abject failure as a company

1) not shortening the spawn times for epic mobs for tlp (this creates a toxic, unfun environment that is easily fixable)
2) not having customer support for broken quests (bait and switch, o we have GMs for the new server... really, what do they do)

there are many more quality of life issues that you have had the time and resources to fix, but have CHOSEN not to.

Extreme exaggeration is not a good form of self expression, it undermines the sincerity of your words to such a degree that nobody can remotely take you seriously, understated always works better when you wish to convey disappointment.

Nothing gets solved with "the nuclear option", it's like being the moron who solves a domestic dispute over who got the chicken legs by shooting his wife in the head. Don't be that guy.

Compaining is fine the "Abject failure as a company" is 100% ridiculous, decisions you would like to have taken place on a few minor issues were not taken, some improvements that could have been made have not been, yeah I get it that even small changes can makes things a whole lot better.

Stop being a drama queen.

thats not drama, that's reality
the game would be, imo, more successful if they would listen the player base and not ignore them

it's hard to know how many more people would stay subbed if they lessened the frustration points. this is on them as a company... it was better when soe was involved with pnp and gms who provided customer service. it is not exaggeration, to consider where they are and where they could be and the huge gap between the 2

ignoring your customer base for years... is failure as a company

You & I have very different perceptions of reality then I guess.

They do listen, doesn't mean they want to or even can act on every suggestion the players put forth.

Some of that boils down to how they feel the design of the game "should" be versus how the players want it & that difference is not necessarily unhealthy, I've seen games ruined by following the group-think too much because what their players wanted was far too big a departure from the creative vision the game was rooted in to begin with.

Some boils down to resources & yet again timing - right now the full focus of the team is on solving only critical game-breaking bugs, server & game stability & on getting the expansion done, after those priorities are dealt with we might see more movement on things like gameplay issues of a lower priority nature, bills gotta get paid & that entails making sure the game brings in the dough first.

Some of the changes players have suggested might well be on the drawing board or even planned in - eventually, but the devs just don't have a timetable for them so they can't say s**t about them yet.

You are right, and they know this all too well, but they can only do what's feasible with the resources they have & the money available. It's a balancing act between competing narratives, between what they want to do & what they can afford to do & what they have time to do.

You are comparing two completely different operations, SoE as this game was run by was a far better financed & resourced company, that unfortunately made a lot of decisions that were better tailored to a game company that made one-off games AKA the standard game development model, where you use the money your hit game makes to finance the next hit game.

EverQuest being a "game as a service" was an alien concept to most game managers & they very probably had a very poor understanding of how to manage them properly because there had been so little of them prior to EverQuest - the management style & tacit understanding of what worked best for that new type of game simply didn't exist for them to draw upon, successive managers each learned a small new bit of it throughout their time on the game and through game's life. Around 2015 people probably started having a grip on it - after millions of dollars of EQ income was already wasted in failed projects rather then being used to re-invest in the star of the show and the studio ended up being sold on likely as a direct end-result of that problem, nobody was really at fault there it's just due to the lag between a new type of technology versus the knowledge that had yet to be accumulated yet was required to run it well. A common problem in the tech world.

What critical quest is “broken”?

To me it just sounds like you don’t like playing on current TLP. If you want something less competitive pick an older server where the content you want to play isn’t “current”.

If the Devs simplify the experience so anyone can get an Epic and waltz into other end game Kunark content like VP, subs would probably drop as people would get bored quickly. Older EQ content required you put more elbow grease and patience in, especially if you wanted an Epic or VP key. You’ll get it eventually, just be patient.

Also, calling the company an “abject failure” is an exaggeration, especially when the subs seem to be going up over the past years, not down. Of it’s legacy MMORPG peers, it’s seems to be doing well. That’s probably in part why Holly got poached by Blizzard.

Sounds like the only failure here is in your ability to get something that literally thousands of others have aquired.

All I know is when my wife calls me an "abject failure" then I immediately respond to correct all the issues that she has presented before me in a positive and contrite manner.

I only partially agree with you here, the VP key quest structure is fine as it is & I do believe the effort required should be meaningful, where I disagree is that on TLP servers the vastly higher number of players who want to do it in a much shorter window of time makes the competition for key parts escalate to levels it should not, the whole point of TLP is to allow players to experience the content they already did and also the stuff they did not get to experience when it was live servers going through it, VP is an integral part of that history which players want to experience so there needs to be some speeding up of access to meet that notalgia tour dream - the current spawn chances of Rotten Skeleton & Pained Soul (RS &PS) currently act as huge roadblocks to that as a direct result of the number of players who want access to VP in a much shorter time.

I genuinely understand why players are so aggrieved & why that makes the situation so much more toxic on TLP purely as a result of the passion & desire of the players conflicting with roadblocks, roadblocks that can be reduced & in fact have already been reduced to varying degrees - the dev stand on only increasing the chance for two mobs to spawn instead of the PH "slightly" (RS & PS) is where I think the roadblock needs to be lessened.

Doing that the players must still go through the keying process so the quest retains its value, having the sheer unadulterated boredom threshold drastically lowered is I think a much better player experience, having to camp a progression access-quest NPC for greater than 8 hours in many cases, far longer then most players can healthily camp it in one session is I feel detrimental to the game in that expansion & should be changed, I also accept however that changing it right now is unlikely due to the demands on the team & what part of the year it is - changes for anything on TLP are likely to be only looked at in January.

“Abject failure” and “the game would be, imo, more successful if...” aren’t compatible statements.

The game is either a total failure, you know it, you can objectively demonstrate it, and only then you can correctly make such a strong statement. Or, you have an opinion and are speculating.

The game isn’t a failure as it’s profitable. Not only that, it’s still profitable and producing new content after 20 years. Even if DBG shut down today, calling that a failure is, at best, a stretch.

I feel you, OP. I really do. The game is filled with uninteresting choke points, and the most effective way to deal with these is meh. I recently cancelled 7 accounts for temporary RL reasons, but even after those reasons clear, I don’t see myself coming back for the same root cause OP is getting at. Cheating and ptw is getting steadily worse due to being largely unchecked and de facto allowed. The only way to play at the top tier is to cheat, either directly or via guild mates doing it for your benefit. There’s simply too many shortcuts to be had that a sense of accomplishment is gone. My preferred way of playing is to box and play with a handful of other boxers, but where’s the challenge when you can either cheese or bully your way to the same outcome with far less effort? My personality is such that I’ll take the easiest path to a goal. Not doing so is too frustrating because the easier course will be stuck at top of mind. For me, EQ devolved into a logistical meta game to collect pixels with a detached side of nerdy social interaction. The games saving grace for me, that nerdy social interaction, is cannibalized by the logistical main game generating toxic culture. I avoid a lot of the toxic behavior by staying on Agnarr, but it gets stale. All of that said, there are plenty of players who either enjoy this play style, or at least don’t detest it enough to tip the scales, that the game is still being played and profitable.

Are you implying that Darkpaw is having marital sex with the OP?

Am I allowed to say "abject failure as a ForumQuester"?

Buddy of mine from college had an odd scar on top of his hand. He had two brothers, so there were three of them all around the same age. Turns out, when they were kids, everyone wanted the chicken legs. One night one brother grabbed the first chicken leg. When my friend went to grab the second, his second brother stuck a fork in the top of my friend's hand to stop him from getting the leg.

Basically how the enc epic works on tlp.

You're basing this "failure" on your own narrow minded set of criteria.

Maybe this company isn't really a game company and doesn't really care about games so much as being able to generate revenue, which they do appear to be quite successful at.

The competition for epic mobs has been this way on every TLP, you would of hated fippy if you dislike the current TLPs. Broken quests, again been that way for every TLP and they get to them when they can. Those us who played on Fippy and even Vulak consider the current TLPs easy mode because that is basically what they are. Really how much easier can you make them, might as well put the items in /claim when the expansion launches.

And looking at the server population when these TLPs launch and even a yea or two in I'd say very few are really a failure.

imagine thinking epics are hard.

I understand your viewpoint entirely. When I was younger, I didn't mind the extremely long camps, but as older adult I don't want to do that kind of stuff anymore. I am not saying it is right, but the developers probably feel that any time gating built into epics is there to make the reward feel more satisfying. It took me a very long time to finish epic 1.0 on my Necromancer the first time, but I did feel some accomplishment.
This next comment is indirectly associated with your comment. The problem developers have is that all players and developers have different understanding of what constitutes fair or balanced work for a reward. They may think sitting at a spawn point for days is warranted for some quests. Recently I have played a lot of another unmentionable game (one that will release an expansion soon). I realized that the challenge should be in defeating the monster or encounter, and not spending countless hours to hope it spawns and hope it drops the upgrade I need. While the developers probably think that long camps is a cornerstorne of EQ.
There are tons of broken quests in EQ, the simple fact is that most never worked in the first place, or one of the many low priority items that will likely never be resolved. For example, many of the newbie quest givers actually gave classic era quest or were involved with them. Instead of taking the time to change when a quest is given, they leave the npc's despawned.

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I feel like you're ignoring the fact that a lot of people that play on TLPs were playing when this content was in-era and we enjoy competition and questing. If I wanted everything handed to me I would still be playing WoW.

When I played this game before TLPs, most of the people I knew were raiding content 2-3 or more expansions behind era. QoL fixes let everybody do all content, while allowing people to strive for more and killing OW/contest spawns as they saw fit. Epics are not not mandatory, keys are not mandatory; if you want them, put in effort.

Ah the Obligatory "well I had to walk uphill backwards in the snow & I liked it so everyone should"
All while completely ignoring the fact that on live only a tiny fraction of the players on any server back then even knew about the key quest and they had a lot longer than 12 weeks to do it in while on TLP almost everyone knows & wants to do it & only has 12 weeks to get it done within era.
But hey, lets not allow facts to get in the way of a gaming-toughguy reply.