[Neric]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

Had I had the financial resources, ability to place the product later, etc. I would have given us about 3 more months to get more polish in, more high level content in, and to distance ourselves from the WoW expansion.

So in 3 months (counting from release) Vanguard will be finally as ready as you intended it to be? Guess you got a nice challenge there

Had I a time machine, I would go back and do a LOT of things differently, but then life doesn't work that way.

How about an MMO based on the Timemachine with instanced missions way back in history? Maybe that would be a cool idea to burn another 30 million with. Sorry, I forgot that you won't get anymore credit in the industry. So never mind...

I do fully admit my writing style is verbose and I made a significant effort to hype the game...

Oh, really?

I think the biggest things that are hurting the game right now are:

1. Performance. We simply asked too much of the engine.

Ok, that's a no brainer.

2. Underpopulated servers.

If the game is a failure it will lead to underpopulated servers. I mean eventually nobody will be playing anymore and that's the ultimate form of underpopulation. How about merging some servers...like one month after release?

Lacking subscribers is just one aspect of underpopulation. Making everything too huge is another. People get lost in your gigantic seamless world of "nothing" and travel times certainly don't improve the situation. The current state of EQ is a nice comparison. After 13 (?) expansions, the world has gotten so huge and there are so many newbie areas that the eight lowlevel characters that get started every week may never meet each other in the same dungeon. Compare that to 120 players in Unrest back in the old days when people didn't have the option to go somewhere else.

3. Launching so close to TBC. I never thought we were going to...

Hey buddy, I warned you about that one (yes, you can look it up on this very forum), but at the same you had no chance. Blizzard was waiting for you, so they could time TBC to bust your ass. That's not surprising at all, because it's the single most obvious and best move that they could have made in that situation. Everything else would be underestimating their intelligence.

4. Marketing. There are two groups of ex-EQ 1, UO, DAoC, etc. players out there: the ones that look back fondly on the years they put into EQ 1 and those who don't

....and you decided it would be a good idea to try to please both groups.

Fact is that many people left EQ, because you had already tried to please everyone and now you wanted to lure them back with the very same concept. How naive....

You still don't realize that EQ was already the best thing that you could ever archive and by trying to improve on it, you made things worse and worse and worse. Yes, it's unlikely that the first attempt at something is the best attempt, but think of Chris Moneymaker and the World Series of Poker. You can be sure that he won't win it again. Like him you are a one-hit-wonder and that's why you should stick to your original successful concept that got you where you are.

Being stubborn is ok, if you insist on the correct opinion. How often do I have to remind you about this very fact? Nobody wants to drink Coke "new formula" and nobody wants to play Brad "new formula" games! Realize it and you made a step in the right direction.

...gonna skip the rest of your posting, because the main points have been commented on already.