As we anticipate the arrival of the merging of several servers on Tuesday, The Harmonium will be looking to grow as well as we move forward onto the new Seradon server.

The Harmonium is an offshoot of the original Harmonium raiding guild from the Povar/Xev days of Everquest. The Harmonium was the #1 raiding guild at the time on Povar, and then on Xev after a mass server transfer to a newer server. The guild was reformed in Vanguard by one of the original founders of the guild and two former officers, with the intent of reconnecting old friends in a more mature but casual environment.

The majority of the members currently in the guild are in the mid 30's to mid 40's, and play evenings in the U.S. timezones. If you are a mature, team oriented player in that level range and are looking for a place to call home and people to call friends, we may have a place for you. Feel free to contact myself (Baye) or our other officer, SuperNaught/Topnaught in game, or speak to any member. More application info can be found on the "Apply" page and applications can be sent into myself via the instructions in the General Forums.

We look forward to meeting new people and developing new friendships as we move into the new server. See you in game!

This afternoon, Smedley posted on the Official Vanguard Forums (oh yea, those are new too) that SOE has aquired Sigil and Vanguard:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Smed As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up.

Looking at Sigil's Team Members page, I quickly count about 104 people on it, which would mean that about half the Sigil team is out of a job today. I hope everything works out for those folks who have worked so hard on Vanguard. On a personal note, I've got to say that I very much hope that everything works out O.K. for our favorite Associate Game Designer Cylus

What will this ultimately mean for the game? Who can say at this point. Smed's post says they will be working on fixing existing problems with the game and expanding the currently available content. He also says:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Smed We do not plan on making any major changes to Vanguard. Any changes are going to come from the team itself. We aren't mandating any big changes to the game. We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.

I think most people knew this day was coming for a LONG time, as in back when Sigil first announced that they were being dropped by Microsoft and partnering up with Sony. There is a lot of dislike for SOE among the Vanguard following, so while this is likely to cost the game a large number of subscriptions, it may be the only way the game can survive at all if they financial pressures are as bad as it seems.

In the news item below, Bayerithe indicated that Brad McQuade had posted a brief message that he was working on a larger post to explain what was going on with SOE/Sigil.

The post is now up , but it doesn't really go into too much detail.

One thing he does talk about, however, is the problem of system requirements for Vanguard. He says:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aradune Lastly, there's the very real issue of Vanguard's system specs, even for the core and hard core gamer in North America and Europe. For a variety of reasons and mistakes on our part that I won't get into right now, Vanguard was released with system spec requirements that were too high for January 2007. Continued optimization will help to a degree, but the game's big hope here is simply Moore's Law and that by the second half of 2007, and certainly by the end of the year, the system spec issue will have been greatly diminished.

It's true. Vanguard's system requirements are too high. WAY too high, and apparently at a pretty fundamental level. These days, I very rarely get a chance to use my desktop PC. Most of my computer time is spent on my laptop, and while my laptop is plenty powerful to run WoW, LOtR (Played the Beta), and many other games (most not even at diminished settings) it doesn't support Vertex Shader 2.0, so Vanguard won't even load.

Even my desktop PC, which is a Dual Core with 2gb RAM and a PCI-E Nvidia 7600 card (a system which, under Vista 64-bit runs Oblivion smooth as butter) stutters and lags far too often in Vanguard. I just put the system together, and I'm certainly not going to upgrade it again any time soon.

My wife's PC is lower specs than mine (AGP ATI 850 and 1gb RAM) and she can hardly play Vanguard at all. So even if I could play she really can't, so we have a tough time playing together, which means I play a game she can play too.

Unfortunately (for the future of Vanguard, I believe) Brad's message seems to indicate that instead of reconsidering and reworking some of their tech to perform better on lower-end systems (and hell, on some higher end systems!) they are simply going to play "Wait for people to buy better PCs".

And while ultimately, people will buy better PCs, by the time the average gamer has a PC that will run Vanguard well, I think one (or all) of the following will be true:

• Vanguard will go the way of Horizons and be abandoned/shut down.
• World of Warcraft's second expansion will be out and people will be playing that instead of jumping to Vanguard as Brad seems to be hoping.
• Other companies will release more accessable MMORPGs that fill the space between LOtR (not complex, but runs well) and Vanguard (Deep and rich, but unrunnalbe) somewhere in between.

Finally, lets face it... not many people are going to be pleased to hear about a higher level of SOE involvement in Vanguard. When the original publishing deal was announced, Sigil made a big deal of the fact that SOE wasn't going to be involved in game design, etc. It looks like that is exactly what is coming down the line, and what everyone feared in the first place. Let the Copy-and-Paste begin! (The control-c and control-v keys MUST have been worn out on the keyboards of the EQ2 designers...)

Hopefully I'm wrong, but only time will tell. While Sigil Online Entertainment waits for the world to upgrade their PCs I think the world will be moving on to other games... or keep playing WoW...