Original source: FoH boards (I guess Fires of Heaven isn't just a book by Robert Jordan).
Vanguards beta is filled to the brim with fanbois. Any objective player pretty much bailed months ago.
So, actually blaming the fans, for once, is right on. Who woulda thunk it?
When all your left with is the sycophantic 'kool-aid' kids, the results are going to reflect that. Even worse, they're setting themselves up for a colossal failure by relying almost entirely on that part of the playerbase. (which by the by, will be the first to flee come release time). Then what are you left with? The game itself, judged on it's own merits.
It's not rocket science.
A) Make the game fun
B) Move on to the things you want to personally see accomplished.
Instead Brad has that reversed. He's almost like a guy saying: If I build it, they will come! Fuck it. I don't care if the game succeeds as long as it has "Teh Vision".
There's too many options nowadays. Utnayan hit the nail on the head for once with that observation. Another thing that has not been pointed out, or said nearly enough, is that EQ *MISSED* much of it's demographic. Many people in their mid to late 20s and early 30s would have loved to play EQ. But it was far too time consuming for them. Much of the growth in MMOs have been the kids growing from console to PC yes. But another part of it was older players waiting for a more casual game to play. 10 million people did not pop out of the woodwork one day and say "We Love Blizzard."
Blizzard simply met the challenge perfectly, and dominated by hitting every demographic they could and rejecting the belief that casual isn't fun or lasting. This was a mistake to many hard-core people. Yes, a mistake to the tune of roughly 120 million dollars a month in revenue. Vanguard biggest mistake seems to be catering to an even smaller demographic than EQ1 did, and that's bad news from a guy who claims the MMO market doesn't need anymore 30 million dollar failures. So damn true, and yet oddly ironic.
The biggest thing I'm looking forward to now with Vanguard is the enormous amount of spin that is yet to come. - Jait
Update: 2 May 2009, Edited post and applied labels.
