Laurion's Song: Only 2 Missions and 8 Raids

Yea raiders are more vocal.

All I know is the devs work hard on all of the content, it all takes time & it takes all the time, I am grateful, I just feel, well, deflated & let down, not by the devs so much as people with the strings in their hands.

All crafted content is time-consuming to make, test, fix, and the more complex it is the more moving parts it has the easier it breaks & the more fixing it requires, there is a need for a variety of content, lots of simple stuff, a decent amount of slightly more involved stuff, a few things with lots of compelxity, and maybe one or two quests that are deep in lore, involved in requirements, have multiple steps etc.

I mean epic weapon quests are probably at the top of the tree for quest design, along with things like the structure of Breakdown in Communication, Lore-seekers Charm of Lore, and the Rallos Zek earring & the Artisan's Prize. Some of those likely took months or even a year or two to plan out & impliment.

Where I think EQ has fallen down some is repeatability & replayability of some stuff, and how that fits into the annual picture.

Yeah I’ll never understand designing quests that are meant to be repeatable. Zero replay reasons to do past mercenary and partisan quests.

Majority of CRC people are raiders so I can imagine which way things are and will be going.

Nothing wrong with raiding, I myself enjoy it, but come on, 2 missions .

Not true, there was a set of repeatable missions I think last year that were very easy/simple for many classes and gave a decent amount of AAs.

CRC isn't dictating content planning on any level. But for what it's worth, most of those same raiders are completionists avidly consuming all group content, typically on multiple characters, and many play on multiple servers, in multiple guilds, and very keenly feel the impacts of lack of content at all levels and their effects on player population and activity.

Actually, the CRC consists of players of all sorts, as per Niente:

Life is hard and work is complex. Whenever I feel annoyed about the imperfections in EQ, I remind myself of the Door Problem, how little I pay annually for EQ, how many hours of entertainment and socialization I get out of EQ annually, and that it's still a great deal for me.

Sure, I want more, but I'm also compassionately cognizant that there must've been some rough stuff going on behind the scenes for the expansion to be truncated.

The solution to most of DP problems has always been providing a proper balance of quantity and quality of content releases. Instead of addressing the content releases properly, they tried to force compliance. Because of that decision, many players bailed altogether. That's why this thread exists today.

I understand you have no expectations, and don't really expect much from them. I think that's the wrong way to go about it though.

Drop it to 6 raids. 2 per tier. 1 easy and one more challenging, with the final raid actually hard.

Put those extra resources into better group content.

I have seen this and do appreciate your offers. Not managed to get on one yet, but you're the shining example of the old school community that is willing to help others at no benefit to yourself.

I would be lying if I said there was no benefit to myself because I believe in Karma lol. But truth be told lots of people have helped me since I started in 2003 and and continue to do so today. I just think it makes things better when we are able to lend a hand from time to time.

I hope you don't bet too much because you're absolutely wrong. Just the testing alone on Beta between the raiding guilds and Absor consumes hours upon hours. And those occur well after the raids have been designed, created, implemented into Beta. Raids are the single most complicated and time-consuming design work in this game. It's not even close.

The thing is, its all well and good to say "we have people representing all these facets of gameplay" and then seeing that SR has as many people involved as half those categories combined.

As long as there is a veil of anonymity around the whole thing (outside those people who openly identify themselves as being a part of it on different discords), its impossible to fully trust the process.

True but DB are the only ones who have to trust the process. I don't think the group was recreated to generate trust in DB design decisions. It was just created by them as a resource they could use. I would agree with what you are saying if DB had said we are creating this group to help create player trust in how we are doing things. That was never said and except for bits and pieces now and again has never been their goal. They never or rarely share any design reasoning with the general EQ gaming populace. Maybe insides get info but not most of us.

I think singling out individual devs without some genuine verifiable things you can point at** is the wrong way to go.

**which in GMM's case was almost certainly based on TEAM decisions (as many things are).

I don't blame any devs, I am not even sure there is blame to be laid at any devs door as there might be really good reasons for all of the issues - what annoys the hell out of me is nobody is giving us a reasonable explanation or more importantly any indication anything at all is going to be done about it.

It's kinda like, oh let them piss & moan a bit they'll soon forget about it, we already had CoV be trimmed down thanks to covid & its not like any ground was made up, it was just lost.

We get precious little content already so any further reduction is acutely felt & severely reduces the sense of value because when the smaller something is the bigger a chunk of that something the loss of any further part of it becomes.

30 zones expansion loses a zone, 3.3% of zones lost
10 zones expansion loses a zone, 10% of zones lost

It's just that a really huge expansion can afford to lose a bit here & there, but an already tiny expnsion - well it really can't without it hurting, a lot.

"Wrong way to go about" what exactly? Fighting a revolution? Usurping the means of entertainment production? It's a small company maintaining a decades-old video game for passion and subsistence, not an illegitimate authority asserting itself over your personal or public life.

The only thing I'm doing is managing my own stress by being compassionate with the people doing the work to provide me with entertainment. If/when I ever deem Everquest as no longer worth my time or money, I'll probably leave an appreciative post, stop payment, and stop playing. Until then, when things are broken, I'll provide actionable feedback. When I disagree, I'll respectfully state why. And at all times, I'm going to be grateful and supportive of the people who do the work.

It's exactly what I ask of my own customers so why not try to be that to others?

Set a low bar and all you get are low quality demands being met.

Daybreak is a gaming company run by vulture capitalists, they want to extract the maximum amount of dollars for the lowest possible investment, they aren't looking to improve the actual gameplay offering any more than it needs to in order to continue to generate income, for them its really all about the balance sheets, there is no desire to make an ancient game amazing, just to keep it barely good enough, not growing just ticking over generating a reliable income from which they can divert money into something that may be able to generate a new income stream.

If we want to see EQ get better resourced we have to provide reasons for that which are fiscal ones, want to appeal to a money man gotta think like one.