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An Interview with the Sigil Team

Part Two of Three

Reinventing the Game

From that standpoint, we wondered how Vanguard was going to appeal to those fans that left. In many of the games described, a lot of the real meat of those games changed or was reinvented by the developer team responsible. Dark Age of Camelot focused on RvR and Anarchy Online just found itself trying to rebuild many of its elements that just weren’t working. In that light, we wondered if Vanguard was going down a similar route.

Once again, Butler referred to the numbers that the team was seeing. He said that as the game progressed and they found out why players were leaving Vanguard, things would begin to alter. They are already in that process using information they obtained from beta, but with the live release, they have access to a much different set of players.

“When you look at games like World of Warcraft, it’s such a stark comparison today when you look at Burning Crusade compared to the first day WoW launched,” he commented. “It’s really not the same game anymore. The WoW that went live had no real end-game.”

“When they implemented raids and more group-based dungeons at the end,” he continued, “they transitioned X million solo/casual gameplayers to our type of game. One that strongly encourages grouping and those players found it is near impossible to get the good items when you’re a high-level player unless you’re in a group. They knew for a fact, from their numbers, what size everything needed to be to achieve optimum usage for their players. They literally settled the game into the market that they knew they had. That’s what we’re in the business of doing.”

Butler also commented on the need for designers to make an adaptable game, where the designers can change options in the game to meet cultural needs or desires (like more grinding in Taiwanese-based games)

“When we talk about reinventing Vanguard in the future, the skies really the limit,” Butler noted. “What does the player really want? What do statistics show us?”

Real Money Transactions/Micro Payments

Another topic that was briefly discussed was the current MMO issue with gold farmers and real money transactions. While gold farmers are a pain for everyone in games that don’t support RMT, Butler mentioned that he believes a game built around RMT would soon be on the market.

“How expensive is $14.95, really?” he asked. “If it cost another $14.95 to gear another character out to level 15, what’s the problem? Don’t get me wrong, that sort of thing isn’t for a game like Vanguard, but for a game that’s built that way – where everything has a price – that’s fine.”

“And on the other hand, what’s the best way to take out gold farmers? You’ve got to beat them at their own game. Take away their market, and they’ll disappear,” Butler added. “The game really has to be built for that sort of thing from the ground up. With Vanguard, it’s just not plausible.”

“I mean, you could even do stuff like loaning your character to other people for a certain cost,” Butler continued. “They have access to your character for X number of days for X amount of money. You could loan out a set of armor. There’s just a wide world of RMTs available.”

This might sound strange to some of you, who believe Sigil is totally against RMTs. In fact, Jones pointed out, Sigil discussed the idea of incorporating RMT into an MMO when the time was right. “It’s funny that the whole internet seemed to get this idea that Sigil was anti-RMT…we’re not, we just don’t like gold farmers and we know that RMT is not right for Vanguard.”

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