For me personally, I loved the game for a short while before f2p. So much so that I subscribed for a month. What turned me off was the population and I just couldn't bring myself to play after the trial isle. Now that it's f2p, the pop is back and I'm loving it. I can actually enjoy the content with other people now!
Honestly folks have a short attention span. SOE did not create vangaurd. Sigil did. In beta we all knew Sigil was in trouble, I can remember the baords being on fire we we all found out they were looking at SOE to buy it out.
Soe took it over, and then stuck the game in maintenance mode right after it released. The game was full of bugs from day one. Soe did everything in their power to kill vangaurd. No updates, not bug fixes, the game was treated as secondary curiosity.until recently.
Now that SOE is taking massive hits after DCUO failed, EQNEXT had to be totaly scrapped and they are no redoing it with the planetside 2 engine instead of the DCUO engine that it was coded in.
SOE has a lot of problem. First and formost they have an anti soe crowd for SWG, then they get a lot of grief due to the fact the screw up their games moer than they help them.
The fact still remains the same vangaurd will always be on the back burner compared to eq, and eq2. It was a threat and that is why they really don't want it around. Right now they are trying to squeeze every last bit of cash out of it with the fremium model. I fully expect in a years time to hear the anouncement that vangaurd has been sunsetted.
Sony has done nothing to this game since a while after launch, and then it was buggy and not worth the money i spent on it. The bes tthing about Vanguard was the Collectors edition box i got, literally the box was better than the rest of the stuff they gave me. I still have the box but i think i trashed the rest of it lol.
But the problem with sony is they make a bad mistake with a game then they shutdown and move on to the next one. Swg they gave up on that EQ2 has bugs vanguard failed, they dont notice the trend with their games THEY ALL FAIL EXCEPT FREE REALMS OF ALL THINGS.
Originally posted by Sylvarii The missinformed ride again lol.So you love Vanguard but you haven't logged into the FTP model but you are sure it's the final nail in the coffin.So to burst your bubble but FTP has bought many more players to the game,the server telon is alive and kicking.FTP has bought many new players to the game,it hasn't been like this since release. You are being stubbern and because of that you are actualky missing a revival in the game.Yes their are a few lag problems but none are game breaking.
+1 for truth. F2P has brought back a lot of old players plus many new ones. F2P is what the players were asking for and finally SOE gave it to them. It was the best thing that they could have done for the game.
Honestly folks have a short attention span. SOE did not create vangaurd. Sigil did. In beta we all knew Sigil was in trouble, I can remember the baords being on fire we we all found out they were looking at SOE to buy it out.
Soe took it over, and then stuck the game in maintenance mode right after it released. The game was full of bugs from day one. Soe did everything in their power to kill vangaurd. No updates, not bug fixes, the game was treated as secondary curiosity.until recently.
Now that SOE is taking massive hits after DCUO failed, EQNEXT had to be totaly scrapped and they are no redoing it with the planetside 2 engine instead of the DCUO engine that it was coded in.
SOE has a lot of problem. First and formost they have an anti soe crowd for SWG, then they get a lot of grief due to the fact the screw up their games moer than they help them.
The fact still remains the same vangaurd will always be on the back burner compared to eq, and eq2. It was a threat and that is why they really don't want it around. Right now they are trying to squeeze every last bit of cash out of it with the fremium model. I fully expect in a years time to hear the anouncement that vangaurd has been sunsetted.
Wow where to start. Your post is a bunch of crap and misinformation except for the part about where SOE did not create Vanguard, Sigil did. I was with Vanguard from the beginning. It was a buggy mess when SOE took it over and they did a lot of performance fixes. So the whole No updates, no bug fixes statement is a bunch of bullsh*t. Yeah sure development did grind to a halt after a while but they did work hard in the beginning to try to clean it up.
SOE was never going to build EQNext off of the DCUO engine. As a matter of fact they NEVER said what engine they was going to use until recently. All that they said before was that they were going to use a new proprietary engine. They have kept all details a big secret. So again your comment on this is false.
SOE screws up there games? Lets see Everquest was the king until WoW came along. It is what inspired the folks at Blizzard to make an mmorpg. And it showed the gaming industry in general that mmorpgs can be profitable. It still has a nice healthy population and is being added to on a regular basis. Does not seem screwed up to me.
Everquest 2? While it never reached the popularity of WoW it has maintained a healthy population. It is loaded with features and content and is added to on a regular basis. It has also won editorial awards from game review sites and magazines. Hardly seems screwed up to me. Free Realms has done quite well for SOE.
The only mistake that SOE has made was with SWG. And they have already admited that they made a mistake and apologized for it. Hell they even kept the Matrix Online alive for a lot longer then I thought they would.
Will Vanguard close in a year? Not when they made the decision to convert it to F2P which is not an easy process, plus put a full development team on it. This is a clear sign that Vanguard is here to stay. You do not put those kinds of resources into a game with the intent to close it.
Yea, I havnt received any notification from soe about it (i had a CE account) and the first I've heard about it is here!
Shame, I was going to play it, but if they arnt advertising then I dont care. VG needs population, without its just a desert. (Its a dry heat)
Lol,did you read my post? The pupulation is thriving since FTP.You dont want to play it thats fine but dont use population as an excuse when the population has risen ten fold since FTP.
if true i can imagine how bad it is... the trouble with F2P is that it often only draws in people who have no real interest in the game itself.. odd as that may sound.. maybe in a few months it will be worth looking at again.. but tbh.. i don't see it.
Actually I played a decent amount on Sunday and the population seems fine and people were pretty polite and helpful.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I can tell you right now, and its not to hurt your feelings. Advertising isnt (wasnt) its problem.
Vanguard had as much hype before release as TOR and WAR and GW2 and TERA and AOC had. I remember it had lots of praise in PC gaming magazines. And it fell short on everything.
It was a mess, and near an uplayable mess on release. The lag was insane, the broken quests were as numberous as the unbroken ones. And the class system was built aropund the forced grouping idea. And that is what hurt it the most.
Now once people got past the learning curve it wasnt has bad. But in the beginning realizing that almost every class had to be at least paired up hurt it.
That may not be the game it is today. But at this point it doesnt matter. Who wants to play an old (in every sense of the word), underpopulated game that offeres less than what a new one now offers?
Im just as passionate about WAR as you are about VG. Only difference is Im not deluding myself.
I think WAR could have been on par with GW2. And in truth it did some things better.
The Dark Elves were truly evil (I miss them). It had a lot of things going for it - a good story, displayable trophy system, morales, races, Tome of Knowledge, character customization, a fun title system, collision dection, 24 unique classes, career tactics, RR customizable buffs, and so much more.
But it will never achieve the sub numbers it deserves, it may be a sad fact. But WAR had its chance and failed miserably at it. They truthfully had about 6 months to "make it right" and still failed miserably at it. Most newly released MMOs only get 2-3 months if theyre lucky. WAR's time is over, same with Vanguard.
Confession
In all honesty to me GW2 feels like a VERY, VERY well polished WAR-lite. And Im okay with that, even happy about it. I havent had this much fun in a MMO since...well, since WAR. Just wish it had a darker side, not really attracted to the goodie-two-shoes personal story of GW2.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
raiding is doomed by a massive lag bug for the last 8 months by now. the lag spikes/freezes make raiding as a very whole no more enjoyable, especially the harder targets are almost impossible. alot of frustration is the result, raids whiped numerous times because of another ~10-20 second raidfreeze in a critical phase. pretty much all guilds are on hold with their progression.
all raidguilds have limited their raiding drastically due to this, most struggle to keep their raidforce up as more and more ppl quit due to this.
sounds somewhat crazy to have such a gamebreaking bug around for 8 months by now? it is.
wanne know what's worse? a dev team who does not give a fk to fix such gamebreaking bug THEY introduced with their 24h downtime in april.
in addition to that, a recent patch even bugged half of the raid targets - it is impossible to defeat them atm.
tell you what, every single patch so far has lowered the gaming experience for 55s by a great deal.
obviously keeping the longtime raiders brings less $ than their f2p cashshop gamble.
the only ppl who are not involved and like to disagree are <50s and f2p ppl. but trust me one thing, sooner or later you will sit in the same boat as we do.
lol this was 100% sure to happen. There were many forum lurkers that had high hopes for f2p Vanguard so whole case was covered with "rose smoke", but f2p Vanguard cannot end diffrently that relaatively quick nostalgia cash crab.
Why?
1. Vanguard is really a game that is not fit for f2p / freemium / cash shops.
2. To made Vanguard experience much better that it is - it would require HUGE amount of money, work and time. This game is big and complex one + still have lot of bugs + is outdated technically also network code wise.
Now do you though that SOE (or anyone else) would invest millions of dollars into 5 year old game that was released as totally unfinished game, failed financially, had dead servers and have still big pile of various problems?
Come on... Vanguard was beautifoul project but it's fate was sealed when they decided to release it 1,5 year too early. There is no coming back from something like that.
Not playing it now, is still one of my favorite MMOs though. The crafting and diplomacy alone made it fun enough to play. the economy helped alot as a l ot of things needed to be crafted. The pve is the opposite of newer mmos in some ways. you won't "burn" through the content in one month. theres multiple dungeons at every tier level. Lots of long chain quests with some good loot at the end. Non instanced dungeons. The best community i've been around. Maybe it was due to the small pop and just the friendlies stuck around. It had pretty much everything someone could want ( not all of course) but was released to early and buggy to recover, which is a shame.
"SoE operated VG at a loss for 18 months while making the game playable but no one came back so they stopped developing it"
Hay everyone, I'll take this one.
You kind of answered your own question......" No one came back " . This falls under the category of no advertisement policy. SOE did not advertise to the public. At first I was getting e-mails about Vanguard. They only offered free time and information to past players, and several times over. Same people over and over. No one new.....To this day the population does not know what Vanugard is, obviously now is too late. But back when SOE took over there was no advertisement.
Make the game playable.....Well, not really..... The Trial island had to be done, or SOE would have not even done that.
SOE DOES NOT IMPROVE THERE GAMES, none of them ( well very little, less than the other big names ). They just make paid expansions for improvement. As I say, Vanguard was already too big justify an expantion.... they were stuck.
SOE didn't see it as a good MMO to spend much money trying to spruce it up, and they really did inherit a "smoking" pile and sometimes when software is too bad, there's just no undoing the mess,you just stick bandaids on it and string it along.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
For me this is the last straw. I could never go back now. I never even attempted to download this F2P crap. F2P games are short lived last attempts for any mmo. After all who plays them ?....only F2P band wagon jumpers. They get what they can for free, then gone when the next one comes out.
Whats wrong with SOE ?.......I would love to drop a microphone in one of there business meetings to find out the real story because I would really like to know what makes them tick, but I can only guess.
So here is a poll, Please take your best guess.
LOTRO raises its hand and disagrees with you about f2p being the death knell for a game.
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
SOE didn't see it as a good MMO to spend much money trying to spruce it up, and they really did inherit a "smoking" pile and sometimes when software is too bad, there's just no undoing the mess,you just stick bandaids on it and string it along.
i dont agree with this..when soe took the game off sigil it was not fit for release,but sigil wanted it released.so it was released.it was in a worse state than it is now thats for sure.soe went like crazy trying to fix this mess. but while doing that it was bleeding subs badly.i think the end came when the population just dramatically dropped so much it was not worth investment..soe put a lot of money into trying to fix this game,but it was so badly coded that even til today its still not right..its playable.nothing gamebreaking but sigil were the problem not soe..if they had waited then released who knows.it could have turned out a lot more popular than it is..
SOE didn't see it as a good MMO to spend much money trying to spruce it up, and they really did inherit a "smoking" pile and sometimes when software is too bad, there's just no undoing the mess,you just stick bandaids on it and string it along.
i dont agree with this..when soe took the game off sigil it was not fit for release,but sigil wanted it released.so it was released.it was in a worse state than it is now thats for sure.soe went like crazy trying to fix this mess. but while doing that it was bleeding subs badly.i think the end came when the population just dramatically dropped so much it was not worth investment..soe put a lot of money into trying to fix this game,but it was so badly coded that even til today its still not right..its playable.nothing gamebreaking but sigil were the problem not soe..if they had waited then released who knows.it could have turned out a lot more popular than it is..
Sigil was not the culprit for the early release. Microsoft was the funding partner at the time iirc and they were the driving force to get something released after all of the funding invested.
One thing I noticed that after SOE made the Trial Island, lots of players cycled through the game. Many loved it and paid for a month only to find no population.
BUT NEVER AT THE SAME TIME. It would be SOE responsibility to Rally players all at the same time, but they failed to do that. This would be crappy marketing....SOE sucks !
It's like this :
-500 base players all the time.
-first month 100 more but no population so they stop.
-second month 100 more players no population so they stop.
Honestly, I think SoE tried to keep it going. But from a business stand point they were never able to pump the assets into the game. I'm sure they made some money on it over the years or at least broke even. But its a huge gamble investing in an MMO period, let alone an MMO who's reputation was already destroyed by its previous owner.
I do agree though, that they should have just closed the servers and fixed it. Then released it brand new a fresh.
At the outset, I want to state plainly and clearly that I really do not have time for video games. But I wanted to return to Vanguard with the F2P and then ultimately resub to support the game.
The F2P model was such a disappointment, that I barely follow the game anymore.
SOE missed another opportunity. I simply will never trust SOE.
"The truth is EA lies." - Youtube User
Sim City. Everquest. Civilization. Dungeon Keeper. Vampire: The Masquerade. These are the games that I love and cherish.
Honestly, I think SoE tried to keep it going. But from a business stand point they were never able to pump the assets into the game. I'm sure they made some money on it over the years or at least broke even. But its a huge gamble investing in an MMO period, let alone an MMO who's reputation was already destroyed by its previous owner.
I do agree though, that they should have just closed the servers and fixed it. Then released it brand new a fresh.
Well I think they never cared about Vanguard or it's players. In business and in all aspects of America there are a lot of un seen politics that we will never know. Ranging from how much they paid for the game, financial favors, marketing for there pay one price for all our games, the list of back round situations could be endless....This stuff you will never know !
On our side, the players we could only guess.....Many decisions for us never made sense. We could scratch our heads as to why. Some people here can go into great deal about the sale of Vanguard to SOE and the history of developers. But at the end of the day and when the sun goes down, ITS STILL A GUESS, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU COULD READ ON THE INTERNET.
The only thing that we have know for sure is the game itself. We had always seen a cheap marketing mess of a game that was a half done GOOD mmo........ Back round politics ruled this game from the beginning.
ONE THING FOR SURE, IS THAT SOE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE PLAYERS. No compassion for us ever ! Vanguard forums had always screamed of the same topics over and over of " please do something ". This went un-answered.
SOE always stayed clueless of what is going on. Hay, I'll even prove it :
*** Who in there right mind would try and re-release F2P between Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft expansion release !!!!! ***
This is either stupidity or something to do with un-seen politics. I would guess un-seen politics....Nothing for it's players, we are trash to SOE.
Last thing, and I'll leave you with this :
Any game that goes F2P is a kick in the pants to it's players. It's like kicking them to the side to market to a different group of players....This in my onion is the bottom line !!!
Comments
Honestly folks have a short attention span. SOE did not create vangaurd. Sigil did. In beta we all knew Sigil was in trouble, I can remember the baords being on fire we we all found out they were looking at SOE to buy it out.
Soe took it over, and then stuck the game in maintenance mode right after it released. The game was full of bugs from day one. Soe did everything in their power to kill vangaurd. No updates, not bug fixes, the game was treated as secondary curiosity.until recently.
Now that SOE is taking massive hits after DCUO failed, EQNEXT had to be totaly scrapped and they are no redoing it with the planetside 2 engine instead of the DCUO engine that it was coded in.
SOE has a lot of problem. First and formost they have an anti soe crowd for SWG, then they get a lot of grief due to the fact the screw up their games moer than they help them.
The fact still remains the same vangaurd will always be on the back burner compared to eq, and eq2. It was a threat and that is why they really don't want it around. Right now they are trying to squeeze every last bit of cash out of it with the fremium model. I fully expect in a years time to hear the anouncement that vangaurd has been sunsetted.
Sony has done nothing to this game since a while after launch, and then it was buggy and not worth the money i spent on it. The bes tthing about Vanguard was the Collectors edition box i got, literally the box was better than the rest of the stuff they gave me. I still have the box but i think i trashed the rest of it lol.
But the problem with sony is they make a bad mistake with a game then they shutdown and move on to the next one. Swg they gave up on that EQ2 has bugs vanguard failed, they dont notice the trend with their games THEY ALL FAIL EXCEPT FREE REALMS OF ALL THINGS.
The Arcade Corner
The Daily Exposition
+1 for truth. F2P has brought back a lot of old players plus many new ones. F2P is what the players were asking for and finally SOE gave it to them. It was the best thing that they could have done for the game.
Wow where to start. Your post is a bunch of crap and misinformation except for the part about where SOE did not create Vanguard, Sigil did. I was with Vanguard from the beginning. It was a buggy mess when SOE took it over and they did a lot of performance fixes. So the whole No updates, no bug fixes statement is a bunch of bullsh*t. Yeah sure development did grind to a halt after a while but they did work hard in the beginning to try to clean it up.
SOE was never going to build EQNext off of the DCUO engine. As a matter of fact they NEVER said what engine they was going to use until recently. All that they said before was that they were going to use a new proprietary engine. They have kept all details a big secret. So again your comment on this is false.
SOE screws up there games? Lets see Everquest was the king until WoW came along. It is what inspired the folks at Blizzard to make an mmorpg. And it showed the gaming industry in general that mmorpgs can be profitable. It still has a nice healthy population and is being added to on a regular basis. Does not seem screwed up to me.
Everquest 2? While it never reached the popularity of WoW it has maintained a healthy population. It is loaded with features and content and is added to on a regular basis. It has also won editorial awards from game review sites and magazines. Hardly seems screwed up to me. Free Realms has done quite well for SOE.
The only mistake that SOE has made was with SWG. And they have already admited that they made a mistake and apologized for it. Hell they even kept the Matrix Online alive for a lot longer then I thought they would.
Will Vanguard close in a year? Not when they made the decision to convert it to F2P which is not an easy process, plus put a full development team on it. This is a clear sign that Vanguard is here to stay. You do not put those kinds of resources into a game with the intent to close it.
Hay.............Whats wrong with dumb, lots of people are dumb.....besides, you don't know the half of it !
Actually I played a decent amount on Sunday and the population seems fine and people were pretty polite and helpful.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I can tell you right now, and its not to hurt your feelings. Advertising isnt (wasnt) its problem.
Vanguard had as much hype before release as TOR and WAR and GW2 and TERA and AOC had. I remember it had lots of praise in PC gaming magazines. And it fell short on everything.
It was a mess, and near an uplayable mess on release. The lag was insane, the broken quests were as numberous as the unbroken ones. And the class system was built aropund the forced grouping idea. And that is what hurt it the most.
Now once people got past the learning curve it wasnt has bad. But in the beginning realizing that almost every class had to be at least paired up hurt it.
That may not be the game it is today. But at this point it doesnt matter. Who wants to play an old (in every sense of the word), underpopulated game that offeres less than what a new one now offers?
Im just as passionate about WAR as you are about VG. Only difference is Im not deluding myself.
I think WAR could have been on par with GW2. And in truth it did some things better.
The Dark Elves were truly evil (I miss them). It had a lot of things going for it - a good story, displayable trophy system, morales, races, Tome of Knowledge, character customization, a fun title system, collision dection, 24 unique classes, career tactics, RR customizable buffs, and so much more.
But it will never achieve the sub numbers it deserves, it may be a sad fact. But WAR had its chance and failed miserably at it. They truthfully had about 6 months to "make it right" and still failed miserably at it. Most newly released MMOs only get 2-3 months if theyre lucky. WAR's time is over, same with Vanguard.
Confession
In all honesty to me GW2 feels like a VERY, VERY well polished WAR-lite. And Im okay with that, even happy about it. I havent had this much fun in a MMO since...well, since WAR. Just wish it had a darker side, not really attracted to the goodie-two-shoes personal story of GW2.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
raiding is doomed by a massive lag bug for the last 8 months by now. the lag spikes/freezes make raiding as a very whole no more enjoyable, especially the harder targets are almost impossible. alot of frustration is the result, raids whiped numerous times because of another ~10-20 second raidfreeze in a critical phase. pretty much all guilds are on hold with their progression.
all raidguilds have limited their raiding drastically due to this, most struggle to keep their raidforce up as more and more ppl quit due to this.
sounds somewhat crazy to have such a gamebreaking bug around for 8 months by now? it is.
wanne know what's worse? a dev team who does not give a fk to fix such gamebreaking bug THEY introduced with their 24h downtime in april.
in addition to that, a recent patch even bugged half of the raid targets - it is impossible to defeat them atm.
tell you what, every single patch so far has lowered the gaming experience for 55s by a great deal.
obviously keeping the longtime raiders brings less $ than their f2p cashshop gamble.
the only ppl who are not involved and like to disagree are <50s and f2p ppl. but trust me one thing, sooner or later you will sit in the same boat as we do.
where is the option
"SoE operated VG at a loss for 18 months while making the game playable but no one came back so they stopped developing it"
lol this was 100% sure to happen. There were many forum lurkers that had high hopes for f2p Vanguard so whole case was covered with "rose smoke", but f2p Vanguard cannot end diffrently that relaatively quick nostalgia cash crab.
Why?
1. Vanguard is really a game that is not fit for f2p / freemium / cash shops.
2. To made Vanguard experience much better that it is - it would require HUGE amount of money, work and time. This game is big and complex one + still have lot of bugs + is outdated technically also network code wise.
Now do you though that SOE (or anyone else) would invest millions of dollars into 5 year old game that was released as totally unfinished game, failed financially, had dead servers and have still big pile of various problems?
Come on... Vanguard was beautifoul project but it's fate was sealed when they decided to release it 1,5 year too early. There is no coming back from something like that.
Hay everyone, I'll take this one.
You kind of answered your own question......" No one came back " . This falls under the category of no advertisement policy. SOE did not advertise to the public. At first I was getting e-mails about Vanguard. They only offered free time and information to past players, and several times over. Same people over and over. No one new.....To this day the population does not know what Vanugard is, obviously now is too late. But back when SOE took over there was no advertisement.
Make the game playable.....Well, not really..... The Trial island had to be done, or SOE would have not even done that.
SOE DOES NOT IMPROVE THERE GAMES, none of them ( well very little, less than the other big names ). They just make paid expansions for improvement. As I say, Vanguard was already too big justify an expantion.... they were stuck.
SOE didn't see it as a good MMO to spend much money trying to spruce it up, and they really did inherit a "smoking" pile and sometimes when software is too bad, there's just no undoing the mess,you just stick bandaids on it and string it along.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
LOTRO raises its hand and disagrees with you about f2p being the death knell for a game.
RIP Ribbitribbitt you are missed, kid.
Currently Playing EVE, ESO
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Dwight D Eisenhower
My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.
Henry Rollins
i dont agree with this..when soe took the game off sigil it was not fit for release,but sigil wanted it released.so it was released.it was in a worse state than it is now thats for sure.soe went like crazy trying to fix this mess. but while doing that it was bleeding subs badly.i think the end came when the population just dramatically dropped so much it was not worth investment..soe put a lot of money into trying to fix this game,but it was so badly coded that even til today its still not right..its playable.nothing gamebreaking but sigil were the problem not soe..if they had waited then released who knows.it could have turned out a lot more popular than it is..
Sigil was not the culprit for the early release. Microsoft was the funding partner at the time iirc and they were the driving force to get something released after all of the funding invested.
One thing I noticed that after SOE made the Trial Island, lots of players cycled through the game. Many loved it and paid for a month only to find no population.
BUT NEVER AT THE SAME TIME. It would be SOE responsibility to Rally players all at the same time, but they failed to do that. This would be crappy marketing....SOE sucks !
It's like this :
-500 base players all the time.
-first month 100 more but no population so they stop.
-second month 100 more players no population so they stop.
- same month after month.
- So doing the math, 500 base players always.
No marketing tatics at all.
Honestly, I think SoE tried to keep it going. But from a business stand point they were never able to pump the assets into the game. I'm sure they made some money on it over the years or at least broke even. But its a huge gamble investing in an MMO period, let alone an MMO who's reputation was already destroyed by its previous owner.
I do agree though, that they should have just closed the servers and fixed it. Then released it brand new a fresh.
At the outset, I want to state plainly and clearly that I really do not have time for video games. But I wanted to return to Vanguard with the F2P and then ultimately resub to support the game.
The F2P model was such a disappointment, that I barely follow the game anymore.
SOE missed another opportunity. I simply will never trust SOE.
"The truth is EA lies." - Youtube User
Sim City. Everquest. Civilization. Dungeon Keeper. Vampire: The Masquerade. These are the games that I love and cherish.
Well I think they never cared about Vanguard or it's players. In business and in all aspects of America there are a lot of un seen politics that we will never know. Ranging from how much they paid for the game, financial favors, marketing for there pay one price for all our games, the list of back round situations could be endless....This stuff you will never know !
On our side, the players we could only guess.....Many decisions for us never made sense. We could scratch our heads as to why. Some people here can go into great deal about the sale of Vanguard to SOE and the history of developers. But at the end of the day and when the sun goes down, ITS STILL A GUESS, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU COULD READ ON THE INTERNET.
The only thing that we have know for sure is the game itself. We had always seen a cheap marketing mess of a game that was a half done GOOD mmo........ Back round politics ruled this game from the beginning.
ONE THING FOR SURE, IS THAT SOE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE PLAYERS. No compassion for us ever ! Vanguard forums had always screamed of the same topics over and over of " please do something ". This went un-answered.
SOE always stayed clueless of what is going on. Hay, I'll even prove it :
*** Who in there right mind would try and re-release F2P between Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft expansion release !!!!! ***
This is either stupidity or something to do with un-seen politics. I would guess un-seen politics....Nothing for it's players, we are trash to SOE.
Last thing, and I'll leave you with this :
Any game that goes F2P is a kick in the pants to it's players. It's like kicking them to the side to market to a different group of players....This in my onion is the bottom line !!!
No
Games are a recreational hobby for me and not a lifestyle