I don"t think it"s very accurate to say that any game that doesn"t follow WoW"s ease of play is going to fail. It seems fairly obvious to me that even after it was made fairly clear that Vanguard was going to be a more "core player" game (which everyone took to mean harder, and Brad now tries to spin as a misunderstanding) it still had a huge following. A lot of people really wanted to get back to their EQ roots and play a difficult, even sometimes frustrating game. Then again, I think a lot of this stems from people thinking WoW is an easy game just because of it"s quick leveling curve. Many of the raids in WoW are extremely difficult and the differences in PvP skill between players is quite obvious.
That being said, Vanguard didn"t fail because it tried to be a "hard" game. I"d say the largest reason it"s failing, by far, is the piss poor performance and the completely unfinished and unrefined state of the game. The other reasons are a little less obvious.
I was heavily involved in the VG beta from 2.5 onward since I was in the most active guild in the game. The core group of us in the guild got a lot of inside information about how development was going and we often got to see and test content that was either available to other testers or other testers just weren"t high enough level for. In my opinion (and I can probably speak for a few other members in my guild who experienced the same things), these are the reasons Vanguard is failing/has failed.
1) Brad was disconnected from the game, almost entirely. I can"t speak for pre-beta 2, but from then on Brad rarely spent long actually in-game. This became even more obvious when he would consistently misinform the public in his posts about beta, and even his posts in the beta forums. There was even an incident where someone in my guild asked Brad a question about a recently introduced mechanic into the game and he flat out had no clue what we were talking about. I can"t recall what the mechanic was, but it was a fairly important game-changing one. As beta went on it became increasingly obvious, both in game and on the forums, that Brad had no fucking clue what he was talking about half the time. Now, that"s understandable in my opinion. You can"t expect a CEO of a company to know all the goings-on inside of it, but when it"s a CEO like Brad who would constantly make long dissertations about game design and mechanics within Vanguard, it just stank of bullshit.
2) A lot of Sigil"s team was completely fucking clueless on how to do game design. If you look through Sigil"s employee page at the developers you"ll be hard pressed to find many experienced people. I don"t mean to bash the employees at Sigil, most were really cool people, but the staffing done at Sigil was atrocious. We had class and mechanic designers that had never worked on a video game before and who"s best experience was playing D&D or EQ. I"m no master at design, and maybe this is standard practice in the MMO industry, but a lot of their decisions were just inane and seriously hurt the game. Why do you think most of the classes were being redesigned right up until release with some classes getting complete overhauls 3 and 4 times?
3) Brad"s overhype of the game. Granted, some of this was due to the rabid Vanboi population that popped up and would cream their pants over every word Brad said, but a lot of the blame has to be laid at Brad"s feet. He always falls back on this lame "well I didn"t promise x" cop-out, but the fact remains when the CEO of a company mentions certain things enough times people begin to expect it. He should"ve known better.
4) The unfinished release, obviously. Like I posted earlier in this thread in response to Brad (which he never responded to), a CEO of a company claiming that the "financial realities" are out of his hands is just fucking hilarious. As the CEO the financial operation of your company is YOUR responsibility. Not to mention after stating, several times, that he would not allow this game to be released until it was ready, he deserves every inflammatory post aimed in his general direction.
5) Finally, and this goes back to the "core player" game design, the total flipflop the designers and Brad tried to pull at the very last minute to make this game more competitive. Once again, being in the position I was in I got to hear about a lot of this straight from the developers mouth. Just months before release every fucking day would bring word that Brad and some other designers were trying to push yet another WoW-clone mechanic into the game. Now I"m not some "UBER HARDCORE" masochist, I enjoyed WoW when I played, but it was obvious that Brad and Co. were scared shitless at the lack of involvement in the VG beta. The retention rate in beta was horrible and they were fucking scared. In an effort to stopgap this they started to jam all these mechanics that the game was obviously not built for into the game to try and court back the "casual" player. The result is what you see now, a half-assed unfinished pile of mediocrity that straddles the line between EQ and WoW and just ends up all the shittier because of it.
So there you have it, why Vanguard is failing/has failed, depending on your point of view. If you"ll notice, a lot of the onus falls on Brad here, no surprise. I had a lot of respect for Brad when I went into Vanguard and now I have zero. Thankfully with this stinker of a game he probably won"t be producing/designing another MMO ever again. At least we can all hope so.
P.S. A big FUCK YOU to Brad (and anyone else who was involved) for "letting go" of by far one of their best designers (the only one who actually played the game with real players for any significant amount of time). Apparently Brad doesn"t like it when his designers express a difference of opinion about the direction of the game (and look who was right?). For that reason alone I sincerely hope you have to sell off all your cars and become of the laughing stock of the industry.
