Vanguard Fail or Genius?

On By HarbingerZeroIn Vanguard

So I hear that Vanguard is offering up free time, and that no one seems to have known about it.  I know I had no idea, and I’ve been logged into my SOE account quite recently for PotBS (which I spent most of the weekend playing, sorry EVE fans!).   So I check my email – nothing there, and nothing in the spam folder.  My email is connected to my account and verified, but I still got nothing.  I check the Vanguard forums…nothing.  I check the update notes.  No, nothing there either but some rather interesting changes.

So I figure this is failure on a high level for SOE, which is not all that unusual.  But then I think some more.  Maybe the goal, with the ripples from the closure of Matrix Online, is to get a clear measure of players who really want to be in Vanguard.  Should they close it?  If they offer free time under the table, who is watching?  And who will come back?  And what will they say about the level cap being raised, the changes to combat and the class and racial skills?

In other words, what kind of buzz can Vanguard generate as a baseline, grassroots movement.  So far, given the number of blogs suddenly talking Vanguard again, I’m guessing that if that was the goal, it was success.

Whether or not that was the intention though…whew, I’m doubting it.  But maybe that’s just because I’m jaded at this point.

5 thoughts on “Vanguard Fail or Genius?”

  1. Interesting – but not interesting enough for me to go back. I got too hyped up for that and too burned, even if it took 18 months for the burning to occur. 😉

  2. HarbingerZero

    I had more fun than I thought I would in the 30 minutes I spent logged into my Druid after I wrote this. I had forgotten how compelling the class mechanics were. So, I guess it worked on me. Most of my angst was my friends having left and GU4, the game itself I always enjoyed, even with its glitches.

  3. Kenny

    I still have no fricken idea why this game failed. All I can think of is that it must have been technical problems that I just was lucky to avoid. I bought a really good PC for Vanguard so it ran great and looked amazing. I remember there being some annoying bugs and a crash to desktop bug that happened about once every hour and a half or something, but I always had faith in people realising that this was just teething problems that are to be expected of a brand new game of that scale. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had faith in people understanding that. People are after all, mostly pricks.

    But as for the game itself, I love it. The world is enormous and great looking. There is tons of quests and places to hunt. As the above person said, the classes are fantastic. In fact, it’s that which is the highlight of the game to me. I tried most of them and they are all great. The Bard is what I always dreamed that someone would create some day. In Vanguard it exists and it works, and it’s great.

    The only reason I don’t play it anymore is because my stupid friends didn’t seem to like the game so quit early. I never could understand why, I have asked them and they said it all round sucked but they just can’t qualify it exactly. Instead they played WoW which although tidy and well made, is nowhere near as interesting or challenging.

    Besides not wanting to play by myself, I’m also put off by the fact that the game has so few players now, that future development is almost none existent. So I don’t want to give time to a game that is going nowhere.

    It all feels like a bit of an injustice to me. Perhaps it was meant to be, but I can’t help but think that gamers were wussy a.holes and overreacted to the problems and they only went and screwed themselves and everyone else out of potentially the greatest MMORPG of all time. If people had stuck with it, they could have afforded to keep the development going at full pace. Within just a few months they would have ironed out most of the bugs, and beyond that it would have had tons of new content pumped in to it. EverQuest was a freakin mess to begin with and that game got tidied up really quickly once the subscriptions started pouring in. If Vanguard had the same, it would be epic by now.

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