Vanguard: WarCry Column: Vanguard Logic: Like it or not

Vanguard Logic: Like it or not
by Petjasalex

Have you ever caught yourself asking the common, yet so frustrating question: Why did they change that feature? What came suddenly over them?

I believe that most of you voiced similar concerns during your gaming carrier. I know I have.

This column is for the fans of the MMORPGs that have asked themselves the aforementioned question at least once.

There are a lot of MMORPGs that begin with a certain group of players in mind. That is understandable and necessary to ensure a minimum subscribers’ base. When the features of a game are publicized, the players are able to determine whether it satisfies their personal needs and desires.

Unfortunately, many MMORPGs have changed their content dramatically, based on their own financial reports and estimates. Even though this practice is a part of a company’s policy serving its financial growth, most of the players find out that what initially made them interested in the game is no longer a part of it. This type of inconsistency becomes more and more common. Thus, the target group of the subscribers changes dramatically. As a result many feel ‘left out’ gradually losing their interest in the game.

The purpose of this column is to determine different categories of players’ needs, and what kind of games offers them their personal ‘stairway to heaven’. It will be your voice to the developers’ team in a wide range of MMORPG games. You will be able to identify yourselves in a specific players’ category, with a certain degree of accuracy. The polls and forums will be our means of determining your opinions. Vanguard shall be the game we’ll use as a research subject, tracing its course through time, examining its consistency and the appeal it has to each player category, as well as the way each update affects the general populace and each of the gamers’ categories.

There are two major reasons why Vanguard is our choice:

* It is a fairly new game, – only two weeks old – . We can observe its updates from the very beginning
* The game designers have declared a policy of consistency. We would like to determine the effects of stable game characteristics on players.

This research won’t generalize the results. Determining a weighted average of the players’ attitude and wishes is not our purpose. Each category has its own distinct features, and is vital to the gaming community. Our results could serve the developers of Vanguard – and other games as well – to reflect your needs in their game, while keeping Vanguard’s backbone – the distinctive elements that make the game special – intact.

Upcoming events: Poll on your goals in Vanguard!