Vanguard celebrates three years of Telon

Happy Birthday Vanguard.

Wow, 3 years already? Time flies.

This game is the physical proof of what happens when you have an unstable launch with minimal content at launch. Now 3 years later, It might actually be the best game out on the market right now, but nobody is playing it because of said launch.

The saddest thing about Vanguard is that SOE will never sell it nor will they signifcantly invest in it. SOE's fantasy MMOG flagship is EQ2 and they do not want anything to directly compete with it -- which Vanguard does -- so they keep Vanguard on a short leash. Too bad, actually, since with proper care and feeding Vanguard could have been their fantasy MMOG flagship. :-(

Guess we have to wait until EQ3. . .

It's ONLY been three years?! People talk about this game like it has been out forever. And how it probably won't be around much longer.

If this game went f2p i would be willing to give it a try.

Fantastic game.

Sadly I haven't subscribed in awhile due to population problems and when the introduced the exchange.

If SoE starts putting resources back into it, I'd resub without a doubt.

The 3rd, and likely last year of Vanguard. For those who didn't catch it, the development team announced that they have shelved all work on future updates and will only be working on bug fixing from now on.

Count me as one of those surprised the game lasted this long. It wasn't just because of the bugs, performance issues, or content. The very foundation of the game was so primitive and too reliant on players putting in work before being allowed to have fun to permit any kind of success. SOE feels like they're trying to milk whatever they can out of it before shutting the game down.

I am not by any means a SOE fanboy. That said. SOE did alot for VG, They put more time into it then I would ever thought they would. They took a horrible launch game and made it into one of the more challenging Fantasy MMOs out there. I still have my collectors edition box sitting on my desk and of all the MMOs I have played then left shortly after. VG is the only one I always Re-Sub to, even for only a month or so.

I hope that VG will not die, because if it did, it would be a loss to the general MMO community.

A fantastic PvE game, run into the ground and neglected by probably the worst MMO developer ever.

Happy Birthday Vanguard.

Vanguard should be a textbook study for game developers so that they truly understand what not to do -- and why -- when it comes to MMO development. Most especially, it highlights the importance of waiting until the game is ready so that you can have a polished launch rather than pushing it out the door with major issues and hoping that enough players will stick around to let you fix the problems.

It took Vanguard the better part of a year to fix its worst problems. Those issues could have been handled in about 3 months with the full pre-launch development team. Much of what they addressed in that year was things that the beta testers had been complaining about six months prior to launch (while the fanbois screamed them down with the "it's only beta" excuse). Those three months would have totally changed the way that the game was received by the community and given it the chance to actually add content over time to keep making the game better. It's a shame, because Vanguard had the potential to be one of the best MMO's out there.

Too many other big name titles have followed the Vanguard pattern. One has to wonder what the genre would be like today if they had learned from Vanguard rather than repeating its mistakes.

Happy Birthday, Vanguard. It's a real shame that you're never going to see the renaissance that you both need and deserve. Not only did you truly innovate in a lot of ways, but you're one of the prettiest MMO's of the last several years.