Gamerant Interview with EQ Devs Regarding Laurion's Song

I just found this article where Gamerant interviews Darkpaw EQ developers Adam Bell, Kevin Lydy, and Jennifer Chan about the new Laurion's Song expansion. From my perspective, it's very refreshing and edifying to hear what the devs are thinking.

Here's the preamble:

Here's the link to the article:

https://gamerant.com/everquest-laurions-song-interview/

Darkpaw, please do more interviews like this.

And do post the links or the interview content in the forums before we have to find them somewhere in the web ! At least we now know what the idea behind APs is, which you refused to answer in the forums. Please get Roshen (Ry Schueller) back as a community manager as Adam (Ngreth) mentioned that the community is so important !

So, basically they made APs because everyone already had max alts made and they couldn't make any more money off of selling character slots. That's just awful. Literally every benefit they described about personas they could have done with existing alts by using the code that was already there. It was 100% about putting another cash grab into the game, not about making the experience better for existing players.

Lemme translate that PR speech:

We're always looking for new ways for Daybreak to increase the revenue - not completely new ways - but asking, "How can we change up that revenue a little bit and get more money out of the vastness of the customers that it is?

We have to be realistic. Every action that is coming from Daybreak and all other gaming companies is about increasing the revenue. Some do call that a cash grab. Sure it is. On the other side everyone if free to buy or not to buy a feature, subscription, item or expansion. A cash grab is only possible if someone does agree with that. So there has to be an agreement between the seller and the buyer which does lead to a contract. No agreement = no contract, no cash grab.

I dont begrudge them the chance to make more money. They are not just doing this for S&G.

How much money will they really make off personas with the fast camp zone restriction though? A drop in the bucket.

Yeah, the fast-camp restriction makes them go from having wide appeal to being more of a niche feature. As it is, I have little interest in even using the free ones I got from beta. But I could see the TLP players buying the expansion for this feature even with the fast-camp restriction.

Remember, they work for the stockholders not you. You do have influence, but it only goes so far.
Yes, personas is a new profit center and probably not something any of the players wanted. Especially
as you need to camp anyway, but it is there now, and I doubt it will ever go away.

Now, a way to summon one of your alts on the account to the current position and camp would be of some real use. Doubt they would ever do that.

Important to also remember that for a company to have stockholders, they generally must be publicly traded.

"generally" - True. Owned by one person, one family, one small group...public does not really make much difference here. Just one group in the power dynamic has more control over what happens, but
like any business, they are always one bad decision away from it all imploding.

I've no real interest in personas. May take another look if they add the ability to consume an alt.

Oh, once you switch to a persona, do the 85-level and 100-level boost apply?

I believe, I have like 3 85 and 1 100 level boost available and really only 1 character under 100.
As melees always have fun with travel, I could see were having and 85/100 level druid/wizard
handy. "Swap/Camp/Login/Port/Swap/Camp/Login" vs. Zone/Zone/Zone/Zone... Especially with secondary and tertiary bind points.

I've only seen maybe one person post that they've used a heroic boost on a persona and it went badly with gear suddenly vanishing.

I have yet to see anyone post that they used a heroic and everything was fine and dandy.

I like that the only answer in regards to using player feedback was about new zones as opposed to old zones. Just highlights how much they ignore like level requirements on gear, focus AA structure, etc.

It's funny to me, because they haven't done anything about the leveling experience in years but they make a new feature to push people into it.

Solid idea, poor execution and implementation.

Sure there's nothing wrong with making money, but there's a difference between supplying an innovative product vs. supplying what we got this year. "Towering" that it is.

Every major new feature over the past few years has had major problems, and relatively little impact on overall game enjoyment. Personas, bank changes, UI changes, etc.

Really the best thing has been the Extra Life promo and that's not even done by DP.

The big takeaway for me is that we finally have two developers on record saying that the community is important and that their jobs are dependent on the continued support of players. Showing gratitude is important and players need to know that the devs care.

I only wish they would come to the forums more often to converse with players and engage in meaningful dialogue. It would help to diffuse the tension around here and foster a lot of goodwill. Darkpaw management needs to allocate time every month for developers to interact with the players on the forums.

They are... Enad Global 7 AB (publ) https://g.co/kgs/v7Pj8q

EG7 (Darkpaw's parent company) is a publically traded company that answers to shareholders.

And this

https://simplywall.st/stocks/se/media/sto-eg7/enad-global-7-shares

The statement about profitability stands out.

Not to forget Overseer, that still does suffer from the agent flood and conversion problem. Nearly everything since and including ToV is half-baked and broken and the new UI, including the engine, is a catastrophe. It does produce so much extra lag during zoning and many crashes until yet.

I don't think that the devs can ever fix it as each window conversion does take them 3 months and there are dozens of windows to go. Why no rollback to 2022 when the UI was fine ? Darkpaw does keep adding more broken stuff instead of fixing existing ones which does grow the scrap heap. EverQuest has become the Plane of Innovation. It is clear that all those fails are the result of scaring away key staff members like Prathun and Holly.