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Fan Faire blog - good and bad news
Mardy
Member Posts: 2,213
For those interested I found this blog while reading about EQ news. There's a section about Vanguard, and you can feel free to read the blog to see what information this player got from Smed himself. Blog is here:
The good news is Smed said the game should be around for a few more years, so there's no immediate or near future plan to shut the game down. The bad news is Vanguard pretty much has no fulltime developers left, as it shares developers that focus primarily on other games. I'll copy/paste the part he posted about Vanguard below:
Vanguard
When SOE said Vanguard wasn’t on the official list of Fan Faire games – they weren’t kidding. I couldn’t find a single developer in Las Vegas this year for Vanguard. They didn’t make the bus trip. They also had a kiosk running the game last year but this year? Nope. There was a live quest on the schedule but I took my wife out to lunch instead. There was still a Vanguard banner hanging in the main hall but that was about it.
I did learn a few things about the game – even though the developers were absent. First, there are no plans to shutter the game. I spoke to John Smedley, President of SOE, directly about the game. Let me say that he was open and honest and we had a great dialogue. He was a pleasure to talk to and regardless of what people say about the guy he is a gamer at heart and cares about the games we all play – including Vanguard. I asked him if the game was in maintenance mode and he said it’s a step above maintenance mode. The truth is that the remaining developers are shared with other games (EQ2, EQ Next etc…) and they allocate time for them to work on Vanguard as the schedule permits. I basically understood it to mean that Vanguard doesn’t have any more full time developers. That was a bit of a disappointment but Smed stated that he thinks the game will stick around for a few more years. He’s also open to ideas on how to make the game more popular.
He acknowledged the chicken and egg problem with spending money on the game and I thanked him for all the effort and money they put in the game since they acquired it from Sigil. It’s truly come a long way. We also talked about doing some kind of free to play server for Vanguard but he wasn’t sure how the “core gamer” that’s left in Vanguard would respond to such a thing. Russell Shanks, EVP / COO of SOE was sitting next to him when we spoke and they both were interested in giving Vanguard a spark of life.
Another developer told me they might end up moving the Vanguard servers to the East coast. Not sure really what the point of that would be but it would be closer to me so that can’t be all bad. This same developer said VG was considering the F2P model but the recent staff reductions hit VG pretty hard and he didn’t feel like the resources were still there to invest that much time in the game. That was also a bummer. I was pitching an idea of a free to play Vanguard server to let people who bought the game come back and see how much progress had been made since release and maybe they would transfer over to the Telon server or subscribe to keep the game alive. At this point, why not do it? What’s the alternative?
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
Comments
Not surprising but still a bummer. I think Vanguard has the most potential out of any MMO.
Interesting. "Few more years" sounds like an audacious thing for Smedley to say though. I wonder if that's what the blogger took it to mean, or if that was a direct quote.
I don't think that really matters. I took it to mean 'as long as people will pay to play the game, even though we're not allocating any resources to the game, we'll continue to take their money.'
Smed may be a gamer in his heart but he's a businessman in his head.
Honestly now that we know for sure EQ3 is in the works (Everquest Next), there goes pretty much any hopes for SOE to do anything to Vanguard. Prior to this fan faire, EQ Next was just a rumor, something hinted by someone at SOE but there was no concrete info. This time we saw actual ingame pics and demos, so they have already been working on it.
This imo is bad news for Vanguard, because EQ3 is for sure going to replace what people was hoping to get out of Vanguard. It'd be more like what Vanguard should've been, if given full SOE resources and development team from scratch. Now players in VG are asking for free to play to be added to the game, but what they don't realize is that doing such thing requires dev resources. Vanguard already don't have any fulltime developers anymore, I have high doubts they'll spend whatever leftover dev time on developing free to play coding, which is actually a lot of work since they have to come out with a new pricing model, new restrictions for players, and of course add RMT items in the game so people will buy them to fund the game. All that requires dev resources, something Vanguard simply does not have.
So enjoy the game as is, because VG may just be the way it is for years to come.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
Hmm didnt think of that, but compare it to EQMAC, that community is only 200 people maybe, MAYBE 300 and thats a stretch. yet its still online. It has 1 server, it has a loyal community. I think thats what to expect from Vanguard in regards to how SoE treats it.
P.S. Personally I think, the hard-core Vanboi's n Gurls need to get together and make a damn Viral Youtube Video of Vanguard and get people playing it. If SoE wont advertise for you make a retarded viral video and im sure people will at least give the free trial a go.
The soldier does the killing, the leader does the convincing. Of course he sounded truthful, you spoke to the leader. To be a leader in a business like SOE, you've pretty much mastered the art of lying and BS'isng. It's been established for many years now, Smed is a dishonest junkie. That man has zero credibility left with the gamerbase.
Sony only bought out Vanguard so they could remove it as possible competition against their 'precious' EQ franchise, of which they hardly support, given their lengths in audacity to protect it.
Whenever Vanguard got some headway in growing, SOE would drop some kind of bomb to halt it's growth. Minor things like 'against-the-grind' mechanics (such as riftways, removing boat transports), to outright peculiar moves like pretty much everything "Silius" ever did. All the additions he ever accomplished were strange, and didn't make much sense in the game world. He even flashed his arrogance by constantly naming game items after himself. Stupid. Yeah, I suppose it was generous enough to get something in the game, but I, like a handful of other players, were generally dissatisfied in the way Silius took things. I know a Lot of people that left due to this weird direction. It was around the time the 'big bomb' was dropped, when they added riftways and removed city factions... what a joke.
It was all intentional of course. To keep Vanguard "slightly alive" enough to generate scrap revenue, and to devote everything else to EverQuest. Silius, after all, is and was an EverQuest 2 developer first, and a Vanguard developer second.
Am I helping to connect the dots here?
Smedley is nothing more than a deceptive and rather ineffective businessman. He manages to keep the scraps afloat, and has somehow managed to keep SOE from sinking altogether. Be it the bungling of SWG, Vanguard or any other choice, SOE's direction is clear. They want to keep their shitty EQ franchise as "king", yet can barely manage to do that.
And who seriously gives a shit about EverQuest Next. EverQuest 3... really? No thanks.
Their only goal is to undermine their own playerbase to support future products that no one gives a damn about. EQnext is clearly a giant money pit, and I hope it's the total epic failure that finally brings SOE to it's pathetically weak knees. Maybe then someone from Sony will finally open their god damn eyes.
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Oh, and if no one believes me in the fact that SOE bought out Vanguard to remove it as competition, then I'd advise you to do some research. Starting when Vanguard was in development and how they wanted to keep it as a hollow-shell during their 'twinkle-in-the-eye' wonder years, hoping for EQ2 to be better than WoW. Up to the point this article is about, how they COMPLETELY REMOVED VANGUARD from the Fan Faire, but KEEP Planetside. Because I'm sure Planetside is so damn populated. (rolls eyes)
Oh, yeah. Sigil had everything under control when SOE suddenly bought them out, or how was it now?
Sorry but Brad messed this game up, if he just would have had some decent programmers the game might have been pretty big but it were dead in the water already when SOE bought it. Too bad but it can never regain the reputation it got at launch and that was Sigils own fault.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Supposedly, the game was dead in the water, and useless, so Sony bought it as a sound business move. Or was it from the depths of their heart, a kind gesture to save a dying gem?
Neither.
Vanguard was competition, and Sony's investors called for some sort of action. They bought it up, and left it adrift at sea. Cutthroat business 101, if you can't compete with a possible contender, then remove it or buy it yourself.
Why don't you run along to your EQNext thread. You seem to be enjoying yourself on promoting that.
I don't believe for a second that Smedley will ever read that, but here we go:
JS you, your company and the constantly non effort your team has shown over the years are a huge disgrace for the whole industry. SOE is taking pride of Everquest forgetting that it has been made by Verant they just bought them up and managed to destroy the open world with PoP and more so Omens of War.
Despite Everquest 1 Soe has yet to release a game coming close in subs. Everquest 2 could have done well if they would have focused on the loyal Everquest 1 crowd, instead of nge-ing the game after the WoW modell of constantly dumbing everything down.
Please stop claiming that Soe didn't influence Sigil they did in almost every aspect of the game, Beta 3 has been a very dumbed down Vanguard with a wowlike UI AND they removed the reactive combat system, just stupid.
Usually I'm not buying into conspiracy theories but facts are:
Soe forced an unready release
Soe influenced Beta 3
Soe knew that the game wasn't ready
Investors wanted the everquestlike competitor to fail
Although I've quit the game long ago, Sigil's Vanguard (till Beta 2) will remain in my heart as the closest thing to Everquest 1 I've yet played.
As for Sillius and his carebear vision fail, fail and fail.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
Sorry but Brad messed this game up, if he just would have had some decent programmers the game might have been pretty big but it were dead in the water already when SOE bought it. Too bad but it can never regain the reputation it got at launch and that was Sigils own fault.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Supposedly, the game was dead in the water, and useless, so Sony bought it as a sound business move. Or was it from the depths of their heart, a kind gesture to save a dying gem?
Neither.
Vanguard was competition, and Sony's investors called for some sort of action. They bought it up, and left it adrift at sea. Cutthroat business 101, if you can't compete with a possible contender, then remove it or buy it yourself.
Why don't you run along to your EQNext thread. You seem to be enjoying yourself on promoting that.
The game would of closed down immediately if Brad had not found a buyer in SOE. Do you seriously believe that this game would of survived without SOE picking it up? Who was lined up to save this disaster after Brad bailed on this project? Really you need to stop with the fanboi conspiracy stuff because it was old then and it is old now.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
Sigil was out of cash. SOE as a publisher was under no obligation to inject anymore money or resources then what was already wasted by Sigil and Brad Mcquaid. Yet despite the aforementioned SOE still provided extra developers when Sigil was scrambling to get the game finished because..SURPRISE they had no more money to hire new staff or pay their current staff to continue development which was a lot more then any publisher had responsibility to do with such a FUBAR'd project.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)