Producer's Letter: Progression Server, April Update, and Beyond

Well it certainly stopped me from buying it!

I have been "faithful to this game for ... many years" - since 2000 in fact - but I am nowhere near needing "end-game content"! I am not sure I like the idea of customised subscriptions, mainly because I feel that I shall come off worse!

When you said,
"What’s coming? What are campaigns?"

I and alot of OLDer folks prob thought... that other... Book game.. of dice rolling.. and I thought.. Ya there is NO ONE doing live Improv, and the current Guide events... man.. they need to have a LIST before hand.. The way it works.. right now the Guide sounds like he is begging for people to come....
A List of folks.. would be way better.. I ignored a Guide once.. didnt even know it was a Guide and my guildies said in guild chat .. BOY the Guide is angry with you... You just ignored him..Yup a list...

"After just having a meeting with Smed, I can honestly say your worries are unfounded. We ARE making expansions going forward."

Hmmmm

@Holly

Since you are releasing methods to purchase fairly unobtainable items via SC, has there been any discussion of making the previous beta reward mercs available for SC at some point, too? Most games that have pre-order/beta/etc rewards eventually offer a means to the general population to obtain these exclusives after they've been out for some time. In this case, some of those rewards have been exclusives for many years now. Those beta mercs are the coolest in the game (imho) and I'm sure quite a few people would be willing to drop some SC on them.

Do you even play Everquest? there are 15 expansions worth of content below level 85, time to get out there and play, quit asking for more crap of your level that was 5 years ago and beyond.

Last month I gave this game another year and now they are changing it back to more low ball crap that won't even compare to when we got 2 small expansions a year. TDS was a take off a 6 month expansion that they charged full price for. Now they want to cut that even smaller.

There is one string left holding onto this game and that is raiding with friends in RoI. With this garbage I see that last string being cut this Fall when the first campaign comes out.

If the use of the word "campaign" doesn't set off your BS trigger, you need a to get a new one. We've had expansions ever since Kunark. Keep giving us expansions. Covering up micro-content with a word like "campaign" isn't fooling anybody with a functioning brain. You're just twisting the knife when you give us buzzwords like that.

EQ is top heavy and you have like over a dozen expansions worth of content for level 85 and below. Absolutely not.

(Yes, it's supposed to look bad, NWS source: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/sweetbroandhellajeff/?cid=001.jpg )

that's making the assumption that the dlc will end up being 29.99 per, which somebody randomly threw out in a previous post. its possible, but no reason to start spreading the rumors about prices yet.

what?

Yeah, same reaction here.

EQ2 went with $15 for their campaign - half (or less - some were $40 even I think) of what their yearly expansions had been. I think the rational expectation is that EQ1 campaigns will be $15 as well.

I never in my life have thought I would ever say I would rather have SOE than what we have now.

Same plant nutrients different gardener.

There is a Rum Cellar preview on youtube where Holly stated that Rum Cellar is smaller than they plan for campaigns, at least compared to their fall compaign and that cost of campaigns might change based upon amount of content in the campaign. I wouldn't assume anything based upon the cost of Rum Cellar unless they plan to give us a small initial campaign (Gnome mountain anyone?) and a larger one a little later. She also discussed breaking up campaign features into individual bundles for people who don't to buy all of the features of the campaign and offering price breaks for bundling multiple components in the campaign: content, crafting, features, etc. Of course that's EQ2, who knows if they will follow the same paradigm. They already have to have a road map which makes it incredibly sad that they won't provide more information about the future instead of allowing speculation to run rampant.....so much for the previously promised transparency, but that's no surprise with the history of broken promises.

I remember when some guy at SOE said that the next release for Everquest will be bigger and better. This sure sounds familiar, but it's totally going to be different this time!

The most humorous part of this will be when a developer stops by to say "don't worry, the sky isn't falling" with a bunch of words that... won't really answer any of the questions that have filled up 8 pages in 24 hours. There will be some verbiage about how "they haven't worked out the details yet, so we can't really tell you this or that or the other thing."

Oh, and then they will tell us how "they're reading all of our posts. Please keep the great feedback coming. We're all discussing it here in the office."

The longer they go without actually answering the questions being asked, the more you all should be nervous. At some point, either a player (or possible even a dev) will stop by and say something about how it's the weekend, and that's why they haven't responded yet.

I was the guy who came up with the figure $29.95. It was a random value I pulled out of my butt, and I'm not basing it on anything.

Except it sounds like a number that's just high enough to make us just mad enough about being just gullible enough to be suckered into paying for content that's just... not enough.

The sky is already falling for Raiders...well almost.
5+2 raid events isn't nearly enough, in the group game you at least can make an alt or something and there will be lots of zones for them.
In the raid game you just hope there will be better times again...but will there be?

You people expect them to make 2 campaigns which combined are the size of an expansion, on top of a normal expansion, all with a much smaller team? Come on..lol

Expansions are finished. Realistically speaking, expect the 2 campaigns combined to be at best the size of TDS. Maybe 3 zones per, 3 raids per camp. So at best 6 raids per year. Most likely less.

2 raids per year. ROFL. (im laughing but im crying inside)

I may just be a pessimist, but all these campaign DLC's sound like is just a different twist on the failure that was staggered release expansions.

Each of these DLC's better be completely unique unto themselves with enough content for a few months or this will crash and burn as well.
Symbius, Yesterday at 4:50 PM Report
Does this forum seriously not have a quote feature?
Well I just wanted to reply to this, saying, the content would not have to be completely unique each time. They do need to make sure there is content to last several months, and not just a week or two. Personally I would rather see something new like every 4 months, with ONE of those packages being a much larger content every year.
I will also add, it will be interesting to see if this new smaller group can be as good and efficient as the SOE teams were. I am putting my money on not even close. If SOE could have done it with less, they would have.
Also, as a newly returned old player, I find all these changes very discouraging.