Vanguard Players

Vanguard PlayersOur third “players” site (after EQII and EQ) was for the newly acquired MMO, Vanguard, Saga of Heroes. This game-to-web integration project was so well timed for the development cycle that it took little effort for the Dev team to put in place the hooks our engineers needed to access game data.

I tried two new things with this version of Players;

  • Auto-blogs – The game server and client would work together to identify when something significant had happened, take a screenshot, and upload the image and the meta data to the web server. I liken it to those roller-coaster photos, taken at the scariest part of the ride. Significant things would be
    • Looting an epic item
    • Finishing an epic quest
    • Getting below 5% health but surviving
    • Joining a guild
    • leveling up to 5, 10, 15, 20… (this one helped us catch some exploiters)
    • Entering and defeating a dungeon for the first time
    • Discovering a Point of Interest for the first time

Tagging would be automatic, as the game knows the names of every player in the screenshot.

  • “My Travels”, a GPS-style track of where your character had been recently, and what events transpired along the way (events from the auto-blogs; close calls, deaths, level-ups, items gained)