The vanguard beta forums were a cesspool because of the morons who are now paying to post. I'm pretty sure I'd vomit if I read even half of the ass kissing going on over at that circle jerk right now.
It's really not that bad. I tend to only check out topics that interest me. There is just a more positive vibe, obviously... but there isn't a whole lot of crazy hardline stances going on. Plenty of disagreements, Dev's feeling people out on some stuff, looking for zone/dungeon ideas, etc..
A response from Brad in regards to a post I made regarding AI.
There's 2 kinds of AI I am excited about:
1. What NPCs do when they're not in combat... walking around, muttiering things, having something to say when hailed, etc. I'm hoping we can do advanced AI here and give NPCs purposes, desires, memories, etc.
2. What NPCs do in combat. This is tricky. What we want are a bunch of different behavior types, so that NPCs don't always do the same thing. Their race, class, location should matter. The context should matter. This makes it so players have to use different tactics in combat, depending on who they are fighting, when, and where.
BUT, we probably don't want super smart NPCs. We did this early on in EQ. The first logical thing an NPC would do is kill the healers. We had them do that for a while. Didn't turn out to be fun, although it was 'realistic'.
