All familiar items should also be pet illusions

They may not be "needed" but they most certainly add enough to the bottom line that it makes it worth the time and money to keep developing them and releasing new ones. Every bit of income that they get from items like that adds up and it also keeps players happy by introducing more things that they like.

The game has changed over time and there is no reason that illusions should be considered a class defining ability as they do nothing to help those classes advance in the game or get groups.

It's called a business doing what it has to to retain paying customers. You regularly spread your opinion on the subject around claiming if they'd just listen to you everything would be so much better, but pretty much every idea you have would make me less likely to pay if implemented.

Here's the thing. You aren't a customer. You don't care about purchasing anything in this game, and you couldn't care less about EG7 profits. I'm sorry, I know, it's a thing, so I'm just gonna give your opinion the exact same respect DPG does, which is none.

I recognized the game easily when I returned after a decade away, and gladly paid for it. I recognize that hero's forge, mounts, illusions, etc have been monetized to up profits, and I'm glad because that kept the sub price down to the exact same price it was when I played in 2002, rather than inflating by 70% like everything else in this cruel world. Expansions went up a bit but $35/year isn't bad against 2x$20/year in the early days unless you look at the number of zones and raids, but that's a matter of development costing far more in this era and having a much smaller client base.

So yeah, familiars, hero's forge, mounts, illusions, pet illusions, great stuff even if I don't buy em. OTOH, there's the aviak pull along familiar, which should be deleted and everyone who ever cast it permabanned.

Maybe I am not a customer, but maybe I am. If that does matter to you, you are a true idol worshipper and only those of your kind will respect you. Dance,.. dance around the golden calf !

You do believe in many nonsense, do you ? There is no connection between the sub prices and the monetization from the ingame marketplace. The profits from both parts are high, very high. Cross-financing is just not needed and illusions and familiars are only two of many marketplace segments. I am pretty sure that the game could be financed totally with just the current subs.

I think that it was more than 2x $20/year and you ignored the money inflation. EQ II did cost 39 € on Amazon in november 2004 which is equal to 57.53 € today.

Because you are not a customer.

The fact is that they are able to use profits from the sale of other items to keep the price of the subscription down. It is very possible that we would be paying more per month now if it wasn't for the various items that they sold in the marketplace.

It is more likely that the money inflation is about equal to the overall market price drops. EverQuest did get older yearly with keeping about the same tech standards and had a waning player population while many new game projects entered the market. The expansion sizes also went down over the years while their prices effectively went up.

I'm pretty sure you need to go back to school and learn about for profit corporations, leveraged buyouts, and how communism has failed every single time it's been tried.

If it was more than 2x$20 per year back then then EQ yearly expansion cost is even cheaper in comparison now. As for EQ2 you might as well quote the price of a not yet released PS7 console, it has literally nothing to do with EQ1 price inflation. Only factor is the EQ sub now allows access to more than one game including EQ2, which again makes it a better value, proving DPG bosses are doing a great job keeping the play price low by grabbing cosmetics revenue like just about every other game in the world right now.

Several classes of customer, TLP subscriber, Live subscriber +expansions like me, and whale that subs + buys top everything + drops crazy money for heritage/cosmetics. They definitely value a whale over a customer like me, and care not at all about the opinion of a FTP that thinks they should not only stop cosmetic sales but start giving more sub content to FTPs. You're literally telling them to rob their shareholders in the most incompetent ways possible.

What are you talking about? The fact that they are still charging the same for a subscription that they did in 1999 is in part due to them getting income from other sources such as the illusions you seem to hate.

Today's subscription prices are even a bit cheaper than in 1999. Compare the prices between the two upper tables on my site. The left one is without inflation, the right one is with inflation. But the whole package is much smaller today than in 1999 including a much smaller player population, a much smaller dev team, and many other problems, which the steady innovations could not compensate. EverQuest started very strong with 74 zones and 25 zones per expansion (in average) until and including PoP. There were no instanced zones yet until LDoN.

Today's expansions do have only 30% as much base zones without the instanced zones, and the instanced zones do only partially add more content (NPC population, scripts, quests), so it might sum up to an overall content size of about 50% which does mean that the effective expansion prices had been raised a lot, even that the game structures are up to 24 years old. Income from other sources than subs are just on top for more profit and much of that money got "invested" into many failed game projects. There is only a minimal re-investment into EQ.

And no, I do not hate illusions, but how they got implemented (most are all/all) and the masses of them. Over the years a lot of crap (like the swinetor illusion) had been cumulated.

You're so confused. You sub for the existing content. There are 5x as many zones now for the same or less money. Expansions are paid development, we give them money, they pay devs, devs add content. A 2023 developer costs probably twice what a 1996 developer cost, which exactly tracks with your 50% content size. Of course income from whatever sources are profit, that's the point of a business, and a business owner gets to decide where they put their money. You don't go into a fast food place, buy a sandwich, and then tell them they have to spend your sandwich money only on renovating and expanding that one location. It's their money, not yours. You want to buy ownership of a company that exists only to perpetuate itself rather than pay the owners, go buy some Green Bay Packers stock.

Subs are only there for those expansions that are locked to FTP/Silver. Everything else can be considered trash, that is why they are unlocked for everyone. But the trash can be recycled to hook new and returning players. Basically the players do run Daybreak, so it is the money of the players, but everything is upside down in this mad world. Without the players Daybreak would be nothing. We players are the real bosses, nobody else.

If all familiars could be pet illusions, that would be so great. I would love to have a pet that was tanking be the fatty fourth gate guardian. Don't get me wrong, there are some fatty pet tank illusions that we currently have, but the point is that the more illusion choices pet classes have, the better!

It's a great way to have personality in the game. For example, obviously I am a strong fan of pet illusions, and I really have the need to use great ones. But some other necros don't care, and they still use the default pet. (a specter) To me, that's gross...but it is a reflection of who they are. And that's great.

For those of us who love pet illusions, we just want more of them, and there's a ton of familiar items that would fit perfectly as pet illusions.

The size of an expansion has nothing to do with the cost of a subscription and the money that they get from selling things like illusions in the marketplace or the more expensive expansions help keep the price down.

Most people like the ability to have cosmetic changes through things like illusions and it does help keep the game running through the revenue it makes. You just seem to hate that others are happy with it.

That is just your opinion but there are still many things that can't be done/used in game without a subscription even in the earliest parts of the game.