May 2016 Producer’s Letter

The only server I would actually recommend to be created is a pvp-server available for everyone to which you can copy (not transfer) your character to obtain achievements (accountwide) which aren`t available anymore.
With whatever any other rulesets/scenarios/battlefields if possible.

Anything else is just a waste of ressouces and can hardly be justified due to recent merges.
At least this is my quite selfish opinion in this matter.

That would require them to care about their players. As it is, the actions of management have shown that they don't. Creating such a lopsided poll, then seeing the backlash on the forums, and announcing shortly after "We're doing both!"? Come on, now.

The poll itself was a joke. You were shoehorned into a decision. There was no "I'd rather not" option other than not voting. And they don't care about the non voters. Show us the numbers of the Voters vs Non-Voters. Redo the poll, add an abstaining option, and see just how many people actually chose one of the options in the last one simply cause there was no 4th option. It's like the presidential election. I only have the 2 candidates to choose from, or not vote at all. It's broken as hell.

Here's a similar poll:

What would you like me to do?
A.) Burn your house down
B.) Put bleach in your car's gas tank
C.) Both

Uh... damn.

Okay come on Devs, can we at least have a preview of the new halls before there released? I am sure alot of us would llike a peek so we know what getting in to.

Also introduce the feature you can equip any weapon in appearance - just because a class can`t wield something according to their profession you can still hold it in your hands to display you got it, right?

Ethereals -- "We cannot be asked to put in work and make super OP items accessible via good old fashioned hard work, instead we will allow you to just grind heroic zones over and over again until you get the BiS item that will tide you over until the next Cashpansion".

Silly customer: But look at the bright side, you can have rehashed fabled raid zones which drop items that can be had for little or no effort but wait for the kicker.....yes they can be out done by drops from solo time key quests.../joy.

I'm really trying to see DBG's point of view to be fair. I'm assuming that server merges left them with extra hardware that they'd like to utilize in a way that brings in revenue to the company. Not knowing the infrastructure of eq2 it's hard for me to judge what could or not be done with spare hardware. But just off the top of my head, if I had to make new servers but not undo the mergers that just happened, I would make servers that would achieve rewards on live servers in the way that participating in beta achieves claimed items of value. For example, if the "race to trakanon" was something my entire raid force would be interested in doing because it could achieve rewards on our main toons, then it would not be a loathsome idea. This would still achieve a burst of exp potion sales and whatnot, but not shoot our live servers in the foot.

While I'll agree with you on the different servers spreading things thin, I actually disagree about upping the sub. I think they would actually stand to lose more subscriptions than would stay with the price hike. They'd probably gain subscriptions if the subscription price were lowered slightly though. Face it, EQ2 is a pretty old game and never has had the widespread popularity of some of it's contemporaries. Dropping the price to $10 or even $12 might be enough to entice more people to sub. Upping it to $20 a month, that seems extreme for me. This coming from someone who paid the $30 a month ages ago for the original All-Access membership but that was back when they had a lot more games & no F2P.

/facepalm
Let's make Everquest 2 great again! Just drop all to nonsense and try listening to your fellow player base for once.

emphasis mine to show what I was replying to.

You must not raid at all. It has been explained time and again why that will not work. Because of different mechanics in the fights of the different raid zones people have to switch out for a class that would get the kill which means if you are one of the classes not needed and you don't have a toon of the class that is you are SOL for getting the loot off of that mob they make the rule being you have to be present for the kill. Or if you have more then 24 people some have to sit out if they have to be present at the kill then no loot for them and no good armour that will help raid progression.

Nothing to see here

I do like the idea of getting rid of the heirloom tag though, just let the broker take care of stuff!

If you buy a 1 year sub the cost equals 9.99 per month and then you get 5.00 DG cash per month so essentially 4.99 per month....that is pretty cheap!!...and to be honest a pretty good deal!

I raid plenty, Alenna. The whole point of what I stated is to encourage people to participate in the game at all levels, whether it is solo, heroic or raid content so that they have to actually play the game on said toon to obtain said loot. IMHO And maybe its just me, but I believe if you want loot on a toon you should be there on that toon to get it.

By your logic heirloom is a band-aid to a larger problem of not rounding out your raid force better and people having to play alts to succeed at encounters. Which is quite often a result of a lack of players (low population), which in turn is due to a whole host of other issues.

If you believe it is only for raiding then why is it on heroic and solo content as well?

If we're going to do this half dance of heirloom itemization existing so your alts and/or so others can get loot you might as well remove the heirloom tag and no trade tag on dropped items all across the board.

So. One new Advanced Solo. One new Heroic Zone. One...yawner of another update.

Meanwhile, two new servers of dubious demand.

I wonder if the poll driving this was the poll of us, or a poll of the numbers guys...

Ok, so I re-read the original post, to see if it's as non-sensical as it seemed the first time. And the highlighted text filtered into my thoughtmeats.

If heirloom items purchased from the marketplace, a merchant or awarded from repeatable quests remain heirloom, what exactly is the heirloom tag being removed from? Dungeon drops and non-repeatable quest rewards? Would that not exclude the timed key quests from being NON-heirloom? What's the point? Why not just do that on live servers? I'd guess that the limitations to account bonuses and claims will include no-trade and/or heirloom items.

We wanted to hear what kind of servers the community wanted so we recently ran an in-game survey. Given the results, we decided to launch two servers, each with different rules.

I hope this is the last time we get such poll in-game. Seriously. Just implement your ideas and that's it. Don't make it look like it was our decision to split communities even more.
/facepalm

Well I will say the game has already became more of a JOB, that you don't get paid for, than a fun thing to do. Keys and more keys then get a tank charm from the uber rare blood key when I am a healer! wows then get a ethereal for a shield and I use 2h. Then harvest till my fingers feel they may fall off and my wrist acks from pain, for the UBER rare food and drink mats. O and to see the bot teams running around doing key quest, then selling them on the broker! Nice! when I have to spend half the day to do my 6 toons, and they are in solo zone running around doing key quest with there bot team.. And recruiting classes is almost impossible yet now 2 new servers to thin us out even more. I am very disappointed in the news of new servers. And the thought of more keys is already making me sad. I also agree where was the option to say NO way to the new server idea? I personally just deleted the in game post and didn't bother to reply. Sad that we are gonna have to either struggle thru waiting to see if the next xpac will be worth staying or quitting. I have played since eq2 launched. But finally feeling stressed out about even logging on.

That doesn't come out to 4.99 a month. That comes out to $5 for a sub and another $5 for stuff I don't want. Also a year long commitment is something I don't want to do with the state this game is in.

Well the new servers as everyone else said it before me, were not wanted at all, I also deleted my mail for the poll. Maybe if you tell us more about the Trakanon server, like what the rewards are ... might be interesting, the other one is just plain blah ...
Cant wait to see what these summer ethereals will be, would have been nicer if that event starts in june, since its called "summer ethereals" but oh well. Last summer ran zones non-stop didnt win any
Also cant wait for new fabled zones !

So is this really true the runes are NOT smartloot ??
Would be extremely disappointing !

First off, people need to stop dwelling on the "unfairness" of the server poll. That was not a poll, it was advance notice that we were getting new servers. That's why there was no "none of the above" answer, the results didn't matter. I'm sure the decision was made some time ago by some accountant or marketing guy or maybe CEO who has no contact with players and just sees $$$. They're going to be disappointed if they think they're going to have another TLE. Oh, and I wouldn't worry too much about the drain on current servers. I'll be surprised if it's even noticeable.

As for the rest of the announcement -- extremely disappointing. I see nothing there. Yes, I do raid but I see nothing that will stop my slide down the parse chart because I don't have any of the stupidly rare BiS items and I refuse to Heartbind to whoever's available at raid time because it goes against my principle of what Heartbound should mean.

So maybe I'll see what the outside world looks like in the summer while I pin my last hope on the expansion.