I play with fps in the 40's (not in towns of course but Im in towns maybe 10% of my time) with a 8800GT @1440x900 and everything on save a few things that don't seem to make a difference visually

Originally posted by Daffid011

Bios upgrades, new memory/motherboard/cpu, drivers, tweeking ini files, graphic settings different for ati/nvidia, posting system specs on the forums in the hopes of help and any other issues in the circus of problems this game has all based on random dumb luck of how vanguard decides to behave on any given computer?  What game serious requires bios updates? 

You are talking about the "fact" that vanguard can run on a modest computer and that people are hell bent on making the game look bad, but at the same time you gloss over how commonplace it is for people to have issues with the game from moment one out of the box.  Most games are simply install and run with almost any problem being solved by selected the hardware appropriate setting.  High quality, balanced, performance, etc. 

Most people will not have the ability to solve the issues if vanguard decides it doesn't like any number of aspects of your computer.  Maybe luck wasn't the best choice of words.  Would random be a better term for how vanguard might perform on someones computer without going to extremes?

Honestly this seems par for the course in my experience.  Every game you install will sometimes have issues.  I started playing eq2 about a year ago.  When I first installed it it would crash all the time one me.  It was super frustrating.  I installed drivers, reinstalled the game, tried all sorts of things.  Ironically the thing the support guy suggested was the last thing I tried and it fixed my problem.  He has me run sysconfig and disable everything.  Low the game ran fine.  Eventually I found it was xfire that was causing the crash.  Reinstalling xfire fixed the problem.  Some time before that my daughter wanted to play wow and installed and and couldn't even get it to load.  I don't recall the actual fix there but it took several days of reinstalling stuff, drivers, etc to get things working.  When titan quest was released I bought that game and running it would give big lag spikes.  Eventually I had to go to the web site for the people that made the sound chip and found a sound driver file that work with my motherboard that worked and fixed that issue.

On the other hand I play lots of games and have also had many work flawlessly from the gitgo.  So to me it seems like it is completely random.  Oh another one that was a hassle was spore, ugh getting that to work was a pain and I never did get rid of a bunch of start up popups complaining about something.   But clicking past them like 5-6 times and the game loads fine...

I been playing for 2 weeks now and having a blast !  The quests are pretty good so far and most towns/buildings/dungeons are unique(have yet to come across buildings that look the same) and the community is friendly and helpful. The population on Halgrad is medium at peek hours and still plenty of people around my level.

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Daffid011

Bios upgrades, new memory/motherboard/cpu, drivers, tweeking ini files, graphic settings different for ati/nvidia, posting system specs on the forums in the hopes of help and any other issues in the circus of problems this game has all based on random dumb luck of how vanguard decides to behave on any given computer?  What game serious requires bios updates? 

You are talking about the "fact" that vanguard can run on a modest computer and that people are hell bent on making the game look bad, but at the same time you gloss over how commonplace it is for people to have issues with the game from moment one out of the box.  Most games are simply install and run with almost any problem being solved by selected the hardware appropriate setting.  High quality, balanced, performance, etc. 

Most people will not have the ability to solve the issues if vanguard decides it doesn't like any number of aspects of your computer.  Maybe luck wasn't the best choice of words.  Would random be a better term for how vanguard might perform on someones computer without going to extremes?

 

Honestly this seems par for the course in my experience.  Every game you install will sometimes have issues.  I started playing eq2 about a year ago.  When I first installed it it would crash all the time one me.  It was super frustrating.  I installed drivers, reinstalled the game, tried all sorts of things.  Ironically the thing the support guy suggested was the last thing I tried and it fixed my problem.  He has me run sysconfig and disable everything.  Low the game ran fine.  Eventually I found it was xfire that was causing the crash.  Reinstalling xfire fixed the problem.  Some time before that my daughter wanted to play wow and installed and and couldn't even get it to load.  I don't recall the actual fix there but it took several days of reinstalling stuff, drivers, etc to get things working.  When titan quest was released I bought that game and running it would give big lag spikes.  Eventually I had to go to the web site for the people that made the sound chip and found a sound driver file that work with my motherboard that worked and fixed that issue.

On the other hand I play lots of games and have also had many work flawlessly from the gitgo.  So to me it seems like it is completely random.  Oh another one that was a hassle was spore, ugh getting that to work was a pain and I never did get rid of a bunch of start up popups complaining about something.   But clicking past them like 5-6 times and the game loads fine...

 

My point wasn't that these types of problems don't occur in other mmos, but proportionately most other games don't suffer anywhere near the same volume of problems.  In you example there is no control over xfire being a runaway process that any company could have anticipated.  That is a problem with xfire and another game that has issues of its own.

Vanguard has always been picky about the computer it runs on.  The problem lies with the programming inside vanguard and the results can vary widely from computer to computer for no real reason.  Even systems with the similar hardware can either have good performance or complete game breaking performance with little rhyme or reason as to why.  The problem isn't the users of those computers either (before anyone makes that claim again), because typically they don't have the same type of problem with other games. 

That is why you have so many people on each side of the discussion.  Some saying the game runs fine and other saying it doesn't.  No single players experience is representative of the collective whole in this case.  Honestly I don't know which group who represent the majority of experiences.  

the game changes once you get off the IOD ( Isle of Dawn ). if anyone is basing thier experience of Vanguard on the IOD they are in for a rude awakening( SoE is tricky). The low level game is almost empty of players and the people you do run into are mostly alt of someone with a high level character.

other then having such a low population of players the game is fine

I love Cheez-its ( www.cheez-it.com/ )

I'm not quite sure how this helps or contributes to this thread, but my current state of being dictated to me that this was the right thing to say in this situation.

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Daffid011

Bios upgrades, new memory/motherboard/cpu, drivers, tweeking ini files, graphic settings different for ati/nvidia, posting system specs on the forums in the hopes of help and any other issues in the circus of problems this game has all based on random dumb luck of how vanguard decides to behave on any given computer?  What game serious requires bios updates? 

You are talking about the "fact" that vanguard can run on a modest computer and that people are hell bent on making the game look bad, but at the same time you gloss over how commonplace it is for people to have issues with the game from moment one out of the box.  Most games are simply install and run with almost any problem being solved by selected the hardware appropriate setting.  High quality, balanced, performance, etc. 

Most people will not have the ability to solve the issues if vanguard decides it doesn't like any number of aspects of your computer.  Maybe luck wasn't the best choice of words.  Would random be a better term for how vanguard might perform on someones computer without going to extremes?

 

Honestly this seems par for the course in my experience.  Every game you install will sometimes have issues.  I started playing eq2 about a year ago.  When I first installed it it would crash all the time one me.  It was super frustrating.  I installed drivers, reinstalled the game, tried all sorts of things.  Ironically the thing the support guy suggested was the last thing I tried and it fixed my problem.  He has me run sysconfig and disable everything.  Low the game ran fine.  Eventually I found it was xfire that was causing the crash.  Reinstalling xfire fixed the problem.  Some time before that my daughter wanted to play wow and installed and and couldn't even get it to load.  I don't recall the actual fix there but it took several days of reinstalling stuff, drivers, etc to get things working.  When titan quest was released I bought that game and running it would give big lag spikes.  Eventually I had to go to the web site for the people that made the sound chip and found a sound driver file that work with my motherboard that worked and fixed that issue.

On the other hand I play lots of games and have also had many work flawlessly from the gitgo.  So to me it seems like it is completely random.  Oh another one that was a hassle was spore, ugh getting that to work was a pain and I never did get rid of a bunch of start up popups complaining about something.   But clicking past them like 5-6 times and the game loads fine...

 

I've had the same general experience with games that require at least some performance out of computer hardware.

CoD: World at War - Crashed on start-up, after 2-days figured out I had to set sound sampling to a lower rate.  /shrug

EQ1 - Crashed on zoning 25% of the time

WoW - No issues except server connectivity, but I probably could have run WoW fine on my Apple IIe

LotRo - No issues of any kind.

Company of Heroes - Unit textures would show as rotating black blobs... had to roll back Nvidia drivers.

EQ2 - Crashed when zoning 50% of the time, eventually quit playing because of it.

Vanguard - No issues after memory leaks we fixed (crashed like everyone else prior to fix)

Crysis - Constant crash and freeze issues, had to run game in DX9 to make it playable.

F.E.A.R. - No issues

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. -  Textures disappeared, never figured out how to fix.

Team Fortress - Game minimizes on me  /shrug

For any game, there is a decent change that just an install and flawless play is not gonna happen.  I don't think the game is unusual in that respect any more.  At launch, it was horrendous and gradually got to where it is today in terms of stability.

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Daffid011

Bios upgrades, new memory/motherboard/cpu, drivers, tweeking ini files, graphic settings different for ati/nvidia, posting system specs on the forums in the hopes of help and any other issues in the circus of problems this game has all based on random dumb luck of how vanguard decides to behave on any given computer?  What game serious requires bios updates? 

You are talking about the "fact" that vanguard can run on a modest computer and that people are hell bent on making the game look bad, but at the same time you gloss over how commonplace it is for people to have issues with the game from moment one out of the box.  Most games are simply install and run with almost any problem being solved by selected the hardware appropriate setting.  High quality, balanced, performance, etc. 

Most people will not have the ability to solve the issues if vanguard decides it doesn't like any number of aspects of your computer.  Maybe luck wasn't the best choice of words.  Would random be a better term for how vanguard might perform on someones computer without going to extremes?

 

Honestly this seems par for the course in my experience.  Every game you install will sometimes have issues.  I started playing eq2 about a year ago.  When I first installed it it would crash all the time one me.  It was super frustrating.  I installed drivers, reinstalled the game, tried all sorts of things.  Ironically the thing the support guy suggested was the last thing I tried and it fixed my problem.  He has me run sysconfig and disable everything.  Low the game ran fine.  Eventually I found it was xfire that was causing the crash.  Reinstalling xfire fixed the problem.  Some time before that my daughter wanted to play wow and installed and and couldn't even get it to load.  I don't recall the actual fix there but it took several days of reinstalling stuff, drivers, etc to get things working.  When titan quest was released I bought that game and running it would give big lag spikes.  Eventually I had to go to the web site for the people that made the sound chip and found a sound driver file that work with my motherboard that worked and fixed that issue.

On the other hand I play lots of games and have also had many work flawlessly from the gitgo.  So to me it seems like it is completely random.  Oh another one that was a hassle was spore, ugh getting that to work was a pain and I never did get rid of a bunch of start up popups complaining about something.   But clicking past them like 5-6 times and the game loads fine...

 

My point wasn't that these types of problems don't occur in other mmos, but proportionately most other games don't suffer anywhere near the same volume of problems.  In you example there is no control over xfire being a runaway process that any company could have anticipated.  That is a problem with xfire and another game that has issues of its own.

Vanguard has always been picky about the computer it runs on.  The problem lies with the programming inside vanguard and the results can vary widely from computer to computer for no real reason.  Even systems with the similar hardware can either have good performance or complete game breaking performance with little rhyme or reason as to why.  The problem isn't the users of those computers either (before anyone makes that claim again), because typically they don't have the same type of problem with other games. 

That is why you have so many people on each side of the discussion.  Some saying the game runs fine and other saying it doesn't.  No single players experience is representative of the collective whole in this case.  Honestly I don't know which group who represent the majority of experiences.  

My point wasn't that xfire created the problem cause believe me I didn't think that was the issue.  Nor in my communication with forums and support did I ever mention it as the problem. 

The point I was trying to make is that until you know what the problem is and have fixed it it is a problem with the game.   It is frustrating and you gotta try a number of things.  The issues are different for every person.  And lastly that problems with games running is not uncommon.  

As to vanguard being more picky then most games I really have no way of saying...  Certainly at launch it was problamatic but in later times I've tried it on my computer and my wifes computer we haven't had any problems from a straight install.   Our computers are pretty different too.  I'm running Vista 64 with an intel quad core, and a gtx8000, she is running on an amd dual core cpu, with an ATI 3850.  I'm running on max settings she is running on balanced settings.

Originally posted by Joppari

I love Cheez-its ( www.cheez-it.com/ )

 

I'm not quite sure how this helps or contributes to this thread, but my current state of being dictated to me that this was the right thing to say in this situation.

I like Icecream. =D

EDIT: LOL, I thought that was the silliest poll ever!! Awesome post/ quote thingy.

use a ram-disk

http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?start=15&topic_id=44058

Originally posted by eolse

it's a new game to you come back in 2 weeks and the bugs will drive you nuts.

Just thought I would post an update after playing for a few weeks.  The pve is awesome, dungeons are great, class design is excellent.  Have a monk up to level 33 and he is also a level 17 carpenter.  Have not had any problems finding groups for the most part.  Community is outstanding!

Yes there are bugs and a lack of polish in some areas.  Little things that should not still be a problem this long after launch.  The engine is poorly coded and fps should be better.  I will note however, I believe this graphics engine is on a par with eq2 as far as performance, neither of them run particularly well.  In VG I do get fantastic performance in dungeons with groups....runs glassy smooth and looks great.

All and all I stand by my original comments, its a great game well worth checking out.  Expect to see some stupid bugs and be prepared for eq2 like engine performance.  If you can put up with these annoyances the core gameplay will blow your socks off. 

Vanguard was a great game at the start, and even better now that theres a trial island.  Unfortunately, the content thins out more and more as you level up, and at 45+ all the content feels like your run of the mill-generic-SOE-bullcrap-autogenerated- grindfest-wtfroflbbq-timesink garbage totally lacking in any kind of creativity.

Vanguard is a shadow of what it was meant to be.  You can feel what its supposed to be when you create your character and start out on your early adventures, but dont be fooled.  The feeling fades away quickly.