Rolo Kipp wrote...
1) I am archiving updates to the OV every Sunday, so I *may* have the newest stuff, depending on when OV goes dark.
I wrote to someone very high up in IGN, asking what as going to happen with the Vault after IGN's sale and Maximus taking the position at Blizzard.
Amazingly, I received a response.
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Their response was short but they indicated that a decision was made about a year ago to stop actively updating the sites that were built on "code bases" and services they nolonger supported but that they will keep the sites alive as archives and have no plans whatsoever to delete the data anytime soon. That answer specifically included the Vault sites.
A number of years ago I asked Maximus if it was okay if I used content from other Vaults/IGN sites for modding in NWN and he said it was. So I became pretty familiar with what modding content IGN had to offer. During that exploration I noticed that not just are the Vault Network sites set up on the same software (what I read as the "code base") as the Neverwinter Vault, but the Planet sites I checked are, too. Like Planet Battlefield, Planet Grand Theft Auto and so on. And they're all still serving their files still.
Over the years various site maintainers have moved on or drifted away and the sites had remained up, but a lot of them did split over the course of last year. That seems to jive with the reponse I recieved from IGN.
My takeaway from the response and my own knowledge of what exists out there is that the Vault and those sites are
intended, anyway, to be up for quite a while to come and not expected to unceremoniously go dark.
(crosses fingers)