I will rephrase.
"Vanguard, Irth Online, Planetside, Auto Assault and other MMOs are suffering because they are not like WoW or because reviewers unfairly compared them to WoW." This statement is suspicious at best.
Guild Wars, Final Fantasy Online, Eve and other MMOs are wildly successful becuase they are like WoW and reviewers who have only ever played WoW liked them is also not true.
There is more to Vanguards lack of subscribers than not enough development money or unfair comparisons to WoW. I am not talking about the accuracy or legitamacy of opinions.
I just do not understand why people "pull" for developers that had millions of dollars to work with. They are not Mother Teresa and they are not misunderstood geniues whose genius is destined to be unrecognized in this century.
Sorry, just ranting because I was fooled by Brad's charisma and my hopes were let down by the reality.
It's fairly hypocritical to accuse people of one thing and then do it yourself, mate. With all due respect, I'm not defending Sigil because of I'm some kind of butt kisser (that you can find in every community btw - first and foremost in WoW), but because I honestly like the game.
No doubt about it, from a technical point of view the game was crap. And I could have accepted criticism that aimed at the technical aspects of the game. Fact is however that the majority of reviews did not give bad scores because of the technical problems, but because the game was not what the reviewer anticipated. Hell, I read a German review (and I am not kidding you here) that criticised that you get a mount so late in the game. Truth is you get a mount at level 10... I don't know one other mmorpg where you get a mount that early. In another review the author claimed that the first mount in Vanguard is unaffordable at level 10. Truth is, there is a quest that gives you the mount for free as a reward. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Quests in Vanguard a repetitive - oh really... I take it in WoW every quest is compeltely different from the quest you did before or what - the quest in Vanguard and WoW are pretty much of the same sort. From many reviews it simply becomes clear that the reviewer tested the game for like 10 minutes and then simply gave up because it was not what he/she anticipated.
You know what the key to the success of LOTRO was? Because it was exactely like WoW. You logged in, and it was pretty much clear what you had to do. You did not even have to follow the explanations of NPCs - if you ever played a MMORPG before (or at least WoW) you knew exactely what to do. In Vanguard that's not quite so easy. Depending on the class you are playing you have to invest a bit of time in finding out how exactely it works. Bards for example can compose their own songs - yep, you can create your very own "spells" from different components - and it's such a cool feature, but did you read ever something like that in a review? I did not. There are many other really nice features to be found in Vanguard, but reviewers simply did not mention them. Either because they didn't play the game long enough or because they were biased and wanted to give it a bad score.
In the case of Vanguard the Press simply acted idiotic. Read for example the online review from PC Gamer. According to them Vanguard is a bad game because it does not follow the success pattern that was established with WoW.
It has repetitive questing and only a handful of monsters. And also repetitive textures. Do you honestly want to tell me that the guy who wrote this kind of shit ever played the game? I would be surprised if he ever installed it. Another argument that reviewers always mentioned that the game had virtually no end game content when it was released. How they figuered that out after one or two days of playing is not quite clear to me, but let's just forget that for a moment. Funny thing is however that LOTRO had no end game content when it was released (there was for example not a single raid) and I never read that in a review. But then again, most LOTRO reviews were surrounded on all sides with advertisments for LOTRO, so that might help to get a better score, I guess. Also great was the review that I read where the reviewer complained about the combat system. Too complicated - he couldn't figure out what all the dots were supposed to signify. Well, I mean... what can you say there? If people are too stupid or too lazy to look it up in the manual then it's like fighting against windmills.
It's also interesting that people are always "disappointed" when they talk about Vanguard. I'm seriously wondering what the hell they are disappointed about (apart from the Power Point-like framerate). The game was pretty much what Sigil always said it would be: A group oriented, challenging game, much like Everquest. They said that right from the beginning - just because some people couldn't or did not want to accept it does not change that.
I'm not saying you have to like Vanguard - I'm just saying it's not a bad game. It's certainly not a perfect game. There are many things that you could do better or differently, but that goes for Everquest 2, and WoW as well. People should try it out because some may find it not nearly as bad as some reviews described it.