[Nipoleon]

Basic Vanguard safety precautions.

If running Vanguard on a low-end system like mine (duocore, 1g ram, geforce 7600) these actions will make dungeon runs less hazardous.

First of all, never run vanguard if you haven't saved your work files (dwg's, docs). Vanguard has a habit of crashing windows xp under certain rare situations.

1. Make a /flush macro button. You can do this by right clicking on an empty button slot in the UI. Flush while travelling after each chunk to be able to travel with a smaller chance of memory leak crash.

2. Before starting a dungeon, either restart vanguard or (like I do) reboot the computer.

3. If you have an empty hard drive reinstall VG to that drive so you can defrag it before every start. Defrag vanguard drive after each patch and before going into long dungeon runs.

These three steps have improved my vanguard experience significantly and taking a 10 minute restart break every now and then helps with the boredom of the grind as well.

P.S.

Other useful macro is /groupcancelinvite (which I buttomized because invite gets bugged if the recipient is chunking or teleporting).

P.P.S

For other wow veterans like myself, vanguard has a steep learning curve when it comes to bug tolerance. If you are running out of patience give this broken game a second chance, because you will some day know when to expect a bug or a crash. Certain parts of the game are so well done its worth the cursing, exp and gear losses to chunk tagging a sector, falling through the floor, trying to ship travel...

When I had my hard times around level 15 I started to gather, spent 5 hours a day lumberjacking, quarrying and getting bug-free treatment (minuscule playstyle is so less hazardous). You get the same blissful feel grinding mats in wow had and soon you will be ready to exp for the next quarter of the level

And the certain people who blindly defend the game on this forum are your evolved forum trolls - defending this pile of bugs when it comes to a smooth gameplay is strangely annoying

P.p.P.p.P.S
That said, it's still an enjoyable game in some aspects and while I'm not going to subscribe for the next couple of months I'll come back and see if this game can be used to staying in shape while waiting for WAR to come and walk over Telon.

[Inara]

Informative post I will say. All good points. The only thing is that its alot of effort into just kicking back and playing for relaxation time. And flush does help but only for so long then you crash anyways. For me its about after 90minutes. Sometimes I make it 3 hours.,

[Thurin]

Good post, Nipoleon. I'll definately try some of these.

[Ceros]

I have Vanguard installed on its own 30 gig partition (V: of course). If you do that, defragging before every launch is unnecessary because the game isn't patched enough to significantly fragment the data with no other activity on that partition. Also remember to turn system restore off on that partition.

[Ceros]

Originally Posted by Nipoleon

That said, it's still an enjoyable game in some aspects and while I'm not going to subscribe for the next couple of months I'll come back and see if this game can be used to staying in shape while waiting for WAR to come and walk over Telon.

I just want to say that I applaud this attitude. For me, I'd rather play Vanguard now with the bugs because I enjoy the game so much I'm willing to play through them. I'm glad that it's out so I have that option. If I was intolerant of the bugs, I'd forget about the game for a couple of months and wait for a new server to launch after April. (assuming new servers continue to launch)