So when SoE buys out VG....

[Sabek]

are they going to rename it EQ3?

[miir]

are they going to rename it EQ3?

World of Trollcraft, I think.

[Sabek]

Was it that transparent?

I don't play any MMO btw. I was just stirring the pot.

[miir]

Was it that transparent?

I don't play any MMO btw. I was just stirring the pot.

I was just throwing some poe-tay-toes in the pot.

[Siji]

I thought you smoked pot..

[Mr Bacon]

http://www.veeshanvault.org/forums/view ... 586#354586

[miir]

http://www.veeshanvault.org/forums/view ... 586#354586

Whoa...

[Sabek]

http://www.veeshanvault.org/forums/view ... 586#354586

What does it mean?

[Animalor]

I guess we'll know the answer to this before too long.

http://forums.station.sony.com/vg/posts ... ic_id=8569

"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."

What does that mean? It means that right now Vanguard is doing decently but not as well as we hoped. If you haven't read my last long post that outlined some of the things that went wrong during development, etc., please do. So the bottom line is that SOE is going to be getting more involved with Sigil and Vanguard - our relationship is going to become even tighter - much tighter. At this point I can't say much more than that.

Does this mean an acquisition? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean more or less people at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean management changes at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

What it does mean at this point is that both companies agree that we need more of SOE's involvement if Vanguard is going to continue to get the support it needs to both continue to be worked on and improved and debugged and optimized. When people start getting burned out of the Warcraft expansion (pardon the pun), we need to make sure that the game is more polished and will play on lower end machines. As people continue to level up, it means that we need additional higher level content, including raid content. If we are going to change our marketing message effectively to target those who played a lot of EverQuest but who have ‘grown up' such that they have jobs, families, etc. that they cannot and will not play another EverQuest even though they enjoyed they game years ago. We've done studies and it's not atypical of an old EQ player, when they hear about Vanguard, to assume that because many of the people involved in Vanguard's development worked on EQ as well, that Vanguard must simply be an EQ 3. From that point they don't even give Vanguard another look. They don't do any more research on the game. They don't go to the official sites. They don't go to the affiliate sites. Instead they think to themselves, "ah well, were I younger and had my life not changed, I'd give it a shot, but I just don't have the time for another EQ with better graphics right now."

And that's it - they don't give Vanguard another thought EQ peaked in late 2001 at almost 500k subscribers. In its lifetime it's sold over 2 million units. Putting EQ in a vacuum and that's a lot of people who played and who aren't playing anymore. And the total number of subscribers didn't start going down until sometime 2002. I'm also pretty sure up until its peak that the average lifespan of a player was nearing 9-12 months. And as I mentioned in my last lengthy post, this group of people who played but don't anymore could arguably be put into two sub-groups - those who look back fondly at those months and even years and those who don't. I have read posts and received emails from people who claim to have played to max level and then quit very angry - the "I just played your game for 2 years and now I hate you" emails. But realistically how big is that group? Even if it was half (boggle) the other group is still pretty big. So ignoring all of the people who have quit or who are growing bored of their current MMOG (WoW, FFXI, DAoC, etc) that need to be reached (and in a very different way, especially the WoW player), both a word of mouth and a formal marketing campaign targeting these people clearly needs to launched. These people need to know that Vanguard does have the ‘EQ feel' in many ways but that it is much more soloable than EQ was, especially the early EQ days. They need to know that you can play for short periods of time and advance. They need to know that the ‘end game' is not all about raiding into the wee hours of the night. Some subset of these people will still feel burnt out of MMOGs period, but I think there's a lot of people who haven't been reached and our and others research supports that. False assumptions are being made by a lot of people. The reality is that Vanguard *is* the game most of these people are looking for - it has the good they remember, but has eliminated a lot of the tedium and necessary long hours that don't fit into their lifestyle anymore.

Then there are the people who are growing weary of their current MMOG. Given how much larger the MMOG gamespace has grown since EQ's zenith in 2001 (arguably 7 times as large worldwide, and at least 2-3 time as large in North America alone), we have to take advantage of this. At some point these people are going to want to start a new MMOG (especially after the WoW expansion newness has worn out, which for most of the non-hard-core would be when you really have to start raiding in the expansion). LoTR Online is an x-factor - reviews from beta testers seem to indicate that the game is more casual like WoW, a small game, and that it looks really good but can run on a lower end system much better than Vanguard (just as WoW can). So at least for a time the more casual bored WoW player may migrate to LoTR Online. How sticky (e.g. how long that game will hold onto players) is unknown, but I think it's safe to say that a significant percentage of the more casual bored WoW player will head to LoTR - at least first, given the franchise around it. Conservatively this leaves the more hard core WoW player (which in Vanguard or EQ terms would be considered either a hard core or, more likely, a core gamer). That number, even just taking the North American and European gamer is still potentially a large one and needs to be targeted (given Vanguard's high system specs, the time it will take to localize, and Blizzard's name recognition and pre-existing proven marketing ability in Asia, I wouldn't count that group, although a very significant one, until 2008 or so. Targeting that group is for a future discussion).

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. The big problem that remains is that you still pretty much need a new system as opposed to, say, simply a new graphics card. But eventually, gamers do replace their systems. Given what Vista (especially the Ultimate edition) takes to really run, combined with other games that come out by the end of the year that really push technology, many people will be compelled to buy new systems. Unlike EQ, which was one of the first hardware only games, Vanguard needs not only a fast graphics card, but also a system with pci-express, fast memory, a fast FSB, etc. With EQ, you just needed to buy a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2 - the rest of your system is fine. With Vanguard, however, just plugging the fastest AGP card into your 2-3 year old system doesn't cut it. In fact, Vanguard runs pretty well on a 2 GB system with a decent pci-express video card and fast memory in a 2.6 GHz Pentium; conversely, run the game on an older AGP system, the fastest AGP card you can buy, and a 3.2 GHz CPU and you'll have framerate issues. The game is simply not CPU bound, nor just graphics card bound, but rather mostly bound by the data that it needs to constantly move from the CPU to main memory to the graphics card, and then all the way back again. It's all about the various bus speeds and caches - moving data around efficiently is arguably more important than processing that data on the CPU or GPU. The only fix here, again, is time. Vista (especially the Ultimate edition, which is what's being pushed to gamers) wants fast components. Direct X 10 hardware and software will help a lot, especially when there is a DX10 version of Vanguard. A native 64bit client of Vanguard will eventually help a lot too. Bottom line: by the end of 2007, a lot more people should have upgraded, especially if Microsoft succeeds with Vista and native DX 10 games. And if they really push Gaming for Windows like they did, say, the Xbox 360, the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 should be a very different landscape for PC games in general and Vanguard specifically. Was the Vanguard tech ahead of its time? Yes, and there has been a price to pay for that short term (although many people are able to play with older machines - why? Different configurations, different settings, different thresholds for lower framerates, etc.). But MMOGs ideally never end and if you've architected your engine to both push the limits of existing and near future technology as well as easily employ future technologies, then you have a game that doesn't look dated one, two, even three plus years down the road. And that's what we did with Vanguard - so we feel some pain now, but if we can keep the momentum going, this decision pays off in the long run (big time).

In summary, there are arguably a lot of people who by mid to end of this year in the MMOG gamespace for whom Vanguard could potentially be very attractive. What the game needs is a re-launch of sorts, including targeted marketing campaigns, an all-around successful move by gamers to the next generation of hardware, continued good word of mouth ‘viral' marketing by those who are already playing, enjoying, and re-subscribing. And all of this could and should ramp up by the end of the year, all the while the Vanguard team is putting in more content, the live team filling out high level content as well as adding to areas of the game's vast seamless world which are a bit empty. Then a re-launch towards the end of the year plus the first expansion (which is looking like first quarter 200, one that would add RTS style city building, ship to ship combat, jousting, and a second ‘half' of the Kojanese Archipelago that makes ship travel meaningful - and by meaningful I mean not tedious, rewarding exploration, with lots of new areas (both in the existing world and in the extension of the archipelago). And I'm talking about some re-use of existing art, combined with new art that fits into the existing continents, and then finally some all out new stuff - different styles of terrain (islands) and ocean to look at while making your journey to found a new player city while constantly being attacked by exotic sea creatures, leviathans, and other traditional members of fantasy and crypto-zoology. Not to mention pirates with canons, or other players and their ships on the PvP servers. And who knows, could be first expansion or second, but eventually you need to pull from Mesoamerican mythology, encounter empires based on Greco-roman architecture... it goes on and on, it's all planned out, and Vanguard can do all of it given sufficient time. The tools have matured, both in terms of art and design, and the art process orders of magnitude more efficient because of years of Maya scripting, an in-house terrain generator that creates what you want as opposed to spitting out algorithmically generated hills and valleys, and an art team that has this process down pat - for example, they were able to re-create Tursh and Leth Nurae in a fraction of time it took them to create the original, smaller, and much less interesting ‘versions'.

"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."

So what does that mean again? Again, I apologize for not being able to go into details and it's the details that need to be worked out. But I think it's safe to say that both Sigil and SOE see the potential of a mind blowing game by the end of the year. What's needed, bottom line, is some time, and how to get that time is what's being worked out. And so I still see a 500k+ game, I was just off by a year for a variety of reasons, some under my control, many not. And I think SOE sees this as well. To pull it off however, requires a funded and supported Sigil and a well marketed Vanguard with these different target audiences identified and solid plan on how to reach them all, and then a solid execution of said plan, hitting them hard, pushing these ‘WoW everywhere' point of purchase materials from the front to the very back.. In the meantime, the Vanguard that was launched in early 2007 continues to move forward, with much of what I've talked about patched in over time, and the rest in the first expansion (or re-launch, or whatever we all agree upon in terms of product and service placement). Bottom line, Vanguard continues to march forward, a solid and fun game today, and an even better one tomorrow. More ‘state of the game' posts by me, a regularly updated ‘In the Works' http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/inTheWorks.vm. And whatever kind of increased partnership between Sigil and SOE is necessary to make this vision a reality. And again, as for what that means exactly, more on that later TM.

[Siji]

So SOE forces Sigil to release SOH too early.. thus setting it up for potential failure/problems.. then swoops in and saves the day by taking it over.

That wasn't rather predictable.

[miir]

So SOE forces Sigil to release SOH too early.. thus setting it up for potential failure/problems.. then swoops in and saves the day by taking it over.

That wasn't rather predictable.

SOE forced nothing.
Brad basically admitted that Sigil ran out of money which forced them to release early. They needed a revenue stream to continue development.


SOE had nothing to do with the development of the game. They had no vested interest (financially or intellectually) in Sigil other than providing infrastructure and billing services.
SOE doesn't even supply ingame support/service. They are all Sigil employees.

[Aslanna]

I agree. I don't think SOE had anything to do with Vanguard going live when it did. They promised more than they could deliver when they said they were going to deliver it and ran out of money. Gotta pay the bills somehow.

[miir]

I agree. I don't think SOE had anything to do with Vanguard going live when it did. They promised more than they could deliver when they said they were going to deliver it and ran out of money. Gotta pay the bills somehow.

I'm inclined to think that SOE would have prefered that Sigil release a slightly more polished product.

[noel]

I agree. I don't think SOE had anything to do with Vanguard going live when it did. They promised more than they could deliver when they said they were going to deliver it and ran out of money. Gotta pay the bills somehow.

I'm inclined to think that SOE would have prefered that Sigil release a slightly more polished product.

Don't you let Rellix hear you suggesting VG isn't polished!!!!!11!

Dumb.

[Sylvus]

I think they should let you transfer your characters from EQ1 to Vanguard.

[miir]

I agree. I don't think SOE had anything to do with Vanguard going live when it did. They promised more than they could deliver when they said they were going to deliver it and ran out of money. Gotta pay the bills somehow.

I'm inclined to think that SOE would have prefered that Sigil release a slightly more polished product.

Don't you let Rellix hear you suggesting VG isn't polished!!!!!11!

Dumb.

Nah, rellix would be the first to admit that.

[Traz-KOE]

I agree. I don't think SOE had anything to do with Vanguard going live when it did. They promised more than they could deliver when they said they were going to deliver it and ran out of money. Gotta pay the bills somehow.

I'm inclined to think that SOE would have prefered that Sigil release a slightly more polished product.

SOE bought MxO- their standards aren't *that* high.

[miir]

SOE bought MxO- their standards aren't *that* high.

They didn't develop or release MxO.

[Dregor Thule]

I think they should let you transfer your characters from EQ1 to Vanguard.

It's a SLAP in the FACE that you can't do it already. At least some kind of veteran reward! Wtf yo.

[flankmen]

From f13.net

The axe finally fell. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. And while many of you may try to spin this to make SOE look bad, apparently this wasn't really their doing. You see, SOE doesn't own Sigil. It doesn't own Sigil now and they won't own them tomorrow. But they do own Vanguard. What fate awaits that game? I don't know. Don't particularly care either.

But I do know that at approximately 4:30PM today, 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.

I contacted SOE since I'm not in the business of burning bridges or spinning news and they had this to say:

"...an announcement is forthcoming tomorrow."

Update: There's some debate over this being ALL employees or just some of them. Obviously, it's not ALL of them - after all, someone had to do the firing. Let's just say that - from what I've heard - they don't have enough employees left to update a casual game... like Snood.

[Animalor]

I think Vanguard will be up there with AC2 and MxO as one of the bigger clusterfuck stories in MMO history.

Note that I'm not comparing the quality of the game itself to my examples above. Just the stuff surrounding it. Hopefully SoE does good by Vanguard.

[miir]

I actually still play MxO from time to time.
For a niche MMOG it's doing fairly well. The community is healthy and active. SOE has done a pretty decent job with the game as far as making it stable, solid and with regular story and content updates.
MxO never had a 6 figure playerbase. After the initial churn, they have maintained a stable playerbase.

AC2 on the other hand was just a major fuckup from release until it closed down.


The difference I think with Vanguard is that it's an exceptional game with a fuckton of potential. With the right dev team, it could realistically surpass EQ2 as SOEs premiere MMOG.




As for the firings at Sigil... it was probably just part of the official purging of the name Sigil. I would be surprised if most (or all) of the existing dev team is not immediately rehired by SOE. It would be pretty fucking crazy if they weren't.

[Animalor]

Well it's official.

SoE has bought up all of Sigil's assets including Vanguard:SoH.
They're bringing over 50 people to grow the game, will have an official forum and everything else.

Brad stays on as a Creative Consultant.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/bye-bye-sigil/ ... 260661.php

Hello Everyone,

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. 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. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

We are also officially opening up forums. In the past, our deal with Sigil didn't allow for this, but as with our other games we feel this is an important part of communicating with the playerbase. You can expect a strong presence from our community team as well as the development team members. While we realize that Sigil had said they wouldn't open up general forums, at SOE we fill this hampers our efforts to communicate effectively with the players. We will continue to support the fansites in a big way, and will be contacting many of them directly to discuss what this change means. By no means do we want to lose the strong fansite support by making this change, but we do think it's important to have a forum for players to communicate directly with SOE.

A few other items I wanted to mention

1. Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard. Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard.

2. 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.

3. We do plan on spending a lot of time cleaning up legacy issues with Vanguard and making sure the game's performance improves.

By way of comparison, this team is approx. the same size as the EQ2 team and I feel like that team has done an amazing job improving EQ2 since it's launch. We intend to do the same thing for Vanguard and it is our hope that the players feel like we're doing right by them.

Smed

[Boogahz]

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.

The damn NGE is why I originally stopped playing the SOE games ><

[Mr Bacon]

As for the firings at Sigil... it was probably just part of the official purging of the name Sigil. I would be surprised if most (or all) of the existing dev team is not immediately rehired by SOE. It would be pretty fucking crazy if they weren't.

Start the tally I suppose, not including those that don't/won't post about it:

1. doomcookie
2. Asquinol - not confirmed but sounds like it
3. Some of the diplomacy team?
4-50 From Nino's post:While I was fortunate to stay employed, there were near 50 people today who were not, and it was painful watching the procession of stunned coworkers packing their belongings into little cardboard boxes with blank looks on their faces. I've never had to endure something like this, and I hope to never have to do it again. I know it is easy to point fingers at 'why' things ended up this way, but the vast, vast majority of the folks losing their jobs today had very little control on how events unfolded and many were skilled and creative people who simply wanted to make a great game.

[kyoukan]

it took this long to fire the fucking cretins responsible for the trainwreck that is diplomacy?

[Hayley]

Does this mean Furor got the axe too?

[kyoukan]

furor works for blizzard does he not? I remember playing wow in beta and basically every quest in the game had a reference to his limp ass eq characters.

[masteen]

Nino was the FOHer that worked for Sigil. He wrote the music or something.

p.s. And yeah, he got fired, but got rehired by SOE for another project that's still in the double-ultra-seekrit phase.

[masteen]

http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561
From one of the forsaken, so take it with a grain of salt.

Hillarity is:

13.net: How was QA treated through the course of development?

Ex-Sigil: QA?

f13.net: QA.

Ex-Sigil: QA was one person up until about November... ONE.

f13.net: What.

Ex-Sigil: 100% serious.

f13.net: What? How? This is an MMOG.

Ex-Sigil: Vanguard had one internal tester for probably 95% of the design cycle.

f13.net: Doesn't the complete and utter failure, in hindsight, seem like a self-fulfilled prophecy though with only one QA member?

Ex-Sigil: The reasons for failure are too numerous to list, but can all be summed up by a lack of management. Brad, for all his faults at least made decisions. So did Jeff. Right or wrong, they took a shot. The people in charge now were so afraid to make the wrong decision that they made no decision at all.

[noel]

I frankly think this sucks. I know a few people who worked for Sigil, and this is a horrible end to a bad story. I didn't personally end up liking the game, but I bought it and tried it out in hopes that my $50 would help them in some way.

If anything good is to come out of this, I hope it's that you shouldn't go all fanboi about a game until it's released in a playable form.

Edit: I just read the entire interview that Masteen posted and all I can say is... OMG. The level of incompetence and delusion is on a level I've never heard of... ever. Simply amazing.

[Adelrune Argenti]

There is oh so much I could say at this point.

I spent almost 4 years at Sigil. However, as of yesterday, I am unemployed. It was my choice. I asked to be on the cut list due to my own feelings about SOE.

The only positive I have is that my part of the project has been flawless. I designed the server setup and system specs as well as the patching procedure and all of that works beautifully.

It is a really strange feeling to pour your heart into something and be left with nothing.

[masteen]

Not really nothing. It still exists, and if SOE manages to patch up all the other issues, your back end will be what it runs on.

So you plan to stay in "teh industry" or are you moving to more mainstream geekery?

[Dregor Thule]

There is oh so much I could say at this point.

I spent almost 4 years at Sigil. However, as of yesterday, I am unemployed. It was my choice. I asked to be on the cut list due to my own feelings about SOE.

The only positive I have is that my part of the project has been flawless. I designed the server setup and system specs as well as the patching procedure and all of that works beautifully.

It is a really strange feeling to pour your heart into something and be left with nothing.

I had no idea you were even working at Sigil!

Sorry for your unemployment. I wasn't a big fan of the game (I had hopes, but they were dashed), but regardless it still sucks for you guys, those that got cut and those that didn't even. A lot of time, sweat and tears went into making it.. I can only imagine how it feels.

[Dregor Thule]

Heh, just read the interview. That was frank, to put it lightly. Only comment I really have is

f13.net: Who are these people who took over after Brad and Jeff disappeared. Who can we pin the tail on?

Ex-Sigil: ... Bill Fisher ...

Oh Tagad

[kyoukan]

There is oh so much I could say at this point.

I spent almost 4 years at Sigil. However, as of yesterday, I am unemployed. It was my choice. I asked to be on the cut list due to my own feelings about SOE.

The only positive I have is that my part of the project has been flawless. I designed the server setup and system specs as well as the patching procedure and all of that works beautifully.

You need a cray supercomputer hard wired to a SGI graphics workstation to get passed the login screen and you claim that your part of the project was flawless? Did it cross your mind to warn anyone that no existing hardware is capable of running this game at an acceptable frame rate?

[miir]

You need a cray supercomputer hard wired to a SGI graphics workstation to get passed the login screen and you claim that your part of the project was flawless? Did it cross your mind to warn anyone that no existing hardware is capable of running this game at an acceptable frame rate?

You really don't know much about client/server archetecture, huh?

[miir]

Oh and I'll let you know how the game runs on my new system after this weekend.

It was totally playable on my old system (an old P4 AGP rig) when I jacked down the graphic settings (about halfway) and tweaked the ini. I got low, but acceptable framerates.

[kyoukan]

getting low frame rates after raking your sliders down to zero and fucking around with features in your ini files is acceptable to you?

You really don't know much about client/server archetecture, huh?

I know vanguard looks only average and runs like fucking crap. what exactly do I need to know about client/server architecture that would make me not care about that? is there some critical detail about client/server architecture that I'm ignorant of that would me go "Oh, okay then! it's perfectly fine that this game runs at 10 fps on my brand new computer that runs better looking games literally seven times faster"?

[masteen]

Stop busting on the server guy about the bloated client.

[noel]

It all ran just fine on my system. I had no problems during actual gameplay. It crashed approximately once every half hour, but given that I was running it on Vista with beta drivers, I didn't place all the blame on the game. Stop bagging on Adelrune.

[Adelrune Argenti]

Yes there are some problems with the client. I never touched that nor had any input on how that performs other than saying "Holy Shit, we can't ship a 20GB+ client. Are you nuts?"

My job was concerned with the server infrastructure, specifying hardware for the db, configuring the O/S and building all the processes and procedures to support Vanguard operationally. That's it. Feel free to heap on whatever you want where it is due. There were mistakes made in places and I expect that from any message board, especially ones which jump at any chance to start some shit. I completed my tasks successfully and most of what I did is hidden from the end user.

[noel]

Hope things work out for you man.

[kyoukan]

well when someone from sigil starts talking about vanguard and system specs in the same post I have to start flinging my feces at them.

[Kwonryu DragonFist]

Nino was the FOHer that worked for Sigil. He wrote the music or something.

p.s. And yeah, he got fired, but got rehired by SOE for another project that's still in the double-ultra-seekrit phase.

Nino wrote the music for Vanguard?

Never knew Nino was such a good composer!

Is the music good in Vanguard?

[Mr Bacon]

Kyou, stop getting pissy just because you don't know how to edit text files.

You really didn't even have to do that do get good performance out of this game, and tweaking within a game's options has been a standard for years.

[miir]

getting low frame rates after raking your sliders down to zero and fucking around with features in your ini files is acceptable to you?

My system is essentially 2-3 year old hardware.
I have no issues tweaking an ini with 5-6 lines of text and bumping down graphical settings down about 50% to get 20FPS.

[Siji]

Kyou, stop getting pissy just because you don't know how to edit text files.

If Kyou couldn't complain publically about something, she'd explode into little tiny yeast infected bits.

[miir]

Compared to WOW the server archetecture seems pretty solid.
I've never had any problems patching.

[Animalor]

I've always sustained that using bittorrent for patch distribution was an absolutly shitty idea.

It's a lousy way for Blizzard/Vivendi to save a few bucks on running a game.