The "Vanguard Sucks" Thread

[conmcb25]

Maybe he is secretly back to playing WoW

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
But if you insist, here is my statement. I'm currently not playing Vanguard, and the turn it takes is greatly diminishing the chance that I will ever pick it up again. That is all I'm going to comment on this issue.

Understandable.

[Asmodean]

Originally posted by DrSpike


Understandable.

Says the man who hasn't actually played the game yet

[DrSpike]

Not quite sure what relevance that has to any of my posts.

[Kuciwalker]

Not quite sure what relevance any of yours posts have.

[conmcb25]

I don't believe relevance has ever been a preq to DrSpike posting

[conmcb25]

Sigil goes down the tubes:

http://www.f13.net/?itemid=560

And Brad doesn't visit the office much?:

http://grouchygamer.blogspot.com/2007/05/brad-mcquaid-abandoned-vanguard-sigil.html

Flame on

[DrSpike]

Oh dear - not good news for the VG fans.

[Asher]

Can someone post the first story? Can't see it from work.

[conmcb25]

First story as requested:

The Short and Morbid Tale of Sigil Games Online

News , Sony , Industry ParanoiaPosted by: schild @ 18:59:13 on 5/14/07

The axe finally fell. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. And while many of you may try to spin this to make SOE look bad, apparently this wasn't really their doing. You see, SOE doesn't own Sigil. It doesn't own Sigil now and they won't own them tomorrow. But they do own Vanguard. What fate awaits that game? I don't know. Don't particularly care either.

But I do know that at approximately 4:30PM today, Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn't seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn't seem like something he'd do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn't. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.

I contacted SOE since I'm not in the business of burning bridges or spinning news and they had this to say:

"...an announcement is forthcoming tomorrow."

Update: There's some debate over this being ALL employees or just some of them. Obviously, it's not ALL of them - after all, someone had to do the firing. Let's just say that - from what I've heard - they don't have enough employees left to update a casual game... like Snood.

[conmcb25]

And hot of the presses, from your favorite MMO producer; Smedley himself:

Hello Everyone,

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

We are also officially opening up forums. In the past, our deal with Sigil didn't allow for this, but as with our other games we fill this is an important part of communicating with the playerbase. You can expect a strong presence from our community team as well as the development team members. While we realize that Sigil had said they wouldn't open up general forums, at SOE we fill this hampers our efforts to communicate effectively with the players. We will continue to support the fansites in a big way, and will be contacting many of them directly to discuss what this change means. By no means do we want to lose the strong fansite support by making this change, but we do think it's important to have a forum for players to communicate directly with SOE.

A few other items I wanted to mention

1. Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard. Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard.

2. We do not plan on making any major changes to Vanguard. Any changes are going to come from the team itself. We aren't mandating any big changes to the game. We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.

3. We do plan on spending a lot of time cleaning up legacy issues with Vanguard and making sure the game's performance improves.

By way of comparison, this team is approx. the same size as the EQ2 team and I feel like that team has done an amazing job improving EQ2 since it's launch. We intend to do the same thing for Vanguard and it is our hope that the players feel like we're doing right by them.

Smed

[Asher]

Man, how right was I.

[Kuciwalker]

New Game Experience

[Harovan]

If you read the opening post carefully, this development comes at no surprise. And contrary of what a large part of the fanbase seems to believe (namely at some poisonous überguild's website), it was not SOE screwing this game up. The Vanguard you see today is a living proof of why perfectionists should not try to make software. They had ample time and ample money to make a good game, and some great ideas, yet they failed, because McQuaid may know a thing or two about designing games, but he certainly knows nothing about leading a project or running a company.

There were 2 things that struck me back in January, when the game was released at least 6 months prematurely. First the very fact that it was released ("Trust me, the game won't be released before it's ready, and it's ready when it's ready when it's ready when I say it's ready yada yada...") - this I was ready to accept through my nose because I saw the economical necessity. And second, that there were no official forums. And the second one was even more disturbing given the pretty good community work Sigil has done throughout development (compare this with SOE's lie and screw tactics). This fact was screaming "There's going to be a crapload of trouble and we're not ready to take it".

Being well aware of this, I nonetheless decided to give it a try, namely because I hadn't played the beta for 2 months straight (thanks to NWN2 and general MMOG sickness) and therefor didn't know exactly the state of the game. My first experience after about 2 weeks of playing and slowly crawling out of the newbie levels was, what the hell did happen to The Vision^TM? And no, it is not the altars and the pretty much dumbed down death penalty. What ruined the game for me (besides the bugs and crashes of course) was - shock! - instant intercontinental travel and double XP weekends. I will try to explain it.

The world is vast, there are three continents and each has a number of starting areas, which are channeled together at later levels. Each continent has different building styles, different weapon and armor looks, different continental bonuses, different quest lines etc. That is good, variety is always good. The game is designed around this. The quests are balanced, so that you can follow the quest line on one continent and enjoy the rewards before they become obsolete by your level. That was the idea behind slow levelling, remember? You should develop your character on one continent until it outgrows it and can afford either a player made ship (expensive!) or public intercontinental travels (again expensive, newbie beware!). Then you're teh cool.

Now comes the biggest sin (aside from releasing early): Too many servers and not enough people. The best way would have been the approach of other games, create a small number of servers and as soon as one is filled to 75-80% of planned capacity, begin discouraging new players from signing up and open a new server. Sigil and SOE (as server host) did the opposite - let's open lots of servers and pray that people will come. But they did not come, at least not in numbers. Where does this leave us?

Three sparsely populated continents with 3 quest lines, all with very desirable rewards. People complain that they can't get groups to do their quests. So let's introduce intercontinental travel, not for cheap but even for free! Now, peasants, enjoy your new freedom and go grouping! And people eagerly did. Just now they did not have one, but three quest lines to follow, which led to quite some unpleasantries. Too little allowance in the quest logs. ****ty looks as you mix styles. Outdated quest rewards, as you basically do 3 quests but can wear only 1 piece per slot. And as if that wasn't enough, ample double XP weekends, which even worsened this situation.

The last straw for me was the announcement, that 2-dot (solo content) and 3-dot (small group content) mobs are having their HP's reduced and yield more XP (yet more XP, shudder). XP is cool, mmkay, that should attract the WoW players, right? Sadly it did not. WoW players play WoW, or now LotRO. They don't care for an unfinished, buggy mess even if you throw buckets of XP at them. But this finally pissed off a large part of Vanguard's core playerbase. I left March 28th, and as I know now, I'm not the only one by a long shot who left around this time. People left in droves.

I certainly don't give a damn about the money I spent on it, I have made worse investments in my life and thankfully enough to fund my hobby. But I somewhat feel sorry for the time it has cost me, even though it was fun while it lasted. But with hindsight I don't regret my decision from March 28th, after my first non-free month was about to run out, to pull the plug for the time being, until better times come. And I salute to my principle to never -ever- subscribe to an online game, however hyped, other than on a monthly base.

I have absolutely no trust to whatever Smedley utters about the future of this game. Everything this man has ever said openly was a lie or at least an halftruth. Still I believe that Vanguard does have a future, otherwise SOE would not have taken it. I'm not saying I will never touch it again once SOE had it in its hands, that is more a thing for fanatics. But I will very carefully watch what Sony makes of it before I consider to play it again. Suffice to say, up to this day I never picked up again a MMOG that I had ditched before.

[FrostyBoy]

Excuse my ignorance. I just checked out Vanguards website, the game seems quite alright; what is the major problem here?

edit: nvm I just read Ralphs post