Sense Heading - Progression Server Unlocks 2017

We shifted the Vote start times on Ragefire and Lockjaw so the servers will no longer open December 25th, 2017 when the EverQuest developers will not be in the office. Now, The votes open December 25 for Ragefire and 27th (very late in the evening) for Lockjaw. If "Yes" wins the polls, Gates of Discord will open January 8th, 2018 for both servers.

Ugg, thanks for two more weeks of Pop content that we are already tired of two months ago. Take time away not add to it after 6 long months of same thing over and over.

Yeah I'd think everyone on LJ and RF would prefer it be 2 weeks earlier so that people have a chance to play over vacation.

100% agree

Yea. 2 weeks early please. 4 months of PoP/LDON is already boring AF and 2 more weeks pushes it out of vacation window for people.

Maybe reduce PoTime lockouts to appease us

Nah, lockouts are fine. We'd prefer vote to start Nov 25th and 27th with a launch on Dec 11th to alleviate the Christmas day launch. Lots of our "older" members have the last few weeks of December off anyway and were looking forward to having a bit of time off to play (minus Christmas day because that wasn't likely to happen for most).

Glad to see I was wrong.

Should have just left it alone.

Strongly disagree. Consider your players. Wouldn't it be nice to give them fresh content throughout the holiday season?

You should move it to be two weeks earlier. I have no idea how this wasn't an obvious choice.

Lol. Dev team just can't win. You guys begged for months to have it moved off Christmas, dev team finally does something pretty unprecedented and actually moves it, and now no one can stop because they moved it the wrong direction.

Be thankful you got what you asked for.

Hmm... I guess common sense would say that the servers with the longest lockouts and the least amount of instanced raid content would be slightly annoyed with it being extended by an additional two weeks. I mean bump it up a week. What would that hurt?

What needs to happen is they need to hire a customer experience professional to think through these things and bring that lens of thought to the conversation. This could be one person supporting all of the games in the DBG portfolio. This is not the same thing as a community manager.

If you think that most designers (of any game) actually play the end game of the games they work on, you'd be mistaken. The last thing they want to do is spend what little free time they have playing the game they spend hours and hours working on.

Also, moving a release of any software (game or eCommerce website) is not unprecedented. It's pretty common practice. In my line of work, we have code freeze from Thanksgiving through Jan. 4th for exactly the reason Negrath stated. The only thing that get's pushed out during the Thanksgiving to New Years holidays are Pri-1 bug fixes (e.g. a bug or site issue that costs us over a specific threshold of dollars).

I'm not saying, "Boohoo, DBG sucks wah wah wah". I'm saying, "awesome job on moving it but from a Customer Experience standpoint, it would be pretty rad to have new content over the holidays when people have time off already planned". If that's possible... that would be great. If not, we'll deal with it.

And, you've just given the exact reason why they probably don't want to move it up 2 weeks instead of back two weeks.

IIRC last year some of the devs were already on vacation by Dec. 11.

That is certainly possible - however we won't know if that is the reason if we don't give feedback and ask if it's possible to release earlier rather than later. That's what customer feedback is all about! Like I said, if the answer to that is "no" then the answer is no. It just would make more sense to push the forward rather later unless it has to do with everyone taking December off (in which case.... we're good with a November release too... because PoTime is stale now).

Unlocking an expansion is not a code change.

No, but their reasons for changing the unlock date was to have staff in the office when the unlock happens. SO, it needs to be at a time when staff are there.

I agree that earlier would have been cool, but thanks for listening devs and making a change. Anything is better than a Christmas day release.

Perhaps I missed it, but could you confirm transfers will be enabled FROM Ragefire TO Lockjaw on January 8th (assuming the vote passes)?

Can we get an update on the unlock dates for 2018 for Phinigel, similar to the list provided for 2017 in the original post? Thanks!