Vanguard Beta In Trouble?

Heartless Gamer writes to mention a blog post exploring potential problems with the Vanguard Beta. The hardcore MMOG in development by Sigil has had some rocky times of late, and it sounds like the beta testers are right up at the top of the list of problems. From the article: "To the detriment of Vanguard, they (Vanguard's community) will protest any implementation that even remotely resembles a mechanic within World of Warcraft. Good or bad, it doesn't matter. If it's something within WoW, they want it O-U-T. Likewise, if you are from WoW, they want YOU out, too. They've already succeeded in driving out many of those testers. They're long gone and I can't say I blame them." Read on for other sites' commentary on this issue.

In some ways I can understand it

The not wanting WoW players I mean. I have come to deeply despise WoW players myself as a pure example of the continued dumbing down of the gaming generation. Anything hard is bad, quick returns are good. And forget about any sense of rollplay.

But quite frankly its really stupid to hate mechanics from WoW cause some of them are REALLY very good. Worse most come from Everquest it's self, which a LOT of the hardcores hold as sacred, WoW just improved on this.

My take. Just get rid of the bad element of beta testers. Or better yet just ignore them when you know they are making a rediculous suggestion. It's their place to find the bugs, not dictate the design of the game.

Re:In some ways I can understand it

The not wanting WoW players I mean. I have come to deeply despise WoW players myself as a pure example of the continued dumbing down of the gaming generation. Anything hard is bad, quick returns are good. And forget about any sense of rollplay.

I'm gonna have to ask you to clarify that. Define "hard". Keep in mind that "takes a long time" isn't hard, it's annoying. Something that requires skill is hard. Something that just anyone can do over a long period of time isn't hard, it's boring. The reason I ask is because you're apparently an FFXI player [slashdot.org] and the standard FFXI player seems to think WoW is "too easy" because things don't take forever.

Quick returns are good, keeping in mind that a quick return can still be a failure. FFXI has plenty of things where you get one try every day (real time) or so. They're "hard" because you have to beat out the 20 gold farmers camping the single spawn point. Succeed in getting it, and you have a 1/20 chance of getting the drop. While that does mean that it's hard to get the drop, it's not hard due to any skill requirement. It's hard because it requires a lot of luck and time.

Compare with WoW, where you might have a 100% chance of getting something if you complete some difficult task. There are plenty of instances in WoW where you'll have to use a large set of abilities to manage to succeed. Fail, and you can try again very quickly instead of packing up and waiting until tomorrow. That's hard, but not due to a time requirement, due to a skill requirement.

So, please. Explain your statement. The rest of your post I agree with completely, I just want to understand why you think WoW "dumbed down" gaming. If anything, WoW is harder to play than FFXI in terms of skill - although not time.

Can't say I blame them...

"To the detriment of Vanguard, they (Vanguard's community) will protest any implementation that even remotely resembles a mechanic within World of Warcraft. Good or bad, it doesn't matter. If it's something within WoW, they want it O-U-T."

Even though WoW is fun (and addicting), if I was playing another game it would be rather annoying to see WoW with just another game engine slapped over it. If you want to play WoW, then it is already there and waiting for you.

For those who want to play something different... Well... It would be nice to have sometehing other than the old "kill things over and over to level up to kill bigger things over and over again to level up to kill bigger things over and over again" because that is pretty much the same formula of WoW, EQ 1/2, and every other MMOG known the man these days. (SWG and UO rest in peace)

Re:Can't say I blame them...

Even though WoW is fun (and addicting), if I was playing another game it would be rather annoying to see WoW with just another game engine slapped over it. If you want to play WoW, then it is already there and waiting for you.

Vanguard could use elements that work great in WoW and implement them with their own gameplay elements. For example, WoW has proved that instances are fun and needed. Not to mention instances allow very creative encounters and great rewards for players because the designers control everything (including the number of people involved in the instance). Take away instances and you have good old issues that plagued EQ: boring fights, retarded competition for mobs where by guilds/players camp mobs. It augments the number of support calls and it encourages griefing. Which avenue did Vanguard chose? No instances. Yes they are planning to put boss mob encounters "on demand", sort of semi instance but even then, they will never be able to make awesome and complex encounters like WoW endzones have (well minus MC). You can't have a complex scripted encounter if you can't control the number of people during the encounter (aka no instances) because guilds will "zerg" it. EQ has proved that.

The more and more I look at Vanguard reminds me of EQ with all their faults. Lot of grinding, no instances, heaven for griefers and gold farmers. Most modern games have implemented ideas from other games, WoW is a perfect example of very little innovation but they cherry picked the stuff that worked in other game. Instances from Anarchy Online, fast paced combat from City of Heroes, PvP from DAoC, humor from ... well ok, Warcraft, and so on.

Vanguard will be a huge flop. The designers who were responsible for the worse flaws EQ had didn't learn from their own mistakes, they are the ones designing Vanguard.

Re:Can't say I blame them...

Exactly. Vangaurd is planning on taking everything people hated about EQ, and making it worse.

Grinds- check. Expect a long hard grind for levels
Farming- check. Expect to do tons of cash farming
Camping- check. No instances, so expect either a "play nice" rule or guilds fighting for spawns
Death penalties- check. Harsher than EQs, according to articles I've read
Long travel times- check. No fast transport or teleports at all.

Yup, not touching this one with a 10 foot pole.

reap what you sow

vanguard was to be the saving grace for the worst of the community that left EQ looking for "the vision". shame they realized way too late that the "vision" is still locked away in 1999 and the vast majority of MMORPG gamers to do not want that sort of carrot on a stick type of grind.

Re:you forgot Ultima Online and Eve

Yeah, I think EVE is the best at battling the grind. There are still grinds that can be done. Grind for money. Grind for standing.

I've played many of the larger MMORPG's out there (UO, EQ1/2, SWG, WoW, and EVE). EVE is truely unique. CCP has bucked the trend in a lot of areas and almost all of them work. 1 server. Letting you know the population (which continues to go up all the time). Skills train over time, even when offline. No way to speed up the process (except learning skills that aid in the processes).

Roleplay is a little difficult because there really isn't an Avatar running around. You are essentially your ship. But other than that, the game has a lot to offer. I jumped in late(Jan 06), years after release. However, the way everything is layed out, you don't feel completely useless unless you grind to the top. Because there is no top. You just keep learning skills. /commercialover

Re:you forgot Ultima Online and Eve

Roleplay is a little difficult because there really isn't an Avatar running around.

Actually, I'd be inclined to disagree. In Eve, roleplay takes it's form in Corporation Management. So you can't pretend to be a dancing catgirl. Instead, you take a leadership role that requires the player to act the part. Be responsible, smart, and decisive. Or you can choose to be a pirate, ruthless and coldblooded. So you just wiped out someone's work for a month in thirty seconds. He should have payed the ransom.

Interpersonal politics make a huge part of the Eve experience. From forming alliances to elbowing out rivals, the role playing element of Eve isn't dictated by the cute and fuzzy animated cartoon, but by the results your actions bring. The hand-off approach from the creators really pays off when your corp takes over a new zone to bring it's own brand of order. You *can't* script that.

Vanguard fails...

... because they think slow grinding and slow traveling is fun.

Shocking, we are hearing reports of them struggling.

Goths?

Enter the "IT SUCKS BECAUSE IT'S POPULAR" crowd. Less than a dozen comments in this thread thus far and half of them are people who hate WoW because it's "dumbed down."

Listen up, guys, WoW has 5.5 million+ subscribers because what it's doing is good, not bad. It's not dumbed down, and if - like me - you spent hardcore-style hours raiding to get the best stuff, you'd know that.

But no, like the guys at Vanguard, you can't get past appearance. If it's popular, it must be bad.

Re:Goths?

Listen up, guys, WoW has 5.5 million+ subscribers because what it's doing is good, not bad.

Reality TV gets a lot of viewers - as does Fox News for that matter. McDonalds sells a lot of burgers. The Da Vinci Code book/movie/hype train is sheer nonsense yet it's taken millions already. This is not because what these ventures are doing is good per se - it's because they've been designed to reach out to the lowest common denominators in order to have a broad appeal.

It's not dumbed down, and if - like me - you spent hardcore-style hours raiding to get the best stuff, you'd know that.

Oh I beg your pardon - I thought you were talking about WoW but clearly I must have misunderstood.

Please raise your hand if this surprises you

Let me see if I read this right. The forums for an online game have been overrun with loud-mouthed, small-eNis self-proclaimed board warriors who enjoy nothing quite so much as proclaiming their own superiority based on which game they play?

And the same "I am Jack's Ass" crowd is full of people with an over inflated sense of self importantce who believe that being invited to join a beta test and asked for some constructive feedback makes their voices more important than those of people who have been developing the game for years, and they regularly hold public roasts of any member of the development team who still cares enough to attempt to communicate with them?

I would be shocked and appalled if it weren't for the fact that this is exactly what has happened with every single game relased this century. The same arrogant twits infest every forum, loudly proclaiming that they now own the game and that those pinhead developers had better start doing things their way or else they're going to leave and take all six billion of their friends with them to whatever the next unreleased game is. The only thing that's surprising about this is that the writer says that Brad McQuaid is still trying to give them what they claim they want.

People often wonder just why it is that game developers often don't participate in their fora or talk directly to the players, and why they are often secretive about what they are working on. This kind of thing is exactly why they do that. Having to deal with this kind of abuse on a daily basis will turn anybody into a recluse.

Inmates running the asylum.

The articles author is dead on. Take your average rabid Apply fanboy x10 and you've got the nut balls who make up the Vanguard community. These players have been pushed from mmorpg to mmorpg as developers quickly realize the kind of game play they worship is not what 95% of players out there want. If you even attempt to suggest changes to the way the envision the game you're in for all sorts of abuse and scorn. They see this as their "last hope" and will do anything to make sure stays that way. Alas, the result is the game supposedly sucks, badly, from what i've heard from beta testers. MS dumping it back to SOE is a sure sign they are struggling. My prediction is the game will not make it to market in it's current form.

Not exactly getting both sides of the story are we

My only experience is with other beta's and with other MMORPG's and while I do regonize what is being claimed here I also notice that this post is totally one sided.

There seems to be some hatred against WoW players. I can only imagine that this is the same hatred that Counterstrike players get. I was in a beta for a couple of more realistic shooters and we had good reasons to loathe CS players. They would get their beta key and instantly demand the game be turned into a CS clone.

If you get a post like "they should do X like they it in CS" or "this game sucks because I am good at X in CS and I suck at it in this game" then there really isn't much you can do.

So the players who like the game as it is fight the players who want to change the game. This nothing new. Just try following a debate on language reform.

The example of a corpse run is mentioned. Corpse run is a penalty for dying. Everquest 2 for instance punishes you with an experience debt unless you go back to where you died and reassorb your ghost. Other games leave your equipment lying out in the wild forcing you to go back to get your loot.

It makes the game more of a challenge forcing you to think about a battle. Not just wether you can handle that boss you need for a quest but wether you will make it back out again.

Without a corspe run you run the risk of players just using dying to get back to the city to sell their loot. Ask Star Wars Galaxies with the Trials of Obi-wan expansion. For that matter it existed before where people would kill themselves to get rid of a doctor buff that was about to run out so they could get a new one.

Kinda ruins the atmo when you got people begging to be wiped out. "Hey you want to go hunt rancors tonight" "Sure, let me just kill myself before we head out okay?" "Eh, right".

WoW for all its success is not everyones cup of tea and it can be disappointing to see every game try to emulate it. Again, look at SWG. It tried to WoW people and is near dead because of it.

So yes forum discusssions can become very heated BUT there is always two sides to a story. The person comments we read in the main article claim that the hardcore resisted attempts to add WoW elements to the game. Eheh, meaning he wanted to make the game into WoW. Is he basically upset because he didn't get to mold the game into his vision?

MMORPG's are very hard games to produce and if the designer doesn't 100% believe in what he wants to do there is the risk that he could start to believe that the tiny vocal minority on the forums somehow represents the majority. On the other hand if he ignores them he risks that they are infact the majority.

You can't please everyone but you sure as hell can upset everyone.

Nintendo's Plan of Attack

Maybe they should take the strategy of not listening to what the customer says, just like Nintendo (which was also suggested in the linked article). All of this "my way or the highway" from the user base is ridiculous considering it isn't their game and it isn't their work.

The games should be made to be fun, and when it is, people will come. It seems that games nowadays are made to be a bragging grounds, fun or not. It has to be an overly difficult game that rewards time (and lots of it) to pander to the "still in school" crowd who have that much time to burn.

I'm not sure that making a game specifically for these people ... the uh, fanbois, if you will, is that ideal anyway. The turn coat pretty quick, and hop onto the next free thing.

Solve the real problem

Make it so that gamers are randomly inserted into "guilds/clans/groups" instantly upon logging in the game and from there make it possible to move about or join other groups. That way all new players start off with some sense of the first two letters of MMO.

There is nothing worse than starting a new game and having to go around trying to make virtual friends to let you in their clique. When I pick up a fun looking game that none of my friends play, I just want to be able to jump in and play.

It is the clique-y-ness of MMO's that put a lot of people off. Either make the group huge and assign new players to it automatically based on their character choice, or at least have some sort of initial grouping system to quickly play and build friends.

Keep 'em out

Vanguard has been advertised as a hardcore-only game since it's inception. I actually like hell levels, grinding and slow travel. It gives me the feel that I'm actually in the world and not just playing a game. I want immersion in an MMORPG, not another game.

There is something to be said for having to wait for 30 minutes for a boat ride from Freeport to Butcherblock with islands to visit on the way. It keeps people more inclined to explore their current environment instead of looking for the fastest way to level up and going to the appropriate zone to do that.

I do hope the game lives up to what it is being advertised to be.

And I'll say it one more time: THEY HAVE BEEN ADVERTISING THAT THEY DON'T WANT THE "WOW" CROWD FOR YEARS. That alone has driven up their popularity with the hardcore MMORPG gamers because honestly, very few hardcore people even PLAY WoW to begin with.

SOE is their biggest problem

SOE is the 10,000 ton boat anchor around their necks. I have two reasons to never trust a MMO that is associated with SOE in any way:

Star Wars Galaxies Combat Upgrade
Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience

It's so bad that mmorpg.com has posted a stickied "Official SOE hate thread" in the forum of every SOE game.

Drama queens ?

Move along... Its only the usual day to day drama in the community.

I think Iwata said it best "Don't listen..."

The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them.

This wisdom applies doubley so for MMOs as those hardcore players "play" (I use that term loosely) the game so much different from the average player. Vangaurd was doomed from the very begining, corpse runs and experience penalties were tolerated because there was not another game like EQ at the time. The landscape is different for MMOs now, if your game even gives a hint of some boring, grindlike mechanic gamers have way to many other options that are actually fun. Making a game challenging does create a fun experience for most people however if that challenge is simply enduring hour upon hour of repeated monotony then you missed the point. Anyone can make an undeafeatable challenge (he mister raid encouter have a billion health points) and it is easy enough to flip some numbers in a database to make leveling up take 50 hours as opposed to 5. Making 50 hours of rock solid challenging yet not frustrating fun however is difficult. I would be all to happy to pay you 20$ a month if you can entertain me that much.

Ves

Well written article

I liked that article, it's too bad they won't mix WoW and EQ...as many mistakes as WoW made they did make some sizeable improvements over EQ as well.

Corpse runs are definately something that should be left in the past.

Vanguard is an attempt at Everquest III

Its amazing this game even got into beta in the first place. For a long time, its been surmised that there was nothing to this game other than tantalizing tidbits on Sigil's website, where the marketing release page text far outweighed the source code of the game in length. The whole game was shrouded in "secrecy" which people assumed that because nothing was coded or built, nothing was discussed about it.

Vanguard apparently wants to bring back what even EQ had to do major gymnastics to code around. Guilds spending more time finding third party programs and strategies to ensure other guilds won't progress rather than working on progression. (If you played EQ during the PoP era and were in a high end guild, it was common to make sure one or both Decorins were moved under the world to make sure nobody got flagged for Rallos Zek until the servers got rebooted.) Some people love the PvE racing, but eventually it will become an arms race of who can make the better ShowEQ, MQ2, or other third party utility. If Sigil doesn't police the game well, it may end up an item duper's paradise as well.

Instead of Sigil actually making content, they seem to want to have players fight amongst themselves to try to get through artifically created bottlenecks, as a way to not have to create new content as fast. For example, having a locked high-end raid zone, where the key only is available by killing the Grand Poobah. Of course the Grand Poobah only spawns every xxx amount of days, and this allows the zone to be itemized and built on the fly, even after release, because players are effectively locked out.

WoW is a casual game, so casual I quit playing it after getting a couple characters to 60, and finding that one Uqua plow is harder than all the WoW raiding put together. However, Blizzard engineered the game right, where player griefing is fairly difficult. WoW is a fun game. You can solo, group, raid, and pvp, and have some means of progression, even if its a faction treadmill. Blizzard also does attempt to address issues with the game. Next patch, they are adding a decent raid area.

If Sigil gives WoW fans the middle finger, who are they going to sell to? The dedicated raiders don't make up that much of the gaming population, and unless Sigil charges $200 a month, they won't be making much money from this game. This only hurts Sigil, as if there isn't a good playerbase, guilds and groups can't get a critical mass to keep raids going, and the game gets abandoned.

Of course, Sigil may be intending to sell this game to people in the East who play Lineage 2 and are used to long grinds and very stiff death penalties (In L2 death had a chance of you losing your weapon, and in that game, weapon loss basically means buying another from ebay or rerolling a new charcter.) I'm not disparaging them, they are an insanely lucrative game market, but If Sigil is intending to pitch to that crowd, they shouldn't have been touting they are "Everquest done right." Instead, maybe tout how they are better than L2.

All and all, I do have a suspicion that this MMO from Sigil was intended to be Everquest 3.

Off Topic, but...

Heartless Gamer needs to get rid of the stupid frozen graphic on the left. It turns scrolling on Firefox into a slide show and induces nausia on my 64-bit Fedora machine. Blech...

Hum....

There's really two issues here.

The first is that Vanguard is not aimed at the same user base as WoW. WoW is clearly a more 'casual' game than EverQuest before it, and Vanguard looks to be designed to be a more sophisticated version of EverQuest's original vision for reward-and-punishment systems, perhaps even harsher. Is the potential playerbase for a game of Vanguard's sort as large as WoW's has proven to be? I've always thought that it wasn't by at least one order of magnitude, perhaps more, and thought that assertions that there was some large community of people that enjoy XP loss and racing to non-instanced raid bosses were flying in the face of all our experiences, player and dev alike, of EQ1. However, if your expectations for population are appropriately calibrated, there's nothing wrong with not having a huge playerbase. If you, as the dev, are satisfied with the artistry and craftsmanship of your game and your game experience, and your players are playing the game they want to be playing (as opposed to killing time waiting for The Next Big Thing), then more power to you. Much as I bash EVE sometimes, there's nothing wrong with it other than offending my (highly personal and idiosyncratic) sense of gaming aesthetics.

The second issue here is the to-me inexplicable assertion, loudly and often repeated, by so many of Vanguard's partisans that their sort of preferred game experience is 'better'. It's true that this sort of 'what I like is better than what you like' is common enough to be banal amongst gamers (even now, wargaming grognards are sneering at us Johnny-come-latelys; nothing we do will ever equal the hate of table-top wargamers for one another). I'm hardly immune myself (see above for my admission of EVE bashing). But certain classes of gamer, and those attracted to the 'difficult' and 'hardcore' aspirations of Vanguard seem very much one of those classes, seem to me to be much worse about it than most. More dogmatic, more aggressive, less tolerant of other perspectives and far, far more strident.

A Response

We have a tremendous amount of respect for World of Warcraft, its success, the expansion of the gaming audience for MMOGs, and many of the elements that they incorporated or improved upon from those games that came before them. They've done this industry a great service by increasing awareness and setting a new bar for quality. As EverQuest did, as World of Warcraft did, as every game that has come out in this genre has done, we will iterate on the things that we feel were done correctly, fix the things we think were done incorrectly, and then innovate where we feel necessary -- this is a largely intuitive process, but one where our experience continues to lead us appropriately. Beta Testers are an extremely valuable resource for feedback, but they do not dictate the design of the game that we are building. That design came from Brad & Jeff and the team long ago (the much and oft touted Vision) and will be tuned and reevaluated by the team as feedback comes in -- but the game design is not, has never been, and will not be dictated by anyone other than the developer. Our Beta testers can be passionate about their opinions and they air them when appropriate, as has been requested of them. However, much like here, you take everything with a grain of salt, carefully evaluate, discard the opinions that are inflammatory or without merit, and then weigh the remainder carefully against your own understanding. The Beta is not in trouble, and the community is not the source of all negativity -- rather, they provide us a resource that is absolutely fundamental to ongoing evaluation of the content and systems we are implementing. And frankly, our daily interaction with the game provides us the most accurate perspective in evaluating the status of the game, its trajectory for launch, and its eventual likelihood of success. We're going to be fine. :) We welcome the conversation. Zack K. Director, Business Development Sigil Games Online

I Hope It Fails

These guys invented "downtime", "camping", "treadmill" and "grinding". The product deserves a quick death.

Fundementally flawed.

The problem I see with MMORPGs, is that not everyone can be the hero.

I can't be content with being Joe Soldier in a huge army, I want to be special in the game world (Although, thinking that some celebrities play MMOs anonymously, maybe they want to be 'ordinary' for a change) I wasn't satisfied with leaving Everquest until for one thing I was the first player in the game to do it.(Actually solving a challenge when there was no online walkthrough!)

The other side is that few people are willing to go through the effort of doing something difficult until someone else has shown it can be done (In Everquest, that's reasonable, because new content was usually broken and incomplete. Killing named dragons that have no loot sucks.)

Someday, with hard work, and reading walkthroughs, and buying expansions, you can be as powerful as that super-awesome guy in the shiny armor you saw as a newbie. except he's even more powerful now.

And you could do what the top players do: pee into bottles so you don't leave the computer, use exploits and cheat programs, not go to school, buy 12 accounts, not go to work, buy items outside of the game context, die of deep vein thrombosis when you finally get out of the chair....

After I finally accomplished something unique in the game, it still didn't satisfy me at all, because I knew that the accomplishment was planned, scripted, and coded to be done in exactly that way. It was in no way creative, constructive, or inventive on my part, I was simply following the script as written. Which is fine, but it consumed a large chunk of a very finite resource, that being time in my life.

I still play games, but I will not play a game with 'time sinks'. Instead I play board games with my neices (Settlers of Catan is great), skill based games (like CounterStrike (on no-AWP servers)), or strategy games (Railroad Tycoon 3, Civ 4), and even some non-MMO rpgs (Oblivion)

But anything where you have to wait to have a turn to wait for an attempt to do something with a small chance of giving you a tiny fraction of a goal, for one of the 20+ people on your team...

Vanguard = Not for Carebears

From what I've seen it's going to be an MMO among the few that aren't for carebears or the lighthearted. Sure instances from WoW and some other games have their place, but in a true MMO world map, loot drops and such don't need instances. You should have to fight it out with others for such things. Remember when WoW was in Beta, the extent of "pvp" was walking up to someone and asking them if they would allow a fight between the two of you.

Games such as WoW are one giant safe zone really. Not counting the "pvp" in it, the fact of Instances takes out alot of such things. This is why games such as Shadowbane, Neocron and the upcoming Darkfall excell at player versus player. Open ended maps where your clan can control towns, you fight other players almost from the start of the game for the rest of the game, no truly safe leveling. The "danger" adds a level of fun, excitment and randomness to it. Theres no Go Here, Kill This and return all in safety. You have to watch your back, you have to time spawns and fight others off for them.

Depending on how Vanguard implements the pvp if any, the no Instances thing for drops/loot would be awesome. Such mechanics have already worked in the aforementioned games. And granted most of those don't have anywhere near the amount of people WoW does, they still have loyal followings and the best pvp I've seen in MMO's.

Another MMO?

Yet another MMO coming out, with the exact same features of every other MMO. I for one am looking forward to Age of Conan, finally an online ARPG, where the game is not "click on target, hit 4,2,1,5 repeat" I am not sure if this will be the end all be all of MMOs but at least they are trying something different (and I know on slashdot different is good, if it comes from Nintendo that is).

Where have all the nice WoW players gone?

I remember when I got WoW when it first came out. I played it and had a grand old time. People were friendly and helpful, kind and respectful. I'm assuming because everyone was new and figuring out the game. Yet for some reason (it happens with EVERY GAME, esp MMO's), when people get knowledgeable of the game they're patience dies and they become self-absorbed grinding bastards. It seems this attitude is spilling over into Vanguard, and it's just in the BETA! Maybe this breed of MMO pseudo-llama is corrupting our games...
Why do we have no tolerance when we hit 60?

I hate to bring up a dead subject, however...

This is probably the exact same crowd, which will approach any new MMO with the following Logic:

I hate X because it doesnt have Y from Everquest.
This game would be much better if it was Everquest.

In short, Hypocritics and Kainophobists.

Re:Not Invented Here

Way to RTFA.

It's not developers that are doing this, it's the hardcore, epeen waving, fanbois that have the WoW hate-on.