Having been a member of the Vanguard beta test, in addition to numerous other early/closed MMO betas, I must say that MMO development costs less and produces far fewer critical bugs when you don't retool your core mechanics every 2-3 months.

Brad is a jackass who can't even remotely control his team and makes proclamations with no substance. If Vanguard fails, the reasons for it will be obvious: He refused to listen to anyone but the "hardcore," which is a painfully small subset of game players (and the team's refusal to listen to anyone else went so far as to ignore/wipe/lock any discussion on this subject), and he allowed his various developers to "test" complex mechanics they knew were never going to work instead of focusing on ideas that might make it into the final product.

Some of us knew what was coming when, in November of '06, the release date was announced and the Crafting and Harvesting mechanics were ripped out and entirely replaced.

A few more people woke up around December, when they stated that they were "beginning" to balance Adventuring (combat and loot).

The final death-knell was in late-January, when numerous new systems were introduced. Item decay being chief among them, they were concepts that should have existed since the beginning of development, or not at all. To even think for a moment that such a complex game mechanic as item decay and repair could be fully rolled out and tested in less than a month requires astonishing levels of either hubris or idiocy, and I know which one I'm leaning towards.

Really enjoy Vanguard and now because of the patient skills I posses it will only get better.
A shame so many people are incredible narrow-minded like the above poster Anon.
What do people like that even think, I mean I can understand if Anon might be a teenager they have a different kind of mind set, but some adult react they way like Anon do, well those adults clearly have different kind of problems in their real life and found a way to vent it on the net towards a GAME, yes I tell you a GAME.
I think Brad never would have thought that among the gamers community we would have so much narrow-minded and shallow minded people that by reading their words probably never ever accomplished themselves in life.
Those that have a successful life meaning jobs, family, friends and enjoy MMORPG’s games will be those that can actually really enjoy Vanguard as I’m seeing all around me when I get time to pop online in game.
On the other side you have the type of people that wanted Vanguard to become their life’s and somehow they really got disappointed in the way their life turned out to be, cause in their life you have lag, bugs, developers that are no good, other people that are no good cause they seem to enjoy that thing they can’t accept and understand, and that’s you don’t need a game to make fun, its you that can make the fun, but somehow somewhere in time people seem to have forgotten how to do that and if something isn’t handed to them in a perfect package then its no good.
Vanguard isn’t their yet, and yes there are some bugs, but this depence if people play a game like a job or if they play the game just to have fun, I will say 2 months ago just before release something told me it would go as planned, and in the first week it didn’t work out at all, but after that the game played like any other game, mind you I’m not a “grinder” don’t have time to play 24/7, try to make some time for this hobby of mine which is about when lucky 5 evenings of the week about 1/2hours sometimes 4 :P
Really would like to see new review of the current state of the game by some gamesites