To ensure no class could actually work for real balance or improvement and thus pidgeon whole classes into little "fix" ever? I.e., instead of what is used to be, druids are no cleric wannabes? my disdain for a certain company that purchased EQ has no bounds.
The way I understand the history is that SoE always owned Verant in some way. As to the forums, they happened long after the purchase/name change/whatever it was.
Verant was created because 989 Studios had made the business decision to dump all non-playstation development. Sony created many PC, Sega, and Nintendo titles in the years before the Playstation existed, but urgently needed more games for their still-newish Playstation platform. EQ was in beta stages at the time, and Verant was created by Smed and McQuaid as a non-Sony development house to finish EQ, taking most of the EQ developers that otherwise would have ended up looking for jobs. The EQ property itself became jointly owned, by 989 Studios, Verant, and SoE (web-games branch of Sony, based in New York at the time) that provided some financing and had needed expertise in the online accounts/billing aspect of things. This was all prior to EQ launch, so SoE had it's fingers in the pie from the beginning. Then, in 2000 after EQ was a blowout success, SoE bought out Verant entirely, acquiring its property, name, and people for a large sum of money, and that's when Verant became a Sony identity. That's also when Smed and McQuaid became millionaires...they took a big risk making Verant for an unproven game, and it paid off big.
Personally, I try to simplify things down to the minimum needed to do the job. For forums I create, I make the minimum necessary to provide for the users. It seems to me that the "Priests" forum serves the needs of Clerics, Druids, and Shaman. There are not so many threads that it becomes a problem. Exactly what is the problem with having them grouped together? There is nothing stopping anyone from creating class specific threads.
imo, it increases the politics. that is what has always stopped druids from getting any real help and continually getting nerfed, because it was too easy to continuously say druids should do this well, or that well, or we should be better at druids in this or that. Even easier once you have two of those classes potentially already in the same forum. Not saying they have gotten worse since. If anything, healing has improved (the area they needed the least help in) and other areas are sorta status quo in the last year. Some new spells and such, but they are gimmicky as druids have often been the last several years and focus too much on AE, so more of a horizontal change.
Because prior to the merge the class board were dead? Here's the old Druid class forum: http://elitegamerslounge.com/home/soearchive/viewforum.php?f=166 And the Cleric: http://elitegamerslounge.com/home/soearchive/viewforum.php?f=165 Shaman: http://elitegamerslounge.com/home/soearchive/viewforum.php?f=175 Wow look at all that activity!
For the most part I've actually stopped posting much on the Wizard class forums I host myself, because these forums actually have people reading them now, it doesn't serve as big a purpose now. If only they would allow us to edit posts here so we could get stickied information threads without needing CRMs to edit them for us that would be perfect.
