Make of it what you will

[Pirotess]

Well as of this afternoon it is official.

SOE owns Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

I have to say its been a strange road we've traveled to this point. It amazes me whats happened to Vanguard in the space of just a years time. Microsoft pulled out, SoE came in, the uproar was deafening. Promises were made, promises were broken, the money ran out and the game launched in a sickeningly unready state. The faithful struggled to keep their faith and slowly fell by the wayside. Now the game that many people fled to hoping it was the last refuge of MMO's has come full circle, back to SoE. I have more I could say, in fact I could write a couple pages worth of heartfelt feelings both good and bad about the game and its status now but instead I'll just offer my condolences to the folks out of a job today and hope they carry on with their search for the MMO of their dreams. Good luck in your search.

Originally Posted by John Smedley

Hello Everyone,

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

We are also officially opening up forums. In the past, our deal with Sigil didn't allow for this, but as with our other games we fill this is an important part of communicating with the playerbase. You can expect a strong presence from our community team as well as the development team members. While we realize that Sigil had said they wouldn't open up general forums, at SOE we fill this hampers our efforts to communicate effectively with the players. We will continue to support the fansites in a big way, and will be contacting many of them directly to discuss what this change means. By no means do we want to lose the strong fansite support by making this change, but we do think it's important to have a forum for players to communicate directly with SOE.

A few other items I wanted to mention

1. Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard. Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard.

2. We do not plan on making any major changes to Vanguard. Any changes are going to come from the team itself. We aren't mandating any big changes to the game. We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.

3. We do plan on spending a lot of time cleaning up legacy issues with Vanguard and making sure the game's performance improves.

By way of comparison, this team is approx. the same size as the EQ2 team and I feel like that team has done an amazing job improving EQ2 since it's launch. We intend to do the same thing for Vanguard and it is our hope that the players feel like we're doing right by them.

[mac173]

Pirotess, my condolences.

Being bought by SOE is the worse outcome I could have thought of for the game. I really feel for you and the other Vanguard players that stuck with the game for the year of hard times just to get shafted.

As to the press release, I would like to comment on a couple of things.

"provide the same level of service we do for our other titles."

In general, this means TERRIBLE. GM's are completely ignorant of the game, cannot answer simple questions about the game, and send you replys that have nothing to do with the question or concern you sent in the first place.

SOE is famous for horrendous customer service. EQ is rife with bugs, broken quests, patches to fix patches and unfinished content. I am sorry you will be subjected to such, but it is the Sony way.

"we will come out with a publishing plan"

EQ no longer exists on store shelves. The "publishing plan" consists of asking players to bring friends to the game. Thats it.

"Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard"

If you can read between the lines, this means they give him an office so they can claim him on the staff to try to retain the current players. His input will have little or no effect on the future of Vanguard.

[Vilaseth]

I am heavily bummed about all of this.
It is even getting hard to find people to group with, less and less people seem to be around. It's a damned shame.

[Pirotess]

Frankly I wouldnt be surprised to see a few server mergers in the very near future. I have zero inside information on that happening but it seems like the best course of action with so many people complaining about the difficulty getting groups which is the heart of the game. With reports running about that Sigil sold less than 200k copies of the game and of those 200k only about 90k are still active, that makes for some pretty barren servers.