One of the most frequent issues that comes up on these forums is the issue of staffing. Many posters post questions, only to get the reply from other posters that EQ doesn't have enough staff to accomplish a bug fix, a suggestion, an innovation, etc. The problem is that we don't have any official staffing numbers from Darkpaw and until we get some kind of official word, we are just speculating. Most studios do a yearly group photo shoot for promotional, recruitment, and company morale purposes. Darkpaw did one for their launch a few years ago but I haven't seen a new one. Of course, developers are listed on the credits of the current expansion, but that information might be out of date. It also does not give us any information about how many devs are assigned to the live version of EQ and the TLP version of EQ. I think if the average EQ player who participates on these forums knew the approximate number of developers assigned to EverQuest, it would help us tailor our expectations of what is achievable. This kind of transparency would help facilitate trust and empathy with the end result of building bridges between the studio and their customers.
I am more interested in what they are fixing as opposed to what they are developing. Whatever they develop will happen whether I like it, wanted it or use it. And I go here to check out fixed stuff https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?forums/resolved.288/ Does it matter who is working where or on what? Not going to change the outcome and probably saves that dev from having endless spam as to why we can't have flying ducks in the game.................................. Or getting stalked at night. Look what happened in the past. Sometimes they need to protect their employees.
Looking at last year's credits gives this breakdown for a few categories: Design: 9 Engineering: 7 Art: 8 Sound: 1 QA: 3 Soon enough you'll get this year's expansion's credits and can compare to see what's changed. That's because people aren't assigned to one or the other. They're the same game.
Thanks for the post. Would you say that most or all of those people spend the majority of their time on EQ or do they bounce to different games? I'm mostly just curious, I don't have an angle or opinion on EQ staffing other than more is better
Does the engineering category include sysadmins/SREs (whatever they're being called these days)? I'm amazed at what a small staff y'all have considering the mountain of technical debt you must all face from a 25 year old game. My hat is off to the team.
The shared resources would be Art/Sound/QA. No, they're listed in the credits under a different category. ( I'm not smart enough to tell you which one, sorry. )
With how popular TLPs are and how much their problems get ignored (especially these later months with the expansion coming) maybe it's time to get a full time TLP dev?
I hope you have learned from what worked in betas years ago and whats not worked the past few years. IE there needs to be at least 2 devs for AA, 2 for spells and 2 for items or those 3 devs need to focused just on their area. And not spend 50% or more of their time doing other stuff like designing raids, fixing other issues or whatever else they get caught up in instead. The past few years those 3 key aspects to this game have seen far to much of "there isn't time", "I couldn't get around to it", "I don't have time for that during beta".
That doesn't mean anything. TLP servers are full of TLP specific issues that constantly get ignored. Of course there are issues that effect both too but even a lot of those are irrelevant to live so they never get fixed like TBM HA scaling.
Please provide which issues are getting ignored. Do you have any proof that they are ignored or are you just making ridiculous claims? I know for a fact the major TLP issues I see that get brought up are unequivocally not ignored.
Thanks for the info Meeko and the insights! I was wondering, does the EQ2 team ever pitch in and help the EQ team and vice versa? I know that Blizz often would often create strike teams where everyone one would pitch in and get milestones out the door and such. Does Darkpaw use strike teams as well?
TBM scaling isn't a TLP issue, but I do agree it could use some work. At the same time I don't see many bug posts about it so either not that many people are sidelined by it, or they need to be making more noise to get it looked at. I ran in to the issues with scaling doing all of TBM progression on live in the last 2 years with new characters. The biggest issues I found are with named mobs and most of the time they can just be ignored (named that spawn randomly in the instance after a certain step that you don't have to kill to progress). I think the only scaling that actually stopped me from doing a mission was in CotF where one of the missions has a named gargoyle that you have to defeat to continue and he was severely overtuned at level ~80ish.
Just because you have some difficulty on a TLP doesn't mean that the rest of the game doesn't have that issue. We've all experienced the TBM scaling at one time or another on every server
28 is only a half old school raid force. Double that and you might be able to produce a full expansion.
