It’s the Year of Darkpaw AMA time!

Are any of these ideas possible?
1) The ability to add more items/pets to housing plots?
I want to make a cozy farm and I was wondering if farm plots are possible i.e. you make or buy a farming plot that would look like the small farm in the dwarf city where the mushrooms spawn. I was hoping they would have several spots where you plant a foraged or ground spawn item and every 12 hours that item would grow out of the ground. It could start off requiring manual farming but as you do quests, you can hire a farm hand that you pay plat (upkeep like the cost when you place trade skill containers) to harvest the items and put them in a chest or parcel them to you or maybe tie it to the Overseers menu; once you build the farm the overseers menu would let you assign "farmer class" guys to tend your crops and after set times like overseers you can get the items but they are specifically the items YOU planted, not the expansion set default items.

2) Guild hall plots are generally empty and rarely decorated; Can we get useful decorations that the guild members can use. I was thinking different sizes of ponds that a master fisherman can stock (like once 20 fish are placed in the pond of a type then unlimited fish of that type can be caught there) with fish caught in a "special way" in the zones they normally are found, and then stock the guild ponds so people can fish those types of fish right at their guild or housing plot (I would guess to put a pond on a housing plot it would only be able to fit the pond and some decorations not a house too). Maybe have different size ponds one for housing plots and bigger ones that fit on a guild plot and bigger sizes let you stock more variety of fish.

3) And keeping with that theme of farms; what are the chances of breeding mounts?
You buy a special stable plot and maybe do a quest or to to capture and tame mount type animals in the wild (horse/nightmare, Worgs, Dragons etc.) then feed them food to cause them to breed and then raise the baby over a few real time months feeding special player made stat foods to increase the speed/stats of the mount. Then maybe give us the ability to craft mount armor from the slot 20 armor augment parts to decorate our mounts (maybe a simple blacksmithing recipe to turn the armor parts into mount gear). And in that vein, how about giving mounts gear slots like mercs have so they have abilities and upgrades. I'm thinking a horseshoe slot to increase the speed or maneuverability some mounts take way to long to get to max speed, that should be something we can reduce. Then a slot for appearance where different colors or styles of armor change the look. And finally its about time our mounts get abilities! We should have war horses that have a devastating KICK, or dragon mounts with a beam/cone style breath weapon, or Drogmor or other lizard style mounts get a poison spit that blinds or DoT's, or the sonic wolf gets a stunning screech attack that silences casters or mezzes, or the polar bear with a maul "bleed" attack, basilisks have a stone gaze, something appropriate for the type of mount that can be added as a item upgrade or it is imbued into the mount as you feed it when it is growing up. This will add flavor to the game not just something to sit on and it makes our mounts customizable to our characters play style.
My wife just said she wants a special mount for rogues that lets her backstab and sneak/hide while mounted...make it happen!

Hi,

1. Will there be an Upgrade to the Tonic of Efficiency Affinity XI Potion? there is an empowered Fellowship campfire but the potion buff is not range bound.

2. Can you make spell Damage pre crit? Basically as an reembursement for the loss of the 10% dmg/heal slot 3 aug?

3. When will the last 2 Necromancer dots be revamped? The Ignite line and the anti plant line of dots.

Can you remove all of the completely garbage items from the legacy of norrath prize packs? People will pay real american dollars for prize packs again if you remove the garbage items out of them like the gate potions, bind potions, the garbage armor, etc. These things are not even currently available until a server has hit rain of fear, and it feels real nice spending $ to open them to see shield of scraps. It's right there in the name, it is garbage.

Could we have a tab in inventory or stats which states a pet's HP, AC, Mana, Haste etc?

I will put this as nicely as I can. DB asks for Beta testers every xpac. We do our best to find bugs and report them with as much detail as possible and spend our time to help make the best product for release date. Alot of us are geeks at heart and know what we are doing. We made/make a living at it. Right now, there are currently several items that were reported during Beta as needing more time and had serious problems, but are currently in live. While all of us realize that making deadlines and promises and being told "it goes in we'll fix it later" we've all heard, we've all been the customer on the other side of things that haven't gone as planned with other companies.

Personally, I think I would have a little more patience with a delay in a rollout rather than a cluster just to make a deadline.

While it's always fun to have new things to do, I might think a little harder and is it better to have something fun to do, or a less broken app? Should/can resources be shuffled to help the "what's broken" meet expectations and make the new fun stuff more enjoyable?

Right now the latest patch has people jumping thru hoops to bounce from a game to rl for a gamma setting which should be a seamless EQ change.

Is there a way to ask for more beta testing before things like this go live? You know who were the strongest beta testers and have their email addys and know their servers/char names, would it be advantageous to drop them a note and ask to pop over and open the beta server up for a week of testing something?

Just food for thought.

While redoing character models is an enormous can of worms, would it be possible to redo environmental textures? Many of the older zones have just a couple textures for the entire ground. Could things like that be changed to make the zones less.... 90s?

Why is everquest the only PC game that I can think of that doesn't have a gamma slider?

Question- is there going to be more class balancing in the future?

Can we please get a door from the Guild Lobby to the Bazaar?

Can we please have a door to the Bazaar and another to the Plane of Knowledge that can be placed in houses or Guild Hall? Even if it's only available in the Marketplace, I'm sure there are a lot of people who like the player housing who would like to be able to go to either of those locations directly.

Why are some illusions one sex only?

Why is Visage of the Rallosian Goblin (very cool of y'all to say that would be the Beta reward, very cool item except....) female only ?
Why is the chanter illusion Pal'lomen Infiltrator male only? (having this chanter illusion in game takes a LOT away from the coolness factor of the Visage of the Rallosian Goblin item)

The other chanter illusion this expansion Fernshade Defender casts both sexes of the illusion, depending on sex of the character it's being cast on. Why aren't all illusions like this ?

Some dudes like roleplaying or pretending or whatever female characters. I don't. I've passed on other awesome illusion items in the past, because the illusion they cast is female only.

Any plans to undo this direct x 11 patch that destroyed the game for so many people? Could we revert it back to DX9 until you guys have worked out all the kinks?

Given the decline in subscriptions (cash flow) due to the DirectX11 rollout, what is Darkpaw and EG7's 2024 financial FP&A recovery plan to be able to support on-going development of personas, UI updates, and DirectX11 simultaneously while also ensuring the next expansion is content rich for the community? Is the releasing of simultaneous features still under development a sustainable business strategy for Daybreak and Darkpaw?

Given the new UI, Personas, and now the DX11 'update', do you have any plans to stop releasing unfinished, unready content to production?

What about a Hardcore server where you only get 10% of normal xp per kill. Everquest has such rich questing and it will force people to explore all of them.to get xp

(your gonna need random loot and free trade on this new sever because they are extremely popular)

*edit* i really have no clue what the game is like past 100, /shrug. maybe make the next expansion focused on all levels again, like the drakkin expansion

*edit #2* maybe 10% is too drastic, maybe 50%.

but Also please make the next expansion for all levels, maybe continue off Lost dungeons of norrath, but let people solo it,

let them solo the original if nothing else.

*Edit*# 3 there really isnt a point to get the higher level expansions if im on progression server. this would solve all problems (making LDoN into a Sequel) and people would want to buy it across the board.

And most importantly, please keep up your events. especially.... well all of them lol, from halloween/thanksgiving/holidays.

you guys are keeping this game great

1. I would like to know if you plan to put real life goodies for original EQ out in the world.
Today I purchased the year of Dark Paw tshirt and the poster, the ONLY 2 items geared towards or sharing in EverQuest original. I can guarantee you if ya'll put stuff out there for us to buy, we would buy it. Affordable box art posters along with the current digital art, t shirts, Bumper stickers, tapestries just to name a few

2. Im a nostalgia type person and I love the old original zones, our starting homes lands before Crescent Reach. Will you ever add anything at all that brings people back to those zones. They are so empty and quite and lonely now. Its been far to long since I have seen someone fall from Kelethin (Great Idea for a tshirt--I survived Kelethin) /wink /wink.

Thank you for your time.
Voidazontle / Endliss
Knights of Luclin (first home) - Luclin Server
Black Dragon Legion (current home <3) - Luclin Server

can you give xp from gray con creatures.... even if its only like 0.00010, it still feels like your accomplishing something

can we have an updated "/dancing in EverQuest" video? Same video style, same music would be fine, makes me cry everytime i watch it truelly love this game and my friends in it.

Can armor sets (suit of blahblah's blahblah chain) PLEASE have a preview WHOLE SET button?

Hi, Firstly thank you for taking the time to do an AMA hopefully you will be able to answer some if not all our my questions!

1. In an interview recently it was stated that TLP earnings is roughly 50% of eq earnings, is this something you intend to try and grow or are you happy with the current balance between live and tlp?

2.Early TLP raiding is mainly throttled around the concept of MoTM, with aoc's and truebox now being limitations to why MoTM was originally introduced are there any plans to revisit MoTM and how it works? I think if you introduced a flexible raiding system based on the amount of attendees it would be very beneficial even if that meant less loot etc.

3. When is the last time you raided on a tlp server and what content where you doing? any highlights or lowlights?

4. Is there any particular concern around the level 70 era expansions (Omens -> Prophecy of Ro) currently casters in that era are unable to do anything meaningful in raid situations due to resists and poor balancing 20 years ago, would there be any considerations to implementing some more favourable resist checks specifically for that era?

5. There have been a plethera of indirect buffs to early era monks and melee throughout the last 4 years, primarily no longer needing magic items to kick / auto attack, or more loot (such as vaniki / mischief), are there any plans to re add focus items pre luclin as a way to equalise this imbalance?

6. What are your opinions on the current state of truebox, what is truebox's objective? Personally I think Truebox is needed for early game TLP (up untill Omens), however things like keystroke detection is outdated and is easily avoidable with VPN's which are now common place due to market changes in the world.

7. Would you consider revamping Truebox alongside your anticheat measure you have listed this year in your development plan? Personally I would like to see you remove keystroke detection and remove auto follow from outside of the group.

8. What is your current stance on what is considered botting in the market, do you agree with blizzard's stance that they have taken on world of warcraft (i.e. to include broadcasting from 1 Pc to many pc's simultaneously as a punishable form of botting?) They currently do not have an automated system to catch these type's of bot's and rely on community led reporting is this something you are wanting to do in the future or are you happy with your current stance on botting which is essentially a more lax stance assuming there is a human sitting there playing the game.

9. DPG stakeholders and devs have previously been known to play in a few player run guilds, without giving yourself away, in recent years which guilds have you enjoyed being in the most?

10. Parsing is one of the best tools raiders have to either have a bit of fun or to optimise there performance, unfortunately there are numerous in-game issues with capturing a lot of other people's damage and/or healing, do you ever wish you could fix this or better introduce an in-game parser?

11. The last few tlp's have catered towards a player base with less and less time, Mischief / Vaniki / Oakwynd are all very kind to us adults who dont have the playtime we wish we had! Is this going to be the trend moving forwards? Personally I love this change and while some people may say its "easy mode" unfortunately I dont have 40 hours to sit on EQ like I once did!