Look, I am all for spending good amounts of cash for the game I love. The sub price has been the same since inception. I get you would need more money to keep the game rolling. I offer this suggestion as a possible solution. 1. Create a new server. 2. Make this a premium Server (Higher Subscription price point) 3. Still offer the market place for vanity items and even offer the buff packages at a reasonable rate and lose the lottery system. (Hell these could stay on lottery upgrading one every year as you have been then putting them on the heritage broker as you had been doing.) 4. Allow people to have fun and grind through all the content in 6 months if that's how they chose to play by making Heroic and Raiding content that doesn't artificially gate with one piece of upgrade gear per 1 hour zone. Make Celestial Spells upgradable through the market place. (Even double to research time and/or DBC you currently have for ancients) 5. Allow heroic zones to be run with zero lockouts. I could add more things to do on this server that have been mentioned in other places that would make this game a whole lot more fun. I would be willing to bet the majority of your raiders would end up there and spend way more money than they do now. Hell, you could probably charge 40-60bucks a month easy for the sub. I guarantee you have a LOT of players that would spend big bucks if it was just fun and not a slug/sloth environment. Hell, I would even play through the content multiple times on Alts if were fun like that. Me and my raid team burn through content in six months and everyone Alt raids and burns it again right behind it. If it's fun people will spend and play. Just sayin...
They better do something. As you know they have ticked off a whole lotta players and the feedback is aflame. I may very well be witnessing a great exodus for the third time.
They have been there and done that. https://www.everquest2.com/news/imported-eq2-enus-3692?locale=en_US Do we really want to ask DB to drag out the old EQ2 Freeport server free to play model and revive EQ II Extended? And then if they did, should they place everything in the marketplace up to but not including the current xpack raid gear, or should every last bit of "stuff" be added into a massive marketplace. And what about the Platinum subscription model which was annual only. Platinum was an all inclusive subscription. If they had something like that today would it include all housing, previous expansions (as premium CE with all the extras including races, features, housing, etc.) or would all elements of past expansions be pulled apart into bits and pieces and the player can build their own game experience so they can "Free to Play. Your Way!™" .
I think manyyy people would stop burn out/quitting as much- if the 'legit raid mobs' dropped a bit more legit loot. No special keys or extra payments needed.... I think they've over-tuned trash & boss mobs, trash drops no loots at all, nothing to earn..don't need experience.. and then the named drop one quality piece that an entire guild 'needs' ..... the grind fest drives away people. Some whales will always pay RL money for whatever..like the leg. card game flock of eagles......even krono are ok with me because people can earn kronos in game , sell kronos for plats to buy lootrights/or tradeable raid gears. Not these cash buyable actual items... nope IMO that sucks....
The loot box buyers wouldn't play on a special server.... you can see it on the everythings buyable server they shut down last year. Some players want to gear-up to the max and move to servers where they can be at top of the heap. Now they don't even have to move..just go raid with a guild and buy the best items....while the guild waits and waits for one piece of good loot to drop
This is good information. I was wondering about this. So they won't play on a special server. Interesting. Moving between servers, that's another thing. I'm liking Jrox idea even more.
All of these D&D-derived types of games are really, at base level, about the Power Shopping. What keeps people playing is getting the next biggest and shinies gear. Once you have that gear, if there is not an even better bit of gear to go after, people will stop playing because the chase is the whole point. The problem in Renewal of Ro is that they've made the chase too long and grindy. Adding P2W gear is the wrong answer, IMHO. Simply changing the heroic and raid loot a little to drop a couple more pieces of loot would fix the problem.
But your "simple change" doesn't result in the largest new influx of cash for Daybreak (nor does the OP's "add a few bucks to the gold sub" wish list), which is why they're adding addicted-gambler whale RNG crates to EQ2 instead. They're even dumping this junk onto the TLs now! They clearly don't want a single server left where players can avoid this pay-to-win garbage. The only thing people can do to stop the devs from adding even more of it, is not to buy any of it.
Oh man please no, we need to merge ALL live servers into 1 not make new ones making our population per server smaller
