I, for one, cannot understand how anyone could find joy in EQ today without having to equip as much gear as possible that had AC values that were multiples of 3 or 5.
The revenue from the marketplace, overseer and perks are strongly underestimated by most players. EQ is maybe the most efficient game on the whole gaming market with minimal upkeep and development costs. The prices do stay the same because the game is aging and the competition on the gaming market is huge and the employee team and expansion sizes got shrinked for even more efficiency because a few investors had gotten greedy, not because it was necessary. I do claim that the costs for Daybreak are going down and not up.
Clearly, the world renowned, Association for Support Statistics. Anyone can use these services, just...reach out.
What are yours for claiming that the costs for Daybreak do increase each year ? The web is full of scattered informations including the EG7 reports, news, news about lay-offs, interviews, etc., which do build a picture after a few years and Jeff Butler presented some insider insights in an interview with Shawn Lord about the efficiency and profit. Ex devs are very good information sources. Like in many other companies the motto is: "A shut mouth catches no flies". The rich and successfull do not talk about money. They like it when people think that they are poor. It is similar to when about nobody does complain about OPed classes in the forums but about everyone is complaining about the weak ones.
Employees get paid more each year as well as they have shown evidence of hiring more people? Just because they do layoffs that doesn't mean that the total costs went down.
What is your source of information that Daybreak employees do get paid more each year ? I doubt that this is true. You would also have to include money inflation for the real wages and not just pure numbers. Most people do not have a single clue about (the real) money inflation and do think that they do earn more when they receive a few bucks more each year. But often they do earn less just because of money inflation which does increase the product prices. In the end the costs do not matter much, all that matters is the profit. Costs are a very weak indicator and only one of many.
That is how it works pretty much everywhere in the world? People get raises each year for things like cost of living increases, market increases to match other companies among other reasons for increased pay. Yes, inflation does mean that the actual increase in pay doesn't mean much if anything but it still means that it is costing them more while the price of things they sell doesn't increase. And increasing costs are important to consider because unless they are offset by increasing revenue either from increase in sales or the price of items going up the revenue is going to decrease.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-inflation-rate-history-by-year-and-forecast-3306093 I think it is fair to say that most if not all businesses that have offices to heat, need electricity and have to pay staff have had costs increase over the years. There may be instances of some things dropping in cost but overall my guess is that costs are still going up for them year over year on average. I could find no where in the EG7 reports that separated out Marketplace income perhaps you could point me in the right direction? You are guessing just like I am guessing from what I can see.
Tangent, but raises aren’t automatic and aren’t universal. I’ve worked places that (large government organization) elected to not do a pay raise.
You must live in a land of milk and honey. Most companies in the region of germany do not automatically raise the wages and the employees are usually too scared about asking for higer wages because the so called government and the other corporations behind them did build an environment of fear and poverty with many unemployees which they can use to set them under pressure. Those people do receive a wage adjustment (not an increase !) for the registered person that they do use, maybe every three to years if they are above the wage floor which does get increased yearly.
What you mean with cost increases is money inflation which just looks like cost increases. Of course we can only speculate about many factors like inflation-adjusted (real) cost increases and marketplace income. Costs have to be seen in relation to the income. The web article that you linked is propaganda which is there to indoctrinate the readers with believe patterns about how economy does work. The truth is totally different. Economy is not a natural (godly) process, it does get totally controlled by tools like the City of London, The World Bank, IWF, private central banks (BiS, FED, Bank of England, etc.), stock exchange and governments. From your source: In reality the inflation rate is more likely an indicator about the dilatation (= inflation) of the amount of money which got created by new credits (debt money) which is theft.
Every company that I have worked for or heard of gives raises each year or their employees leave them and move on to someone else that will give them a higher salary.
Problem is "competition" look at how much other mmorpgs are charging per month & IF EQ a game with 2002-era graphics was to ask for the amount it would need to fill out the team we'd be paying 2 or 3 times what other games charge. That's why the focus is on revenue streams, expansions, marketplace, krono, perks. If EQ's old upper management had a clue about running a game as a service (GAAS) model in the past & not blown all of EQ's cash on other game development as the standard software houses did then and still do EQ could have kept up & still been a market leading title. Also if you took inflation into account EQ gets cheaper every year, but so does most of the competition.
Charms and Power Sources have sucked since they came into the game. I think it's a great idea to have them increase in power while wearing that expansions armor. It's 100x better then "gains power the longer your in a zone" or "gains power the higher the sun is." If I see a cha with stupid stuff like that on it pass because it's useless. Power Sources are the same way, either you hope the one you need drops or spend 300k to replace it for some minor upgrades for a set time. *Eye roll* they wouldn't be so bad if you could take them to someone in PoK or something and give them some plat or something to recharge them.
The only time "situational" charms will ever gain any use is if those situations are "above the baseline". So if a wearing items from expansion aug tops out at 100% the others would need to have that same level of baseline PLUS some bonus on top of that. Which is why they are almost exclusively considered tribute fodder or garbage.
That is exactly what EQ is all about. Past few years has been something else, not EQ. Min/max focus everything thats not an EQ thing. Roleplaying. Game has been lacking roleplaying. EQ has been lacking EQ Min/max, containers for every armor turns into class specific gear (min/maxing) Charms increase in power if you have done all the expansion quests (min/maxing) What is roleplay? What is EQ? All I see is samething over and over, and its just not EQ. Next expansion focus should be to make EQ more EQ
