Weekly Newsletter 01_07_08: Let the Games Begin

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Updated Fri, Jan 02, 2009 by Dalmarus

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Let The Games Begin

January 7th, 2008 - By Dalmarus

"My ignore list won't cover the costs of my /ignore passions." – Astuun

In last week's newsletter, I took some time to discuss the possible impact of the regional chat within Vanguard. There’s both good and bad, but I think we all agree that the influx of players is a good thing overall.

Forum member, Delfina, suggested a poll on the matter and said I may be surprised at how often the regional chat gets turned off. According to our poll, 40% of the voters have turned off regional chat at least occasionally and 50% of those people have turned it off permanently. That number was far higher than I expected, but I can understand the reasoning behind it. I think the quote I took from another forum member, Astuun, explains the cause right there.

With the recent spam war being at least temporarily won by the gold sellers, Astuun has summed up my feelings pretty well. The gold spammers have managed to bypass the regional chat spam filter and have been bombarding the regional chat channels approximately every 10 seconds while I was on this weekend. I haven’t managed to fill up my ignore list quite yet, but I imagine it has to be getting close. My suggestion of mailing them all booby-trapped keyboards to end the spam has not been accepted by the masses yet, so I’ll leave it to the capable people at SOE to come up with a more rational solution.

Enough with the regional chat and spam talk though. Time to get into something far more exciting – things we have planned on the Vanguard at Ten Ton Hammer site for the future!

Before I get to long-term plans, let me give you something to look forward to right now. For the next two weeks, I’ll be posting a series of exclusive interviews with none other than Vanguard Producer, Thom Terrazas! Thom was gracious enough to take some time out of his immensely busy schedule to answer some questions for our readers. There are a total of four sets of questions, each one revolving around various aspects of the game. The first one will be posted this Tuesday with others to be scattered throughout the next two weeks, so be sure to keep checking back for these interviews!

So what are we going to be up to in the coming months? Lots of things! There you go. That’s the answer. Really, I’m not kidding.

All right, fine. Here’s a little more detail, haha.

The weekly newsletters will continue, along with the Monster Projects and the weekly poll. Along with this though, we’ll strive to bring you even more quest guides in the coming year. As such, I have a question to ask all of you. What kind of quest guides do you want to see the most? We’ve done a poll on this in the past, but with the amount of new players we’ve gotten in the recent months, I may decide to run a new one.

My biggest interest is to find out whether our readers want to see a lot more quick quests in the Quest Database or continue concentrating on the large quest lines such as the Pantheon of the Ancients or Coterie Infineum Sanctuary series.

There are a number of other new things coming to the site that I can’t divulge just yet, but trust me when I say as soon as I can, I certainly will!

The new year has started and I can't wait to see how the ride plays out! How about you?