Did many of you get this e-mail from SOE? I received it on one of my 6 paid accounts. The link sent me to an on-line poll about my satisfaction with many aspects of TDS. They even had an entry for each Arx raid, but no ability to not rate those I've not attempted yet.
I did yes, and it wasn't pretty . Regarding raids, that's what the N/A choice was for am guessing. I found it amusing they polled specific zones - the caverns results ought to be fun.
The only zone I rated above 5 was Thuliasaur, but even it suffers from the key problem of the whole expansion in that the gear and spells drops are not worth wasting the vast amounts of time required to attain them.
I like a flaming heap of refuse better than CotF. That doesn't mean that the heap is good, though =/.
Hopefully SoE takes the time to read the responses. Some things in this expansion aren't really salvageable (pitiful amount of zones/raids) but other tedious aspects (spell drop rates, hailing nonsense) and/or nerfs (RoF and below experience nerf, CoTF HA experience nerf) can still be changed. TDS piled on the unfun and people are just going to quit when their threshold for tedium has been crossed. They might have oodles of time to design the next expansion so it's not a steaming pile but a lot of good that is going to do with a fed up playerbase.
I put more effort than I should have into the poll. Who knows how much, if any, will be read. The few positives I said were that the overall art was really well done, having progression again is okay, and the story (despite the annoying hail system) was a nice addition. tl;dr - 5+2 raids is pitiful for a 12 month expansion cycle, slicing off small portions of old zones and calling them new zones is silly (Katta, Brother Island,) EQ deserves/needs more resources, developers should play the game and model themselves after exceptional ones like Dzarn
This poll could potentially be a bad thing. It might mean that sales are down when compared to past expansions and they are trying to figure out why. You can say well, just read the forums to find out why. But people tend to be a little more truthful and less exaggerated without extreme hyperbole's when they are explaining WHY behind closed doors where nobody but the developers see it. Which might be what this poll is all about. Sales cannot be up regardless. They cannot compare to expansions of the past. I don't care what anyone says, because this game is losing subscriptions/players on a yearly basis and hardly anyone is coming back to the game to make up for the player losses. I'd venture a guess that for every 5 players the game loses to retirement, MAYBE 1 comes back. 1 cannot replace 5. So you're fighting a rough uphill battle where retention is concerned. The overall EverQuest population is smaller now than it was back in HoT for example. So HOW can sales be anything BUT down when compared to past expansions? The smaller the population gets, the worse the hit feels when players do retire and leave the game. So perhaps they are finally starting to feel the brunt force of these retirements with EverQuest. Games like EverQuest do finally reach a point in their shelf life where a single player retiring sends small ripples throughout the company. EverQuest probably isn't at that point yet, but I bet you its finally starting to feel these cluster retirements that tend to happen with this game occasionally. An already small population getting even smaller isn't good for business. At some point, the company begins to feel these retirements and now its EverQuest's turn to finally feel them. I'll say this much, a mass exodus like we have seen in the past would almost kill this game now. EverQuest is on very thin ice these days and it doesn't have much room for error anymore. That isn't exactly a very comforting thing to know.
I don't see the poll as a bad thing per se. Subs/xpac purchases might be (probably are!) down, but at worst the results will go unread. I wish they did more polling of players who leave the game as well.
I believe there is an exit survey to state why you're canceling your subscription and "What can we do to get you back" type of questions etc. But really, anyone canceling their account and quitting this game wont take the time to answer that. At least a large majority wont.
Hmm that is actually news to me, several of my accounts are cancelled and going dry soon, but I never saw the exit survey. I disagree on your point about exit polling going unused, some players who have invested many years and dollars into this game appreciate one last chance to voice their grievances when leaving Norrath.
I think many people want to tell Sony exactly why they are leaving, in fact they want to tell everyone using the forums.
The team is turning their attention towards the next expansion, and surveys like these are designed to help us get feedback from our most engaged customers.
Those with All Access subscriptions pay anywhere from $100 to $150 per year for their subscriptions (depending on the term). If they use Kronos then their All Access membership is putting over $200 in SoE's pockets annually. An expansion only costs $49 to $89 annually. It's easy to buy an expansion for access to zones, but then stay FtP without financially supporting SoE further. Just buying an expansion is not a great way to test for customer loyalty. A case can be made, Roshen, that your most engaged customers are those paying for monthly All Access accounts because they pay more on an annual basis. If it's true that you want feedback from your "most engaged customers," then you're polling the wrong crowd. Sure, there's some overlap, but SoE is still willfully ignoring some that are actually paying more than those that only purchase expansions. Once again, a dart was thrown at a dartboard... and missed.
Does this mean the team has stopped paying attention to the expansion we just received with which many people are very unsatisfied?
It's a good idea. I hope that people other than developers are reading the responses. I said some negative but constructive things about the CEO and his comment that the "next expansion" (which would later be revealed to be TDS) would be bigger than COTF. And many, many people would argue that was not the case. http://www.reddit.com/r/EQNext/comments/1w2lu2/im_john_smedley_president_of_soe_amaa/cey6etp
