Greetings once again.  The SOE folks have given us a Game Update over at the Vanguard Players Site which lists many plans on their road to fixing the game. Check out the pasted update below:

"Hey Everybody,

It’s time for an update as I promised last week. I had hoped to get this posted up earlier but the patch gremlins had other ideas. Integration is moving along very well. We are getting Vanguard hooked into the various areas like QA (Yeah!) and forums.

I have heard from more than a few people expressing concern as to whether or not SOE is really committed to seeing Vanguard be the successful game we all know it can be. The team has had multiple resources thrown at it in an effort to get us up and running as quickly as possible from QA to marketing and PR. So put simply, they are.

Ok, let’s get to the meat of it.

Welcome to the new age of Vanguard! Otherwise known as “What is the Vanguard team working on because it sure doesn’t seem to be tails!”

In our continuing effort to develop a better rapport with the community, we will be posting our milestone goals as well as our game update patches going forward. The awesome apart of that is you, the community, will be able to see what the team is working on and offer feedback via polls and discussion threads. This works out great for both of us, you are no longer left wondering what on earth the Vanguard team is working on and we get some great directed feedback on upcoming priorities, features, and content.

Milestones

Going forward we will be posting on www.VGplayers.com the teams current milestone goals and tasks. An individual milestone typically spans about 6 weeks in length. Please keep in mind that some tasks will spill over into several milestones. As the tasks are completed, they will assigned to a Game Update patch and be pushed out to the Test Server and then to the Live Servers.

Game Updates

We will also be moving to a more consistent patch schedule. Approximately every 6 weeks we will push a game update. This game update will be comprised of some percentage of new content, new features, and new art that was completed in the previous milestones. We will still be patching in the weeks in-between the game updates with bug fixes, performance upgrades, and everything else not covered.

We will get the milestone goals posted as soon as possible with the contents of the game update patch following a few days later. As always, feedback is appreciated.

Thank you for your support!

--Hasium

Vanguard’s Milestone 1 goals.

-          Performance / optimization increases

-          Fix bugs

-          Raid content

-          Finish features that were almost complete before the SOE acquisition occurred.

Here are some of the tasks the team is working that will help us achieve those goals.

Design

Bug Team

The bug team is, as one would imagine, working on bugs. Bugs being worked on range from big things like broken quests and abilities that are not working to minor things like typos and missing text. At the end of this milestone, players should be able to observe a noticeable reduction in bugs. High profile fixes will be mentioned in patch or update notes while the majority of other bugs fixed will go in quietly.

Content Team

The content team is busy working on one of the premiere raid dungeons for Vanguard. The Ancient Port Warehouse in Thestra is currently in the works. The team is currently planning population for group and raid content as well as itemization, and diplomacy population. The art for the dungeon has already been finished.

Diplomacy Team

The diplomacy team is currently in the beginning stages of converting the diplomacy system from a skill-based system to a level based system. There will be no huge diplomacy gameplay changes, the switch is more about representing the same information in a different (better) way. Aruspex will be posting the details in another thread.

The diplomacy team is also working on putting together some cool looking tier 4 clothing options as well as adding House quests.

Crafting Team

The crafting team is putting in the quests to allow crafters to learn how to create Guild Houses. Yes, that’s right; Guild houses are finally coming to Vanguard!

Programming  (extra superfluous words have been removed)

-          Fixing memory leaks

-          Fixing bugs that cause CTD’s / client memory issues.

-          Fix the last remaining bugs for Brotherhoods

-          Raid UI and tools support

-          A more intuitive LFG tool with better functionality

-          Rest exp.

-          Changing Diplomacy from skill based to level based.

Art

Environment Team

The team’s primary task this milestone is working what we’re calling the “trial island”. The island is being built using highly optimized existing assets in an effort to establish a new art content pipeline that is able to produce, in laymen’s terms – cool looking stuff that won’t make your computer explode – quicker than we’ve previously been able to do so.

The overall benefit for the trial island is that we are working on heavily optimizing existing assets. The knowledge learned through this will then be applied to existing art assets in the game therefore increasing performance. In addition we will be using the completed island (which will feature a couple dungeons as well as diplomacy and crafting content) as a free downloadable “Vanguard demo”.

Character Team

The character team is optimizing the humanoid NPC’s that are used in villages, cities, dungeons, etc. which will give a significant performance boost.

The character team is also working on new armor sets for use in an upcoming high end raid dungeon."