Again from Brad:

Obviously, I’m biased as all heck and very bullish about Vanguard, but my confidence level is very high. Let’s use conservative numbers. If we get most of the old school EQ players (say, 200k) and then we get just 5% of WoW’s 6 million (300k), that’s 500k subscribers, which is 45k more than EQ had when I left SOE and when EQ was top dog. And I think that’s conservative — I think we can do even better than that — with every 100 players WoW introduces to MMOGs, there must be at least 5 of them that are now or who will be looking for something more like Vanguard, so as they grow, our potential grows as well. And if Vanguard get’s 500k subscribers, we will be in fantastic shape financially from both Sigil and Microsoft’s perspective. Not that we’d mind more, of course :) Like I said, agree or disagree, but those are our conservative numbers (note I said more like 250k a year ago, but that was also when WoW was much smaller as well — like I said, everytime they grow the gamespace, they not only profit themselves, they also help every MMOG developer out).

He writes more about the progress on the beta here.

He even makes fun of me (btw, it’s not so hard to find Blizzard’s press releases).

I tend to sympathize with Utnayan (even if he lacks arguments). You cannot ask anymore the players to have “faith”. It doesn’t work anymore and we are much more jaded nowadays. Faith is something you have to earn.

As Matt Peckham said about Oblivion:

On the national cynic’s curve, we’ve all progressed mightily since 2001.