It is nice to see so many people around, but most of the people I met were already Vanguard players, so while it may bring old players back to the game, I don’t know if it’s compelling enough to bring new players, who may not have the system requirements to run the game. I could barely run in a straight line :/

The whole experience was just so frustrating, I had to make myself wait until this morning to write the review.

I really enjoyed your review of Isle of Dawn. I just rolled a monk last night to try it out and was amazed at the amount of content. I will likely be writing a review update 6 in a week or two, but so far the fixes have all be very subtle. One example is the character models that had a graphics glitch, which made certain character models to appear as if they had claws. Now that this is fixed, I barely recall the issue existed. I think that will be the case with many of the fixes. I’m sorry to hear about your targeting issues, all we can do is hope that they get to the remaining problems asap. Unfortunately, there are many bugs still out there like this that need to be fixed. I think that the developers have thier priorities a bit out of order, but I am glad that they are getting so much done. I think that is a good sign for the players of Vanguard all the way around.

As you know I also am a refugee of Revelry and Honor, so I can empathize with you about the absense of any activity with the membership. However, please don’t give up. I do miss my friends from Revelry and Honor, but it isn’t the only great guild on the server. I would suggest that you take a good look at Shadowfire. I’ve been spending my off raid nights with them and I find them to be very similar to the way Reverly and Honor was in many ways. If you’re looking for something else, send me an email and I can give you a few other places to look into.

As to Vanguard tanking, while it is still a possibility, it won’t be happening anytime soon. Furthermore, if Vanguard continues to gain momentum, I think that it is safe to say that there will be a lot more to get excited about in the near future. It’s been hinted at several times and I think we can expect an expansion. I am not interested in Warhammer Online, I’ve read and heard a lot about it. It sounds like a lot of fun and there are a lot of great features that would be great in a lot of MMOs. But even if that were not the case and I didn’t like the game, I wouldn’t be logging into a blog to make a negative post about it on someone else’s blog. Talyn spent a lot of time on his post, giving an ubiased review of the current state of the game and I really appreciate that. To see that someone chose to create a post here in support of another game seems disrespectful to Talyn’s effort.

One note, though: it’s not quite true to say that there are no additional effects on swimming. In Vanguard, some water has a current, that’ll move you downstream as you swim. This is most noticable in certain rivers, and the strength varies river by river; one of the rivers on Thestra will sweep you WAY downstream of you try to swim across it.

Best implementation of water? Well, no. But I’m also not aware of any other game that does this.

However… Casualties of WAR has an IRC channel and a Ventrilo server and it’s been fun to just join in and chat even though I’m not playing, and I get the feeling I’ll have a great time from a guild perspective.

Will the guild be the silver lining on the dark cloud of Diku or will the mechanics and potentially poor community outweigh the positives that a great guild brings? It’s all a tossup and I won’t have an answer until I’m in the game.

I personally think Vanguard just needs to be let go. It has been on life support too long and is officially brain dead.
Truly sad, but an accepted fact at this time.

Bummer. Ah well. Was worth a try wasn’t it?