What is the current planned future of Everquest

I have noticed over time that it's quite possible you might be the most negative poster on these forums. That is saying something my friend.

I look forward to EQ's future. I recently was hired on as a IT Director for a company that was bought out by a private equity firm, much like DBG was. Its very interesting to see the challenges in EQ are much the same as my current role. I walked into a business that had been badly mismanaged for many years and never invested in the IT infrastructure (Servers are 7+ years old / SANs are in worse shape at the Data Center) and had extremely dated processes. The old leadership had people doing ridiculous processes that was leading to some horrid inefficiencies. The great thing about the buyout is the old guard lost its power, and the new blood (CEO, a couple dept. VPs, and myself) had the ability to inspire the change needed to succeed. Things that used to take the company months, we are doing in days or weeks. I believe that DBG is capable of doing the same and having the private equity firm in charge is the ticket to inspire the needed change.

That all said, I don't work for a software development company, so here is hoping they don't just try to make pretty cats in the Marketplace and turn a quick buck but neglect to invest the needed resources to properly extend EQ's life... (**cough** TBM **cough**) Sometimes there isn't enough staffing change that has happened to inspire the proper change. In my case, I was lucky because I had the needed support from the executive team, in EQ's case, the jury is still out.

Why thank you

Rhodz has nothing on Shiftee, also Klak #1 sh itposter.

I'd be willing to wager they just put servers like quarm on auto-cycle to keep the game in the green and stop putting out at expansions at some point.

I think a eq reboot would be Best done start in Freeport fill in all the areas don't go to felwith or erud yet. Nagafen and vox are unfightable for now but are quest givers you have to fight their minions raid to prove worthy. Zones can't always stay , I mean seb can't be the grind spot forever no matter how much it changes but it doesn't have to be empty put out new quest's for old zones when you make new ones, you could let players design quest's

Careful with those negative vibes man... someone's safe space might be in peril. I suggest trigger warnings to prevent being burned at the stake. Actually you may have nailed it.

No man is so despised as one that speaks unwelcomed truth.

I don't really think there is a future. From what ex-devs have said of the company it's a horrible place to work and the people working there are incompetent, elitist, entitled, suffering from very poor leadership and refuse to change their ways. The pay is bad too and below industry standard according to one fellow, which probably means they don't have talented people working there either. I expect they will just be raking in money from microtransactions and putting out small pieces of content they threw together every year or two to make people think the game is still going when it's not.

Source: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Daybreak-Game-Company-Reviews-E973097.htm

Personally I think they should go through and purge all the bad people working there because they are cancer and hire some talented people to rebuild then continue the EQ franchise in singleplayer RPG's and other smaller type games (Like Hearthstone-like card games) for a while since MMO's are in a horrible state right now. They need to build up a good reputation among gamers and remind a lot of people what EQ is, because the EQ games have been irrelevant for so long that a lot of the newer generation gamers probably don't even know what EverQuest is.

I hope that reworking the back end will result in faster loading times, a simplified user interface, and an offline auction house capability. We can all dream.

If you missed the news of Legends of Norrath shutting down a few weeks ago, it's not too surprising. I didn't play it either.

Personally I still love the game. . even after 17 years of playing I look forward to Beta and new content. With already so many zones in the game, I could care less that they re-vamp old zones. A lot of us got to re-live old content recently doing the Artisan Prize augmentation. Bring on what ever is next.

I'd be surprised if they ever went to true offline AH style capability, they would be losing out on all the revenue from bazaar bots which would not be good for normal people playing. They would have to make up that lost revenue somewhere else.

People actually do that? I have 3 gold accounts but I wouldn't set up a 4th to be a bazaar bot. Well if I played on Firiona Vie, maybe.

I run 3-4 traders myself. Some others on my server run about 10 to 15 traders as well as 2 buyers. Need the Krono to pay for my subs!

Are we talking full time traders? Nuts.

Well I'll give you an idea, just running 3-4 traders I can get about 20 mill plat a month roughly, double exp weekends it can sky rocket to like 8 mill plat in a weekend as alot of players come back and buy stuff. So thats roughly 10 krono a month, so I can support my 4 mains as well as my 4 traders that way.



With the artisan's prize, selling every type of artisan's seal I was able to make ~70 mill plat about 6 weeks ago, now they don't sell for more than a million each, but they were in so high demand I was able to sell them for 6 mill a piece on some types.

While there might be some incompetent people working for Daybreak, I have seen more work come out of them in the last 6 months than I have seen in years. They suffered from bad management and lack of resources. The developers, designers, artists and etc.. aren't the problem. Smedley leaving and EQ Next shutting down were the right choices to move this company out of the red and into the positive.

This new expansion may not have the amount of content a previous expansion had, then again it could have more than TBM. However the people they have working on Everquest right now are the right people and are the very definition of Everquest.

Personally, I think EQ is already dying. As long as people continue to support it financially for nostalgic reasons it will be a long slow death.
DBG in my estimation is just going to milk it for all they can for as long as they can. Spending as little as possible while they are doing so. I'm basing this opinion on the last couple expansions and what they asked us to pay for them compared to the product they delivered.
In many ways it is has been and always will be ... (insert superlatives here) ... in the world of online gaming. Unfortunately people, technology, etc. change and adapting to those changes is most often improbable, if not impossible. Recent changes have cleared the way for the game to expand laterally rather than in a linear progression. Heroic stats and mod 2s based off of them for example, changes to AAs and the AA window, etc.
Most of the people I know only continue to play this game out of a sense of nostalgia to the game and loyalty to those others that they have known for many many years of being in the same guild/server. Not all but most of them play other MMO's and are eagerly anticipating the release of several MMOPGs that are in development now.

Wow, no one has ever made this bold claim before.

EQ has been dying since Dark Ages of Camelot came out, or so people keep trying to tell me. Here they are 15 years later, a total of 17 plus years all together, and people are still logging in to get their fix. Many EQ killers have come and gone and EQ is still not completely dead.

All I can say is that DB should have EQ1 as their priority. I would, anyway. Because, it's the king of the proverbial roost when it comes to a lot of things. It's so immense from the years of growth. I'm not a big gamer, but is there any other game out there that even comes close to the number of zones, quests, items, etc, in EQ? It's so big that you don't just travel through space, but even time.

What I mean is, in zones like Faydark you have that, older synth-driven music with older NPC graphics in there, and as you move through the zones the music begins to become more sophisticated, along with the graphics and you can just, see and hear the years passing by as you go.

You've got a choice of character graphics, old and new. And the new graphics are good enough, there's really no need to work on graphics when games these days actually, purposely go toward retro-graphics; and here you have that choice of retro or more modern. Plus you've got free to play, and just, so much in this game.

New expansions are cool, but with some out-of-the-box brainstorming you could really drive EQ above everything else. Starting with this type of genius post:

It would take a bit of work, but ideas like this would be absolutely worth it. In the end, it's all about marketing, and EQ1 has a lot to boast in marketing, adding in ideas like the above and it excels beyond.