EverQuest Producer’s Letter October 2022

Any chance of letting this bake a little bit longer? I'm sure there's more we could have expected from a quarterly newsletter.

Allow me to summarize:

What we did in the past 3 months!
- merged two empty servers
- overseer achievements
- new underwhelming and underpowered heroic characters
- TLP drivel

What we plan to do for the next 3 months!
- Fundraiser
- New expansion
- Some seasonal content which will mostly be ignored

I am personally excited that they are addressing raid lag and class balance.

O wait, nevermind. We get Christmas collectibles though. I can't owlbear-ly wait.

Without the success of TLP, EQ would have been shut down ages ago. TLP are keeping EQ alive, not Live servers.

Agree to disagree. TLP requires so many development resources that could, in my opinion, be better served on actual new content.

<3 u

The problem is that most people never access that 'new content'.

Many Live servers have only 1 or 2 high-end guilds left. That's only about 60-120 people who access that content on a server, that's not a lot of money.

For something to make sense financially, it has to be broadly supported. That's why I am in favor of the UI overhaul for example, it will benefit every single player.

But new lvl 120+ content...not so much. Especially new raid content is likely a poor return on investment at this point.

There are more people on the servers accessing the content including raids. Trying to claim otherwise is just false and misleading.

Show me your proof. We are going to need datasheets on this.

...by the way, not being in "an active guild" does not mean you are not accessing new content. What are your "1 or 2 high-end guilds" that somehow compromise of the entire server's population? Raiding guilds? Gotta tell you, by June most raiding guilds are empty during the week when it's not a raid night. Tell us how populated the TLPs are 6 months after launch. I'll wait.

There are far less.

Servers used to have 8+ raid guilds. Many servers now have 1 or 2, and there are far fewer Live servers to begin with.

I can't look in Daybreak's financials, but simple math tells me that the return-on-investment when designing new raids and high-end content can only be incredibly poor.

What is a huge success however is TLP, one could argue EQ should design content for TLP instead.

Servers never had 8 raiding guilds, even Xegony which is historically the most populated original server. Xegony at most held 3 maybe 4 current content raid guilds.

Velious/Luclin era: Inner Circle, Havenlight, Illuminati Sancti (and SoA/Ook friends)
Modern era: Realm of Insanity, Machin Shin, Iratus Lepus, Champions of Norrath -- am I missing any?

It actually looks like, if my numbers there are correct, there's more active current-content raiding guilds on Xegony than there used to be.


TLP servers begin to flop 6-12 months after release, and more so after another new TLP comes out. The reason they keep getting axed and merged into other unpopulated servers is because they don't sustain the same way that Live servers do.

They seem to think that releasing new high end content each year is profitable for them as they keep on doing it. Also as it appears that a significant amount of the TLP players don't like newer content I am not sure why you think they would like new content designed for the TLP servers.

At some point they will have to stop, because you're designing content for a smaller and smaller slice of the EQ population.

The number of people who can afford to raid for 4 hours every night to tackle high-end content is a fraction of what it used to be. The few raid guilds that are left per server are increasingly struggling to yield 54 people every single night.

The high-end zones themselves are deserted wastelands.

At some point they will have to focus their attention on what is making money, and that is TLP.

and TLPs struggle to even make 1 raiding guild by Gates of Discord.
It's okay to be wrong, just stop replying though.

Haha here we are again, TLP player coming on the Live forum part, to spew his non sense.

It's been stated by Holly a few years ago that Live was standing for at least 50 % of the current EQ income.

So you are completly wrong. Without the sucess of Live servers, there would have been no TLP server since 2006.16 years later, the Live crowd is still bringing constant income in this game every year buying expansions, while the TLP bunch just goes from one TLP server to another doing the same thing over and over again, and just has to susbscribe to the game without having to buy newer expansions.

You are also ignorant clearly of playing on Live servers.
You realize that there is a big crowd of non raiding player population, doing group content on Live, that is in non raiding guilds ? It's not only "raiders" on these Live servers.

Casual players benefit nothing from lvl 110+ expansions with high-end content. In fact these lvl 110+ group zones are complete wastelands, I sometimes wonder what the point of these zones is. They are made for a handful of people.

The only way a casual grouper would benefit is if expansions are like TSS where there is content for everyone.

Please, this is not a TLP specific argument. We have had these discussions all the way back in PoP and GoD when people argued that too much content was targeted at a too small high-end group of players.

Focusing on the high-end caused a mass player exodus during GoD.

Far too much content is made for the high-end. Far too few high-end raid guilds and high-end players still exist to justify building out whole zones that look like wastelands.

It depends on how far back you go in time.

https://omaniwinter.org/bkb/

SoD 9x
UF 7x
HoTT 7x
VoA 7x
RoF 7x
CoTF 5x
TDS 5x
TBM 5x
EoK 4x
RoS 3x
TBL 3x
ToV 3x
CoV 4x ** guild from TLP moved to server
ToL 3x ** aus based guild folded.

There is also a raiding 'alliance' for the more casual people who can only raid on the weekend. They are raiding ToV / CoV and a little ToL. So figure there are ~ 200-300 people raiding newish content, with at least double that doing group stuff.

And no one is saying otherwise, this is a game that is almost 25 years old at this point. At some point the subscriber base is going to get small enough that all servers will have troubles. However that does not seem to be the case now as they are still working on producing the new expansion each year along with the new TLP server each year.

I proposed the idea a year or two ago to:

• merge all Live servers
• merge (which they have currently) all Free Trade servers
• keep TLPs until the monthly population reaches a threshold of 100 or 500 or so, while providing free server transfers off until it gets axed

With most relevant content being instanced or put into pickzones, there's no real reason to not max the population on one server outside of maybe PoK/Bazaar conflicts.

And with all the issues they have on a new TLP server with population caps on a server it shouldn't be hard to understand that they can't merge all live servers. Not to mention you have players who prefer to play on a lower population server.

You constantly spew such nonsense. There are tons of casual players on the live servers. You have no idea what you're talking about.