Greetings yet again oh delvers in things dead and most foul. Word has reached our sinister ears of another Milestone announcement over at Vanguard Players. Milestone #2 has been announced and in a general sense... it reads much like Milestone #1... Raids, Bugs, Performance, and Trial Island! Oh yes, and someone has begun to work on the Griffin mount quest.. yay flying bird cats!!! Read on friend!

"Hey Everybody,
Ok, on to Milestone 2 goals. We started work on it July 2nd so we are about a week into it now. The main focus will continue to be on optimizations and bug fixing, along with continuing work on some of the previous milestone goals like raids and the Trial Island.

Game Update 2 is the next update coming up. As soon as the update makes it to QA, we will post the contents of it for everyone to discuss. Following QA, it will be pushed to the Test server. Expect it to stay there for a few weeks for the test players to bang on before it gets pushed to the Live servers.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Hasium

Milestones
We will be posting on www.VGplayers.com the teams current milestone goals and tasks. An individual milestone typically spans about 6 weeks in length. Please keep in mind that some tasks will spill over into several milestones. As the tasks are completed, they will assigned to a Game Update patch and be pushed out to the Test Server and then to the Live Servers.

Game Updates
We will also be moving to a more consistent patch schedule. Approximately every 6 weeks we will push a game update. This game update will be comprised of some percentage of new content, new features, and new art that was completed in the previous milestones. We will still be patching in the weeks in-between the game updates with bug fixes, performance upgrades, and everything else not covered.

Vanguard’s Milestone 2 goals.

1. Performance / optimization increases
2. Fix bugs
3. Raid content
4. Trial Island

Here are some of the tasks the team is working that will help us achieve those goals.

Design

Content Team

1. Work continues on the Ancient Port Warehouse at a pretty steady pace.
2. Work on the Griffon, permanent flying mount quest has started.
3. Design is working with Art on the trial island.
4. The optimized humanoid NPC’s completed by Art in the previous milestone are now being implemented starting in Rindol Field.

Diplomacy Team

1. The diplomacy team is continuing working on putting together some cool looking tier 4 clothing options.
2. The diplomacy team is also continuing work on adding House quests.

Programming (only some extra superfluous words have been removed)

1. Fixing memory leaks
2. Fixing bugs that cause CTD’s / client memory issues.
3. Raid UI and tools support
4. Creating better tools for Customer Service. This will allow them to provide better in-game support for our customers.
5. Working through the bug queue. This includes fixing some of the more annoying PvP bugs. See, there is some love for the PvP players. J

Art

Environment Team

Warning, the following text is a direct copy from the previous milestone. There is no vast conspiracy of lazy typing from Hasium. It just means that work on the Trial Island continues. J

The team’s primary task this milestone is working what we’re calling the “trial island”. The island is being built using highly optimized existing assets in an effort to establish a new art content pipeline that is able to produce, in laymen’s terms – cool looking stuff that won’t make your computer explode – quicker than we’ve previously been able to do so.

The overall benefit for the trial island is that we are working on heavily optimizing existing assets. The knowledge learned through this will then be applied to existing art assets in the game therefore increasing performance. In addition we will be using the completed island (which will feature a couple dungeons as well as diplomacy and crafting content) as a free downloadable “Vanguard demo”.

Character Team

• The character team is working on assets for the Trial Island."