How to stop players from leaving to Pantheon.

I propose right before Pantheon is released, bring back the recruit a friend program (circa 2011) 300% xp when grouped and create a Free for all server free trade and another server with PvP charge people a one time fee of $100 for a toon in heroic gear all AAs/lvls/progression up to the previous expansion. So they have to grind the current expansions lvls and AAs. Keep free to play 3 expansions behind. Just some food for thought.

Unless Pantheon utterly fails to be a true EQ successor, or has some singular design aspect to it that is just unbearable, there is nothing that would cause me to reroll EQ over rolling something in Pantheon. Not even a fully instanced, tradeable loot, triple experience, 2 month unlock TLP server (and, regardless of whether truebox or not).

The excitement of a new game potentially bringing months or years worth of new content, new systems, new everything to explore, just has to take precedence over rehashes.

I agree but the hype is always short lived. I for one am hoping Pantheon crushes EQ. But then again nothing has come close.

lol

I don't see the draw of Pantheon, honestly. It looks like derivative garbage that pulls from all the things people didn't like, (but think they did) about EQ. It's being built by a guy who is notorious for his failure to make the last game he made work, one that was also supposed to replace EQ.

No amount of free xp, free loot, free whatever will keep current EQ players from trying Pantheon. In fact, I'd suspect for most of us it would be just the opposite--the more free whatever DBG throws at us, the more excited we will be to try something new where stuff is hard to come by again, as it was when most of us first started EQ and fell in love with the game and the genre.

Whether players return to Everquest after trying Pantheon really is more dependent upon Pantheon than anything DBG might do. If twenty years of history is any guide, some of us will likely be back, but only because Pantheon will let us down and we'll be back to waiting for the next big thing (and once again playing Everquest in the meanwhile.)

The only thing that can stop Pantheon...is Pantheon itself!

lol pantheon.....

It will be glorious!!!

I will be leaving EQ when it comes out in 2050. lol

The biggest reason I even have interest in TLP is because, starting over on a new server where everyone else also starts over, for however brief an instant, re-creates the feeling I had in 1999. But in the end, we know what mobs drop what loot, and what spells will be available, etc. Imagine, then, how much stronger the effect is when embarking on an entire game that no one has done before, not merely a new server?

Because even if a new game has slow experience, chooses to forego having a meaningful player economy by using no-trade, etc, it's still a new game, and everything you do is trailblazing. Unfortunately every game I tried besides EQ had some flaw. The best experience I ever had outside of EQ was SW TOR. The combat was bearable as an EQ vet, but I played the Imperial Agent storyline, enjoyed it, and didn't come back. SW TOR just seemed to me like a single player game in which you could run past other players while going between single player quests, like ships crossing in the night. A beautiful world, but no multiplayer/community reason to stay after the single player storyline was done.

Not counting my completion of the SW TOR storyline, I can have more fun logging into any EQ server, and just /joining general and chatting with EQ people, than I have ever had trying other MMORPGs. At the same time, and unfortunately, that chatting is also more fun than actually playing EQ again. It's the only thing that really makes playing EQ bearable whenever I do play again.

So here's hoping someone comes up with the next big thing, whether it's Pantheon or not.

Why do they need to worry about keeping people from leaving for a game that's never going to get out of pre-Alpha? Too much money to be made keeping it out of Alpha.

kolani, to offset your negativity, i'd like to offer you SUPERFOUNDER status to our pantheon forums and eventual game. for this priviledge, i'll need you to refrain from making any negative remarks about pantheon anywhere on the internetz as well as providing screenshots of 10 positive posts per month. you can also look at our forums and our half dozen 20 second video clips as much as you want. everyone else, if you want this, paypal me $25,000, k? k! also, guyz, we are going to have a huge party in vegas on the fourth of july with guns and drugs and hookers and imported german llamas doing tricks. i'll also give you rides in my brand new 2018 lamborghini hurcan.

^ i'm roleplaying brad here.

This, I think, is exactly why players keep leaving to try other games, and some of us at least keep coming back to Everquest. Keep hoping for something that will be as good as EQ in 1999-2002 was, in terms of the good parts of the experience (like childbirth, the pain of 12 hour fear corpse runs, or losing your corpse and all your gear in the wall in solb and praying for days that the GM"s would answer your petition before it rotted, or patches that took two days, or 15 minute zone times, or having your coldain ring 8 ganked by the guy using seq with no help from SOE, those things kinda fade...)

And we've yet to find it, so EQ TLP is pretty good in the meanwhile.

What will happen first : Pantheon, Star Citizen, Half Life 3, or a good Fantastic 4 Movie.

Vote now on your touchtone keypads.

Provided the FTC approves the merger, the good Fantastic Four movie.

Also, the business model for Pantheon doesn't favor it launching, a lot of the tier levels offer either an extended or lifetime subscription once the game releases. Unless new people are buying the game and coming in that aren't the target audience that have already pledged once it gets out of crowdfunding, incoming revenue will dry up completely.

I think it actually comes down to, back then, things were still unknown. I lost an entire corpse of stuff at level 45 back in 99, and I was madder than I ever was while playing Mike Tyson's Punch Out, except I couldn't smash my keyboard into the floor like I did my controllers...but you know what? Not long after that, I dinged 46 and got new spells. Prior to that I'd never been level 46. Didn't know what that was like. I quickly forgot about all that stuff and recovered it fairly quickly.

Nowadays, if bad stuff like that happens, there's no other mystery about the game left to discover to make it feel better. There's only the fury!

At this point the only mystery is whether Daybreak will ever have an open economy TLP server. BTW I nominate that we stop calling it "FV rules" and call it "open economy".

If you want to stop players from leaving to Pantheon, it's a challenge, but realistically it's not that hard:

We're pleased to announce that DBG has partnered with [insert reputable game development company] to create the next generation of the beloved Everquest franchise. Everquest 3 will feature gameplay drawn principally from Everquest - the online game that started it all - while benefiting from the best features of Everquest II and the lessons learned from Landmark and the cancelled Everquest Next project.

Of course, the devil's in the details, but the franchise could absolutely be saved, and Pantheon squashed unceremoniously, by spending just a little bit of money. Just give a good game company a ten year license, and let someone who cares make EQ 3 on a AAA budget. As grateful as I am to Mr. McQuaid for his contribution to getting this train going, Brad is a visionary who has proven he's not great at actually running a business or managing a game (and apparently he's not awesome at securing funding for a project either). Besides, my reading on Pantheon makes me feel like it's going to have serious forest-and-trees problems. The things that made EQ great aren't lost corpses or hours spent staring at digital spell books, but the stories that our relationships with one another created--stories we now still tell.

Compound that with the fact that DBG is a money mill. That's fine from a business standpoint, but in the market of public opinion, stock in the franchise is at an all time low after the EQNext fiasco. So license it to someone who can make a sequel as a love-letter to fans of the original games, someone who can make tough choices about what darlings to murder in order to deal with the fact that EQ's core demographic now has jobs and families, and out-Pantheon at its own game.

If you have the right developer you could get a game funded, and if you come up with the right feature set, you could attract a larger player base than any any amount of TLPs could ever see or Pantheon could ever attract. Creating a balance between old-school class interdependence, role parity, mob pathing and aggro mechanics, etc.; and modern engine optimization, aesthetics, and approaches to avoiding wasting players' time or making things too convenient to be rewarding or too inconvenient to be worth the time commitment is no small task, but it's not rocket science either. Fans of both games intuitively know where EQ and EQ2 succeeded and failed respectively, and I sincerely believe that the franchise's loyal players would be willing to make concessions (especially to one another) in order to see a new installment.

But more than anything, I feel like Pantheon's appeal is desperation. The game's traction, what little it has, exists because no one else is in that space. The primary appeal of Pantheon can be summed up here: "It's like a new EQ." Well you guys own EQ. An endless stream of TLPs and expansions on a shoestring budget is not a living game. It's a holding pattern. I don't know anything about DBG's balance sheets, but I know that the franchise is worth a fortune. Right now that value isn't being properly leveraged, but it could be if someone was willing to take the risks.

If you want to stop players from leaving to Pantheon, make a game that does what Pantheon's trying to do better (and realistically, based on what happened with Next, you need to make the announcement when it's basically already done). Otherwise your life's blood depends on whether Pantheon gets made at all. Right now I'd put that at about a coin flip, but then what the hell do I know?

You assume Pantheon will actually be released. Spoiler alert: it will not. It makes me laugh. If Matrix was here, he'd laugh too.

Considering it is still in a "pre-alpha" stage and charging $10k+ for access to the game and they are talking about adding more testers throughout the year do you really think they will be launching the game anytime soon?