VG is an anomoly.  Even after weighing in all of it's previous issues, poor launch, and the fact that it's ran by SoE.. It still keeps coming up as number one PVE in my books.  And yet it has only a few servers as if nobody has heard of it or played it since the launch disaster.  If you haven't tried it in a while, give it another shot.  The graphics and world alone is amazing, not to mention a decent crafting system and unique features like diplomacy. 

I think some people put it down on the forums because of their experiences in 2007, but I was there too, I left at the same time.. but since then I've tried it several more times, and it really has come along way.  The developers have put a lot into fixing the bugs and performance.

it is true Vanguard is one of the best mmo's out there, i played it at launch and it was a disaster came back 1 year later and it was a whole different game! still the problem with the game is, there is not much end game content and the painfull faction grind! otehr then that it is a great game.

I continue to wonder why so many people automatically think someone is a paid shill when they post something positive about a game that they like.  Even when their post history, if you bothered to check the OPs out before opening your trap, shows that they post about and on a variety of topics.  Including roleplaying.  I am sure SOE is paying someone to post about that.

Get a clue. 

Meh, I play'd VG for the first time a couple of months ago, and it had alot going for it. But there is still a lack of people (like you never saw them)

And that graphics IMO where bad, they could have been good. but they just looked....unpolished, and the water in that game sucked.

But it did/does have a good crafting system and it is fairly fun.

Ive been tiptoeing on that line the past few days but I think I will be giving it a shot after this weekend  

What kind of PvP does Vanguard have?

Originally posted by Forumfall

So you work for them huh?

Nope. I just honestly believe people are missing out.  I'm pretty critical of MMO's, and yea VG isn't EQ3 but as far as PVE goes I still haven't found anything better.  I still think EVE is the best PVP mmo, but so does many others.. they have a lot of players.  But VG has a pretty low population for being as good as it is.

Originally posted by forinboy

I continue to wonder why so many people automatically think someone is a paid shill when they post something positive about a game that they like.  Even when their post history, if you bothered to check the OPs out before opening your trap, shows that they post about and on a variety of topics.  Including roleplaying.  I am sure SOE is paying someone to post about that.

Get a clue. 

It is because the Vanguard/EQ Sony fanbois come off like paid shills. I have been following these boards for several years. I look at the General Discussion Forums daily. More often than not, if there is a post about how much someone likes their game and asks people to play it again it is almost always a Vanguard poster.

Just a few days ago there was this post: www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/241270/Playing-all-the-modern-MMOs-only-Vanguard-holds-my-attention.html

I dont think these posts are paid shills, but they come off that way. Perception is reality. You tend to rub people the wrong way when once a week there are these pro-Vanguard posts in the non-Vanguard forum.

As for my opinion, as I copy and paste to all the pro-Vanguard posts, here are my thoughts:

********************************************************************************************

The Vanguard word is huge. Heck, it is massive. Also I will say that the number classes to pick is impressive. I also did like the diplomacy mini game a little bit and the crafting is top notch. After that, it's all down hill.

Vanguard wins my award for one of the worst performance game engines for an MMO, second to Warhammer. Vanguard is the only game I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE where your framerate actually goes down when you visit a dungeon. I guess the developers were so obsessed with seamless that they forgot that you dont have to keep drawings of the earth above you. The engine just feels like it is chugging along. It has never felt like it fully supported dual core properly, and games like Crysis, Fallout 3, Bioshock, etc run much better.

The artwork in Vanguard is drab and dreary much like Everquest 2. This is tough to put a finger on. But I have always felt that the colors in these Sony games have a grey filter over them. It's hard to explain. Maybe I just dont like the artwork that the Sony puts out for these titles.

The world is massive, but EMPTY. Yes there are many areas to get quests and explore. But you will soon notice that A LOT of the landscape is empty. Go ahead, go for a hike. Climb some nice mountains. Think you are gonna find something cool? Maybe a temple? Maybe a small cave? Maybe a small grave site or something interesting? Nope.

There are still to this day textures and objects that flicker. Some doors are invisible and you can see the world behind it until you get up close, then the door appears.

If you try going for a swim, be careful when you get out or you will end up bugging out and be stuck inside the game world, underground. This is rare though.

Vanguard has always won my award for the most bugged mines of any game I have ever seen. If you enjoy mining in games, stay far away. The developers STILL to this day have not figured out how to fix this issue.

There are more issues but I will end it here.

I will go as far to say that Vanguard may not even crack the top 10 as far as MMOs right now..Heck some free MMOs are better.

Vanguard is a good game.

For PvE I am not sure I found anything better.

The world is huge, the spheres of leveling is a nice touch, and the factions help for those who always enjoy having something to do.

different quests around the world are very nice and promote a great storyline.

If you enter VG with a goal in mind, "I want to craft/I want to explore/I want to delve into dungeons" then... i'm sure you can make it happen.

problems might affect a game, but i've never seen an MMO without problems.

So, just enjoy what the game has to offer.

I've tried Vanguard a while ago. I was also invited into the beta but couldn't get the game to run decently on my, at the time, outdated PC. It was a decent game and I really liked the diplomacy system. The game world also looked good and the weather was great.

On the other hand, I really hated the character models and the animations. Also, the game play was a bit too slow for my liking.

It is a decent game with a lot of untapped potential. SoE really needs to put more people on the VG dev team.

I saw this "Come back for 10 days free" offer in the latest article on MMORPG.com, but I tried to log in to my account and it wasnt active.

do you need to re-input your subscription info to get the 10 days re-trial like the Warhammer Online "come back" trial?

i tried it again but still didn't like it very much. It has it's good aspects and stuff though.

I played the trial and liked it enough to buy a month, but I don't really log in again.  As to why...I can't quite explain.  It's one of those games like LotRO that I can see myself buying a month now again but for some reason I don't get sucked in and stay.

The crafting system is quite cool and I like it a lot.  But, I personally seem to run into a lot of weird bugs or unfinished/odd things.  Simple stuff like clicking a corpse seems hard sometimes.  And I've had a few crafting bugs where I had to quit the game and log back in to finish certain crafting quests.   It runs well on my PC, too, at least not noticeably worse than other games (4870x2 at 19x12), and the overall graphics are good; excepting the water and armour models.

Still it is pretty cool, even if it seemed a bit quiet once I left the Isle of Dawn.  I just expected it to be a bit more polished considering how long it's been out.

The mounts are uninspiring and look horrible, the animations are horrible, the PVP is horrible, the UI for the game is generic and unoriginal, the gameplay consists of your generic XYZ/fetch quests, the game runs like crap (and before people jump at me about this, my system runs Conan flawlessly on max settings with 8x AA + HDR), the graphics make the characters look like plastic dolls, they dumbed down the game so much from its original state that there really is no challenge left at all, the population is low and still dwindling down (for a good reason), and the game is run by incompetent fools who are starting to implement their own form of RMT in all of their games while still maintaining a P2P payment system (I mean really, B2P + P2P + micro transactions? Could they be anymore greedy?). Not only that, but in order to run the game at a "playable" speed, you need to type in a command every 30 minutes - 1 hour to flush out your cache folder.

Sillius should do what lead game devs like him do best, and quite while he's behind. Him and Gaute can go ahead and have a nice vacation together with the money they've swindled from their player base.

The only nice part is the player crafted houses/ships/guild halls, but that's not enough to justify every other crap thing about this game.

It's not only the worst PVE MMO ever, it's quite possibly the worst MMO ever.