DX11 - Why were our expectations so high?

Hugely botched DX11 rollout. Nearly every guildie in a guild with over 150 active, daily members is experiencing issues. The forums are ablaze with countless posts detailing a variety of issues related to the patch. Many with their pitchforks and torches demanding remuneration or announcing their departure from EQ.

Darkpaw tries. And tries hard. They try to do the impossible on what I can only surmise is a shoestring budget. I have spent more time troubleshooting EQ for myself and my guildmates since noon yesterday (when servers came back up) than I have spent playing.

I am hugely let down. Something as mission-critical as the graphics pipeline in a computer game should have taken top priority. And maybe it did. Maybe the technical challenge was so insurmountable that this IS the best they could do?

I am disappointed, but also really asking - Why were expectations so high?

I don't think the expectations were that high. I do think look at what changes they are making, and come up with a way to release them to the masses while having a way to also revert the changes or turn them off.

New ui, great idea for all the stuff that can be done with how it will be when it is finished. New ui, you cannot see your bag because it opened under your inventory screen and that bag cannot ever be on top of your inventory screen, that is bad.

Changing everything from directx 9 to directx 11, ok, great. Hope about before we do the wide release, we also make a button for just using directx 9 for anyone that has ANY problem with it.

Directx 11 released in ......... 2009........

This is absolutely not the best they could have done.

They could have done better by simply not releasing it until it was ready in July 2024.

There is zero upside for it to be force-released now instead of later this year.

There is nothing easier than the developers decreasing their own expectations, and doing less.

Yes, we want you to do less, and release it later. Thanks.

It boggles the mind.

And...where's some sort of response ?

I truly did not play most of yesterday, just because I was expecting servers to be pulled down for some sort of fix-it patch...but just ...silence.

why not goto directx 12?

DX12 probably sucks with a small dev team

People probably generally have old computers or use cheaper older computers for like boxing and such especially for like tlps that need 1 pc per box, dx11 capable pc's are probably a significantly higher percentage then 12 when you account for all of that

They probably didn't really even need to leave 9, but it might eventually only be available via emulation and that's probably a mess for upkeep vs something more active, so easier to just yolo and move forward

DX12 has downsides and challenges that DX11 doesn't. DX11 is superior in the context of Everquest as already confirmed by the devs.

However, DX9 is superior to the current implementation of DX11.

The good news is that DX11 can be delayed until it's ready with zero impact to anyone including Daybreak.

The better news is that by delaying DX11, Daybreak will actually see improved revenue in 2024 by not losing as many subscribers. Doing nothing now and releasing it later, will result in increased cash flow for Daybreak. Easy decision!

They massively exceeded my expectations, but that bar is low.

As long as they put off making DX11 the only version, they have to run test for everything under both DX9 and DX11, every bug fix and 'improvements' like UI revamp had to be done twice. and QA time costs money.

Now that they can ignore DX9 code, they can fix the bugs much faster.

for the record ... as a full time test server player DX11 has been live on test now for almost a year easy. its not a new issue. i am honestly surprised they even released dx11 ... i was sure they would have axed this idea along with there "updated" UI long ago .... its all "working as intended" enjoy!!!

Or layoff more folks...

I did laugh out loud though at your fix bugs faster line. And what QA? EQ hasn't had any QA for years now. Unless you count the player base as QA...

Evolved from snail to slug pace. Lose the shell, we are speed!

Year of Darkpaw, here's a laughably terrible DX11 go live. Enjoy! Seems fitting with the other mind boggling rollouts they've had recently.

QA costs a whole lot of money when you simultaneously push out half-baked UIs, personas, and DX11. This is called bad decision making, not justification for avoiding high QA costs.

Further, no one said anything about maintaining DX11 on live. Rollback to DX9, and continue to put 100% effort into fixing only DX11 on test. Nobody needs to touch anything on DX9.

If they lose a significant amount of their subscribers, then they won't have sufficient cash flow to ever fix UIs, personas, and DX11.

Relatively recent when considering the age of the universe.

They've definitely got too many different "things" going on.

Probably under a huge hammer to meet a self imposed deadline, aka the 2023/2024 road maps.

The devs knew that the update will break many things as they got informed about that by the players including me. They were watching this thread (see below), which was noticeable by the likes they shared. All my warnings about releasing DX11 got ignored including my suggestion for the half-baked /pet inventory check command. So someone enforced the update by knowing how troublesome it would be.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/high-five-to-the-dev-team.295395/#post-4275538

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ve-to-the-dev-team.295395/page-2#post-4275790

QA for all these things was FREE - we *told* them about all the problems, and still they pushed them out. =/

I do hope Angel understands we are not upset with the messenger ... only the message. But yes, this has been worked on, we have tried to help, provided information on what we use to give them a direction for quite some time. Alot of us are currently on DX12 and still experiencing the problems. As it was stated, other games work correctly, feeding it down to Windows settings creates a hornets nest of player problems that most of the geeks completely understand and my guess is "if" they have a desktop/laptop person at DB they understand. If they don't, that's a hire that would be worth their investment. Having that expertise that understands how an app works with the hardware may not be the shiny job, but it's going to pay untold dividends in the long run.