I was really loooking into Vanguard for a while, but one major pitfall is that quite a lot of the player base has already quit. Apparently there were some major flaws at release and if I remember correctly there are only around 50,000 people currently playing.

Tell your friend to multibox WoW. From what I've seen that really makes people enjoy the game again. It's almost like playing for the first time... just with a bunch of kids calling you a bot and hacker.