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Originally Posted by Krones The original Vanguard community was fucking fantastic if you were into armchair design and wanted too help shape and mold Vanguard into a remarkable world, something different, a mmog with advanced concepts and ideas, potential, tremendous fucking kick-ass potential, the funding was there, the development team was there, the early community support was there.
Think about it, how many positive leaks have you read besides from Oloh, which are discredited by many who know his history since he is McQuaid's lap dog and the conglomerate game sites who know absolutely fucking jack-shit about mmogs compared to any veteran on this board? I've read constant pessimistic outlooks ever since beta 0, including private channels from friends of friends breaking the nda, etc. Friends whom I trust more than any of those cocksuckers. Why all the fucking negativity when Vanguard had one of the most outstanding pre-beta communities ever?
Vanguard's early community downfall was inevitable, nothing lasts forever. I’ve noticed that a lot of the core vanbois didn't stick around after McQuaid announced Sigil would be shit-canning their forums in favor of third party forums after Vanguard's release, aside from the few die-hards still sticking around. Not worth it, no beta invite, no forum as we once knew it.
Still despite the death of one of the best communities, the majority of Vanguard's early followers would have made excellent alpha testers before adding random signups and starting the transition to a disastrous closed public beta and Vanguard didn't take advantage of that. I'm not talking about Oloh and his cronies either.
Sigil fucked up the selection process early on, while random beta picks are fair and needed for optimization, Vanguard needed a large decent core of hardcore alpha testers early in the creation process who are understandable, respectable and patient. Testers who don't fucking need, but more than anything else desire and want too put up with the bullshit that comes with early development. Yes, I know these testers are still out there, but that's not the point.
The sorry ass retention numbers for beta floating around only prove Sigil fucked up, someone please tell me what exactly McQuaid was expecting after the majority of those random pickups have played EQII and WoW for the last year? Gosh, Idiot! comes to my mind. It's too late to fix that fuck up now and Sigil has to basically start over with a substantial credible testing base in phase 3. Frustrating for those players who really could have made an impact on Vanguard. I'm scraping the surface, I'm not even going to dilvulge all the nitty-gritty details I've fucking heard from trusted sources on how Sigil has handled Vanguard's early testing phases.
Maybe Vanguard's beta retention will improve when they zerg invite another 5-8 thousand testers and their proposed 3rd gen mechanics such as combat, crafting and dueling npcs with canned phrases should be more polished. However, despite all that shit I just wrote, the most detrimental outlook too Vanguard is the fact Sigil lost three of their most talented (senior) designers in the last year, a massive fact and that alone hurts Vanguard's development more than anything else.
Vanguard@E3 compared to the progress we witnessed last year should be very interesting. |
