Vanguard is LIVE.....Follow

I hear that Allakhazam will be hosting a Vanguard Forum and will start doing what it does for WoW and other MMO for Vanguard. I haven't been back to this forum in more than a year now since I left WoW and I'm just wondering if it will be a new place of residence for me again.

I'll try to explain the reasoning behind this being our only Vanguard presence for the moment.

1. While we have expanded a lot over the past couple years, we are still a small staff. We only have four full time programmers. It's my job to decide what is the best way to utilize them. Vanguard is coming out 2 weeks after the game that sold more copies in 24 hours than any game in history. Clearly, from a business standpoing, our first priority was to make sure our WoW site was ready for their expansion.

2. Lord of the Rings Online comes out in a couple months as well. For the resources we have not devoted to WoW, we had to decide whether to do one site or both. We ultimately decided to put our resources into LOTRO instead of Vanguard. This was due to several factors. First, I played both and simply think LOTRO is better. When games like Horizons and Shadowbane came out there were threads begging us to do sites for them too and after playing them I decided it would be a waste of time on our part. Second, Turbine has given us plenty of access to their game to get all our programers into it and enough other staff members that we can have a lot of people working on it to make a top notch site. They also will help promote the site as one of their fan sites. I refuse to make a site that is not excellent. Sigil on the other hand has actually kicked some of our staff members out of their beta, leaving us with only 2 actual beta accounts amongst our entire staff. One was mine, and I had to share my access with our programmers just to give them a look at it. We are all gamers and love playing MMOs, and we develop the sites for ourselves with the idea that if we like it so will the other players. For every game we cover, we have several people who have played it to a high level. It is hard to develop a site for a game you don't play, and we were just not able to play much of Vanguard. Add to that Sigil's insistance that they will not link us from their site and will delete forum posts mentioning us, and it makes it that much harder to develop a site for Vanguard, and makes less business sense for us to devote precious resources to it.

Sigil's position on us is wrong. Anyone who uses our site knows that we have no ads or promotions of any kind for gold selling and in fact ban all forum posters who promote gold selling. While we don't require the cooperation of the game developer to make a site for a game (old EQ vets will recall that Brad McQuaid absolutely hated our site when it was first launched and SOE at first wanted nothing to do with us), the active opposition of a developer makes it harder for us to do so and thus more likely to just skip past a mediocre game. Frankly, if Vanguard kicked *** we would have done whatever we needed to do to develop a site, but given what it actually is, it was just not worth the hassle.

When the game comes out, I will re-evaluate our position. Hopefully for the players sake, someone will step up and build the type of site we normally build. Then we can just refer you all to them. While I hate to lose you while you play Vanguard, I hope you will understand and check back with us for your next game. Of course, you can always use this forum to talk about the game.

I'm sorry but am I the only that hopes Vanguard fails massively? There is absolutely nothing about this game that intrigues me in the least. Add that on top of the fact that they repeatedly pushed it back and then they acted like fucktards towards the guys here. Needless to say I hope it's a failure on Battlefield Earth proportions.

I'm just playing WoW and holding out for Star Trek Online in late 2008. I had a brief, flirtatious interest in Vanguard until I found out that it had become an SOE property. And with nothing else looking promising any time soon, I'm stuck with WoW.

Lol Tarv, you've made it pretty clear that you don't agree about the specs and performance/

The fact is though, that I played this game with a machine under spec on the processor and haved played with others who were under-spec. And while the game wasn't nearly as pretty with all the settings turned down, it was and is playable.

Maybe you didn't properly adjust the setting when you tried to play??...or maybe you had an incompatible graphics card. That, more than actual specs seem to be giving people problems.

Anyway I'm over spec now, the game runs great and looks great. I can even run EQ in the background. I've got a new Disciple started and up to level 10 and have also made a Ranger.

I think I'm in for the long haul.