Archived Threads and TBL Beta Forums Removed

It is disappointing to see that the tradition of removing the beta forums has continued. All of the information that helped explain the vague tasks and cryptic dev decisions will no longer be accessible, which only hurts players who have not already completed all of TBL progression. So DBG are also continuing the tradition of helping the elite and actively hindering the rest of the player base, and feeding the growing the disparity between new/casual players and end-game raiders.

But now it looks like the Archived threads have also been removed. The beta forums should always have been added to the the Archive, so that the valuable information which players helped create would be available to everybody. But removing the Archived threads altogether? Why?

EDIT: I finished TBL progression and am not concerned for myself. I am concerned about the accessibility of the game for others.

I am surprised that they last this long. A warning they were going away would have been nice though.

Helping the elite? With the beta forums? You know there is this cool website out there, with a walk through for every task in the game. (EQ Resource, check it out sometime). Far better than wading through "This is broken", and a discussion on how it's broken, if it's fixed... why it was broken... Your anger at raiders is completely out of whack for the removal of the beta forums. /boggle.

I am a raider. I am not angry at raiders.

Did you or anybody you worked group content with ever benefit from the beta forums? If so, you had an advantage that is no longer available to players who work on this content in the future.

There is a large disparity between raiders and non-raiders. It begins with gear, but does not end there. The disparity continues with things like interactions with the developers. And while all of the 3rd-party sites help to fill in the gaps, none of them is complete. All of us just lost a key source of information.

More information is always better. Face it, EQ is a complex game, maybe the most complex game there is. I see zero good reasons to ever remove forums here.

I started a wiki just so information doesn't get lost. Unfortunately, I can't save everything. Now we see another source of information gone...for no good reason.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked at beta forums to figure out group content as any info found in those forums is either outdated by the time it’s live or it’s just people reporting what is not working correctly followed by a devs reply of whether it’s working as intended or not. Was there really any useful info on there that would not be on eqresource? I’d say eqresource is pretty complete for all expansions since house of Thule. And also I’m willing to bet the vast majority of “casuals” do not come to these forums at all.

Maybe they're just making room for another 20 years of forum discussion?

It was cool to go back and read the old posts though, kind of like a time capsule.

Once things are live? No. Never. The only people that benefit from the beta forums are the people that participate in beta... They're the only ones that have access to it.

Well technically anyone who preordered had access to the beta forums. I didn't do beta at all but I ready the forums since preorder gave you access to them.

IMO: better to have a policy that hides the beta forums after ~4months. A two-week warning would've been better, but everyone knew it was coming. Anyone who wanted to save info from those forums to EQREsource / zam had ample time. The alternative of having a bunch of stagnant, out of date information gives less motivation to the community to properly catalog the information.

There have also been numerous times where dev 1 does something intentionally and its logged on beta forums and then later down the road be it months or years the same dev forgets or dev 2 comes along and said it wasn't intended, a bug or a mistake. Can't have that being pulled up.

That's what I mean, people with access to beta (whether participating or not). The forums weren't there for everyone.

Here let me help spoil the elites advantage.

https://eqresource.com
http://everquest.allakhazam.com
http://www.eqtraders.com
http://www.raidloot.com

Beta forums are always a crap shoot. Some things are addressed and others are ignored. Working as intended 2019 = the nerf was needed for the health of the game 2020.

Aw man, you gave him the URLs?!

It does suck that the archived stuff is gone considering using the forum search for specific topics does not always produce good results but doing a google search will a lot of times produce results for a discussion on an old thread that does answer some questions regarding older things that might not be currently discussed. Maybe it was an unintended removal on their part to remove all of the old archived stuff? If so I hope they add it back because there was still some good/useful discussions about things that are helpful from time to time. Worse case some of those old threads are a good read on a lazy day. If its space they need maybe they could have just deleted the thousands of duplicate TLP threads about making a free trade TLP, or PVP TLP, or boxers suck, or "new" idea for the next TLP that is actually the same idea as the thread five bellow it but the OP did not get enough responses so they reworded everything and started a new one.

Ah, is that what happened? I did that just this morning and the thread I found wasn't available. I just assumed the conversation turned ugly and the mods deleted it.

Most likely that's what happened. The forum search results is horrible and often turns up to much useless stuff that does not even relate to what you are looking for or at least in my experience. I almost always just use an outside search engine and it will bring me to several forum discussions that actually relate to what I am trying to find.

EQResource's walkthrough of All Hail the King is still obsessed with Rememberance Consuming Sage when the Beta forums made it clear that he's not always the update npc.

Daybreak shot themselves in the foot, as most of the common google queries lead to the archived threads for resololution. Things like Necro Wake the Dead, the key to bring up the aura window, etc.

Why is it a shot in the foot? Because of that lost SEO results, any ads on the forum pages will go unseen and instead be served to other sites that may, or may not have the actual answer to a question resolved over 10 years ago on these forums.

Why shot in the foot? Because players that can't find the answers to questions get frustrated. Frustrated players quit EQ. Players quitting EQ means less revenue for Daybreak.

But go ahead and keep removing information for no reason at all, Daybreak.