Hi folks,
Lol..."please help, we"re drowning"...haha, I remember that. That was my statement, exactly. And it was so true, too.
It is easy to generate supposition and make assumptions when you don"t have all of the details. While that suppositionmaybe a plausible scenario given your available information, it doesn"t mean it isthescenario. Given the information I have, I could just as well say Utnayan is a PR machine secretly hired by Blizzard to slander Sigil. Or better yet...hired by the secondary market industry in revenge of Sigil"s strong stance on the secondary market.
Oloh doesn"t play Vanguard, sad to say. I think I"ve seen him log on a total of once since launch. I think he lost interest in the game during beta, and for those who participated in beta prior to around beta 4, you"d know why.
But yeah, he founded both the site and the beta guild. Since he was a "friend and family" of Sigil, he was in beta very early, but he kept the guild and the site distinctly separate. (Out of necessity, really--he wrote the NDA and he wasn"t about to breach it.) I didn"t even know which of my fellow SV staff members were in beta until I got accepted myself around the end of beta 2.5.
One of Oloh"s original goals for the site and the guildpost-launch was to fill the same role that FoH did during EQ1. The site was to be the venue for the in-game hardcore guild to publish their achievements. Several things happened though, which changed things prior to that intention materializing. For one, the NDA kept the guild and the site as quite separate entities, and even now this is still true. The site staff cannot drive the direction of the guild, and the guild cannot drive the direction of the site. For two, Oloh himself lost interest before launch and so the direction of the guild and the site was left up to the then guild leader (Leto) and the site staff, respectively.
The beta guild SV is quite different than the launch guild SV. Several of the members that were in toward the end of beta are founders of the post-launch guild, but the ranks have been filled with regular players. Where the beta guild was around for testing purposes, the launch guild is meant to be a hardcore player guild (although not as hardcore as Oloh originally planned, since he is no longer its leader).
As for the site, well...I was in the role of system admin for the site up to launch. But just before launch, we experience such an explosion in load that our server was experiencing severe issues. I have a RL day job that occupies most of my time, but I"ve been able to get by during VG beta with minimal maintenance on the SV site. But the additional load was too much for both our server at the time and my ability to handle, so we started looking at our options. Since we don"t make any money at all from SV and had been paying out of pocket for our hosting, we didn"t have a lot of options available. But, one of the more viable options to us was given to us by Requiem and Tyen with the offer to host our site for free in exchange for putting their ads on our site. Frankly, had that offer not been on our table at the time, there may not be an SV site today. It was a perfect match since Requiem"s business strategy for uberguilds.org network involves hosting sites like ours (prominent, and/or high-profile gaming guilds), and Requiem"s ad policy matched ours in terms of anti-secondary market. That and Requiem has the hardware and the know-how to manage it well and I don"t.
In summary, I haven"t even talked to Oloh in the last couple of months. Everyone else who runs the site have RL day jobs that don"t involve the gaming industry at all. The guild and the site are run as separate entities. The only ties SV has with uberguilds.org is that they host our site for free (although we made it clear that SV staff would retain complete ownership and control over the site before we accepted the hosting offer), and the only ties we have with Sigil are via the affiliate program and the same contacts and interaction that all of the affiliate sites have.
Actually, I don"t think Brad is very impressed with Silky Venom anymore. haha In fact, I think he rather dislikes it because there is a lot of anti-Vanguard sentiment there (but to be fair, there is a lot of pro-Vanguard there too).