Fix the near constant raid lag. Larger expansions and two per year since money is no longer an object. Make items truly unique again with lots of class only items and such instead of the copy/paste previous expansion with 7% more stats model. Same for spells and AAs.
I wonder how many player suggestions from the forums over the years have actually made it into EQ? I'm seriously considering making a list to evaluate the efficacy of the forums. To me the forums remind me of the macabre carousel in the dystopian sci-fi film Logan's Run. Where people who were ready to be terminated figured they had a chance to be reborn if they made it to the top. I suspect the faint hope that a dev may actually read a suggestion, comprehend, contemplate and add it into the game is what motivates many players to post here. I'm sure we'd be shocked if we saw the hard numbers.
It was a fun fantasy while it lasted. Now if we can just convince a serious person like Elon Musk to purchase the EQ franchise.
I don't think the "efficacy of the forums" can be measured in "how often (the loudest) players get thier way." I also think it differs on a case by case basis, and the devs have no responsibility to implement all suggestions.
The handful of devs responsible for EverQuest is dwarfed by the sheer volume of crowdsourced expertise that players have. It is foolish and arrogant for a company not to leverage of the wisdom of their players. The ivory tower days where devs know better than their players ™ is over as platforms like Steam see players as useful partners in the development process. Player feedback via Early Access on Steam is proving to be instrumental helping developers make games as good as they can be. The failure to acknowledge players who are unpaid testers playing hundreds of hours of your game is a sure fire path to low sales and player dissatisfaction. I'm speculating here but I think that number of player suggestions made on the forums that actually made it into EQ is very small to negligible. This begs the question: if the players voices are not being listened to on the forums, then what is the point of the forums? More bugs are being submitted every day and unfixed bugs are piling up. There is no commitment from Darkpaw to fix all of them, so many are ignored. The devs have no bandwidth to read or implement suggestions. In fact, despite being requested constantly, we can't even get a proper suggestions sub-forum. If we can't even get a suggestions sub-forum that takes all of one minute to create, what makes anyone think we can get other suggestions evaluated and implemented? I believe the reason is this: if we had a Suggestions sub-forum, everyone could see the suggestions and the fact that none of them would ever have a chance of being implemented would be an embarrassment to Darkpaw. Forums done right can be a tremendous source of value for both developers and players. Forums done wrong can be a big source of frustration and endless toxicity for both parties. I think these forums are the latter. The people at the top of Daybreak and Darkpaw have to have the resources to change the forums and make them efficacious. They need to find both the will and the energy. Until this happens, nothing will change.
I'm not even sure why we do beta anymore. All of the suggestions for improvement are skipped, and the massive majority of bugs are ignored and pushed as Live content.
It goes without saying that releasing expansions with known bugs and ignoring beta tester feedback is not the way a professional video game studio should be doing things. Then players pay up to $250 for the privilege of playing a bug filled expansion. Then the devs spend the next 6 months fixing the bugs they created. Rinse and repeat. I've worked on smaller devs teams than the EQ team and we had 100's of bugs that we fixed before our game went gold and was released. It was as matter of pride and professionalism. If we released a bug filled game, our Metacritic score would would suffer and our studio would lose prestige and credibility. Regarding our testers, we worshipped the ground they walked on. The gave us amazing intel and insights that we used to make our games better. We didn't have the audacity or stupidity to ignore them. Daybreak doesn't have to follow the normal rules that apply to the rest of the industry because they have a captive audience of fans and veterans that keep paying them no matter what. At the same time, EG7 siphons off the profits that should be reinvested into hiring more devs. The entire affair sounds like an abusive relationship where both parties refuse to take action and change. The only hope for the future of EQ franchise is that it gets sold to a serious company that with vision and talent.
This is objectively untrue. "Devs don't take orders from the players" and "the most vocal players don't ALWAYS get thier way" doesn't mean they ignore "all" suggestions. Furthermore they invited players into whatever the program is called earlier in the year for more specific ongoing discourse. I didn't personally apply since I have erratic focus that comes and stays for a few weeks/months then fades periodically. The problem with self-appointed emissaries of "the fans" is each represents opinions but they are not universal opinions and not every idea is healthy for the long term of the game. I'm not claiming things are perfect or that terrible ideas like the outrageous overapplication of pull immunities don't go live, but to claim "all" the suggestions are ignored is factually wrong. I don't have objective figures on reported bugs vs. bugs that go live. One example being a certain guild leader saving the entire raid game extreme headaches by requesting the Unstomped achievement be made individual, and they listened.
Even though there is a walkthrough you have to go through to delete a toon.. I have accidently deleted a toon. Give us a res token in marketplace (I would pay $150) to be able to resurrect deleted toons (like GM's used to do for us ) .
i would buy EQ then sell it to amazon gaming so it would be 100% free to play with prime membership. this way we would have more people playing.
Remove druids and all asslings from Everquest. Necros can wear plate and duel wield, ports to every zone and have cape graphics.
Give Jenn Chan a raise and an assistant to help with day-to-day maintenance of EQ while she figures out which is more feasible: a port to the UE5 game engine or rewriting the game engine in house from the ground up. Once the decision is made, give EQ the resources to get the job done. I suspect there are a lot of bugs that could be fixed and unimplemented suggestions that have been around for years that would be possible if the devs didn't have to tiptoe through fragile, uncommented spaghetti code to fix them without breaking six other things in the process. Double shrink two human characters, one to lead and the other to follow, and make that distance the default /autofollow distance for all characters and races. (In the current paradigm, follow distance shrinks as the characters shrink.) Double shrink makes a/f work immeasurably better than today's standard, but it's suboptimal for actual gameplay. While you're at it, being able to control one character from within another character's client so players don't have to alt-tab windows would be great. If ISB can figure out how to do it, surely the EQ team could do the same.
