You know you have a problem when you have to hide your Evercrack, and no one knows what it actually is anyway. A few years ago, I told some high school age gamers that I play Everquest, and one asked, "Is that a game from the 1980s?"
I used to know that zone well enough, I got my BIBS and crown from there. Nowadays I don't understand how I could have remembered navigating that mess, especially without a map. I wonder what changed, other than me getting dumber.
Unless a server is appreciable different and much better honed and curated for a different purpose, I have no need for a TLP server. I have been playing Everquest since 1999, and I don't really need to grind through all of those levels again. TLP is a niche product that some players enjoy, but it isn't going to save Everquest.
I recommend EQ as a game and a walk through, play through history lesson of gaming mechanics. If you follow through EQ's expansions and archived news website stories about them and read archival internet archived threads on dead EQ fan sites, etc actual gaming mechanics made news. I remember very early on actual TV news and Large distribuition paper and web news talking about mobs being social and actually running to get help. I remember some website like Business Insider doing a whole story explaining virtual economy to neophyte business developers and how amazed they were at people spending real life dollars on virtual entities. Ever see summining mobs before EQ? Ever see a zone that changed the character model of and to every player seeing them? (Grieg's End named mobs) Ever see mobs teleport to their spawnpoint mid fight and return with the rest of the zone? Ever see a developer's son as a Bas relief sculpture in a cliff face? (importation of real faces into game art) Ever see mobs die and a spirit or other iteration spawn in it's place? Ever see timered events like Doomshade in UP? Ever see mobs in another game with see invis <and> undead see invis and matching camo spells for them? Ever see a game with such a deep roster of mob types and categories? Undead, Racial specific, Animal Plant, Aberration? Ever see MMORPG pets you can command to do your bidding? Player names put in game for best of the best, ot Xanthe's Earring of Nature for being the first non employee to solve it? Everquest is very much like the game development hall of fame and it is no lie and no coincideence that World of Warcraft even took mob names from it. The art in Everquest, similarly is a live museum of game design. There are VERY clear differences in style , depth and expectation of the artistry from expansion to expansion, from the signs on the walls of Runnyeye to the Pyreliens on Riftseeker's for instance, the use of layers, shading and so on. Compare Luclin era dragons to to the Art of tower raids or one of my favorites Convorteum /waves @ Ergon Everquest is utterly and totally unique in gaming and in 1999 was already deeper and more intuitive than any game released since. In WoW if I keyswap something there is NO safety net to tell me it just UNDID an existing command. In Everquest I can view them all and duplicates are displayed in red, not undone, puposely left redundant. Can you say forage on right turn and tracking on left turn, yet left and right turn still function? I can even add a /say hotbutton and have THAT triggered. Not everyone views depth and complexity as "better" because what they want out of the experience is ease and simplicity. Why WoW outsold EQ Those of us who can hang, those who have seen all this roll out, still play Everquest for a reason. Persistently nerfing all the positive aspects, like pickup groups with a chainpuller to XP grind after raids is typically replaced with a script driven automated glyph recharge group and a host of NPC alt accounts with text triggers to autobuff the guild. these things drive tenured players, the ones who answer all the questions in gen chat, aways from your game. I recommend EQ all the time, have for a quarter century now, yet the devs here mostly hate me. Mostly for calling out BS like- Hey, remeber the Phinigel TLP rollout where they never told anyone about nerfing XP to oblivion before it opened, yet they added XP pots to marketplace and stopped them dropping in game? cos I do. I ranted quite a bit about that and played Legion in WoW even as much as I preferred EQ. I also had a bit to say when the EQ button went permanently onscreen and uncloseable. A sign of things to come vs immersion in a roleplaying game, now with advertising onscreen at all times. Nowadays they barely respond to game breaking bugs, yet the marketplace never times out, never lags, stutters. Yes, I recommend Everquest, but I caution: The people who invented it have long departed and in these later years it's run by beancounters, so look for older established guilds, like... Lions of the Heart Inverse Logic, etc as these types of players, this ethos, this respect, for YOU is still to be found here, the journey is, and always was, what you make of it. Some of the obstacles have changed. AoCs, Instances reduce bottlenecks and single guild / player posession of perma camps. Play Nice is out the window mostly. (Their choice to save money on actual GMs) As much of a history lesson for gaming Everquest is, it is also a history lesson in game company development and honestly, frankly, I'm amazed EQ has made it this far in today's modern gaming environment. I could do with more focus on the game systems themselves, like promptly fixing known issues prioritized over 13 flavors of rabbits that have nothing to do with roleplaying and everything to do with pandering, while actual players of the game await fixes. I would have preferred more Everquest over a lame copy of WoW's mission table system of Timerquest, soleley developed to copy the skewed 4 hour, 6 hour, 8 hour times to artificially increase monetization time, but that too is part of MMORPG history as a business. I could do with a lot less developer hubris over clearly unpopular decisions, like nerf hammering mob per kill XP. It was unnecessary, unpopular and is still costing us players who give up and will not buy your heroics because if it. People who quit are 100% unmonetizeable. Some of the most tenured players, on this, the eve of your 25th anniversary March 16th are quiet quitting because of these nerfs and more specifically, the disdain the devs show toward the game and it's players, treating them as cash cows and whales instead of the loyal fanbase thay are, and have been for longer than soome of them have even been alive.
You underestimate the financials of TLPs TLPs generate a LOT of Krono buys, bag buys, mounts, LoN assets once Sunrise and Palatial guild halls spawn. It's not so niche when AAA titles swipe the idea either. Transferring all sorts of prenerf drops to live also pays well. 25 bucks to sell a drop for 5 krono on live is a winner. You are also sorely mistaken at least, or disingenuous at worst that it's an either or thing, like we don't play both live and TLP. To wit: A Krono on Agnarr can be bought for the platinum value 1-2 Luclin or Velious era drops, which is waaaaay easier than 3 million PP on live. a Level 65 can cop that in 30 minutes or less. They are intertwined economies, not separate at all.
[quote="Bobokin, post: 4292785, member: 408941"TLP is a niche product that some players enjoy, but it isn't going to save Everquest.[/quote] It's more than half the total revenue now. Without TLPs, EQ would already be in maintenance mode.
That is sign of the demise of Everquest when half the revenue is a niche product. TLPs help Daybreak with revenue, but they show just how weak the live servers and base game are. The live servers should be driving revenue at a pace much higher than the TLP servers, but they are not.
No. Not sure how you read my post and came to the conclusion I soloed my way from zero to 125 and max AA solo/molo lol
That hasn't been true for the last several years, based on disclosed financial data. Holly reported the revenue split was about 50/50 back when she first took over as producer. You're just waking up to this truth now?? Quite a few players, including myself, play on both a Live server and a TLP. They don't have to be mutually exclusive things. TLPs aren't a niche product. EverQuest is a niche product.
How does Holly making that statement back your premise? You act like what you are stating is something new. It is well known information. No one here is just "waking up" to it now. Having the TLP servers bring in 50% of the revenue is a bad sign, so doubling down on that information does not validate your premise. To the contrary, it shows that the live servers are not bringing in the revenue they should be. The live servers should be driving the revenue at a rate much higher than the TLP servers. The TLP servers are a short term temporary fix to a long term problem. A Band Aid on a hemorrhaging wound is not a cure. As it is now, the TLP servers make a short run, die off, and get merged into other servers. They are not healthy, and they are not going to save Everquest from its demise as well as doing a better job at the base game and live servers would have. Back to the main topic, if I am not going to recommend Everquest to younger gamers, I am certainly not going to recommend the TLP servers and their mandatory monthly All Access fees.
New live servers would get a bunch of that revenue too. My point is that the TLP servers are not growing the player base and potential revenue as much as a better overall live server game would. So TLP servers are good for money making schemes. That is good for the health of the game? That's what you are going with here? How can I be either mistaken or disingenuous when I never stated it is an either/or thing? If you are going to beat a straw man, at least make sure he exists in the first place. It does give evidence that the TLP servers are being used by established players rather than new players and new revenue sources.
I’ve tried to talk some friends into TLP launches like Mischief and Aradune. No expectation, they’d stick around but just the novelty of an old game filled with players. No luck on that front. Definitely wouldn’t recommend Live.
Sure, but it's about specifics. This game still has the best iteration of a necromancer class from any other games out there, or if you want to play crowd control enchanter class can't be beat etc. This in turn leads to unique gameplay that is lacking elsewhere or outright missing. Or how the age group population of this game is older than in other mmorpgs, or how the pacing of the game is slower unless crap hits the fan but you can usually predict when that happens and be prepared, or if you're a filthy boxer how you can customize and play multiple characters like a well oiled small army, and so on and on. At the same time, the game has become too easy over the years to recommend to a hardcore crowd and too daunting/old school for casuals to step in with what's available out there. So I don't recommend it overall, but I point out the specifics that differentiate it and make it "better". You can sheep one monster at a time? I'm not impressed
I think the current stewards of EQ are by far the worst we have ever had and they seem bound and determined to put EQlive into the grave. Mismanaged doesnt begin to describe the farce that has become our game. They are simply wringing cash out of their base with TLP which adds ZERO new content. They are just charging you for nostalgia for a game that died about 4 years ago.
This. Whilst I think the AMA was good for giving us a snapshot of how the developers and designers think about Everquest ,I get the feeling that they are way off the mark about who plays their game and how it is played. So many answers were abrupt No, or we may look into that in the future. I wasn't surprised to find JChan answering a question on sparkly pets being a thing and saying it was what people wanted. How do they know that - did they ever ask us if we wanted a rainbow coloured lion to follow us around? I agree that there are limitations to how things can be retroactively fixed, but my biggest concern was that it is clear they don't have the manpower to correct past content, but they aren't learning from any lessons about current content / gear / exp etc. and continue to pump it out from one year to the next. Surely, it would make sense to pause and think about how they can change direction in the future so they don't have these hang-ups from one expansion to the next. I was shocked to read that the reason is we don't have enough content in this particular expansion was because Absor made a boo-boo and took on too much work. Doesn't this guy have a manager that should be telling him what is important, and what isn't? If he is that important to the content of an expansion, then someone else should be picking up the slack so he is free to do what he needs to do.
This is on purpose. They want those levels to be unplayable because it forces what few users they have left to purchase level boost and or krono to buy power-leveling from the botters that they pretend they don't want in the game. I would never recommend EverQuest to anyone. Mostly because this game isn't Everquest. This is something else completely and the business model is obviously to suck as much life and revenue as possible out of its nostalgia and until its dead. They don't actually want to preserve the game. Either that or the people in charge have zero business sense at all and are just running into the ground out of pure stupidity. I don't actually believe that tho, I think it's all on purpose.
