How to stop players from leaving to Pantheon.

Stop me if you've heard this one. David Georgeson, Brad McQuaid, and Curt Schilling walk into a bar, with an idea about the next great MMO....

That reminds me...if by some miracle Daybreak ever does release a new EQ game, I wonder if they're still going to kill Tunare.

4 pages to talk about nothing.

People will always want to explore new games coming out. Dark Age of Camelot was going to kill EQ. Warcraft was going to kill EQ. They definitely lost people over the years but a lot of us keep coming back. You can put Pantheon down into the same category. People will check it out, if it's good we'll stay, if not we'll be back. Even if it is good. We'll still be back.

Really wish people would stop trying to bolster the fantastically irrelevant part of EQ. Almost no one cares about it being a mature game with literal years of content.
EQ is the pinnacle of a well thought out MMO, but almost no one cares about its older content.
TLP is not played for anything outside of RLM krono/plat sales, and obsolete server firsts of content older than their children. I remember all the crying from boxed army commandos trying to define the rule set and/or loopholes of the new TLPs. I would happily grind for months to get one bubble of exp of something authentically difficult, fresh, and uncharted over the same uninteresting bore-fest of the standard EQ wash & repeat. Unless it blows hard like Rift or <insert dumb mmo failure >. But hey... I heard in the next EQ expansion you get to kill spiders, snakes and bats…but uh, they are even more bad-has than the ones from this expansion, and they drop mad crazy loot that is just a wee-lil bit better than the last crazy bad-gas loots from last one. Except EQ is so old the realistic ceiling of achievement is gone that I just see it at full absurd stupid level.

Good...then I'll have something worth spending my krono on.

One idea is to unlock raid lockouts for different toons on the same account. Ie if one toon on an account raids anguish all others are locked out for the same time period, free them up. Small but significant.

Come on think for yourself people... People keep parroting this same hivemind meme but Brad has only had one failure, but has had multiple successes. EQ was a massive success and he was behind the first 2 expansions which are arguably the best ones...

He only had one failure, and it was due to Microsoft reneging on a deal which admittedly a better CEO might have avoided by locking them into a contract on it. But Brad is not even involved in that in this game. He is not the CEO, he has someone else in that role. Brad's role in this company is creative officer.

How is that worthy of derision?

Most appropriate response ever.

I was mostly kidding, but on the subject of Brad's failings I think his biggest is biting off more than he can chew from a design sense. It was true back in 1999 when EQ released more as a beta with so many pieces not falling into place until Kunark and beyond. Vanguard released with one racial zone barely finished. And while I am hopeful for Pantheon he's promised an awful lot in terms of races and classes. Maybe too much!

Doing too much is a concern, there is a video where environments effect the player, so players crossing a bridge in a blizzard will get frozen solid unless they have some immunity or something. Also there is going to be colored mana that does different things. Some stuff I think may end up being too gimmicky to be worthwhile and to me a lot of things are not worth doing unless they are done really well. It would be better to not do them at all and spend that time on making the basics really good.

Also I am concerned that it wont have the magic x factor that makes a game addictive because I am not even sure if that is possible anymore, without changing the MMO formula. For example I played EQ in 1999 and it was super addictive, but that was for 3 or 4 reasons that I don't think would even be possible to recreate anymore.

1) We didn't know what was to come. So at level 20 you got to visit more interesting places like Unrest and things got more fun with more spells. When 20-30 started to become a slog, you were still motivated because you couldn't wait to see what would happen at 30+, and nobody knew what was going to be in the high levels. Nowadays everyone already knows everything, it is just more mobs with more hp, and some raiding at the end of it. There is no sense of wonder anymore.

2) Back then a really slow level pace made things really addictive. You would play all night and in 5 hours you would barely get a few bubbles into your level, partly because it was so slow, and partly because people were so new at the game, you would spend 3 hours travelling somewhere and find too many people were already there. So you go somewhere else and your group is not very strong so it is slow. But this made people really addicted... Because you wanted to keep up with your friends, and other players, and being slow made that feel possible. In modern MMOs, I join the game a week after release and there already max level players. It just kills my desire to race people or compete with people to be seen as a l33t player. Yet in 1999 the teenage me was super driven by that sort of thing. Also if the pace is too slow, nowadays people would find it boring and would complain or quit. I don't think many people would accept that sort of pace anymore, they want faster progress now. Yet if the pace is too fast, the whole experience seems disposable and fleeting. Finding a perfect balance may not even be possible.

3) MMOs used to be so new so it was so exciting. Nobody had seen a world full of real people before. I remember a guy coming to join the group I was in at Orc 1 in the commons in 1999 and he had only recently started. He kept saying, "Wow this is so cool..." People would ask, "Are you a real person or NPC?" because they weren't sure how /con worked yet and various other things. And the gameplay was wild as well because everyone was a noob. All casters would over nuke and end up tanking mobs, tanks would never be able to taunt because their gear sucked, healers would spam heal people and go oom in seconds, nobody could single pull, most people didn't even know what a lot of the spells did, you had to cast them on yourself and try to work out what it did. The whole thing was a really exciting new experience, but again, you can't get that any in MMOs. Partly because everyone already knows how to play and how these games work, and partly because nobody would accept a game that doesn't have tooltips etc.

There are some others too. But basically I think MMOs are tired in general. There was a time when a new EQ was what I really wanted and a lot of people did too, but I think that time was a bout 2007. It is 2018 now and I think that ship has sailed. A fresh EQ in a new engine with improved combat, it would be nice and a bet a lot of EQ players would like find a new home there, but even if they did a good job of it, I doubt it would break 100,000 players. The only thing that would truly excite me would be a game that is technically an MMO but is very different to play and a whole new experience, and I think that is impossible for anyone except massive budget types, Blizzard etc. Even they haven't found a way to make a new MMO.