[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Mike Rozak]

Before I bought it, I didn't expect to like Vanguard. It's designed for
a different sort of player than I am. However, I thought I'd take a look
anyway. To prepare myself for the worst, I read quite a few rants and
reviews about Vanguard. According to the reviews/rants, Vanguard's
biggest problems were:
 
1) Bugs and crashes.
2) High system requirements. (Lag)
3) Grind.
 
 
So far, I've found:
 
1) My vanguard experience has been mostly bug-free... other than setup,
although reviewers didn't seem to have any problems with setup.
 
2) It runs really well on my 2-year old computer. I've been impressed by
this because Vanguard uses bump-mapped specular surfaces everywhere,
even on the grass! or what I take to be the grass. (Someone went a bit
overboard with specularity, kind of like when people went font-crazy
when Macs first appeared.) Specular bump-maps require quite a few
cycles, so much so that I had to shut most of them off for EQ2 and
Oblivion.
 
3) I haven't encountered the grind yet, but I don't expect to hang
around long enough to verify this as being true.
 
 
What's really interesting with the Vanguard reviewers/ranters, as well
as other game reviews/rants that I've read recently, is that there are
huge flaws in Vanguard (from my perspective), but none of the
reviewers/ranters mention them. I won't bother going into the flaws now,
though.
 
So, here's a question? Why do I perceive huge flaws that the reviewers
ranters don't? And vice versa?
 
1) The fundamental game isn't right for me, causing me to nitpick at
"flaws" that people targeted by the game won't see? Could be, but WoW
and EQ2 are essentially the same game, and I didn't cringe at them
nearly as much as I do at Vanguard. (WoW and EQ2 are both less hard-core
than Vanguard though.)
 
2) I'm designing and programming my own game, which has made me more
aware of Vanguard's flaws in ways that reviewers/ranters wouldn't be?
But why the Vanguard team didn't do anything about the flaws is another
discussion... "Frog in gradually-boiling water" design, and/or, one
person's flaw is another person's feature.
 
3) Reviewers/ranters perceive the same flaws as I do, but on a
subconscious level. Since they can't verbalize the problems, they
complain about other issues, much the same as someone will say, "I don't
like him because he laughs like a hyena," when the laugh really has
nothing to do with their like/dislike, but is merely an obvious problem
to point to.
 
4) Am I merely delusional?
 
Any ideas?