Myth: Sigil alone was responsible for the shoddy development of Vanguard.
Reality: "Although SOE was responsible chiefly for marketing, publication, distribution, subscription services and maintenance of game servers, some of SOE's game designers and artists did participate directly in Vanguard's development."
Myth: SOE had nothing whatsoever to do with the early release of a broken and incomplete product.
Reality: "Had I had the financial resources, ability to place the product later, etc. I would have given us about 3 more months to get more polish in, more high level content in, and to distance ourselves from the WoW expansion." (Sigil CEO)
From reading this information, it seems to me that SOE worked directly on this busted piece of garbage, pushed it live before it was ready, and then bought Sigil out after the game fell flat on its face.
Things you fail to mention ...
Sigils COE was Brad Mcquad who squadered several years, and several million dollars away (50 million?) before he went to MS to further fund his game. MS eventually got tired of throwing good money after bad and cut off the cash cow. At this point Vanguard and sigil would have died still born if SOE had not stepped in and given the imcompetant developer yet more time, money and resourse to try and get the game live and polished. SOE eventualy (like MS) had to tell Bradto get his shit together and launch which as we all can see today he wasn't able to. Had any company given Brad a blank check he's probably still be leeching a existance yet to today with Vanguard in a unfinished state. Oh wait he still is as he had no problem it seems with having most of Sigil employees pink slipped in the parking lot while he was off accepting a deal as advisor for Vanguard with SOE.
Seems to me If you wanted to place blame you could toss some at Brad for wasting 50 million dollars, or at MS for not being willing lose to even more millions on this turkey then they did., but in the end Yes we should blame SOE because if they hadn't stepped in Vanguard never would have launched, and We wouldn't have wasted our money trying this turkey (in some peoples cases multiple times) and having threads like these.
Has SOE done ftp on any game? None I can recall.My sence is they care so little about VG they don't even want to breathe life into the game with FTP. Myself...I would start playing the moment if was free.
I haven't logged onto Vanguard for about 2 months but I still pay my subscription
Anyway I have some really good news for everyone that to be honest I only read now on the official forms ....they are merging the 4 servers into 1 USA server.
Vanguard doesn't need saving anymore ....now there will be ample people on the one remaining server
Now before people say " an MMO cant have one server and call itself successful" ...doesn't EVE have one server ?
This to me is good news ..and some people think SOE doesn't care ?
Why has almost no-one recognized my point ....let me say it again ?
VANGUARD DOESN'T NEED SAVING ...THEY ARE MERGING THE SERVERS
Its like the series Flash Forward where people find out they actually aren't going to die and they have a future ...its awesome .Can someone try to be at least a little happy with this ?
Vanguard doesn't have the reputation like WoW to charge money for people to pay it.
DDO didn't have that great of a reputation as well, but it managed with the sudden spike of ads and the fact that a P2P quality game was going f2p... well, it was new, then.
It's not impossible, if Sony was willing to sacrifice the money in developing the f2p model (which I doubt), and the ads (which I doubt as well), and maybe even reviving servers if the population does indeed, somehow, spike (which I doubt x3), maybe then they will have some kind of game rolling. Right now? this game is as stagnant as... a... couch potato that is reaching for the job column in vain hope of getting their ass outta the seat.
Technical issues aside, Vanguard was the last game that I truly enjoyed the world as a whole. All other games since have felt incomplete to me. Kind of funny...
I doubt I will trust SOE with any other game. I was burned by SWG with the best of them. I stood by Vanguard for as long as I could, and sometimes I am drawn back because I get sick of playing what's available today.
If SOE does not wish to support Vanguard, then I agree they should look at their pricing. F2P doesn't make me too happy, but if it meant Vanguard could live longer, then so be it.
I haven't logged onto Vanguard for about 2 months but I still pay my subscription
Anyway I have some really good news for everyone that to be honest I only read now on the official forms ....they are merging the 4 servers into 1 USA server.
Vanguard doesn't need saving anymore ....now there will be ample people on the one remaining server
Now before people say " an MMO cant have one server and call itself successful" ...doesn't EVE have one server ?
This to me is good news ..and some people think SOE doesn't care ?
Why has almost no-one recognized my point ....let me say it again ?
VANGUARD DOESN'T NEED SAVING ...THEY ARE MERGING THE SERVERS
Its like the series Flash Forward where people find out they actually aren't going to die and they have a future ...its awesome .Can someone try to be at least a little happy with this ?
Umm.. perhaps because merging servers isn't "saving" the game?
Merging servers is only going to be a temporary solution to any issue and even then it doesn't fix most of the games issues. There is a reason why 3 full servers worth of people left the game and they are reducing down to one server. That is not going to increase resources to develop the game.
Mergers in the past didn't help the game avoid these mergers, so not sure what you think will be resolved from another round of mergers.
Oh by the way, eve has 1 server, but over 300,000 subscribers. Vanguard has 1 server, but I doubt it has more than 5,000 subscribers.
To give you credit, merging servers is the right thing to do for the health of the game (maybe way to late), but it isn't something to cheer about. That is like asking someone why someone who just got diagnosed with 6 months to live isn't happy they just got a slice of cake.
There will always be those that want to save the Lame Horse. The Horse will never be a work-horse, accomplished or competitor in it's field, and Vanguard hasn't been for a very long time and never will be.
The server merge should have been done 3-years ago, but now that it is finally, lets just let the kids ride this nag slowly in a big circle around the ring. It's not such a big deal.
Hahaha F2P isn't going to save this game. It will only just delay the inevatible. There's reasons not to come back to Vanguard and the 15 dollar Sub Tag isn't whats stopping people from coming to this game. Its the reputation and launch flop of epic proportions. If 15 sub fee was all that was stopping gamers from playing this game it would have a considerable population growth after the free trial launched. Yet all it has is a crap ton of free toons that are just on the isle and nobody in the actual game. Its going to 1 server because paying to keep 4 non populated servers is more expensive then just keeping 1 non populated server. This game is over. 99% of us MMOers get that this game is dead the other 1% need to catch up. Stop wasting your money on this game your toons will be getting deleted shortly soon.
Vanguard remains one of the few games I haven't given a solid try. Not that I don't want to, it's just that their trial keeps asking for a credit card and that makes me nervous. We're talking about SOE, here...
I really do hope, for the sake of its small but loyal player base, that something happens to turn it around. Like many MMO's but even moreso, IMO, this games weakness is its lack of accessibility. Like I said, even the free trial deters some of us might-be subscribers, and few who can't try, will buy into a game that's teetering on the brink like this one.
I'm pretty sure you can try the game without a credit card. Just make a new station account if your current one is giving you problems with a credit card request.
havent read all the thoughs, but VG should just fade away, I played it for 2 months in march and april 2010, and thought wow how is this game not bigger then this. Then I hit 25 and the newness wore off and realized hey there is ABSOLUTELY no character development. No talent trees, no way to customize your char. With a good AA system or talent tree this game had a lot of potential. RIFT will do what VG failed to do.
Vanguard joins Horizons, AC2 and Shadowbane as games that all had tremendous potential but couldnt follow thru with what was needed
if SOE wanna to give up VG,plz make the game open source,may been someone can keep the service moving.living is everthing for hardcore
My point exactly. If players are going to be responsible for marketting and development, the game should be open-source, not pay-to-play. Why pay SOE if the players do all the work for themselves?
Concering other comments about Sigil/SOE, I don't deny Sigil made mistakes; Brad lists a bunch of them pubilcly. At the same time, some try to say that SOE had nothing to do with the disaster. I dispute that. According to sources referenced in the wiki, SOE was directly involved in development; and SOE set the release date regardless of the state of the game, and how it coincided with the WoW expansion.
The development was shoddy or incomplete; Sigil and SOE were both involved. The release was ill-timed; it seems that this was SOE's decision.
If VG went opened source, dedicated players would polish it up in no time. The guys who do mods to Fo3 alone in one year did one hundred times the new content you got in Vangaurd since launch.
If VG went opened source, dedicated players would polish it up in no time. The guys who do mods to Fo3 alone in one year did one hundred times the new content you got in Vangaurd since launch.
Its just not a viable option. Remember they are licensing the engine that is used in Vanguard, that comes with its own set of restrictions. Furthermore, mmorpgs cannot have community generated content at this point, its been thrown around by many of the top mmo companies and they havent found a viable and safe solution just yet.
Also to those saying f2p is the solution. No its not. I think these people just want to play the game for free and then leave it just as fast. The entire game would have to be redesigned with a cash shop in mind, and that wouldnt work out too well.
The only viable solution at this point is for Sony to pump money into the project and have a re-release in the form of an expansion. The engine was originally intended to be upgraded to the unreal 3 engine when the time came. Well nows that time. If they chose to go this rout, it would be brilliant marketing to allow the game to be free until the expansion is released, allowing for a player base to form with no strings attached.
SOE already has one F2P mmo (FreeRealms), another (Clone Wars Online) in development, multiple f2p non-mmo multiplayer games like Infantry for example. They also have several F2P online ccgs and Pox Nora, as well as the Agency facebook game. All of those are supported by SOE's Station Cash micro-transaction infrastructure.
They also haven't announced the business models for The Agency or DCUO yet.
So...
They have an existing micro-transactions infrastructure that is currently supporting several F2P titles. I suspect the income from this rivals or surpasses any subscription income they are pulling in.
They have more F2P titles on the horizon.
It could just be the development costs associated with converting Vanguard to a F2P model that is preventing it from happening. The money men have to be convinced that the initial investment would pay off in the long run. It's a risk Turbine took with DDO and that seems to have certainly paid off for them, and set a precedent in the industry that makes future F2P conversions of underperforming mmos slightly more likely to get the green light.
Also, I have played Vanguard recently and it has aged very well imho.
Actually Free Realms is not a free to play game anymore. It was when it was released, but soe changed it to a subscription only model with cash shop. You can still try any character up to level 4, but beyond that is a subscription fee.
If anything, that shows that soe really doesn't understand the free to play market all that well. Considering vanguard is designed on the subscription model it would take some serious effort to retool the game to be successful as a cash shop free to play game. It took Turbine somewhere around 9 months to convert DDO and who knows how long to convert LOTRO.
Free to play is really the only option for VG, but considering the effort and understanding to make that happen I doubt it is possible and will never happen.
Well tried the game.. it just isn't fun... To save it ? Possibly... take a page from DDO... change it to F2P and add an item mall... that seems to be the trick now-a-days in resurrecting near dead games. Hell the koreans/japanese developers pioneered that trick... send their dead games to the US audience... add an item mall.... taa-daaa.. an instant resurrection and hit. The key word now seems to be..casual mmo... sure I've been hardcore before (1996-2007) on EQ and WoW... but I find that I no longer have the inclination and time to sit thru 8-12 hour playing sessions. I simply got old.
Comments
SOE was not even involved with Sigil until about 9 months before release.
SOE was not a part of the development of Vanguard.
Edited to add the links....notice the dates. First one is the partnership, second is the buyout.
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/22202-soe-publish-vanguard.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13956
F2P is the only way to save Vanguard.
Vanguard doesn't have the reputation like WoW to charge money for people to pay it.
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/RZetlin
SOE will never go F2P.
How about $7.99 a month. I'd go back for that.
Things you fail to mention ...
Sigils COE was Brad Mcquad who squadered several years, and several million dollars away (50 million?) before he went to MS to further fund his game. MS eventually got tired of throwing good money after bad and cut off the cash cow. At this point Vanguard and sigil would have died still born if SOE had not stepped in and given the imcompetant developer yet more time, money and resourse to try and get the game live and polished. SOE eventualy (like MS) had to tell Bradto get his shit together and launch which as we all can see today he wasn't able to. Had any company given Brad a blank check he's probably still be leeching a existance yet to today with Vanguard in a unfinished state. Oh wait he still is as he had no problem it seems with having most of Sigil employees pink slipped in the parking lot while he was off accepting a deal as advisor for Vanguard with SOE.
Seems to me If you wanted to place blame you could toss some at Brad for wasting 50 million dollars, or at MS for not being willing lose to even more millions on this turkey then they did., but in the end Yes we should blame SOE because if they hadn't stepped in Vanguard never would have launched, and We wouldn't have wasted our money trying this turkey (in some peoples cases multiple times) and having threads like these.
Has SOE done ftp on any game? None I can recall.My sence is they care so little about VG they don't even want to breathe life into the game with FTP. Myself...I would start playing the moment if was free.
Why has almost no-one recognized my point ....let me say it again ?
VANGUARD DOESN'T NEED SAVING ...THEY ARE MERGING THE SERVERS
Its like the series Flash Forward where people find out they actually aren't going to die and they have a future ...its awesome .Can someone try to be at least a little happy with this ?
"after the time of dice came the day of mice "
There are only four(?) servers left so US PvE and PvP will merge, EU PvE and PvP will merge. Is that what you are saying?
http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts/list.m?topic_id=53481
they are going to merge ALL servers US and EU into 1 server.
F2p is the only solution imo ......
DDO didn't have that great of a reputation as well, but it managed with the sudden spike of ads and the fact that a P2P quality game was going f2p... well, it was new, then.
It's not impossible, if Sony was willing to sacrifice the money in developing the f2p model (which I doubt), and the ads (which I doubt as well), and maybe even reviving servers if the population does indeed, somehow, spike (which I doubt x3), maybe then they will have some kind of game rolling. Right now? this game is as stagnant as... a... couch potato that is reaching for the job column in vain hope of getting their ass outta the seat.
Technical issues aside, Vanguard was the last game that I truly enjoyed the world as a whole. All other games since have felt incomplete to me. Kind of funny...
I doubt I will trust SOE with any other game. I was burned by SWG with the best of them. I stood by Vanguard for as long as I could, and sometimes I am drawn back because I get sick of playing what's available today.
If SOE does not wish to support Vanguard, then I agree they should look at their pricing. F2P doesn't make me too happy, but if it meant Vanguard could live longer, then so be it.
Umm.. perhaps because merging servers isn't "saving" the game?
Merging servers is only going to be a temporary solution to any issue and even then it doesn't fix most of the games issues. There is a reason why 3 full servers worth of people left the game and they are reducing down to one server. That is not going to increase resources to develop the game.
Mergers in the past didn't help the game avoid these mergers, so not sure what you think will be resolved from another round of mergers.
Oh by the way, eve has 1 server, but over 300,000 subscribers. Vanguard has 1 server, but I doubt it has more than 5,000 subscribers.
To give you credit, merging servers is the right thing to do for the health of the game (maybe way to late), but it isn't something to cheer about. That is like asking someone why someone who just got diagnosed with 6 months to live isn't happy they just got a slice of cake.
There will always be those that want to save the Lame Horse. The Horse will never be a work-horse, accomplished or competitor in it's field, and Vanguard hasn't been for a very long time and never will be.
The server merge should have been done 3-years ago, but now that it is finally, lets just let the kids ride this nag slowly in a big circle around the ring. It's not such a big deal.
Hahaha F2P isn't going to save this game. It will only just delay the inevatible. There's reasons not to come back to Vanguard and the 15 dollar Sub Tag isn't whats stopping people from coming to this game. Its the reputation and launch flop of epic proportions. If 15 sub fee was all that was stopping gamers from playing this game it would have a considerable population growth after the free trial launched. Yet all it has is a crap ton of free toons that are just on the isle and nobody in the actual game. Its going to 1 server because paying to keep 4 non populated servers is more expensive then just keeping 1 non populated server. This game is over. 99% of us MMOers get that this game is dead the other 1% need to catch up. Stop wasting your money on this game your toons will be getting deleted shortly soon.
Vanguard remains one of the few games I haven't given a solid try. Not that I don't want to, it's just that their trial keeps asking for a credit card and that makes me nervous. We're talking about SOE, here...
I really do hope, for the sake of its small but loyal player base, that something happens to turn it around. Like many MMO's but even moreso, IMO, this games weakness is its lack of accessibility. Like I said, even the free trial deters some of us might-be subscribers, and few who can't try, will buy into a game that's teetering on the brink like this one.
I'm pretty sure you can try the game without a credit card. Just make a new station account if your current one is giving you problems with a credit card request.
The Isale of dawn trial is free.
havent read all the thoughs, but VG should just fade away, I played it for 2 months in march and april 2010, and thought wow how is this game not bigger then this. Then I hit 25 and the newness wore off and realized hey there is ABSOLUTELY no character development. No talent trees, no way to customize your char. With a good AA system or talent tree this game had a lot of potential. RIFT will do what VG failed to do.
Vanguard joins Horizons, AC2 and Shadowbane as games that all had tremendous potential but couldnt follow thru with what was needed
if SOE wanna to give up VG,plz make the game open source,may been someone can keep the service moving.living is everthing for hardcore
My point exactly. If players are going to be responsible for marketting and development, the game should be open-source, not pay-to-play. Why pay SOE if the players do all the work for themselves?
Concering other comments about Sigil/SOE, I don't deny Sigil made mistakes; Brad lists a bunch of them pubilcly. At the same time, some try to say that SOE had nothing to do with the disaster. I dispute that. According to sources referenced in the wiki, SOE was directly involved in development; and SOE set the release date regardless of the state of the game, and how it coincided with the WoW expansion.
The development was shoddy or incomplete; Sigil and SOE were both involved. The release was ill-timed; it seems that this was SOE's decision.
Silius, aka Salem Grant, killed Vanguard long, long ago. Killed it dead.
If VG went opened source, dedicated players would polish it up in no time. The guys who do mods to Fo3 alone in one year did one hundred times the new content you got in Vangaurd since launch.
Its just not a viable option. Remember they are licensing the engine that is used in Vanguard, that comes with its own set of restrictions. Furthermore, mmorpgs cannot have community generated content at this point, its been thrown around by many of the top mmo companies and they havent found a viable and safe solution just yet.
Also to those saying f2p is the solution. No its not. I think these people just want to play the game for free and then leave it just as fast. The entire game would have to be redesigned with a cash shop in mind, and that wouldnt work out too well.
The only viable solution at this point is for Sony to pump money into the project and have a re-release in the form of an expansion. The engine was originally intended to be upgraded to the unreal 3 engine when the time came. Well nows that time. If they chose to go this rout, it would be brilliant marketing to allow the game to be free until the expansion is released, allowing for a player base to form with no strings attached.
On the topic of SOE and F2P
SOE already has one F2P mmo (FreeRealms), another (Clone Wars Online) in development, multiple f2p non-mmo multiplayer games like Infantry for example. They also have several F2P online ccgs and Pox Nora, as well as the Agency facebook game. All of those are supported by SOE's Station Cash micro-transaction infrastructure.
They also haven't announced the business models for The Agency or DCUO yet.
So...
They have an existing micro-transactions infrastructure that is currently supporting several F2P titles. I suspect the income from this rivals or surpasses any subscription income they are pulling in.
They have more F2P titles on the horizon.
It could just be the development costs associated with converting Vanguard to a F2P model that is preventing it from happening. The money men have to be convinced that the initial investment would pay off in the long run. It's a risk Turbine took with DDO and that seems to have certainly paid off for them, and set a precedent in the industry that makes future F2P conversions of underperforming mmos slightly more likely to get the green light.
Also, I have played Vanguard recently and it has aged very well imho.
Actually Free Realms is not a free to play game anymore. It was when it was released, but soe changed it to a subscription only model with cash shop. You can still try any character up to level 4, but beyond that is a subscription fee.
If anything, that shows that soe really doesn't understand the free to play market all that well. Considering vanguard is designed on the subscription model it would take some serious effort to retool the game to be successful as a cash shop free to play game. It took Turbine somewhere around 9 months to convert DDO and who knows how long to convert LOTRO.
Free to play is really the only option for VG, but considering the effort and understanding to make that happen I doubt it is possible and will never happen.
Well tried the game.. it just isn't fun... To save it ? Possibly... take a page from DDO... change it to F2P and add an item mall... that seems to be the trick now-a-days in resurrecting near dead games. Hell the koreans/japanese developers pioneered that trick... send their dead games to the US audience... add an item mall.... taa-daaa.. an instant resurrection and hit. The key word now seems to be..casual mmo... sure I've been hardcore before (1996-2007) on EQ and WoW... but I find that I no longer have the inclination and time to sit thru 8-12 hour playing sessions. I simply got old.