Community Resource Council Launching Soon!

Excellent. I've spent some time in those waters too in reasonably senior roles. But anyway this still goes back to "Burden of proof". You made an assertion, I asked you for evidence to support your hypothesis. Diverting to saying "I worked in a fortune 50 company" is not evidence or your assertions about lack of control and business policies. I assume you're saying you worked in management in fortune 50, which would indicate (as any MBA course would give you) that you should be familiar with burden of proof.
Not particularly full of myself, just looking for evidence to support assertions. I was more than a little offhand in my response to you about your experience, and that was rude of me; I do apologise for that.

As to the wordiness, this is an ongoing debate, not a business proposal, options paper or similar (I write in a different style for those, keyed to the context). I'm having a shot (sometime, perhaps more clumsily than I should, for which I do apologise) at exposing how I frame the issues at hand, the assumptions I make and the progressions I follow to achieve my conclusions. This allow (deliberately) someone to look, read and say "Aha, I see your error.". And if the new evidence invalidates what I have in mind, then I retract and reconsider my stances. I'm fairly flexible in this manner, all I need is superior evidence to that which I have.

And on the game playing, yes, I play the game. I started with EQ1, shortly after it came out.. Took a lengthy break (and visited other areas), then came back to EQ about 6 or so years ago.. I moved to EQ2 about 3 years ago.
And yes, I know that there are problems with chat channels. What I _don't_ know is the work list and plans that the teams are up against, so I have no comparison of how business risks are being assessed and so on.

My assessment of viability goes back to the takeover of DB, at which time, various financials were released (in 2020, EverQuest made $11.5m in revenue, whereas EverQuest 2 made $6.5m. EverQuest has 66,000 subscribers and 82,000 monthly active players, whereas EverQuest 2 has 21,000 subscribers and 29,000 monthly active players). From what I can roughly gauge, these figures work out as sustainable to a quality point. How much flexibility there is from that, I can't say, but it's enough to keep the lights on. Part of the disparity in figures I'd expect to be mirrored in the fact that EQ1 has extensive boxing engagement across multiple paid accounts, EQ2 doesn't have that level of boxing engagement (though that's weak evidence being anecdotal observation).

Res ipsa loquitur.

That's a fair and well balanced riposte (though, it'd be nice to have actual references to which ones you're referring to for evaluation, as so far I've only detected probable deterioration by knowledge loss which occurs in small environments). I would still advocate that resource starvation leads to a higher clustering of risks which cause exactly the same issues covered by Res (which I'd tend to apply to larger and more heavily resourced entities), and goes back to my point about the only ways I can think of rapidly of mitigating the risk is by clustering resources around the most viable assessed areas, and close down the now deprecated resources (some of the games). Or add resource (preferable, for those of us who play). As they game isn't life critical (or, if we're brutally honest, business critical or most of the things in that line), I'm suspecting the third option has been taken which is "Continue, but with risk.". I've seen enough environments first hand in SMB and degradation of domain knowledge to lead me to come down on the side of 'resource starvation' as things stand. That, and I'd actually like to be cautiously optimistic.
But, as we both know, I don't have conclusive info, so I'll just tip my hat to you and say "It's been a pleasure."

this council is not to improve what should have been for a long time. but for what will be implemented for later.
That's how I translate it.
Basically you give your ideas, they like it, it's discussed and it's done or change it a bit. And you worked for free.

Hail and well met,
Long have I wondered if there will be a council on this platform, and now, finally, after many years, someone decided to start one. Congratulations! There really is a first time for everything, and hopefully this will change the way some things are handled for the better. Sigh, that being said in the past a lot of us have posted into these forums with replies like the one I'm making and felt like we were part of a team, or at the very least like someone out there in Dev land actually looked in on the content from time to time. Yes, I'm aware I'm not always the bright, positive ray of sunshine, but on occasion you do need a good wind going in the right direction. I still miss Holly Windstalker, and I suspect a lot of you do as well, but there are other things I miss, like the LON card game, dungeons that grant exp, I could go on a bit, but that should make the point. To your endeavor to create a council I applaud your endeavor, and I will keep an eye out for it. Especially if you don't mind having a builder in your midst.
Farewell for now,
Baphmistra

Dreamweaver previously unbanned most everyone on Discord when he was our mod. Are you sure you're not already unbanned from Discord? Ask for a current invite link and try it just to be sure.

And that's why we are where we are.

Welp, everything posted so far was quite the read. I'm known to be extremely wordy, but I might need to pass my crown over to Miauler xD.

The concerns about a CRC being utilized properly are very valid, especially given the history of this exact same idea when implemented in the past. I think the dev team would find that they'll receive a much better response and higher quality engagement if they described how they intend to utilize the committee. The FAQ is a great documentation for description of the committee, but it says very little on how much, or in what way the team is going to actually use, or interact with the committee (frequency, type of game design, level of information involvement, method of communication/feedback, etc).

I also want to make a quick note and say that the committee should honestly value the inclusion of people who have had vocal and sometimes disentive voices. I have an feeling after reading both links (and specifically the first point in the FAQ), the devs are going to shy away from people who will obviously have strong opinions and might be prone to biased influencing in their feedback...

Imo, it would be better to listen to that bias feedback on development ideas that you may be wanting to propose to the CRC, than to listen to opinions coming from players/perspectives that will play the game no matter what you do to it (if that makes any sense). Both are valuable, but from a general players point of view, it feels like the devs have rarely listened to, acknowledged, or acted upon the suggestions and comments made by the former (at the very least, not in the past few years on anything other than the TLE servers).

Past Community Councils have definitely had clashing advice and views, but managed pretty much to be collegial and function together.

Which is an environment you'd want to encourage. People will have different points of view as a matter of course. This encourages discussion ensuring all sides of a topic are thoroughly covered. If you only had people that always agreed with each other, you have the wrong blend of people on the committee. People see the world differently based on their experience, perceptions and beliefs. Naturally, there will be cases where they all agree and that's ok, too. When they're always agreeing all of the time, then something went wrong, haha.

Done that... dont work, thanks though
Besides its recent - i would stay say its weird how they are handed out and not moderated as here but hey ho.. what can i do? absolutely nothing,.

I don't use Discord, though I've tried to, so I can't comment on how any devs handle complaints. I do regularly post on the forum and I've always been treated fairly by the devs. That is saying a lot as I don't always express myself appropriately due to age, mental decline, and illness.

And I have found that my suggestions are considered and sometimes implemented though it might take a few years. I've helped develop software games and making changes isn't always an easy process and can sometimes be too costly.

I think the CC has a very good chance of working if people are respectful of each other and understand they are advising and not decision making. A company can always use fresh ideas, from current users, to make their product more desirable.

And, while posting suggestions on the forum can be helpful, it doesn't allow for the give-and-take that is often necessary to implement the suggestion so that it is satisfactory to users and the company. For example, I have often protested the linearity of the quests which seems, at least to me, passé in a quantum world.

Players (as a group) have innumerable playing abilities and styles. Requiring quests be completed in a certain order, or completed at all, automatically denies some players the ability to complete a signature line. This can be due to any number of limiting factors such as time constraints or physical challenges,.

However, requiring 'x' number of quests be completed, in any order, allows players flexibility in completing the quests and make the game accessible to more players. That translates into more money for the company.

But this is a simplistic suggestion as the game also has instances, dungeons, and raids. The rules for signature lines wouldn't necessarily work well with these features. Thus the give-and-take necessary between users and devs if this suggestion was considered.

I don't see any reason why users and devs can't work together to makes this an awesome and totally unique game. They just need to stop playing copy cat, with other games, and start thinking outside the box.

It's interesting on occasion at how we fall into the trap of using phrases like "thinking outside the box." It sounds great, but it's usually ineffective. Why? Because our minds put us in, and then keep us in a "box," to maintain our sanity. There's a reason we're in the box to begin with. The job of our subconscious is to make sure we always think we're sane and making good decisions. Some funny, but accurate examples: you just bought a new car. Ever notice how once you buy something, how you notice how many were on the road driving with you, when a year ago, you didn't pay any attention. Why do you think there are reception lines at weddings? Put another way, we're talking about 'buyer's remorse.' Once you're in that box, your mind works OT to keep you there.

I'm guessing what Proto12 meant was they need to listen to ALL players - not just the sugar & sunshine crowd, but also those who blatantly and bluntly point out what is a problem, why it's a problem and show no compunction or remorse in placing the blame for what's a problem squarely where it belongs - on the shoulders of DBG & the dev/coding team.
Not taking real, serious complaints personally and simply addressing whatever the problem with the game is should be the order of the day, but ignoring people and problems because you don't like how they were stated is just bad customer service & product support. At least imho.

Yes, admittedly I would tend to be one of those people. In large part it stems from a direct threat of permanent ban because I proved the devs wrong and refused to drop the issue. They don't like that, never have & never will. But, I also have sung praises of some of them when they do great things. Not the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named sort, but you get the idea.

And for the record, all the history I personally experience & have heard from others about how much DBG & the devs listen to and treat the player community, no friggin way I'd bother being on this "council".

Bhayar:

Merriam-Webster defines "thinking outside the box" as: "to explore ideas that are creative and unusual and that are not limited or controlled by rules or tradition."

The only problems that I forsee is the usual non-communication from anyone other than Chrol, Gninja, and Denmum (for the most part). The issues plaguing the community are only brought upon because the people in charge of the implementation of those decisions and mechanics absolutely refuse to have any sort of constructive communication with the playerbase (see class balance and crate itemization). If they would just open up discord and listen to the players complain about the same issues over and over again, and then act upon those complaints/concerns, we wouldnt even need this council.

This council will probably not help in the slightest, as the communication we give would probably not be heard by the people that need to hear about it.

That being said, i intend to apply and give all that feedback regardless, even if it falls on deaf ears.

The application form is now live: http://daybreakgames.votigo.com/fbsignupforms/sweeps/EverQuestIICommunityResourceCoucilApplication

My first bit of feedback would be to suggest moving the expiring captcha check to the bottom of the form where it more logically fits into the overall process (and also means you don't keep getting bounced back up the form when it expires)

Fixed, and thank you for the suggestion. On my end, I had no idea it expired after a given amount of time. Hopefully, moving it to the bottom will resolve the issue.

don't forget Kaitheel he talks with us on the test server all the time