WarCry: StaticX: Will more customizations for characters be implamented any time soon?
Phathom: More anytime soon? Not actually. We're working on adding helms for update 4 and with that addition, we will be removing a small amount of facial animations. We originally thought it was going to eliminate a lot of customizations but as we have found out after further review, we will not need to remove very many at all.
Phathom: Obviously, very many doesn't equate to a true number but we will follow up soon with the customizations we are removing with a list of the benefits you will recieve when this goes live
WarCry: Gadareth: Will saddlebags have their capacity increased to at least match that offered by bags ?
Silius: Should already be live
WarCry: schug: What steps have you already taken to hinder or completely stop the use of third-party programs? What do you plan to do in the future that you already haven't done as well?
Head-GM-Moonlite: Hey schug! Excellent question! If you play on Sartok (Hi Sartokians!) you'll know that recently big holes have been made by the GM team in collaboration with the coding and programming teams to catch those using third party programmes! ?
Head-GM-Moonlite: I can not tell you certain things, because then the cheaters will know what we have implemented, but I can tell you this is one of the top priorities for both customer service and coding teams. These programmes change constantly, and get more clever all the time, but we are all working hard to stop this. I will let you all into another secret...SOE has a policy where we do not discuss action against accounts that you do not o
Head-GM-Moonlite: We also don't spam to the servers every time someone had action taken against them, but there are plans in the works to release weekly the numbers of people we catch. I can tell you today alone we banned12 accounts for teleport hacking.
Head-GM-Moonlite: :)
WarCry: Akroma_Sartok: With MMO's like Warhammer and AOC on the horizon, how do you plan to not only keep the current playerbase but also increase the amount of players in Vanguard?
GlipSOE: The answer is pretty simple really, we plan to just keep making the best game possible. We've got a lot of really fun things planned for next year and even though other games may be "newer" we're gonna have some pretty neat features going in as well that I think will keep us very competitive.
WarCry: Caspin: With Vanguard being out for almost a year and GU3 and 4 being geared to high level players, it appears that you will be switching to push updates to attract new players and raise server population after GU4, do you expect that you will have enough time after GU4 to push out additional high end content after you finish your plans to attract more people to avoid stagnation at the end-game?
GlipSOE: There's certainly a balance that we need to strike in order to satisfy both sides of the player base, but having just gone over next year's schedule today I think we've got them spaced out pretty good. We're never really getting away from either for more than an update at a time, if at all.
WarCry: Nemoen: With the release of APW, the level 50 crowd has new content to focus through. Yet
it is a matter of speculation on how long it will last. Are they any plans in the works to give Vanguard an Alternate Advancement System similar to EQ, or for that matter a raise in the level cap?
Phathom: During the next year, we are planning on adding alternate advancement system(s) as well as adding more high end content with more high level raid-dungeon encounters and overland raid encounters.
Phathom: Obviously, if players are leveling faster than the content we are putting in, we have a big problem. So we'll be focusing on giving more high level content to the player base, adding more raid content, AA's, etc...
Phathom: Level caps are slated for the next year as well but we have a bit of planning before it is implemented
Phathom: we want to make sure we do it right
WarCry: Starocotes: When will there be a community-service that informs early WHY and HOW LONG servers are down? maybe in launcher or on website ?
Ellyra: We will always attempt to inform players as soon as we are aware of any downtime or server maintenance. The Vanguard Announcements section of the forums should be updated whenever servers will be unavailable, as well as the VGPlayers page.
Ellyra: In addition to this, Customer Service will often broadcast in-game whenever they can to inform players of unexpected downtime. The SOE Knowledge Base also has information regarding downtimes.
