Producer's Letter: Progression Server, April Update, and Beyond

I predict the first campaign will be a mountain full of gnomes.......

This should be interesting. LoN Loots prices should tumble, but Daybreak should make a fair profit from doing this. At least I know I'm going to spending way too much $$ on these

I want the blue skelly merc...

Although that wasn't technically an LoN loot card was it? I think you had to collect three gems or something?

I opened up 50 - 100 traveler card packs, and I ended up with 10+ copies of the same frost covered gem. I didn't get a single drop of the other two gems. I assumed the quest was broken, or I was doing it wrong.

either way, I was dissuaded from continuing to get more.

Back to staggered release? So what I'm guessing will happen is something quite similar to what happened in RoF/CotF. They can buy themselves more time to make the next two campaigns (i.e. The next expansion), but the reality of the lack of resources will hit subsequent to that. They essentially have a year and a half to make the first campaign (and I'm guessing some of that content will be saved for the second) expansion's worth of campaigns, but afterwards they'll only have half a year per campaign, and the amount of content will significantly decrease.

I'll probably end up buying them regardless, but this is a really awful plan...

A TDS sized bunch of content every six months is acceptable. Dividing TDS into halves and giving us a half every six months isn't going to provide the endgame raiding scene enough stuff to keep it going.

I'm not sure Sancus... the way I read it is that they are moving to this model now (ie this fall). The first campaign will land this fall. The second one will be next spring.

They don't have 1.5 years before the crunch. They have 0.5 years before the reality hits home when they start trying to scrape together another campaign for next spring.

Unless they are positioning themselves such that the 17th anniversary missions due next spring will be instead called "campaigns."

I wonder if the Campaigns will be pure content. As in you buy them and you get the zones (with their quests and HAs and so forth). But the gear and spells inside it might be L106+ so you might need to buy the "Levels 106-110" addition for your account to use them.

In the end, it's too soon to know one way or another; I doubt the red names have even begun to think on how these will be monetized, but with the way the game has reorganized in recent years, there are more options available that weren't really possible with the Expansion model. (For example, look at how DCUO parcels out new powers and stuff for non-members; they are often included in the price for members)

A campaign sounds like linear scripted content. At least in the military sense. If 2 campaigns equal one expansion then they should be priced accordingly. ie. half the price of a 'full' expansion.

Yeah, I thought something in my head and wrote something rather different... They'd have a year (they've had since TDS release) to create a new expansion, but this time they're only releasing 1/2 an expansion at that time. They then have another half year before they have to make the other 1/2, leading to 1.5 years for a whole expansion's worth of "campaigns."

I understand the context of the jargon but after googling, reading through the post and reading the EQ2 post, I still don't know the words of the acronym. What does DLC stand for?

Down loadable content

Would it be possible to make these "campaign" DLCs purchasable either via SC or a Krono? If a Krono costs 17.99 USD which is about half of an expansion, it seems like a reasonable request to me. Or charge me 2500-3500 SC for it.

When you talk about the epic 1.0 "improvements" are you talking about them in the same way the new Freeport was an "improvement"?

You all have to remember that Daybreak are new owners with mostly the old Soe staff. So deciding how to do Expansions has probably just now being looked at. That stated their timeframe start now to next year at this time bto get new campaigns going - 1 yr
buffalou

How does this effect FTP unlocks?

People need to quit saying COTF was not a full expansion it had 30 + heroics with 6 zone. You can have a huge amount of content without having 15 new zones. COTF was one of the bigger expansions we had but people who hate heroics dont count them as content. What if people who hate raids dont count them as content ? by that logic every expansion has been small.

Look at the patch notes for the Test Server that were posted earlier this week. The 1.0 Improvements are good improvements, to eliminate the chokepoints from raid targets being constantly being kept killed and others selling rights to the kills.

No time to make a real expansion, but plenty of time to play around with a TLP server. How about you add an option to the poll that says kill the TLP to make more content for the rest of us.

Lost a ton of people with the staggered release of CotF. Content packs were tried and failed with EQ2 as well. It was said those were mistakes and wouldn't be done again. We were told there we would get a full expansion after CotF. We got TDS. Optimists said the expansion after TDS would be the full one that was promised. Now back to staggered release.

Why call them Campaigns? Because they need to rebrand a previously failed release strategy for EQ and EQ2 in the hopes people don't riot. Just as with the staggered release of CotF it buys them nearly a full development cycle to push out the first campaign, but after that initial release it will get smaller and smaller as their lead time shrinks with each "campaign."

I'd love to see an answer to this question instead of a dodge.

The last time we were told we'd get rolling content releases we got CotF, and after that we got promised the traditional model and got TDS.

Neither is/was sufficient or up to the standards of most of the previous Everquest expansions, to say the least.

How is 2 campaigns a year staggered releases? Was it considered staggered releases when we got 2 smaller expansions a year?