[Raya]

There has been a lot of talk recently on various forums and especially the official Vanguard forum about the offers of a company called IGE, who has been buying up fansites of Vanguard. Okay, there's nothing wrong with buying fansites…or is there? These fansites are not only Vanguard fansites, but they are Vanguard AFFILIATED fansites, which is a horse of a different color.

Affiliated fansites, for those who don't know, are sites that have agreed to certain conditions with Sigil Games Online, the current developer of VANGUARD: SAGA OF HEROES. One of the conditions is to not carry any advertising of secondary market purveyors. All Affiliated fansites agree to this condition. In return they receive significant fansite benefits, such as an all expense paid trip to the Sigil offices to preview the game, privileged interviews with the members of the game-developing team, exclusive screenshots and direct personal contact with the developers.

Late last night, as the site manager for Vanguard Silky Venom, I was offered by email from Jonathan O. Yantis, Chief Strategic Officer of IGE, the sum of $85,000 to sell Vanguard Silky Venom to IGE. I was, to say the least, floored by this proposal. If you take a look at the Vanguard Silky Venom site, there are maybe a total of five news items altogether. The hit count for this not-even-launched site is perhaps as high as 12 hits a day—not 12,000, but 12. Very interesting (and faintly flattering) to be offered such a high sum for such a neophyte site, don't you think?

Some background and some points to speculate on are necessary to try and pinpoint why this and other offers have been made.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is causing huge waves in the MMO industry because it isn't even out of alpha yet and is already generating a large fan following…and now a corporation willing to pay large amounts of money to buy fansites.

Why would IGE want to buy out these fansites? Who is IGE anyhow? Well, from their own admission, they are purveyors of what is phrased as secondary market items-- ingame-generated objects, such as currency, armor, jewels/gems, and other prized treasures of an MMO. IGE employs people who do nothing but play the game to acquire these things. IGE then sells the items for real money to players of the game.

Why is this perhaps not such a good thing to do? Such companies as Sigil and Blizzard are firm in their stance that the product these secondary market merchants are selling does not belong to them. It belongs to the creators of the game. In most cases, the game developers/owners make this a part of their condition to license the gameplay to the various people playing the game, i.e. these players may have the use and enjoyment of the items ingame, but they have no legal right or claims of ownership in them. You know the jargon…it's all worded in very lawyerese terms. But basically, before even entering the game to play it, every player is greeted with an End Users' License Agreement (EULA) that states that, by continuing to play the game (by hitting the OK button), the person agrees to NOT do that very thing, i.e. sell ingame assets to third parties outside the game. These game-developing companies further assert that in no way is the third party, i.e. the secondary market merchants, entitled to make a profit from the intellectual property of the game developer/owner.

The game developers talk about the amount of time and work it takes to balance the ingame economy. Yet, when the game economy is flooded by currency bought from outside the game, it becomes inflated and prices go out of sight, where the average player can no longer afford to buy such things that should be otherwise available to him/her. To compound this imbalance, when the marketplace ingame is flooded with unique items, they become devalued and things that were worth "a lot of plat" are now virtually worthless because the supply far outweighs the demand.

Another instance that some of the larger game companies are making note of is that commercial players (the players employed or contracted by secondary market merchants) appear to be fanatical about conducting their farming activities. They will camp prized items to the exclusion of legitimate players, which takes away the legitimate player's enjoyment of the game. Some of the game companies are losing large quantities of legitimate players because of their lack of satisfaction at being consistently ousted from popular spots by the "farmers."

IGE has defended itself by saying that 80% of the players want access to the secondary market merchandise. In another interview, Cindy Bowens, Community Relations Manager of Sigil Games Online, has questioned this percentage. It doesn't seem to accord with the findings of the game developers.

So, IGE buys up fansites, because the fansites that THEY own will definitely advertise their secondary market items for sale. And no one can tell them not to. They won't be Affiliates anymore, but they don't seem to care. Perhaps they think if they keep buying up all the sites, it won't matter.

Oh yeah, about the email from IGE…after consulting with the other person involved in the site, I tonight sent an email back to IGE, politely declining the offer. It will be interesting to see if the ante is upped. It doesn't really matter. Both the owner and the manager of this site stand firm.

Vanguard Silky Venom is not for sale.