Wait...yep. Developers get in over their heads and release...junk. Roma Victor, I'm looking at you!!

Yep, MMO's are stuck in shovelware mode. Everyone thinks they can copy the game before them and sit back and watch the money roll in. When they find out they can't do it, they release Vanguard, Thrones of Chaos, Auto Assault...hmmm, let me look at the list to the left there...MxO, Roma Victor, DnL, Horizons, etc.

Sucks, but this has happened to every genre. Diablo clones, C&C clones, Civ clones, Doom clones, on and on and on.

So, I tried cruising the EQ2 and SWG forums today....

The EQ2 forums are ok, I guess. They are slow and much uglier than the old Lithium boards.

The SWG forums are broken. Pages take forever to load, if they load. I timeout more often then not.

Gogo SOE!!

I understand what you two are saying, but this just isn't feasable in MMO's. Every player is special. If we weren't, we'd all be the NPC's walking around, not the heroes with the big loots.

Yes, being surrounded by 100 Jedi is not true to Star Wars, but being surrounded by 100 spies or bounty hunters isn't either, ya know? If we stuck to the true nature of Star Wars, there would be 0 Jedi players. Luke, Vader and the Emperor were it.

90 minutes of CGI Night Elf females running and jumping in the forest....

Very biased, shine job. There is a huge difference between MMO's evolving and being unfinished. EQ, EQ2, EVE, DAoC, WoW, etc. were finished, but continue to evolve. Vanguard is nowhere close to being finished. He doesn't make one mention of bugs or crashes, either. That is a crime in and of itself. To ignore them is unbelievable.

Reviewers need to stop rating Vanguard on its potential (which is great), and rate it on what it is at this point in time, a bad game.

When the bugs, memory leaks and client optimizations are worked out, maybe this will be a good game. Until then, buyer beware.

Sounds to me like a company trimming the fat. They are most likely cutting lose contract workers and temps brought in to do the bulk design work. Once all of your release models/terrains/textures/buidlings, etc etc are done, there's no point in keeping all of those extra folks around. The core art team/designers/programmers will finish up and release content from here on out.

The sky isn't falling yet. Yet.

People disconnecting in EVE is nothing new. I can't tell you how many times multiple people would disconnect on fleet ops. Not only on large scale ops, but 10 man gank squads. Making long runs was risky, as you may lose too many people, or have to constantly stop and wait for folks to log back in all the time. And those were EVE problems, as the people who drop would still be on Teamspeak. The BSOD is on your end, but random dropping and client crashes are on CCP's end.

The Shadowknight is a very good tank class. Wears plate mail, is the evil counterpart to the Paladin. Their melee attacks have lifetaps and DoT components. Has a very nice spell shield that drains health from the mobs and gives life back to you. Good soloing and good for grouping.

Necromancer/Conjurer/Illusionist are mage pet classes. Necromancers summon undead and do damage via lifetaps and DoT's. Conjurers summon elementals and do magic DD's and AOE's. Illusionists summon a twin of themselves and are great mez/stun mages with DoT's and DD's. All 3 solo and group well. Coercer is the 4th mage pet class, but I don't know much about them. Similar to the Illusionist.

Those are the classes I'd recommend starting out with. One big issue in EQ2 right now is the spell economy is out of whack. You need to upgrade your spells beyond the first tier you automatically get when you level up. In the old days, spell upgrades called Adept 1's dropped (and still do) from mobs were the most common upgrade. They are the middle of the road upgrade and serve very well. Now, these Adept 1's can be used as tribute to the Gods and so they are vastly overpriced. I would recommend taking up crafting and create your own spell upgrades. I'm doing this with my Shadowknight and it is working very well. Gain a combat level, go out and harvest and level up crafting, upgrade spells and get back to hunting again. If you don't, you will have a hard time upgrading your spells. as even the player crafted spells can be overpriced.

I agree with Rattrap, that every MMO I've seen slammed in Beta has pretty much sucked when it was released. Shadowbane, Horizons (beta tested this one myself), DnL, DDO, stop me now, I'm crying already. Hell, look to your left, if any of those released games had bad beta testimonials, you can pretty much say the game sucks now.

WoW and EVE held me through the greater part of 2006. I just went back and tried EQ2 again and have found it to be a damn fine game now. Too bad it took SOE 3 or 4 tries to get it right, but they seem to have found their groove with this one. EQ2 should keep me in MMO land until WAR/Vanguard/Conan release. Maybe even Darkfall will release in 2007 and maybe it will be good. Keeping my fingers triple crossed on that.

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Originally posted by Coldmeat

Time to start a pool, I guess

Gold:May 1st 07
Live May 22nd 07

SOE release date? 1 week before the WoW expansion, wether the game is running or not. Hey, they did it with EQ2, why not Vanguard.

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