An EQ Player's Council that Represents Players

If you limit it to the forums and not require an NDA that prevents them from getting feedback on a lot of things that they don't want to or can't make public yet.

Delayed outrage is the best outrage.

The NDA is needed because EQ players like to pay for the expansions before release then be surprised about what is in them. No NDA, no surprise.

Thank you for taking the time Niente to share with us the thought process behind the vetting process for the CRC. The criteria Darkpaw used was surprislingly quite expansive and inclusive of the many player archetypes that play EQ. I have no problem with the CRC and your explanation has helped lots of us to understand what is going on. We really appreciate the transparency too.

The idea of a player-centric Player Council was not to usurp the CRC but to compliment it. If such an organization can provide useful and actionable data that help make EQ a better experience for the greatest number of people with the least amount of cost, then I think that's a good thing. The fact that people still care about a 24 year old MMORPG and get involved in heated dicussions is a testament to its enduring genius.

As many have mentioned publicly and privately, such an endeavour would take a lot of plannig and require a lot of work. I think the best course of action would be create an indepedent fansite. This takes all the pressure off of Darkpaw and Daybreak. Thank you for your support and encouragement.

Quite the opposite. That lets the devs speak freely. If they had to worry about every single thing they say getting blasted across these boards, the devs wouldn't communicate.
Otherwise, anything a dev says will be picked apart and misconstrued. That would chill and kill communication. The NDA is a necessary and a good thing.

Its helpful not to think of it as a "us vs them" thing. Everyone involved wants to make a good game. On these forums, many come to do battle, not communicate. So that warps things.

Some of which are in said group...

They barely communicate as is. Getting rid of the NDA and actually speaking freely about EVERYTHING would earn them a lot more goodwill than the radio silence they maintain now.

The NDA is what allows a lot of the communication in the first place as there are things that they or the company doesn't want to become public for various reasons and would not be communicated otherwise.

I appreciate both sides of the argument as to why the devs may not want to speek freely about certain issues in the game. However, I think openess and transparecy are worth the cost. You are right that the devs would earn more goodwill and trutst if they were to adopt this strategy.

In the absence of information from Darkpaw, the forums often end up being very speculative about what

is going on and that creates frustration and alienation. Both the emotional and time investement into EverQuest that players have gives them a well earned sense of entitlement. Most EQ players are in this for the long haul. We've invested a great portion of our lives into Norrath. We just want to know where this cruise ship is taking us before we board the boat.

Since 1999 when EQ was released, MMO forums have been unique in the history of gaming. MMO players are extremely vocal and passionate. All the devs know and understand this, yet they willingly became MMO developers just the same. So I don't understand why do not want to engage players here more frequently.

MMOs are a unique continuous live service product and service that requires that the daily involvement of the community. Many of the best changes to EQ came because of outcry from the players on the official forums. Players are essentially unpaid beta testers who know the product better than the creators. That's just the truth. So let's start acknowledging that a bit more and give loyal players the respect they are due.

Waring is making more and more sense

Hard core raiders may want to be surprised after NDAs are lifted but they also like to preview and do all the raids before beta is finished. So they are never surprised. Plus some group players are very competitive even though there is no real group player competition and they do beta for the same reason to be able to hit the ground running when the game drops.

That being said yes there are folks who like to see things only after the game drops. I am one of those. I used to do guiding and I would never use my guide powers to explore places I hadn't been as a player unless I had to do it for the job. Other guides were all over the place. So all that to say there are some who surprise is the most important and some who are willing to sacrifice that for some sort of advantage or just enjoy finding bugs and alpha/beta testing.

The point would be that they have 1 person to communicate with regarding the information gathered rather than several thousand people.

If they don't want to or cannot make it public, then it is not ready to be brought to anyone outside of the company. Consistently, when they do not want to make things public, it is because they know that the public does not want it. They also know that it is much easier to get bad things in when they don't announce them ahead of time.

There is no NDA on the Beta, there has not been in well over a decade.

The NDA is what allows the bad things to get implemented. The things that no one wants, but the CRC won't tell them it is a bad idea. There is more benefit from them being open at this point in the life of the game compared to them keeping things secret.

If they don't want to share surprises, fine then don't share it. But if they think they can share it with the CRC there should be no reason why they cannot share the same information with everyone else. If they think that there will be too much backlash from them sharing that they intend to do something, then they probably should rethink doing that.

And that person would be bound by an NDA just like the CRC and wouldn't be able to keep the rest of the players informed of things. If they are not bound by an NDA they won't be doing anything different then all the other posters on the fourms.

What would be the point of the new group then? They do use groups that they have NDA's with to gather feedback on some ideas from knowing that they are bound by an NDA.

They use the NDA to get feedback on various ideas, without it they would have even less feedback available to them. Also the isn't a group of 'Yes Men" but that doesn't mean we have the power to change things either.

There is no need for any of those people to be bound by an NDA, other than to prevent backlash from bad decisions stopping poorly thought out changes before they happen, instead of the entire playbase having to deal with the effects of those bad decisions for months or years.

The NDA's serve no purpose other than to prevent the public from calling the Devs on bad decisions before they implement them.

The Betas which have been going on for the last Decade or so have not had NDAs. If you wanted to talk to the Devs about issues you go to the Beta Forums, but there is nothing restricting anyone from talking about everything in the new expansion. That is how the communication should be. Let those who want to discuss everything openly with everyone.

The NDAs do nothing to get them the feedback. The NDAs inherently limit the feedback that they can get. It is further limited by the people that they choose. There is no way to prove any of that. We have to have blind faith, because nothing is shared with the community until it is already decided, and generally the public only learn about some horrible decisions 1 week before they go to live; that is not showing any benefit of an NDA for this game.

This is silly.

You're acting like the choice is between DPG releasing something publicly and keeping something "secret". It's not though, when DPG wants to make something public, they will do so regardless of whether an NDA exists with some number of people.

The NDA covers things that DPG is not yet ready for them to be made public (or things that may never be made public). In those cases, and during this time period, any sort of public disclosure is already off the table, so your choices are:

- Have a group of players, bound by a NDA, who can provide feedback to the developers.
- Have no ability for any player to provide feedback to the developers.

No company is ever going make all of their ideas and plans public the moment they have them, a CRC covered by the NDA simply gives them the ability to get some feedback before they're ready to say something public.

Kind of the point of my tongue-in-cheek comment. An NDA is kind of pointless, for EQ.

They have actually increased revenue by selling the same patterned expansions and starting new servers with past content and tweaked rules. The majority of EQ players do not want any surprises and they want to pay for that. Live players pre-buy the expansion based on a small bit of information for the privilege of testing the content so it works well enough for release and to run through the raids many times so on race day they are more "prepared". Not in beta and/or not raiding? They still want maps ready to go, walkthroughs for their first run of anything, no mobs that can see through invis/IVU to create travel restrictions, upfront knowledge of the best path to acquire the best items, recipes available, etc.

The NDA being discussed was in regard to the CRC and around the alternate persona feature in the upcoming expansion, a feature which sounds like it was announced prematurely and when nobody knew expansion content was also reduced. DP would do better to have frank and open discussions either on these forums or in Discord, wherever they feel they can get the most eyeballs. Apparently they make enough money doing things the forum loves to hate, imagine working through some ideas, pre-implementation, to focus on things that could encourage players to spend money. Granted, it would not be easy but they would probably make more money and have to do less actual work.