There are very few options a software company has when they run out of money and releasing early is one of them; another is killing the project or selling it to someone who might have a different view of what the game should be. In the end it does impact the player base and become thier problem. Would the game never making retail have pleased everyone more? Would selling it off to someone else been better? Would you have wanted Sigil to sell the rights to the game to Sony and thus allowing them to do as they wanted to it, or would you rather have the game release in an effort to build some revenue so that they can finish what they started.
In the end I harbor no ill will toward Sigil for doing wha they thought was in thier best interest to save the game. Id rather be able to play it then not, and if they could have got the money to keep it in develoement longer they already stated they would have, but they couldn't. I take thier word for that and am gratefull that the game was able to be released, because never having gotten to play the game woud have been much worse as far as I'm concerned.
But no one critisising Sigil thinks like that. They have this idea that they could have just kept it in developement and the early release is some sort of conspiracy. As an artist that takes pride in his work I know that I would much rather produce an unfinished piece then have to destroy it because I ran out of money for more paint. And no amount of, "use more paint!" is going to change the fact that without money I can't.
As far as WoW setting the bar. The only bar they set was the revenue producing capabilities of an MMO.
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Certainly having a known IP will lend to the success of your title; thus the purpose of companies shelling out big bucks for movie, book, and pen and paper IPs. Or translating existing game IPs into the MMO genre.
But you can't credit WoW's success solely to the simple fact Warcraft 3 and it's predecessors were great, can you?
By your logic, Everquest 2 and Asheron's Call 2 were supposed to see successes just as great as their predecessors simply because of pre-existing fans. The Matrix Online was supposed to fall into the hands of everyone that purchased movie tickets and DVDs of the trilogy.
Not the case, if your game sucks, then it's going to do bad. If it's good, then it's going to do good. Don't disjoint the meaning of a 'launch' from the livelihood of a game; a launch is the opening of a game and it's most important time period. Day 1 means much more than Day 1,339. The first month means much more than the thirty-seventh month.
I don't mean to offend, but I still say you're thinking shallowly. You're excusing all of Vanguard's shortcomings because of crazy ideas like this; that WoW was successful for every reason but being an enjoyable and fairly bug-free game. You're basically erasing the premises for WoW's success, and other MMOs downfall, because you feel Vanguard teeters a bit towards the latter?
Go on and credit WoW's success to whatever you want though, whether its my saying World of Warcraft was exceedingly polished in comparison to other MMOs at launch among other things, or you saying it was based solely on having a pre-existing fanbase; they're both things Vanguard is without.
I wasn't talking to just you, I might've quoted just you. There are people in this thread who keep saying "I haven't experienced any bugs in Vanguard", but will go on and compile lists from old patch notes in WoW and proclaim therefore WoW was as buggy, or buggier than Vanguard in launch.
I'm just saying Vanguard is buggier than World of Warcraft was at launch, simply because it is. As I've said time and time again, even if Vanguard has just one more bug than WoW did, then it falls beneath the standards bar.
Of course what you call 'doom and gloom' posts would be overly harsh if Vanguard had just one more bug...but the doom and gloom posts are about more plentiful, and more severe bugs than this Vanish, Arcane Missiles, whatever else that's being dredged up. It's about losing levels, losing items, dying due to crashes and suffering unjust penalties that can't occur in WoW.
To you they may be entirely different. To others who start the game, pick a race, pick a class, start in front of an NPC with a quest indicator over their head, get the quest, look in their quest log, go and kill 10 things nearby and loot some body part, take it back to an NPC...rinse wash and repeat step step 3 through 6. They're pretty much the same thing and deserve comparisons.
And you're being a bit lenient on WoW there actually; instancing had its own set of problems. Raid lockouts, instance server being too busy or somesuch, and so on.
You can't nitpick over feature lists and equate it to how much coding there is. I'm not saying WoW is a bigger game, but WoW certainly had a bigger budget and more quality of a team and it shows.
Oh, these are the exact reasons you're thinking Sigil should be judged less harshly though, right? It has less of a budget? Possible smaller team?
Well Dark Age of Camelot had something like 2.5 million bucks to make the game, couldn't even afford an Oracle database to store character data so Mythic resorted to using open source software like MySQL.
But guess what? On day one of Dark Age of Camelot I could pull a mob, and it wouldn't completely disappear until I shuffled around and it magically appeared behind me.
Most of the people complaining about issues are doing so because they have no reason to be sympathetic to Sigil's shortcomings, and every reason to expect things to work that aren't.
One could nitpick over every single issue and compare it to every MMO of the past; but the simple fact is, whether you're generalizing WoW's launch and comparing it to Vanguard's launch, or going into individual issues and comparing it to past games....Vanguard is a buggy disappointment to people and they're justified in their complaints.
We're practically doing the same things in Vanguard that we were doing in old MMOs, except old ones have either executed it better or less buggy. We have every reason to deserve these things to at LEAST work as they did in other games but EXPECT them to work even better.
Of course Sigil having money issues isn't my problem...for the exact reasons mentioned above in the Mythic/Dark Age of Camelot example. MMOs have been made with far less money, with more advanced tech and features for their time period and came out polished.
Vanguard was mismanaged if it ran out of money, simple. So it's the management fault, not my own. I don't have to be compassionate towards them, nor do I have to find it admirable that some players are compassionate. I can respect it, but I won't do it myself.
If you go to Dairy Queen and order a Cookie 'n Creme Blizzard (god I'm hungry), it's not your fault if the manager ordered too much cookie dough for another variety and you're only getting the Creme. You don't say "I understand, here let me pay you full price for this dessert without the cookies in it."
NCSoft by the way did develop both Lineage games, but it was also a publisher for other projects either released or in the works. Sigil has no past products to thrive off of, so I don't really get your point about NCSoft not having money problems. Are you saying Lineage II was unacceptable because NCSoft had the money and time to release it better? I didn't play, but i'd certainly agree if that's the case. I'm sure it was a port from Korea, lending even more to idea that it should've been better.
That's exactly how you're supposed to think about these products; criticize them! Sigil is no more innocent than NCSoft. While NCSoft had money, Sigil should've managed theirs better.
You don't have to harbor any ill-will towards Sigil to find their game unacceptable. I'm playing it and I occasionally have fun. I plan to play it right up until Warhammer Online releases, and then make a decision of whether the game has come along enough for me to continue or I jump ship.
That's kind of how you're supposed to navigate MMOs, just like any other product a business sells you. Because they're just products that businesses sell us...
No one is calling the early release a malicious act against wouldbe fans, I'm calling it mismanagement. It doesn't matter WHAT the reason was behind the early release, it resulted in an overly buggy product not acceptable for release.
I don't care that Sigil ran out of money, ok? Playing MMOs is supposed to be as simple as seeing an ad for it, going to the store, picking up the box, installing it, and playing. Much like I did with WoW, DAoC and CoH. It didn't require a forum membership to Fozzik's Hardware, digging into my .ini files, and visiting third-party sites for any relevant news about whether it's safe or not to log in-game and not be victimized by bugs in light of today's levelling and item disappearance round-ups.
Reading forum archives, FAQs and in general be given a history lesson on Sigil and Vanguard, and then deciding to be sympathetic is asking waaay too much. Can't tell you who the CEO of Cox is or even the manager of the place I pay my bills, but I've been using their service for six years. Sorry, I just don't find any reason to change my opinions about a subpar product just because it's developers are 'honest' and 'open' about their shortcomings.
I do believe WoW garnered some of thier success through good gameplay, but I also believe that the magority of the success they gained was through a 10 year IP with millions of copies sold. I also believe that without that name recognition it would have built its subs much slower.
I don't deny VG has bugs, I expect it when an MMO is released and when one is released earlier then intended I expect to find more then usual. Throw in one really big world, a lot of race/ class options, gameplay options and you compound the problem. Sencebility and patients makes me understanding of the situation.
WoW and VG aren't the same kind of MMO no matter how you slice it. They are no more alike then VG and CoH or CoH and UO. Being an MMO doesn't make them the same; nor does having a recognizable game mechanic that can be picked up on by the majority of MMO players.
My stance if very simple. VG is no more broken then WoW was. I'm not going to be blind to bugs or performance problems in VG any more then I was with WoW, L2, CoH or any of the dozen other MMO's I do or have played. At the same time I'll give counter argument whenever I see the OMG VG is bug infested and WoW was so much better at launch posts and responces. I even provided a link to WoW's tech forums where anyone can read any one of the posts on the 125 pages worth of complaints about bugs and performance issues.
As well as express that in my opinion a polished game doesn't require the revamp of every class over the course of two years and presented in the form of "content additons" 
Also, it's been a pleasure debating this topic with ya Sepher. It's refreshing reading something not writin by a ravid fan or discruntled hater who can articulate and be civilized. Something these particullar boards could use more of.
It's time for bed now. I've got a migraine from thinking and the nerves in my hand and arm are on fire.
Edit: Yeah the lineage 2 thing, not really sure what I was getting at. The two games seem most alike to me with the large seemless worlds and a lot of the same problems at release. Not really about money just that VG made me have flash backs to the early days of L2.