I've been playing vanguard since beta 3, anyway ive been able to experience vanguard raiding up close on test, and ive been quite impressed, the dungeun's (ancient port warehouse) difficulty is immense, trash mobs can whipe (and do) and ill prepared or poorly organized raid force.

As for general play, the crafting system is pretty much the most complex in any mmo, and the gear you make is comparable to adventured loot

Once you hit around 25, you have most of your skills, and will only get upgrades or a few new ones, but it takes awhile to master your class and really find out what makes them great.

The population is actually rising (dont believe the haters) and the performance has improved steadily

Originally posted by Salvatoris

I played through the Vanguard beta for several months and I really enjoyed some parts of it.  I liked the overall style and setting, but mainly I was attracted to the games potential depth.  I have to say potential because most of what I was looking forward to wasn't working yet, and still wasn't at launch.  Regardless of the bugs and poor performance, during beta I really believed this game was going to be the next great one for me... eventually.  Unfortunately they decided to go ahead and start charging for a game I wasn't willing to pay for... leaving me to wonder if it would ever realize the potential that i was so excited about to begin with.

I keep reading about updates and new content, so I am wondering how the game is now, compared to how it was at launch.  Performance was my biggest issue.  I had two choices, run like a slide show or turn it all the way down where it looked like crap... and still occasionally get the slide-show.  I still have the same hardware, since it was pretty new at the time, and it has run every other game that has come out since then with no issues.  I have a P4 3.2 with 2 gig of DDR and a geforce 7800(512).  What would I see performance-wise?  Would I have to spend all day running somedoods tweaks to get it to run decently?  Would I have to turn it down so it looks worse than WoW to get above 12 fps?

Besides bugs, the next biggest issue I had was the lack of content and slow progression... especially if you like to play duo.  As bad as XP was solo, it was next to nothing in a group of 2.  With very few quests for a small group, all we could do was farm mobs near our level, which would often lead to death and the loss of all your newfound XP plus some.  How are those things now?  Roughly how long does it take to get from level 22 to level 23?  Is there any content for small groups, and how is XP duoing?

A few assorted random questions....

Can you wear helms yet?

If so, does your head still stick out the back?

Is housing working correctly and relatively affordable?

Are there more than 4 different cat race faces yet?  How about the number of hairstyles?

How long does it really take to load in to a new chunk.

Do mobs still moonwalk and warp around near chunk lines?

How is the economy? 

Is there any market for crafted items below max lvl crafter?

Still no XP for crafting real items?

Is the crafting grind any shorter or at least more rewarding?

Is the population as bad as everyone says it is?

I'm sure I had more questions... but I don't want to bore people.  Any feedback from current players, or players who recently quit, would be greatly appreciated. :)

 

Uhm so no helms, they are coming soon, housing works, i dont bother with it, but yeah its not too bad i think there are diplomacy quests you can do to get a small house for free (still gotta buy the plot)

Dont know about the cat faces, i know they dont have tails

takes me about 1-2 seconds to load a chunk, some older computers its more noticable at around 5-10 seconds, mobs will follow you through the chunks now for the most part, sometimes they give up and reset but yeah they arent doing all that funky stuff anymore (chunk times are down considerably since launch)

The economy was inflated due to a plat dupe that was in the game for alittle while so everyone has a decent amount of cash, but sony has been working on cashsinks to take that cash out (renting flying mounts, etc.)

You get crafting exp for crafting real items, i think, im not a crafter but i think you do, they just recently cut the crafting leveling curse by 1/3 so its not too bad anymore, i would say that lower lvl crafted gear is in more demand than the higher level gear because of all the alts and new folks starting up, at least thats the way it is on the market, and lower tier ultra rare materials tend to cost more than higher tier to a certain extent (lvl 20s-30s) compared to lvl 50

population is actually pretty good, there are only 4 servers now but each has a good population and is growing,

i think i answered them all rofl

game update 3 brought pretty significant performance increases and fixed alot of memeory leaks that were causing CTDs, my laptop went from 10 fps to 25-35 fps so yeah pretty big for most people

i would try ebay, they have alot of upopened copies selling for 1-10 dollars, if not you can always bite the bullet and buy the game

SoE has done wonders for vanguard, their team is very dedicated

well if your on seradon, we have seradon.com, if not the official vg forums have server sections where i see alot of people organizing groups for certain days, i would say the official forums are the way to go see they have a really good population

vanguard, (i didnt take the picture someone else did and posted it on the vanguard forums)