A year ago, at the close of 2007, I threw out some prognostications about the coming 12 months. Those months have now passed and it’s time to pay the piper. Just as with last year I’m going to grade my predictions on a straight pass/fail basis; percentages are for actuarials.
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A bunch of truly fantastic news and features have gone across WoW Insider and Massivley in the last few days. I had to share me some love:

• A wrapup of the pounding that cross-gender ‘research’ took at the hands of Bartle and the Freeman.  I particularly liked the comments on Raph’s blog; almost nothing from him and several really nice retorts from the peanut gallery.
• Will Dobson put together a fantastic look at the Spring Festival going on over in LOTRO. It’s not only interesting and informative but a great chance to show off our new gallery software. Nice!
• The WoW Insider team headed to the Tourney test realm and came away with some amazing stuff. Amanda Miller has a writeup of the events, but you really have to check out the gallery of their experiences. I want to ride a giant Raven Lord!
• A FANTASTIC announcement from NCsoft as they unveil the beginnings of Issue 12 for City of Heroes. I really love the sound of this content – definitely going to have to check it out. In fact, talking it over with the EQ2 group, it sounds like CoH might be our next destination once we hit max level sometime near the end of this year.
• I remember seeing the flying mounts at the end of Vanguard Beta over a year ago now, and only now are they getting put into the game. A little sad, but still great news for the players who have been waiting patiently for this content to drop. Game Update 4 is live!

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People often talk about what’s important in Massive games. While I tend to find discussions of elements like storytelling, graphics, or theme interesting, much of that is missing the point. Why do people play Massive games? People. It’s as simple as that. While some titles make great single-player experiences too, the fundamental component of any MMOG is that second M.

Raiding, guilds, and chat elements, then, tend to get a lot of attention. And rightly so; the guild is the fundamental unit of any Massive game. Raiding is the ‘thing people do together’ in many titles, and the chat component of the game allows the whole thing to happen in the first place. There’s a missing level of granularity there, that I think is far too often overlooked: the single static group. Static groups are, in my mind, just as important as guilds to the success or failure of a game. Incredibly common, they’re one of the most joyous things about massive games. Tabletop gamers will recognize the static group, that band of comrades, immediately. That’s where my group came from, after all – a player of mine wandering away from the table (and the state).

Static group recognition, in my mind, isn’t just a nice optional feature; it’s an important concept in online gaming that goes regularly overlooked.

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The death of Vanguard, or rather its slow decline, is a noteworthy point in a number of 2008 prognostications around the blogosphere. I tend to think that’s a freaking shame. If as nothing more than as a testament to all those newbie designers, I really like the idea of Vanguard sticking around. So what can be done at this point?

What can put the brakes on this game’s freefall? In my mind, I think about the only thing left is an influx of new players. A sufficient parachute of players might make this game’s time in the air a little longer – and certainly more interesting.

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Almost exactly a year ago I put down some predictions for the year in Massive games. It’d be cheating if I didn’t grade myself, so that’s what I’m going to do here, looking back at my 2006 MMOGnostications. This will be a pass/fail test, class … pens at the ready!

Burning Problems – The launch of the expansion to World of Warcraft is going to cause Blizzard bigtime headaches.

Buzz! Bigtime wrong. The launch went almost flawlessly, and despite the huge impact it has had on the life of raiders WoW rolls along unbowed and unbroken. I always thought the expansion was going to be good, but I expected Blizzard to have problems similar to the game’s initial launch. Instead, big blue learned its lessons and scored a customer relations coup.

That Not So Fresh Feeling – At least one of the MMOGs slated to launch this year is going to end up being kind of a stinker.

Ding! This was kind of one of my ’safety’ options, but it came very much true nonetheless. Vanguard was a huge letdown for expectant fans, and the SOE team is still doing overtime work to make the ship sail in a straight line.

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Update: It’s official now. Smedley’s post on the forums gives up most of the details. The official press release says that the game sold about 200,000 units since launch.

So. F13 has the news:

At approximately 4:30PM [April 14th], Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn’t seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn’t seem like something he’d do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn’t. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.

Actually, we know for sure the McQuaid wasn’t the one to do it. Grouchy Gamer reports that lord-and-master of Vanguard Brad McQuaid hasn’t been in the Sigil offices since last year. You know, since before the game shipped? Just in case you think that’s some crazy guy on a website, I’ll go on record as saying I can verify most of what he’s saying. I too have heard from ’sources’ who say that the hard workers, the guys on the ground at Sigil, were fucked over by a gent who tipped his toe into the ‘running a company’ pool and decided it was a wee bit too nippy for him.

One of these ’sources’ has been suggesting I look into this further, talk to some of these guys and write it up. And I will say: if there’s any ex-Sigil employees looking to talk my email address is right here on the site. Update: F13 has a talk with one of the ex-devs and lays it all out.

But the reality is, I haven’t dug very hard because the whole thing depresses the hell out of me. How can a guy like McQuaid, who was there at the very beginning, care so little about the project he started? This wasn’t some green schlub out of college: he helped to make one of these things when ‘catass’ wasn’t even a term yet. Hell, he helped make the game that spawned the term.

Krones has a few insightful things to say about this over at Plaguelands, but the last words go to Grouchy:

I should tell you that I’m pissed that I wasted 2 years on developing a community at my site for a game that is nothing more than a steaming pile of shit. I’m pissed that the good people (and good developers) that I care about at Sigil are now in the street, and Brad still has millions and Jeff Butler a job … In the end, this game may someday be good. Tomorrow, when this news is announced a lot of the SOE haters will just jump ship, whether SOE had anything to do with this game failing or not. Fact is, it has (failed.) And fact is, it’s not SOE’s fault. The blame for this one falls squarely at the desk where the buck should stop. The CEO’s office. The empty one in the corner.

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Update on the future of Sigil and Vanguard coming soon…

It’s all ultimately good news, but complicated enough to justify one of my verbose postings :)  I should have my first Sigil/Vanguard update up tomorrow and then look for regular updates as to the future of the game here and on the affiliate sites (probably weekly or so, depending on what’s going on).  I will post here first and then immediately copy the post to a set of the Vanguard affiliate sites.

thanks,

-Brad 

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