Okay, so OP: Zombie Hunter had its share of problems, and not minor among those were our problems with Vanguard. Now, some of this is firsthand, and which bits those are should be obvious, and some of it is hearsay from fairly reliable sources. First off, they agreed to keep our signup sheet there so that those of you who live in the east valley could go and pre-register. Now, I went down there personally and didn't see the signup sheet (or any of our handout flyers) clearly visible anywhere, but I didn't ask about it. Apparently many of you asked on multiple occasions, and were told that Vanguard wasn't a pre-order location. One or two of you fought them on the point and were allowed to pre-order there. This will be important later. At the same time, they were telling PSC that nobody was coming in to pre-order, and everyone there knew about the sign-up sheet etc. etc.
Apparently for a while they were also spreading rumors about our game, that nobody should go because it would be "unsafe". I personally saw that someone had been told that the last mission in particular would be bad, and he recommended to one of our attendees that he should "wear extra padding". Now, for those of you who attended, it was pretty obvious we didn't change the last mission, as without the corn it was admittedly pretty shitty. The civilians had no maze to navigate for their mission: "escape the AO alive", and simply ran straight for the exit, meeting no resistance beyond a few wide shots from the paramilitary as they moved to complete their own mission. And, obviously, nobody was injured.
Finally, they scheduled a lock-in for the night of our event, apparently with the purpose of occupying their employees and giving them an excuse not to attend our Op. The lock-in, it should be noted, was scheduled months after we'd already picked a day for our Op. They were supposed to be there, and they were supposed to bring both a chronograph and the pre-order money. They did neither, saying "we need to be here to help with the lock-in". Luckily, Nukeduster was gracious enough to let us use his chronograph, and even swung by Vanguard on his way out to Glendale to pick up the pre-order money... which they refused to give him, even after PSC authorized it. Last I heard, they are demanding that PhoenixShadowCompany himself go down to Gilbert to pick it up, which is a bit out of the way for someone living in the northwest valley. Either one of them can corroborate that, I'm not absolutely 100% sure how that went down.
Now here's some more of the hearsay bit: we hear that they've done this repeatedly to other groups running events - they agree to help, then they sabotage the event at every possible turn. And in addition, we hear that they've started, without any instigating event, to randomly search VIP players' belongings without cause or provocation, and without that player being present to witness the search, and that some of said players have reported items going missing after finding their bags rifled through.
So I ask, does anybody here have a similar story to tell about their own experiences in partnering with Vanguard, or, for special bonus points, can anybody give a firsthand account of what VIP employees told them about our game and why it was supposedly dangerous?
