The Reason Why Some of us Are Frustrated with Daybreak Games

Many of the posts on the official EQ forums from both veteran and new/returning players are an expression of frustration with DGB and the developers over various issues.

In the real world, thanks to social media, we live in a state of heightened consumer activism and awareness that gives us certain expectations. So we as EQ players expect DGB to listen to our problems and suggestions and hopefully take action to address them. When our concerns are ignored, we feel that "we" are being ignored. Nobody likes being ignored, especially paying customers.

The problem is that there is no system of meaningful back and forth dialogue with the developers. Posts from actual devs are few and far between. All players can hope is that a dev will read their bug/concern/suggestion and it will be fixed in a future patch. Hope is not a strategy.

Another problem is that we don't even know how many devs are actively working in TLP servers. Right now, it's reasonable to assume that there are only a few devs working on our servers. This probably explains why that devs admittedly have no time to post on the forums. If this is true, then we can certainly understand the plight of the devs who appear to be overworked and subsequently don't have time to read or post on the forums.

If the forums are purporting to be a mechanism for one-way communication to the devs who may or may not read posts, then I think forums are inefficient way of doing this since there is no guarantee that posts will be read or evaluated by them. Forums are also prone to being monopolized by a handful of posters and these posters do not necessarily represent the will of the playerbase.

The current system is to make a post, state your case, and hope the enough of our fellow posters will agree that DGB has no choice but to weigh in. We shouldn't have to shame DGB devs by creating posting campaigns like a politician who is trying to get elected. There has to be a better way to facilitate meaningful two-way communication.

Maybe gaming forums are a thing of the past and a relic of the golden days of life before the Internet. I suspect they have limited efficacy for promoting concrete improvement to video game that players care about as devs are under no obligation to listen or act upon our concerns. Of course this is assuming that the devs care just as much about the state of the game as the players do.

I've played EQ for a long time and spent thousand of dollars on EQ, and I've never received a survey from Daybreak Games about the state of EverQuest or what I would like to see them work on.

I believe most EQ players want this MMO to be as good as it can be. There are many long-standing bugs that could be fixed and outstanding quality of life issues that could be improved. But, we have no power. Devs have a bit more power. Daybreak Games management has all the power as they control how many devs that are assigned to EQ TLP servers and what their jobs are supposed to be.

We are all in this together. It's safe to say, the status quo is not really working as well as it could be. The players could be better served by more dev staff and a better communication system where player concerns are taken seriously. With more devs, the current dev workload would be reduced giving them more time to fix many of the outstanding issues that has plagued EverQuest over the years.

I know the devs are super passionate and really care about EverQuest or they wouldn't be here. If DGB could hire more devs and reduce the crushing workload they face, then devs would have more time to interact with players and continue to make this the most amazing MMORPG ever created.

Thanks for listening.

Here's the issue with this paragraph. Frequently coders, artists, and everything else that encompasses what a 'dev' is usually doesn't require 'soft skills'. These are not customer service people. They are not social media people. The best they could do is maybe post a picture of their cat or dog with an emoji. You're not looking for that.

What you are looking for them to provide they simply aren't going to be any good at. In fact in many cases they have tried this. They do post in the forums. Half the time you can barely understand what it is they are talking about.

Then there is the issue of time. Social media is a lengthy affair. Time spent doing that is time spent not working on their primary job. Which means they need to spend free time doing so. They're not being paid for that. And being forced to do so means they are now working more hours for the same pay, effectively a pay cut. Its not too far fetched to say they've made efforts to prevent this. Some may elect to come out and spend free time occasionally, but that is their own wish, and I dare say it ought to stay that way. I would know, I've done details in the Army when I was younger related to Public Affairs. In every case it cut into time I could be spending playing video games back in the barracks or carousing out in town.

Finally, the dialogue between devs and players is always a touchy one. Players only post things when they are upset. That means they are abrasive. Devs are not trained in customer service, they don't react well to beratement. And you all WILL berate them, well you already do on a daily basis without them even being present. Who wants that target on their back?

One of the ways Funcom handles this is a selection of positive players. Those who while may be critical of the game, still have positive insights and generally do not insult the devs. These are forum posters who contribute positively to the community, modders, influencers (who aren't trying to extort), and others who generally make the community a better place.

My experience in this group has been quite well. We have heated discussions on occasion, but we don't outright bash each other or the devs, like you would see the normal forum user do. We speak directly to the devs in real time on discord and they get our feedback and even test things before it goes to the actual live test environment. And they take our suggestions with a bit more merit. They don't do everything we suggest because well, it is their games and their vision. But they put alot more weight and its easier to sift through the BS.

Daybreak could consider doing this. And if they did, they should keep it lowkey. This isn't something many of us who play the Funcom game in question asked for, it was by invite only. I'd suggest the same being here. Yeah its cherry picking, but its something.

One thing we could do as a playerbase is be more positive. Don't berate the company. Don't berate the devs. Don't post things such as 'Customer service doesn't ban people'. Just stop being twits. I shouldn't have to say this, but it has to be said in every game forum:

Positive Criticism: "I don't see any action being taken against cheaters. Can we see more transparency on this?"

Negative Criticism: "Daybreak doesn't care about cheaters, reports do nothing."

Let me clue you all in on something, they don't listen to the second example and it doesn't get anything accomplished. Here's another one:

Positive Criticism: "I'm having this bug. It happens at this location with this race and class. It happens when these actions are taken. My computer specs are: x y z (if applicable, post anyway if unsure)"

Negative Criticism: "This bug has been around for decades, they don't care and can't do their jobs."

A good majority of the complaints are the latter example, and its no wonder we're surprised things don't get fixed or it appears the community as a whole is ignored?

This is actually none of our business. Just because you buy a product does not mean you are entitled to know how it is made, who made it, and why every decision was made. In some cases these are trade secrets, in others there is security concerns to be accounted for. And at the end of the day, its outright rude to ask how someone maintains their business.

Let's stick with the product itself. Either its adequate or its not. If not, then lets figure out why it isn't and address those concerns. If they don't have the manpower to give us a proper working product that is on them, not us. We still pay the same amount either way. They simply need to fix it with what they have.

The forums have always been and will always be a resource for the players to use to communicate with one another. The occasional feedback from a dev deciding to participate is just icing on the cake. But as far as feedback. They do see the diamonds in the rough. As far as the personalities driving the game, this only happens when their suggestions align with what the devs and producers already want to do. Which means it was going to happen anyway.

Yes our feedback doesn't have a major sway in the direction of the game. Even if they had a private group of select players to help them. Why? Because devs make the games they want to make at the end of the day. This is tempered of course by financial decisions on occasion. But usually there's going to be a guy in charge of ideas that is going to facilitate the game going forward. Its only if the idea is a total flop that they'll likely go back and change something.

With a game going for 22 years, the number of flops have been actually minimal. Sure some may disagree with this. But their wallets spoke louder than their forum text. You do occasionally have to step away from the game to get their attention once in a while.

Every time I take a break from TLP and cancel my sub to spend it elsewhere sends a much louder message than any forum post you could make. And to my knowledge, I DO get a survey every time I do that. But usually my message to them is something along the lines of "found something else I wanted to play, I'll be back in a few months."

I would dare say that is the most common message. Why should they change things drastically? That's a rhetorical question. Obviously they should, when I get an email about a change up in servers (like with Mischief and Thornblade) it peaks my interest and I come back sooner.

I am not a dev, but if I opened this post I would immediately back out. Nobody has time to read this wall of text. Make your point more succinctly.

OP: Not enough enough Dev to Player communication, we should hire more devs so they have time to discuss the game/feedback with us

Reply 1: Stop making negative posts, posts constructive criticism. Other games have a small group of hand picked players that provide meaningful back and forth with the devs, maybe EQ could use something like that.

They actually do have this, there was a post to apply to be part of it a few months ago (https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ource-council-applications-now-closed.274026/).
They also had a private invite discord chat before Rizlona got released with some handpicked guild leaders (https://pastebin.com/DSPXxrg0)


The 2nd one was viewed poorly by alot of people because they weren't invited to participate and felt that the people chosen didn't represent their interests/desires. Which is somewhat fair since we are such a polarized community when it comes to so many parts of this game (boxing, no boxing, tlp, live, etc), you only need to look at the hundreds of "New TLP idea" posts to get a sense that there is no consensus in what the players want.

Nobody forced you to read this post. But thanks for the bump.

My point is you want people who are already operating under a time crunch to take time to read a wall of text, you're going to have better results if you can distill your thoughts into the meat and potatoes. Nobody has time to read all that, especially not the developers of this game.

In general I'm glad the devs do not take player concerns more seriously. Just because players are concerned about something does not mean it should be fixed. Players consistently want things that are bad for the game's long term health. It doesn't take too much time on this forum to see that a lot of really bad ideas are put forth with regularity.

That's not to say the devs should never listen to players; they should and they do. Devs have implemented a ton of things the players have suggested/asked for in the last few years. Selo's, Rizlona, and Mischief/Thornblade are all examples of that. I think the level of influence is appropriate right where it currently is.

I don't disagree with many of your points but I strongly disagree with the legalistic nature of this paragraph. It's 2021, and we live in a consumer awareness culture that cares about how the products we are consumed are produced. Many shoppers will not purchase clothes created in sweatshops. Many coffee drinkers will only purchased sustainably grown fair trade coffee. How things are made matters to a lot of people. It's not rude to care about people.

We also live in a review based economy. Crowdsourced product reviews have built Amazon and apps like Yelp. Without the input of customers, these platforms would not even exist. Yet here we are using a 30 year old technology (BBS like forums) that have existed since dialup modems to allow players and developers to discuss this MMORPG.

When Coca-Cola changed its formula in 1985 and released New Coke, thousands of Coke lovers rose up and complained. By your logic they should have stayed quiet like obedient school children and let the company go out of business. Thankfully, they raised their voices and Coca-Cola listened and brought back the original formula. The rest is history.

If EverQuest is understaffed and the developers are overworked, you bet I care and I think all of us should care too because in the end it will be better for them and for players who've invested much of their leisure time playing EQ if more devs are hired to ease the workload.

MMORPGs need players to survive. Of course, they need the revenue but they also need their feedback, their bug reports, their suggestions, and even their hopes and dreams for Norrath. Daybreak Games is not selling widgets, they are selling a unique, magical, shared experience.

My post is a plea to help make EverQuest a better MMORPG with the solution of hiring more staff so that communication can be improved with both the people who make this game and the people that play this game. Let's not resort to if you don't like how EverQuest is made, then quit type of arguments. No, you can't have my stuff.

This is not necessarily true. Either the company will get a return on those investments, or they won't. Hiring more devs is ultimately a business decision. It would not guarantee they will be able to increase revenue as a result. If they won't, it's not a good idea, even if we as players would like them to do it. It could ultimately lead to the company going out of business or the product being sold if the expenses are outpacing the revenue.

Point taken. However, devs are tasked with the responsibility of knowing what player suggestions might be good or bad for the game's long term health.

Defining a MMO's long term health can mean many things. Health of the game financially or health of the game for the players. I could easily point to many decisions that developers have made that are not necessarily good for the heath of the game but very good for the health of the company's bottom line.

As monetization has become the fastest growing area of game design, there is a big debate in design circles as to what the role of video game designers actually is today. But this is a debate for another time.

Everything in business is a risk. But not every decision businesses make today is a pure business decision. Many people are hired in various departments for virtue signaling purposes. Not every role in a company can be reduced to its impact on the bottom line.

I used to work in the music industry. Many of the labels back in the day had talented artists that barely sold any albums. They kept them on solely for the prestige that it gave their label.

What if a player has a suggestion that would double the amount of players that played EQ and a newly hired dev with an open mind saw it and implemented it?

What if the dev that invented Krono was never hired by SOE back in the day due to a business rationale and as a result of lack of revenue, EQ was closed down years ago?

Food for thought.

I think the opposite is the problem. The devs listen to way too much crying on the forums. I think the game would be better off if players had less of an effect on the game.

Social media was one of the worst mistakes of our lifetimes. The problem is, most people's thoughts aren't worth listening to. Most people's concerns are overblown and overall a detriment to the game. If they listened more to what people say on the forums (they already listen to it too much) and other forms of feedback, the game would be entirely dead by now because Krono would be removed.

It wasn't a dev that invented Krono.

But it most certainly was due to a business rationale.

Personally I prefer the devs working on the game rather than reading the forums and responding. As long as we are getting feedback from CS, which on the most part we are. We just need to understand that Accendo is new and still learning the ropes.

Talking of new there are a few new devs, again still learning the ropes so I imagine it will be a while before they are up to speed with all the EQ systems.This was mentioned in the last producers letter and since then I have seen at least 1 other new name pop up in red.

I do feel there have been some stupid changes to EQ recently, like the changes to filters which make things worse instead of better. Hoping these get rectified soon.

I'll say this, if the EQ staff is understaffed and overworked, they'll make a decision long before you even hear about it. Its not like there isn't a dozen companies that would be willing to have them. Video game development not only wasn't really hurt by the pandemic (outside of mandates) but thrived because of it being one of the few forms of entertainment available.

If they are struggling with the conditions, they're likely being heavily compensated for it.

I think labelling posts as "crying" is non-starter, subjective and not very charitable. At the very least, the forums provide an outlet for people to express themselves about the state of the game. Take that away and another forum will undoubtedly spring up somewhere and I guarantee it would not be pretty.

Video game devs routinely hold events where devs are on panels and get asked questions. Should we eliminate those as well because the devs have better things to do like working on the game? We could make the same argument for devs playing the game too or any other non-development task they do.

There are many intelligent and thoughtful posters on these forums who know the game inside and out. Failing to recognize the collective wisdom and experience of veteran players would be a mistake. Hundreds of video games are released every day and most of these studios would kill to have the kind of passionate and vocal fans that Daybreak has.

I am a developer, I make software for a living and I manage a large majority of the software we make as well. I'm not a game developer but I figured I would give you some insight of how a company runs that makes software.

Management makes tickets for us to do specific things. They place a priority on these tickets so we do the tickets with the highest priority or whichever our director tells us to do first. If someone in the company is not happy with the software we make or wants to change it, they have to filter that feedback/complaints up through their department leads, supervisors and then those people can open tickets. Then those tickets are reviewed by our programming director to see if this is a concern that we should even waste our time with. Normally high priority tickets are things that will help make the company more money. If the ticket is a good idea but a low priority item, it gets placed into a backlog until we are done with more higher priority items.

I don't know the command structure of Darkpaw Games or who handles what gets worked on or who is even managing the tickets for issues but I'm pretty sure someone in a more senior role or someone in a management position is handling what gets worked on there. The devs probably do have the power to open tickets themselves and can probably even work on very small projects that take little time as long as it doesn't conflict with them working on high priority tickets. There is most likely a schedule for when they have to get things done since they release expansions every year.

So most likely the issues that you want delt with are probably being filtered out by someone in a management role as they want the devs working on higher priority items that make the company money. Tickets that will require a large time investment by devs that will bring in very little money for a company are usually thrown into a blackhole never to be seen again.

I'd imagine that game developers in larger companies do something very similar. The only difference is some of the similarities that video game development shares with producing visual media such as movies and shows.

And occasionally you have some companies who set aside a few people for creative purposes. Basically they get to tinker with ideas and methods on the side to come up with new stuff that the management simply doesn't have the talent for. I don't know how Daybreak handles this. But from what I've seen its usually a small group of about 2-3 people. Old Disney had an entire department of their creative company dedicated to this.

On another thought (the following is my two cents and not related nor in response to the quoted person), I remembered that players usually tend to overblow a bug and exaggerate its effects. What they call game breaking usually isn't, and usually isn't as high of a priority to fix because it doesn't affect everyone. A high priority bug will be one that affects everyone, has a high detriment of play, and usually has no work around. For example, logging in and crashing where ini file tweaks, reinstalling the game, and restarting the computer doesn't work, and it affects a large percentage. That will get a quick hotfix. But turning in a quest item and it poofs with no feedback while annoying, frustrating, and emotionally tedious is going to be a lower priority to many other things. Especially if there is a work around available.

And of course there are bugs that through all efforts by multiple people, they can't seem to solve. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to have a bug that you try to tackle for weeks, months, and even up to years to fix with nothing to show for it. People tend to think that because coding uses logic that every bug can be fixed by 'just doing it right'. There is no right way to code. Everyone solves an problem differently. There are standards the industry has to make sure that people can read each other's code. But if I asked everyone to give me some pseudocode on how to derive all the prime numbers from 1-1000 using a recursive method, there'd be dozens of different ways on doing this. Some more efficient than others. The trick is finding the way that works and the most efficiently. Of course you try to figure out the first and then tweak for the latter, then sometimes you start over to get it done efficiently (to get better performance). But at the end of the day the coder is a human being and they just cannot process hundreds of thousands of lines of code and have an intimate knowledge of how everything works together.

Couple this with the fact that multiple teams have worked on this project for 25 years. Even comments, its going to be a journey just figuring somethings out. The great news is the game has been in development for the entire time, so systems working with other systems is documented and there's just a way of doing things. Which is why they can crank out an expansion every so often. But fixing decades-old bugs may not happen soon.

To put it shortly its not as easy as clicking a checkbox that says, 'don't be buggy'. Believe me, coders wish it were that easy. They would fix all bugs ever if they could. So players need to stop taking it personally when their favorite thing they like to do doesn't work the way they think it should.

Now where proper critiques can be made is where they prioritize fixes and feature developments. But this is really going to be up to personal taste. For example, a buggy spawn in an epic questline is of no interest compared to new features being added to a live player. Even among TLP players there will be those more interested in bugs in planar progression being fixed over those in Kunark.

What the players need to decide is are the priorities lining up with their own? If not, then they need to decide if it is acceptable or not. If it is, then they keep playing. If not, then they vote with their wallet and move on elsewhere. And this goes for everything involved with development, not just bug fixes.

For example, when I played Blood of Luclin for Everquest 2, I did not believe the experience warranted the cost I paid. I can't think of any bugs that made the experience bad, but the features and content themselves was just under par. The zones were too small. The quest lines were boring. The way you obtained gear to do the group content was not fun or enjoyable. There was too much focus on microtransactions that influenced the power of your character. And the amount of ability management on your character (requiring up to 7-9 hotbars of 12 buttons each) was tedious and took far too much screenspace. The feedback was given and the decision was made that the direction of the game was unacceptable and thus I stopped playing.

Buy some EG7. Stage a shareholder's revolt!

My question for you is would you rather the limited number of developers we have spend time working on making the game better or reading the forums and explaining themselves to the players?