Indeed! If they'd been perhaps allowed by SONY to have been more serious with the advertising back then, there was quite a lot we could've bragged about. ;-> But that's just my pet theory...may or may not be true. /shrug Oh, way before; that's how I first got into WoW before I could make an informed decision about spending that kind of money on two games (and I'd hitchhiked a bit on my hubby's City of Heroes account...shh ;->). :-/ Either that, or I'm thinking of another free trial they had way back when... ;-> Oh, ow... Even now, with better systems, I've either gotten so used to the middlin' level of capability, I just keep it there. Haven't tried to be ambitious with it. ;-> Uwk
Seeing the marketing team wont advertise maybe we as players should start doing more streaming/video content on youtube/twitch and do it for them. There are a few streamers and videos I have seen but no where near as many as other "popular" MMOs on twitch/youtube.
Sounds like our experiences may differ due to where we live. I first gave EQ2 a spin in early December 2004. I agree that pre-launch, I was seeing comparable amounts of info for EQ2 and WoW in magazines, but I believe most of it was due to the magazines scavenging for content, rather than EQ2 going heavy on marketing. Applicable to the era, I went to a retail outlet to purchase the box copy. What I didn't expect was to see WoW having about 5-8 times the shelf space compared to EQ2, and ALL of the MMO related posters/banners in the store (EB Games) being for WoW. By the time DoF came around, it was even more telling. I also remember all the WoW trial edition CDs that included 2 weeks time, for around $2. I could be mistaken, but I think I remember seeing these back in 2004. The info I found on these trial edition CDs is that they came out on November 24, 2004. World of Warcraft: Trial Edition - Wowpedia - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft (fandom.com) If that is not correct, happy for someone to advise otherwise. I also believe Vanilla WoW boxes sold in my region included some 7-day trial codes that people could give to friends. It is entirely possible the whole experience was completely different in Germany, so I will accept what you say happened in over there in good faith.
Whoa! Gotta admit, I've never heard of those trial DVDs. Wonder if they were also a thing in Germany way back when and I just completely missed or forgot all about it. I checked out the wowpedia link and I'm amazed to even see this on DVD. I still have my first couple of original WoW game boxes, and they all came on lots and lots of CDs. The installation was a huge pain, required you to play disk jockey, then forced you to spend hours downloading updates, anyway. I had no idea things were so different over here! As for in-store advertising, back in 2004 Germany didn't really have anything that compared to places like EB Games or GameStop. Computer games were sold in toy shops and electronics stores, space was generally limited, so I don't personally remember any super-spectacular in-store advertising for WoW. Maybe there were places that went crazy with it, but certainly not around me. Obviously, they had the posters and the pyramids of game boxes, just like with any major release, really. With that in mind, when the first expansion, Burning Crusade, released in early 2007, WoW had blown up so much, I remember queueing outside a shop alongside countless people for the midnight release. Big deal in Germany, as there were no places that opened 24/7, shops close on weekends, so this was highly unusual! They played WoW tavern music outside through a speaker system, put up WoW artwork with a projector, people even got interviewed by the press, and then everyone was shy to tell them the names of their characters. They must have done something right, because you wouldn't see a gathering of that sort for anything related to Everquest. What I do remember is WoW being heavily criticized by the press for being overly violent. 2007 was also the year where the story about a wow player blew up in Germany, who allegedly agreed to sleep with someone in exchange for an ultra rare mount. I had one of the absolute worst job interviews in my life, because the HR manager strongly disapproved of the fact I play WoW. He had me describe in every detail what happens when you kill an enemy on there. They didn't call me back. Until fairly recently, gaming was frowned upon by many where I'm from. When I ultimately relocated to the UK, it felt like stepping into an alternate dimension: Dedicated videogame stores, games being advertised on TV, videogame merchandise in shops. Never seen anything like it. I think Germany has finally caught up, but it took them long enough. Hmm, I'm not entirely sure Sony simply didn't want or allow them to advertise. May I ask what brings you to that conclusion? If I remember correctly, you said it might be because they were worried about harming sales of the PlayStation, but I'm not sure gaming consoles and MMORPGs really shared much of the same target audience back in the day. Was there any drama between Sony and SOE? I mean, it seems completely insane to dump enormous amounts of money into a project like EQ2, then actively block all advertising for the sake of console sales. By that logic, why create EQ2 at all? Why have an entire online games division? Granted, I can't really think of any good reason why there weren't any TV ads or more aggressive advertising in general. Those behind the scenes videos alone were all they needed. I still watch them every once in a while and daydream about what could have been. They clearly had a big budget, so why stop at advertising? Utterly baffling.
Yep and lo and behold, WOW zoomed in and advertised everywhere and bye-bye EQ1 players. Then to save the day, someone decided to open EQ up to f2p. They launched EQ2 and more left EQ1. Soon, (whether f2p was before launch or later I forgot but it isn't important when) they started complaining about not getting to do and have everything the subs did and got and they would leave. So, next bright idea was to give them much of what the subs did and got to get them back. See how that snowball grew? This is what I saw in eq1 AND here. Basically, a short synopsis of what was happening from a paying/player point of view. Not asking anyone to agree with the timeline but it is close enough.
Maybe because much of the player base is not a kid and a great many are old and retired and have real life experiences to draw on?
Marketing wont make a damn difference in attracting any new players to this game. look at the amount of content and quality/polish on release of titles such as New world, Guild wars 2, Elder Scrolls online and World of Warcraft and then look at what we got last week... Just saying. This game is trying to keep its current players, not attract anyone new.
When in doubt, I guess don't get too detailed about one's hobbies on a resume... :-/ <skip> That's a point; probably waaay separate divisions between online gaming and console gaming, for all I know. I do know that SONY was more than happy to throw us all under the bus for the sake of the Pro7 deal, or at least half of the "stable" of games they had by then, with very little actual information released. Poor Brasse came back from having a grand winter holiday time in Germany (lucky! ), telling us all about this awesome thing that was going to happen in January (2011, imho? 2012?), like it was already a solid deal, set in stone, carved in granite, etc. As I recall, she was the first to get the axe (and not in any way a Dwarf would like :-/) as a direct result of us asking too many questions. X-/ So, you may very well be right; it may have been that they weren't overly hostile towards us until near the end... :-/ Still, why not advertise more? Especially once WoW proved how well it could do for one's bottom line? /puzzled Uwk
Which is silly. If nothing else, us oldsters are gonna start "leaving the game" due to simple attrition. Since our Frostfell celebrations are considered so universally awesome, we should at least push ads out there regarding that, like everyone else on the planet does where winter holidays and capitalism collide -- hmm. Maybe our message might get lost in that flood, come to think... :-/ Uwk
Okaaay...then where is it? Uwk who also has relied on direct observation regarding this since 2004 ("Oh, looky, another post-apocalypse. But where are the ads for it? Well, at least the previews for it in the movie theaters are pretty.")
You're not wrong. In my defense, I've worked with games for a very long time, and that's where I ultimately went back to, so it's not something I can easily omit from my CV. But yeah, I was also fairly naive at the time and just assumed it wasn't such a big deal to like videogames. To be fair, it's unlikely I would have fit in at this place, if this is how they reacted. I still remember how happy some folks were with the announcement of the transition, expecting localizations to be finalized at long last, everything was supposed to be better, then Pro7 cut all the corners and were so woefully underprepared. Oh well. We'll never know what the thoughts were behind marketing for EQ2, or lack thereof. I wonder how much of a difference it would have made in the end. WoW completely exploded at its peak, its success went far beyond anything even the folks at Blizzard could have ever hoped for, and it crushed just about every competitor that ever tried to stand against it. It survived this whole massive boom of MMOs and it's still doing more than okay for itself today. I mean, sure, it peaked a long time ago, but half my friends and family couldn't wait to jump on their new Dragonflight expansion. All the behind the scenes scandals about Blizzard apparently did very little to hurt WoW. Or as someone in the industry once said: At the end of it all, when we've finally wrecked the entire planet and wiped one another out, there will be two things left - cockroaches and WoW. Hard to say if more advertising ultimately would have mattered all that much. Countless other games have tried over the past 18 years. For most of them, it made very little difference.
Back with SOE there was always new MMO's coming out and with Pro7 not a single 1. So I agree Pro7 cut a lot. Daybreak Game cancelled that Marvel MMO pretty Quickly. That money was suppose to go back into there other Games. But a lot of thing gone tight. I use to think that Leaving SOE was a Great thing sadly not any more. So no ads for the Game isn't shocking.
"No ads for the game" was always apparently par for the course. Y'know, o Devs and Powers, making a game that you lot would like to play is a wonderful thing, truly, but if the folks with the decision-making abilities want to make a solid business of it, you gotta make something that others want to play, too. And then you need to tell us about it. ;-> Uwk
The marketing is very far behind the times at this point. Does Darkbreak even have a Tik-tok account?
They were and then they Cancelled it and now We wait for EverQuest Exp 31 where they make a old engine do new Graphics So EverQuest can live another 20 years. It doesn't need New Graphics it needs a New Engine but ask Anyone at Darkpaw how and they go We can't do a EQ like EverQuest 1999. Why? We don't know how. This part is sad because Like or not EQ2 will follow. But like every Year there an Exp got to beat the Dec Deadline.
One issue could also be the "spaghetti code," at least some of which was a case of programmers trying to hold the company hostage. "Give in to our demands or the code gets it! If you fire us, you'll never be able to unsnarl it! Muahahahaha!" "We'll take our chances. Bye. /slamming_door_on_tuchim_of_jerks" Way back when in the Stone Age, when I still had a Win98 machine (and the game still worked on it! sorta), there was a DDoS, or a hack, or a something else that was nasty, and we were down for about oh, at least a couple of weeks or more here in EQ2 (I can't recall if the other games were affected, too; this was the only one I was interested in playing, even with a Station account. Time more than money was an issue). One dev we were able to communicate with sotto voce in a way, or maybe he was a programmer, sighed a lot and basically said he'd love to have the game down for even longer, like at least a month or more, to completely, finally re-do everything. New engine to deal with better GPUs and peripherals to take up the CPU load. More efficient display of graphics, so we wouldn't need to keep upgrading our computers constantly to play the game. Etc. But he knew they'd never get that kind of time from SOE. As it was, they came back as soon as they could, almost immediately after fixing the temporary nasty problem, with all sorts of incentives, gifts, etc. to make it up to us. I think the best gift we could've had was to have let that dude and his mates completely straighten out and modernize it all. :-/ Uwk
That still won't help new players. My highest is a level 88 Channeler and I'm still finding areas where I permanently messed this character up, beyond return. I started a few others, but there are so few low level zones that you have one or two paths and you're hitting the same. damn. quests. as the last 100 times. The game on live is way too complex. The EQ2i wiki is kind of up-to-date; however, it's not intuitive to look there. I log in and I'm both overwhelmed and underwhelmed, at the same time. There are so many aspects of the game I think I've messed up; some seem to be fixable, such as where I put my AA points; others, such as overseers, seem to have no remedy. Another is that this game is entirely dependent on quests. It's not about exploration, or experience (per se), but the quests you are on. Let's say that you get to a point where you only have yellow/red heroic quests... where do you go? That's where I'm at. I'm not powerful enough to complete the heroics for my quests, yet; however, I have no idea where to go for regular quests. At level ~90, or so, there are not a lot of zones. There are a ton 110+ or even 100+, but those are too powerful for me, especially since a lot of the mobs have those special brackets around them (which I've learned to mean they are more powerful mobs for their given level). I've had 88 levels of loneliness; @tasnee tried to start a group guild and that fell through, for many reasons. So, here I am, stuck on a level 88 character, with no answers in the chat channels and few answers in the guild and nowhere to go to really find out hints about where to go next. Advertising will not cure these issues, for new players. I have no incentive to log in and try anything; I tried the Kael server, but since the game is so complex, I have no idea how to play a level 90 of any character, at any time. I tried the PVP server, but it's desolate and empty; I haven't tried Varsoon, but I did try the other one before Varsoon came out and everybody was already way past my level, so again, I was alone. EQ2 seems like it was built on the internal skeleton of a 20-year old Jenga game. Whomever decides the direction kept expanding upwards, but not outwards. Maybe they know their demographics; however, that leads to a slow death, like somebody mentioned before.
