[Twobit Whore]

WoW will bring in and keep non-MMO players. VG will not. VG will appeal to former EQ players and that's about it. And it won't appeal to all of them, only the ones who sit on forums and reminisce about how fun the game was pre-Luclin and how the spires and the bazaar and GYs and PoK ruined the game. Not the actual content of the expansions, just the fact that it was 'dumbed down'. So you have a subset of people within a subset that Vanguard appeals to. Then on top of that you have people who think VG isn't anything like what was promised and how brokers and the idea of makiing death penalites lighter and travel more convenient is akin to Luclin/PoK in EQ. So now you have alienated a subset of your subset within a subset.

It doesn't matter how 'core' or 'casual' you try to make Vanguard, it's not going to get new people to the genre like WoW simply because of the preconceptions and early word of mouth. All it will do is alienate even MORE of the people inside a subset within a subset within a subset.

Tack on the ridiculus hardware requirements/performance issues and it adds yet ANOTHER subset to the initial bunch.

Honestly, the best thing they could do at this point is increase the death penalty, make levelling slower, remove brokers and the idea of 'faster' travel. Call the game a niche game for the hardcore and keep your 50k or so whatever people that will play it for the next 5 years.