Community
Many fans of the original EverQuest followed the development of Vanguard closely. Sigil opened official forums before even releasing a title, in July 2003, and was periodically revealing concept art, screenshots, and settings history and lore. Some of the artwork was created by well-known fantasy artists such as Brom, Don Maitz and the late Keith Parkinson.
Much of the community had formed around the Sigil website forums, but there were also events such as fans visiting Sigil, IRC chats, and contests. A "Community Summit" was held on October 7, 2004 that showed Vanguard to an audience from the game's own community.
For release, Sigil decided to eliminate centralized forums in favor of a controlled community structure consisting of a network of approved websites which would be regularly visited by official community liaisons, and which in theory would be granted privileged access to interviews and promotional content. There was considerable criticism of this strategy on some forums.
Upon its acquisition of Vanguard, SOE almost immediately abandoned the Sigil "controlled community" format, making vgplayers.com the central site for Vanguard support, much as is done with their other MMO titles.
Read more about this topic: Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes
Famous quotes containing the word community:
“Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and a cosmopolitan. But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism, too, is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from the community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years, but a populist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.”
—John Lukacs (b. 1924)
“Every community is an association of some kind and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)