Did you mean 2008 there Michael?

Vanguard has already hit “good” (or at least “good enough”) and it’s amazing what the team there has done to make it more stable and optimise stuff, the big thing it’s lacking at the moment is high end content, the low end game and client stability is there now.

Sure, they added raiding, but as everyone knows, raiders make up a small percentage of the population (though the raider population is probably slightly larger than most given it’s more “hardcore” rep), so the situation is people hit 50, grind swamp armour for a week or two and then disappear.

Unfortunately, this has swapped one “bleed” (CTD’s, general client instability, low FPS) for another (boredom at higher levels if you don’t raid) and until they address high end game content, I think they’ll continue to churn all the new/returning subs (of which there has been quite a few of lately).

I guess I’m agreeing with you on the VG point, but for slightly different reasons than you’ve given.

I also think TR is going to face the same challenge. I’m 2/3 of the way to the cap in that (and there’s a lot ahead of me) and already there’s a lot of grumbles about lack of end game content (with the devs mentioning “raiding” and “PvP” as “The Answer”). TR’s biggest issue in the coming year will be player retention and churn if that’s their only “answers”…

Golden rule of MMO’s: Content is king. If players have something fun/fresh to do, anything, then they’ll forgive a lot of rough edges.

Turbine is a company that “gets” this and they generally have pretty good player retention…they are one of the only MMO companies that I’ll actively avoid because I know how addictive their monthly “crack” updates can be!! :o)

Hmm…I’m rambling now…I’ll leave it there with a Happy New Year!!!

In nearly 10 years of playing MMOs Vanguard is only the second (after EQ1) to “hook” me and keep me hooked. I recently took a break from it to go back to EQ2 to play RoK, but after a month I was desperate to get back to Telon. I want to try LotRO, but haven;t yet simply because I don;t want to take more time out from the enormous fun I am having in Vanguard, and for the same reason I doubt I will be trying Warhammer either.

Of course, I was fortunate in that, right from the start, I had very few of the technical issues in VG that others had. It played solidly with decent graphics for me from launch. Since SoE took over and put some competent programmers on it, it plays more smoothly than EQ2 on my system.

Currently there’s a posiitve horde of new players, and that began before the recent one-month free revival of lapsed accounts. People seem to be having a lot of fun. I never thought Brad would get his 500k subs and now I would think 50k subs would be good progress, but so what?

We have arthouse movies, indie bands, cult novels, small-scale, profitable aesthetic successes in all forms or art, often funded by mcuh more mainstream production houses. MMOs don’t all need to be the big Summer blockbuster, some just need to be the sleeper that makes back its costs on international takings and is always showing, somewhere because for a particular audience it plays just right.

The big issue for me isn’t whether Vanguard can grow from where it is now, but whether Sony will choose to stay in the MMO game at all. No, I don’t think SoE will go to India for any $300m, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the big corporation divest itself of the MMO operation somehow, and if that should happen then all bets for the future of all SoE MMOs would be off.

Well, maybe.

But I think it is more likely to hit in late 2008, just close enough to the next EQ2 expansion and with enough fanfair to painfully remind us all how small EQ2 is next to the beast from Azeroth.