Burnout XII ftw! Edit: It was a little disappointing though, in beta, seeing how much time it took to name spells. Considering the lack of resources, I'd much rather that time be spent in other areas.
There should be a necromancer spell called "Rank" I mean, we have Splurt, Splart and Splort... I see nothing wrong with Rank Rk2....
Just had a thought, now that we have a EQ2 producer here, maybe she will finely add fae as a playable race! Get working on that Holly!
Hey folks, just a couple of things....every person on the team is implementing. There are no devs who aren't developing. The lines are blurring too. This team is a guild of Swiss Army Knives (for lack of a better term). They have all touched every system at some point in their EQ careers. And they will again. Lots of energy to tackle many things and plan the right releases. When I said I'm being reminded of how dev works...I meant implementation and systems, not process. I used to make NPC spells, raids, quests, items and the lot...with several devs who are on the team now who are much better at it. Lots of memories and changes/improvements to how we used to do things. Are there some things the team wishes they did better? Yes. Even I can claim that. The job is to always do better and the best intentions are always at work. We all want to be proud of what we bring you and that's our goal. The experience issue as Jenn posted is being worked through as far as how to address it. These things usually aren't as easy as changing a number or reverting a change...this is one of those. As she said, once we are all solid on our plans, we'll talk about timelines. It's a priority because of the player feedback and the team's wish list. More to come. And when we have real news, I won't bury it in this post.
I'm very impressed with the communication we are getting now from the dev team. EQ has become a ship lost in stormy seas , but she ain't sunk yet ! I have a feeling if we step back and give Holly and the team a chance they just might get us back on course A lot of us are gettin' old and cranky now and tend to get fussy when our EQ world gets outta whack. Doozy
Ok, Julie Burness (Ellyra) left 9 months ago, and Eric Wagoner was probably not a regular member of the EQ1 team. But 4 of the 10 designers are gone, and the status of 2 more is unknown - anybody heard from Chandrok or Elegist? With the full design team we got TDS. Now half of them are gone. That does not sound good for the next expansion, does it?
My suggestion for helping out EQ. Keep all the subscription $ actually for EQ and not hand it out to everything BUT EQ like SOE did. (New owner, new policy.)
This is also part of why I suggest a design direction that focuses on making fresh, creative, and interesting use of existing assets, systems, and areas - basically, to create new and monetizable fun in the game despite the now really obvious restrictions that come with reduced staffing. Inevitably, this means DBG are going to have to pull off some serious feats of creativity - using your compiled years of knowledge to find a way to break out of the current claustrophobic design space and really reinvigorate the game. The alternative would seem to be continuing to release smaller and increasingly cookie-cutter expansion packs until the game (or DBG itself) actually does properly go under, which... would suck.
...Okay, so instead of me merely worrying "Maybe their dev team is now not much bigger than a moderate sized indie game dev team now?" I should be actually thinking that. Wow. ...Interesting times.
The ephemeral nature of posts severely limits what I can say about this subject. There's some good and bad with changes, but losing Dzarn is insanely bad for those of who enjoyed rich content that combined modern game design but still felt like Everquest.
I am not sure if this has been mentioned in the 30 page post as I have not read. but I strongly feel that older heroics like call of the forsaken shouldn't be the prime way to level up in a new expansion honestly the exp was so abysmal in the darkened sea me and my buddies just reran gribble and I would like to know if there are plans to change this.
After learning what Dzarn did for the game, a good bit of hope left me too. Without some good news coming lightning fast i can see the Eq lights going out for the first time and for real now, this is some serious ...
So that's 5/10 gone. I hope at least Elegist is still here. Otherwise we have a Lead Designer and 2 Assistant Lead Designers bossing over 1 person - Aristo. That would be funny if it wasn't so sad. But the overall message from Daybreak is abundantly clear: EQ is getting downgraded big time.
Most EQ players vastly overestimate how profitable EQ is. Most MMO players have zero business acumen because they are emotionally involved in the product. If EQ is pulling down more than 3 or 4 million a year, I'd be surprised. There are 17 servers, with 4 that are very low population specialty servers. The popular servers would be lucky to have 4k total users, of which maybe half are actually spending money on the game. Think about it. They've shoehorned everyone into COTF and TDS. How populated does your server feel in those very few zones as compared to the heyday where we kept lists for camps and simply saying "LFG" in /ooc would get you a group or on a list in any zone in about 10 mins? 13 servers x 2k paying users x $15 / month (this is factoring in micro transactions to balance out the lower rates for 1 year subs) That's about 390k per month You calculate the burden rate of 12 people on a low income earner like EQ and you lose money. Burden rate is roughly 2x the cost of the person's wage. Let's say the median wage is 50k a year for each of the 12 employees. 50k x 2burden x 12mo = 1.2 million per year in costs to run the team Now you have to pay your corporate "taxes". Well, Corporate already took 1/2 of the expected revenue in the form of internal taxes before the project got a single penny. Cutting those employees? EQ just got profitable again: profitable in the eyes of the ones funding it. A lot of people are thinking that EQ funds were "magically" funding EQNext. Business doesn't work that way. In order to measure profitability of products, you don't take revenue from one product and spend it on another, you use capital venture money. SOE was borrowing from investors (Sony: the mother ship). Sony sold SOE because the investment wasn't going to pay off in time to be profitable to them.
I would imagine he is gone too, or we would have heard something by now. Very disappointed to lose both Dzarn and Elegist, they both brought some interesting ideas to the game, I loved doing last years anniversary quests with more than one way of completing them. I'd hoped Elegist would do more of those. Dzarns epic ornament quests, murder mission & raid, Pillars raid, AC explanation, lore discussions and countless other things he brought to the game, but most of all I liked the fact he raided high end content and was one of us. If the dev team is now Windstalker Prathun Elidroth Absor Aristo I don't hold out ever getting an expansion bigger than TDS, my hope for EQ is fading.
To be clear, the point of my post about the shrinking team size wasn't to speculate on EQ1's profitability in any way, neither at this point nor at any point in the recent past. The point of my stating that was just to let myself be stunned for a moment and marvel at perceiving the fact I've lived to see EQ1's dev team reduced to indie proportions, regardless of what the exact reasons for that shrinkage might be. Indeed. If the dev team isn't actually this tiny now and our worries are unfounded, a show of "No, we're still here!" postings on the forums, or other flavor of "dev roll call," would go a long way toward assuaging this band of our concerns. But so far it sounds like Yinla's take on it is spot-on accurate.
