Excellent post Brad, and I am very very thankful for you posting this.
I want to ask a very specific question though, which you may or may not want to answer. Originally, in the earlier Vanguard betas, Sigil's stance on solo advancement and how hard a game should be was completely different.
I think you and your designers decided to take a good honest look at WoW's success and decided that people DID want to have the ability to solo meaningfully, and the game got made a lot more solo friendly and in my view improved a lot. It takes a lot of courage to go back and change your design, and in my opinion, this change was very needed and very well done.
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Then there's the whole WoW vs Vanguard issue where many people think that if they enjoy WoW they won't like Vanguard or vice versa. This is in part again to those pre-conceptions, but also our fan base has contributed to this stereotype. (sorry Vanguard fans, I don't mean to generalize here, but there has been a negative vibe, a polarizing vibe, even with me and others posting that this game is inclusive not exclusive).
Then there's the issue that Vanguard is a different game and won't appeal to everyone. Some people like that, and some people don't.
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The reason this issue cropped up, is that ORIGINALLY vanguard was targetted to be a lot more hardcore and a lot less friendly towards casuals, and a lot of the original people who signed up for the beta were people who were fans of this gamestyle. When you guys did some absolutely fantastic changes, you ended up with a very loud bunch of people who signed up to play a game that was different to what Vanguard is now, and that left a very polarizing atmosphere.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but don't you feel that a lot of the problems that you faced with the image that Vanguard portrarys were due to the way you portrayed yourself in the beginning?
