| Vanguard just added 500 more accounts to beta a few weeks ago? I would say the initial response from the new people was less than impressive.
The thing from a business stand point is the way they seem to change total focus every now and then. I obviously have no way of knowing, it appears however they don't have a basic set principles of what they think makes something fun or not fun they have stuck with. It is like their focus on this fundamental type of stuff changes just as much as how they try to implement those things.
I can see specific game play adjustments like a mini map, death penalty and combat design adjustments. Those are normal from what it seems every game goes through in Betas and part of balancing difficulty and so on. Adjustments focused on making up content, making entry levels interesting, and such, aren’t fine tuning and should have been recognized as part of a general well defined theme set down at the outset.
Do you see the problem? You come up with idea X and implement it by spending money, and then you realize after the flaws in X come out it lacking, so you come up with Y, then Z and do the same thing over and over again. Each time you are adding more and more cost and altering the game in such a way that when you are done you have parts of X, Y and Z and so on in a piecemeal sort of fashion. Yet those parts were not designed wholly with the other parts in mind.
How much will be broken and unworkable as a result? At what level do the mechanics of quests and the mathematics behind those things get changed? How much are storyboards altered. Do you really have time to review all parts every time you make fundamental changes?
The changes I see with Vanguard bring up questions of concern simply because they are not changes intended to try to balance out what their main focuses and goals for the game are; they are changes in the basic idea of the game itself. | 