Steal from Season of Discovery!!

Blizzard makes a bunch of games besides WoW and it has been reported that the layoffs are related to them being purchased by Microsoft. It is highly unlikely that it had anything to do with Season of Discovery.

Right, majority of them are already reported as blizzard employees and confirmed by Ybarra when he stepped down today. Point is - things aren't going well...D3, then D4 were not good games, SoD was incredibly poorly thought out. I'm sure many of those affected were due to underperformance as is the case with most companies lay offs. The weak links are first out.

Staying on topic though - the argument stands - really don't want to emulate something that isn't exactly all roses and sunshine right now. Trying to repeat SoD in EQ would be a huge mistake for a much much smaller population of players.

And there is nothing to suggest that it was Season of Discovery that is to blame for any of the layoffs as Blizzard produces a bunch of games and was recently purchased and after a purchase layoffs tend to happen.

1900 of the 22,000 employees is what 8% I mean that could of been other Activision/Blizzard games such as Overwatch and Diablo who have massive teams It wasn't just WoW, so make sure you have other supporting facts before making blanket statements. WoWs classic team is basically the size of EQs Dev team. And BTW, WoW SoD is a massive success.

Your right, poorly worded. A certain amount of personnel are always victims in mergers. The point also stands that it is a strong indicator things aren't going that well - 8% is considered a very large number in terms of layoffs. I will stand by that if everything was as successful as OP claims they wouldn't be making significant changes. New owners of businesses are looking at what have you done for me lately not what did you do in 2009. It would be unwise for EQ to try and steal from something that is not really super successful.

OP may not know that the whole WoW classic servers idea and subsequent stuff are literally copied from EQ where TLPs have been successful since Combine opened in late 2000s.

I'd rather have Prathun back.

The mass layoffs would happen regardless of "success" or not. The mass layoffs were long in work before SoD even launched. Multiple area's got touched not just WoW etc. And yes it indeed sucks. It was just a measure to insure bottom line, not to make a better "product"

It should also be noted that they have just canceled a survival game that has been in development for over 6 years and it is likely that the people working on that made up a chunk of the layoff numbers.

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-survival-game-cancellation-news/

Mass layoffs are usually a trimming of the fat. You always have those people who slide into meetings and say one thing (usually repeating or agreeing on what someone else said) so they look present but then after the meeting they're always offline and hard to get a hold of. They have "family emergencies" very frequently and in today's remote age they're able to get away with it FAR easier. These people usually always push work off on others and somehow survive in the company. They're fat that needs to be trimmed to keep the company lean. And, in a company with 22k employees its probably about 8% of them that represent this fat content.

Are you really suggesting that all the recent tech layoffs only targeted people who slacked off?

Slacking off or redundant positions. Somewhat interchangable. If I was consulting for Microsoft and looking at this acquisition I would ask questions like why does this developer have 2 assistants to google things when they could do it for themselves...so yeah slacking off/delegating/redundant/overlapping positions whatever you want to call it. Trimming of the fat is a generally accepted term for what is happening.

Or if you really want to look at it if EQ3 is truly in development then you can bet Microsoft will be pushing WoW2. Which would naturally result in trimming of WoW resources. EQ is directly responsible for the creation of modern MMOs. If there is an evolution/modernization of the genre and resurgence in popularity the race is between EQ and WoW.

And yeah, social media posts show wow devs were hit pretty hard.

Not sure why you think they would be pushing for WoW2 when they already invest so much on adding things to WoW. Seems like that will just needlessly hurt one of the games. Also EQ3 has been tried before and there was no known attempt at a sequel for any of the competitors.

Ain't no way Microsoft is scared of Everquest IP enough to spend billions of dollars to compete against it.

I love EQ, but that's some serious cope mechanism.

You find it unreasonable that a game could re-invent the market?

Unlikely yes, but also without EQ - they wouldn't even exist or have instancing or anything. They stole everything they did and just found a way to appeal to more players through other games.

Is it possible that EQ3 could re-awaken a dormant genre? Yeah. Would another company not want to follow and instead lead and do the creating? Yeah.

I never implied they are scared of EQ IP. I implied they want to get proper credit for creating something.

Why yes, I do find it very unreasonable that EQ would. EQ players don't want something to redefine their game. They want their game with better graphics. That game already does exist. It doesn't have mainstream appeal, and it doesn't really need/want it. That's fine. I would much rather have EQ3 be more a better version of EQ1 classic than a brand new style.

But I also know that EQ1 is niche and that's just what it is, and i'm fine with that. I don't need nor want the devs to try and do something new. They tried that. It was called EQ Next, and we all see how well that went.

Just gimmie EQ1 with better graphics, animations, and systems. Not a clone, but a nice sequel.

Bad idea, whenever EverQuest has stolen Ideas from other games what it has always done is allow them to hold some promise to sell an expansion, then purposely make them so much worse than the original idea in order to fit in with the existant developer-team dogma, often so much worse it would appear to have been close to a complete and utter waste of developer time except maybe in a few edge-case scenarios.

If any of that was remotely accurate then Miragul would not have happened.

I'd rather he see his career prospects get better not worse.

I'm not going to go digging but its been speculated the Wow Story is going to sunset with the next trio of expansions (rumor). That's where the WoW 2 speculation comes in. And their TLPs are made for the same reason as EQ's. Its sales. Sales fix everything.