Silius on 2009 and Vangaurd

submitted by lifebane on Jan 22nd, 2009

Silius recently posted about what he sees ahead in 2009 for Vanguard.  He also tossed up a poll to see what it is that the community is most interested in seeing developed in the game.  You can see the original post here but I have copied over the article for your ease of reference below and also plugged in the current % breakdown by option offered in that poll.

"Greetings all,

Well the holidays are over and we are very busy around the office now that everyone is back. The Christmas update took a lot of work to get out and everyday we are working on bug fixes related to it and of course older bugs. 2009 looks to be a very nice year for Vanguard as we spend some time looking to our future. We spent 2008 adjusting, tweaking, and bug fixing. In that time we managed to get out some new content but not nearly the breadth of content we wanted to get out. As many of you know we have started working on a level increase and alternate advancement on top of mapping out our content for the year starting with the Pantheon. Our team has changed hear and there over the past year and we are still working some kinks out but I feel very positive about where we are headed.

So with that out of the way I want to get into some details and announcements. First thing is that the Christmas update spread our team a little to thin when considering the other things we were working on. This resulted in Pantheon not getting the attention I had desired throughout November and December. After evaluating where we were I was left with two options, demand unreasonable hours from my team and push out a product that none of us would be happy with quality wise or push the update back and do a smaller update for our anniversary. I opted for number 2 because you all deserve a higher quality product and I want the team to continue to enjoy working on Vanguard as they have over the past year and some change. Does this mean we are pushing it till infinity? Not at all but I do not want to give a date as I am still getting feedback form our QA department on what is realistic for them given some other things we have to do in the background. We will continue to push things to test and ask for assistance as it really is our best tool given the sheer size of Vanguard in contrast to our team. Something else to note is that we will be updating our in the works page. No this is not a joke, and April fools is 3+ months away. I cannot apologize enough for what has happened with this page but it is an item that we will be making an effort to keep up to date.

So now that I have the good/bad news out of the way I want to give you something I hope is taken as good news. When looking at our schedule and how we have to focus our team there are always going to be some things we cannot spend time on do to player demand. Part of our planning for this year we want to involve the community more. So I am going to use this time to poll the community to see where they want our minds to head. We have taken some time to try to categorize things the best we can given feedback from the forums. We are currently working on setting up some player choice updates and we would use this poll as a basis for what we would do with them. Please keep in mind that these updates have to be small updates as we have larger projects in mind.

Below is a basic definition of each poll option to better help with selection.

Adventuring Group revamps: ( 15%)
Solo/Small group
6-Man

Non Adventuring Content: ( 18%)
Crafting
Diplomacy
Housing
Fluff (Fishing, Cooking, etc.)

Raid/Guild Functionality: ( 29%)
Raid content
Raid UI work and bug fixes
Raid functionality
Guild UI work and bug fixes
Guild functionality

PVE Balance: ( 3%)
NPC AI/Difficulty
Class tweaks and fixes

PVP Balance ( 8%)
Class tweaks and fixes

No New Content, stick to bug fixes only ( 27%)
unfun :(