I don't think Vanguard is a faction (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 20:38 (3597 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Look at the meaning of the word. It is the people who go out into the world to explore, fight enemies and bring stuff back to the City.

The Hunter, Warlock, and Titan Vanguards are more like house mothers or representatives for each class. Perhaps they should be seen as mentors or class specific shops :-)

Vanguardness is class based not faction based. Vanguard and Faction are orthogonal.

We realized that was wrong, but Narcogen apparently forgot to edit it out :-p

Not exactly. I read one thing that seemed to indicate it was clearly wrong, and I was going to edit it out.

Then I read some more things and realized that the precise meaning is apparently either still open to interpretation and speculation, or that at least the confusion has not been decisively cleared up by a direct statement from Bungie, and since you qualified the statement by saying "I think it's a faction" I decided to leave it in.

Yes, it's probably wrong, but it wasn't too far off the best speculation available around the time. If you look at fan wikis they're still just guessing. Some say it's a class, some say it's a faction, some say it's a play mode.

It's not listed at the official site as a play mode, but there is an unidentified icon there.

It doesn't appear to be a class, because there have only ever been three.

The official site doesn't detail all the factions yet, and since "vanguard" is still used in what looks to me like more than one context (Hunter Vanguard, Vanguard Quartermaster) it's still unclear to me. I just don't know whether that's because I'm misunderstanding it or because it hasn't yet been made clear.

The existence of a "vanguard" for each class certainly makes sense, but then the "vanguard quartermaster" doesn't seem to. Why would vanguards need their own quartermaster if vanguards are not player characters? What would vanguards of different classes and, presumably, factions have in common that would lead them to share a quartermaster?