http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/02/22/in-the-land-of-dying-mmos-everquest Interesting article filled with some mistakes. The author makes it seem like EQ is a ghost town. Either he does not know or does not care to start in Glooming Deep or Cresent Reach.The guild leader "Raptor" the author was hanging with should have told him that. Unless this Kotaku author was trying to add false credit to his clickbaity title? Also he was trying to communicate with "Hail" instead of sending a tell? What? Poor article and lousy research by author Robert Zak. If that's not bad enough some tlp guy is trying to add his .02 in the comments section and making us look even worse. Please comment on the article and clear up some misconceptions.
I didnt finish all the reading.. really the game is dead to anyone new.. think about it.. dont know anyone or anything about the game this would be the worst game to play. hardly anything like it was back in the day. I dont even know how anyone new starts. LFG is deader than a door nail at most levels. bazaar is probably completely dead to anyone selling stuff to a newb. i cant picture starting this game having never played or not played in 5+ years.
There are new and returning players in The Newbie Zone section of the forums every single week. I'm in a guild full of them and they are all having a good time.
I remember a journalist posting in these forums a few months ago about writing an article (which I assume is this author and article). I suggested he get a broad range of experiences - raiding guilds, public raiding, family guilds, pick-up groups. Looks like that advice was put on the shelf and they just went with the one guild. Don't get me wrong, IL is a good guild and there's certainly some perspective there, but it's no wonder this article comes across as EQ being a wasteland, populated only by veterans. It would've been an eye opener for this person to go to a guild that isn't stomping on older raids, and feel the joy of finally getting a win on something that's been challenging them for months. Or to go to one of the family-style guilds, of which there are two popular ones on the server they were farting around on, and see what it's like to return, or be new entirely. Or hell, go to one of the TLP servers! There's some old school for ya.
This particular article is a common theme of the market - the journalist is just doing his job. There's a panel every year at Penny Arcade Expos about how the markets for MMO's are dying and what gaming companies can/are doing to keep people subscribing or placing digital transactions. Don't read too much into it, you really shouldn't.
I read the article and do not have a problem with anything he wrote. For the most part it's an accurate depiction of what EQ Live is like. There is more activity going on than he was able to see, but he did at least acknowledge that much of what was going on was conducted in quiet privacy. He could have looked for a broader experience but I can understand with production constraints why that may not have been possible. The progression servers have somewhat higher populations but they are mostly the same people that had been playing on the normal servers. They are not new young blood, for the most part, and we do not owe the progression server population anything special. It was the veterans on plain old normal servers that kept the game alive this long. At the same time, it's not right to poop all over the progression servers; I am in favor of their existence as long as they are producing revenue.
I thought the article was a little sad, but I don't think I disagree with any of it. I don't think he wrote the article for the tiny EQ-playing audience, but for the rest of the world and I think it was a pretty accurate depiction. I even think he was quite kind and put us in a better light than many other authors would have.
