WarCry: Lumio-VGVault: What is the devs favorite "About Vanguard" Comic? and Why?
GlipSOE: I like any of the comics that make fun of the designers. I also appreciate the effort that goes into drawing me. I realize its hard to capture my beauty on mere (digital) pen and paper, so I applaud the effort that goes into attempting to do so.
Gebron: It's easy to draw Glip... he already looks like a cartoon. =)
WarCry: Akroma_Sartok: Will the UI ever have contextual menus that allow us to harvest without looting and other normal stuff that wasn't included in the Vanguard UI?
GlipSOE: Currently, there isn't a plan for that - but I'm not going to say that its never going to happen.
WarCry: schug: How do you plan to remedy class balance issues that arise on the pvp server?
Phathom: PVP - good question! During the next few updates, we will be evaluating classes and balance within the game. First and foremost, this will put classes in a categorization that we hope to hold every update to this categorization. For example, do we want druids and mages as the only classes that do additional teleportation from this day forward...
Phathom: bad example maybe but we need to ensure that PVP is at the top of the list when we evaluate the balance between classes
WarCry: Ardenya: the issue that interest me and my guild the most is: what future plans does the dev team have addressing the ping issues weve been facing in APW? I understand the problem is a complicated one but when can we expect this issue to be resolved and APW being playble with multiple guilds in one shard at primetime?
Gebron: Okay, yeah, feel free to throw tomatoes at me for that one. We tested APW over several months to make sure any potential lag issues were known and fixed, and obviously we missed some. The team has been doing everything in their power to come up with both short and long-term solutions. We've also had some guilds in-game helping us with diagnosing the issue.
Gebron: We do know that guilds are able to improve lag by logging off and back on when it gets really bad. That seems to help quite a bit. We'll be announcing the fix as soon as we have it on test, we just want to make sure that our fix does not negatively affect gameplay.
Gebron: And I'm both amazed and honored at how much guilds have collaborated to mitigate some of the lag issues. Excellent community we have, to be sure.
WarCry: Alex: When can we expect the paladin and dreadknight revamps to be completed? And will they be as viable as warriors in tanking raids?
Silius: The Dreadknight revamp is pretty much done and Paladin is on its way. The goal is that all tanks can do their primary job equally well.
WarCry: AnnraThannar: When will trial island be ready and is trial island also dedicated for old buddy key owners. I hope so, because it may help reducing spam.
Phathom: Trial Island is a name that has a poor association with it at the moment. The Trial Island was started with the intention of having a stand alone client that new players can try out. Our current intention for the Trial Island is to use it as the new starting location for most of the races and new players.
Phathom: The Isle of Dawn is the actual name now "Spoiler Alert"
Phathom: We plan on restarting work on the Isle next month and expect to have it out to you near and around April
Phathom: Spam -- We are looking at issues at the moment with this but we want you to be able to get your friends back in the game to experience a much better starting experience
Phathom: and allow you to be there to share the new experience without having the content too low for you to play. We're still working out the details
WarCry: Edge: With all the efforts in recent updates to give players the potential to gain XP faster through adjusting leveling curves and rested xp, is there any chance we will be able to turn xp off for those of us who like to progress at our own pace?
GlipSOE: We're looking into adding something like that. Though the bigger goal isn't to stop players from progressing but to make sure they have plenty of fun things to do as they progress.
WarCry: gavalin: So now that update 3 is live, whats next?
Silius: Gavalin - Update 4 will have the flying mount quest and a revamp of the riftway system.
WarCry: trolane: How big is the VG team now and why are updates so slow? Why hasn't the in the works page been updated since milestone 2 ?
Phathom: SOE has a policy where we do not discuss headcounts but I can share a little bit about the slow update. Update 3 was scheduled many moons ago and to be honest, we lost some important people and moved the team down to San Diego at the same time that slowed down the build. In addition I think we bit off too much in the beginning and were unable to trim the update down. We were a little anxious and realized we had a little bit more wor
Phathom: that ? is supposed to be a :)
Phathom: We shot high and now we are focusing on planning an scheduling to get updates out in a timely manner
