Literally none of what was listed is cost cutting with regard to EQ. All of the changes listed increased the costs, they did not reduce them. What they did do was improve the quality and performance of the game. The issue is that a lot of people refuse to optimize their system to work.
I will. I don't like doing the quest or progression. I don't hate doing it once. It can even be fun. It's the forced bit of it all, where you have to repeat it all for boxes, alts, new players, returnees, keeping track of all the hails and looting, who did what steps, which character needs which item, competition with other groups for mobs or groundspawns, that one mission that sucks unless you have X class, and that other one that's super buggy. I mean if you like that, great, but don't railroad people into "Simon says or it takes you 30x as long".
Not sure what how we play has to do with broken UI and DX but, yes we played many ways. Solo, molo, box, group with the guild etc. We are not leaving because of lack of content or class balance or any of those other things. We have up to date equipment so its not a matter of cost to update but we can no longer play due to how they have "updated" the game with the game
I liked several of your posts, not because I'm happy about what was said, but because I appreciate the honesty coming from long time posters who love this game, and bear no ill will to the developers. I haven't been playing for quite a while, don't even have it installed on any computer in the house now. All of the devs (and art staff) are great people, cool and interesting, I've never done beta so never been that close to 'playing' with devs. But it's been fun over the years learning about their individual personalities, in little tidbits. I bear none of them any ill will. I think they are great people. But company wide they have been doing a very poor job, with their stewardship of this game, for a very long time. So many straws on so many of our backs, you bear them because this is EQ, and there's nothing like it. For anyone hoping they are going to turn this all around, I'll recall something that really irked me when I heard it, and I think explains quite a bit about the milking going on with EQ. Ji Ham saying "EverQuest players are Super Sticky." == They'll take any junk you give them. So many recent statements for new 'features' or changes to legacy code have shown the developers don't have a clue about the deeper implications of even small changes. And are woefully unaware of deep relationships between ingrained subsystems in the code. The UI is a disgrace. There were people, including myself (how silly of me) who were excited about what could be done with the new UI, when it actually becomes a real boy. First delayed 30 days then released still completely unfinished, because 3 or 4 windows out of however many dozens there are to convert and a broken conversion tool? == unfinished. People who were excited about new UI, discouraged. I feel dumb for even thinking I would contribute more to this game. How many of the great people who helped with workarounds for their first UI release are still waiting for them to finish? And how do they feel about it? It was never about the money, Player Studio was so much fun, so fascinating and interesting to learn. I loved it. Now I don't even have the slightest desire to reinstall and play this game at all. I still have a tiny fraction of a financial stake in seeing it do well. And that looks like it's dwindling as it starts to swirl down the drain. Seriously guys, love ya, but you all could have done so much better, even with the limited budget you are given.
It makes a huge difference. I know older players that like the game, but they all box or are in raiding guilds, and they just log in to raid. The players I see quitting, including the guild leader and officers of our sister guild, are all human group/molo players. Everquest is now, and has been for years, a game for boxers and raiders.
A play style makes no difference when the game doesn't work. Using one example: the screen is too dark to see in Demi Plane of Decay. So it would not matter if your solo, molo, grouped or raiding.
Quality and performance are down, I used to be able to spin around while pulling without locking up or skipping a 90 degree arc. And.. as I said, they had to make some of these changes due to M$ end of lifing products. Chain adjusting/optimizing my systems is something I do at work for pay, it's not something I do to be able to enjoy a 25 year old game. I'll review it post patch this week, but I'm not daily scraping the forum for ideas for undoing what DPG has done each and every time they rip game performance to shreds.
Where did I say I was quiting? Cancelling a sub, does not mean quiting, it means they aren't getting any more money out of me until they fix stuff. The only way to get through to companys when words do not work is by hitting them where it hurts, in the wallet.
On the contrary, Quality and Performance have been greatly increased. Your issue is specific to your system, not the game. I can regularly spin in circles in the guild lobby. I might get a skip for less than a second when it first loads, but after that initial moment, there is no issues at all. This is with the non-optimized memory.ini. There is no chain adjusting, you just haven't optimized your system for the game ever. The issue is actually on your side not theirs. No, they did not have to do any of these changes, they could have left all of these things alone. Microsoft not supporting DX9 does not make DX9 disappear or stop working. That is a fallacy. The majority of the changes are actually there to resolve many issues that have been around for years, and could not be fixed until after these very changes were made.
Can confirm. Great strides have been made. More are needed, too. I am more excited about the future of EQ than I have been in years.
Sorry, by live I meant max lvl current content (on live) as opposed to giving lower lvl and new players stuff to do.
The game's been in maintenance mode for a long time. The amount of actual "new content" is pretty low, and I'm talking about mostly artwork (which is great btw, I love the new models and zone designs), but in terms of quests, gear, etc it's all recycled and most of it is cut/paste-fix-the-bug-later design. This is likely due to a miniscule development team that's been trimmed and cut and trimmed again so many times there is literally no way to have another real game expansion again. The only reason we're getting new content is because an actual "maintenance mode" would die off extremely quickly in this era of EverQuest. Most of the population is already pretty bored within 3-4 months of an expansion launch, imagine if that was the last expansion this game ever had. That we're getting any new content still is a miracle.
Proof? Oh right, it's pure speculation on your part parading as fact. The lag skips are from spawning mobs dropping into view, just started happening recently, and if my system built with high end parts less than 2 years ago is the problem, then essentially 80%+ of EQ users are "responsible" for this new post patch issue. No clue how many issues they already had with DX9, but literally took me 1 minute to find a dev posting about one on the staff tracker.
I can understand a lot of the Arguments, from my Side i can just say, what is really Offputing to play the Game is if theres a Persitent Problem with the Game, like on my End i had extrem Lag Issues on Raids, so bad that when the Boss was at 50% HP on my Screen that Guild was doing Loot already, and its not that we had ~70Mil DPS, no we were more around of 20 Mil, just to set it in Perspective, so i was more than 10 Minutes behind, and it takes a lot of Energy to get it Fixes. My Problems started once the Beta Server went live, and it lasted until mid December until i found a Solution, that it was playable again. My Guild and me set toghter Mutliple Nights in a Row, Hours over Hours trying to fix it. Sadly i did not really get a lot of Help from the Customer Suport, most of the Time when i write a Ticket, i get the Feeling that as a Customer im worthless in the Eye of the Customer Suport, just a nagging piece of work for them, really often i get answers along the Line of, well that sounds like a You Problem. And weve got the Expierence that im not alone, as after the Lag Problem got Fixed on my End, they did a Patch and almost for the whole Guild it was sometimes close to unplayable, hence one of our Guild Mates send a Ticket looking for a way to fix it, and mentioned that it was Unplayable for him, hence the Customer Suport said, well if its unplayable for you than i canceled the Subcription for your 3 Accounts. I dont know if its excatly how that went, as i was just Told thats how it went. But im going to be Honest it wouldnt suprise me. What i wanted to say in this Long Post, is probably that, i can understand why a lot of People cant take it anymore, because if you have a Problem, you seldomy get taken Serious, and i/we (from the ones i know) dont want to Optimies our Systems just to play EQ, as it means we have to reset every single Setting we made to play other Games, or do Home Office. Best Excample is the Gama Slider beeing Removed from the Game, only Fix for us was to go into the Graphics Card Setting and setting the Gama Value up Manually, problem was you couldnt see anything anymore besides EQ, for the Rest it was to bright. So all in all i understand if someone is saying its enough
At the beginning, I thought like this. It's not hurting my performance, there's something wrong with their computer. Then I upgraded my graphics card about a week after the DX11 update dropped. I thought it wasn't an issue until it was. Funny how humans are like that. Please don't pawn this off on the people suffering issues. Let's say the percentage of people having issues is small- 10% ok? From talking to people in my guild, at least for us that is super low. But 10%. Imagine if 10% of WoW players after an update had the mentioned issues. WoW isn't as old, but 20 years is pretty close to our 25. There would be articles left and right about it. Blizzard would be in full damage control mode. But as someone quoted Ji Ham saying, EQ players are sticky. DPG to some people can do no wrong. We instead say things like "we couldn't anticipate newer mainstream graphics cards working differently", "it's ok if it doesn't work, the budget is small", "optimize your system for this one specific game", or "just mess with your ini files for hours trying to find the sweet spot of least issue". Darkpaw aren't indie devs trying to get something marginally playable out to anyone who will try it. And they were warned by people on test of these issues. They could have waited to release DX11. Instead, it's on us to make their game work. And some of us seem ok with that. I was for a while. TL;DR: stop holding players accountable for something DPG did.
The fact that what you describe as problems have repeatedly been shown to be caused by exactly what I described. The skips have happened for decades. You only noticing it now is because before your system was optimized for the DX9 EQ. The people who haven't ever bothered to optimize their system are the ones who have problems. The newer the system, the more the problem.
