I love the expansion! I hate that its not accessible to most! (reqs & zones too hard)

I get that you see things as a_fun_change...nothing wrong with that... I think its great and I am happy for you.

I however don't see it as a_fun_change, I haven't for a good while now..I do think they did a good job with the expansion but I will NOT be herded into heroic zones with raid like requirements and call it a_fun_change. I am fairly certain I am not the only person around that feels this way, but maybe we are the minority and they will continue down the path of destruction of a once flagship game.
They didn't loose paying customers due to the age of the game, they lost them because of unwanted changes and money grabs that doesn't add up to a_fun_change for many of us.

And not fun is why EQNext was canceled...

Some what of an update on my part as I have gained more gear some zones have become a little easier,. but people are not grouping, and yes I mean PUGs - like it or not we need them, this is normally a time when the LFG channel is buzzing all day and its pretty quiet, I don't really think we had a major drop in population right after an expac like this was released. It's just far to quiet, the silence here is deafening and its odd. I stand by my original thoughts, this needs to be easier in some way, I think a lot are just not bothering because its rough to get the stats needed. They are going to get bored sooner or later running solos and I'm afraid many will just up and leave after that.

Lastly I think this needs to be a bit easier on healers still, we lack DPS cause we need 2 of them for most things, I have seen even the most skilled healers struggle with this stuff, many of whom I call my friends, I don't want to see them leave or get discouraged because they don't feel like they can do their job anymore ( I know a lot are feeling this way). So here's to hoping there will be a good balance, QoL patch soon. I want to see more people out there trying for groups and not failing

I don't think I've met many other players, actually none, who were soloing current heroic content in the first week of an expac launch.

I'd suggest you're the exception, not the norm and I'm not entirely convinced DBG should be basing their gaming model on exceptions.

Big chunks of California have been burned to the ground, the rest of the country is in the middle of getting ready for Christmas. It's right after Christmas, when folks get the expac as a gift, that we get the next population explosion.

Of course. But the reason I mentioned it wasn't to suggest it's possible for a large subset of players to solo heroics. Reason I mentioned it was to give a reference point for how easy heroics have been. While I'm very good at it, if i can do so, there is no way it's properly tuned for a group of 6; which has been the case for way too long. I'm happy that this expansion bucked that trend.

Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with the current tunning of a couple problematic bosses in t1 heroics for where they are in progression (l'm looking at you boss #3 in Enkindled Towers). But all like 2 of them don't add up to the message of this thread imo that "things are too hard". As a whole, it's a huge improvement over the normal portfolio a faceroll heroic zones.

This post isn't making much sense to me.

I grew up in California and spent a great deal of the first half of my life there. I still have relatives living there to this day.

I've also spent the last 2 decades playing various MMOs and other online games starting with EQ beta in 1998. A great deal of my free time and entertainment dollar has been spent on SOE and DBG products since then.

So, I know that the fires are not going to hinder even a significant portion of the population of the state of California from going on with their lives because I've seen it and I've lived it myself. Even if the fires did have a large effect negating the entire state, 8% or so of the total population of one country is not enough of an impact to depopulate a popular online game.

In recent years people keep mentioning how the game slows down for summer vacation, the holidays, or whatever, and that this is normal. Is it? Is there any documentation that shows that this is normal for this and related genres of games, or is this just a localized phenomena?

I know first hand that GW2 and ESO are showing an opposite trend. Those games are packed for the holiday season. Again. At a brief glance SWTOR doesn't seem to be slowing down for the holidays either. I'm not currently playing FFXIV, but I'm told it's also doing just fine. That was the trend in this game as well until recent years. More people tend to play over the summer, during the weekend, or on a holiday, and especially in the winter. The reason is simple, more people who want to play have time to play during the periods when people are now claiming everyone has something better to do.

I've also learned over the last 37 years that I've been gaming that when a gamer is excited about something they don't tend to wait weeks or months to go get it. They're certainly not going to be content with hoping someone else gets it for them as a present, not unless they're financially strapped.

So, this is what I'm curious and confused about. Are there any actual numbers showing trends in the genre as a whole that would support your post? Are there any numbers showing trends in comparable titles over time, or over specific periods of time? Is there any hard information that would show how something like the problems in California could be having a significant effect on global user participation in an online product? Perhaps there is some information showing that a significant amount of EQ2 players are in or around the areas effected by the fires?

If your comment is accurate it might help to share the information that it's based on. Perhaps everyone could find solutions to how this game appears to be performing abnormally compared to several others.

If it's not perhaps such comments should be worded more carefully in the future so as to be clearly understood as opinion.

And, if you actually read this for, yay.

I have no evidence, but logically games with younger average player base (12-22 let’s say) should see increased populations during all school breaks. While games with older player bases should stay more constant.

Definitely in my younger days Summer/Christmas break was when we played 24/7. Now we have jobs and other adult things *sigh*

I also agree with you, ~60,000 people evacuated and fighting the fires from what I can read. That’s a very very very small fraction of the population of the USA alone.

There has been quite a lot of interesting study done on EQ2. At one point, SOE released 60 terabytes of data (three years' worth) to researchers, and a bunch of very interesting studies came out of that. I wrote up some of it in an old forum post.

At that point, it was estimated that in the Western world (ignoring Asia), there were about 40-50 million MMORPG player accounts, mostly fantasy RPGs, and EQ2 at that point had more than 300,000 players who averaged 26 hours per week playing the game..The average EQ2 players were adults in their thirties, with more players in their 30s than in their 20s. The age range gravitated (and still does) to older audiences. these older players tended to play more hours per week than younger players (in contravention of what the PEW Research Center finds for gaming overall). Hours spent playing were less than average hours of TV watching per week, and gaming tends to displace consumption of other media such as TV. EQ2 also gets a larger percentage of female players than gaming overall.

Compare this to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey 2017 that reported the average PC gamer playing less than 30 minutes a day, with the player demographics skewed towards teenage male players.

The Entertainment Software Association also publishes annual demographics data (2018 is available).

In current year, it's generally more beneficial to rely on observable evidence in the game(s) you're actively playing, than to rely on studies that are years to a decade old, or statistics that pertain to a spectrum of which your genre is a tiny fraction.

In other major titles of the MMORPG genre, EQ2's low seasonal and holiday numbers are an aberration, though 'school is out, school is in, it's the holiday season, it's the weekend, it's the middle of the week' gets trotted out, depending on when the conversation pops up again.

Every. Single. Time.

No amount of rationality will stem the tide.

I might be able to find the paper once I’m at work, assuming they actually published. But I would love to know how you jump from 60TB or server logs to:

“An unexpected finding was that players tended to be healthier than the general population, as measured by their Body Mass Index (BMI). They tended to be slightly more depressed, but less anxious.

The healthiest participants in this sample were the older women. This led to interesting thinking about gender differences in gaming. Surveys revealed that while women were in the minority of players, they tended to be the most intense players, which is counter-stereotypical. The women were more likely to be bisexual, more likely to be disabled, and were a little bit older on average than the men.”

Even if server logs include account information all you would have is name and address of the account owner. Not sure how you calculate their age and BMI from that.

There were also individual questionnaires and such. The study methodology was described in detail in some of the papers that came out of that data. They pursued several avenues of investigation. The studies that came out of it were really fascinating.

Ahh that makes more sense. I was starting to wonder what spyware SoE installed on our machines lol. I’ll be sure to see what I can find in the journals, I would love an excuse to do video game research at work.

Keep in mind that most current studies of the 'game industry' include everything from console games to computer, single player, multi player, massively multi player, including things like candy crush. So while they're definitely an interesting read if you're interested in that kind of analytics and how it applies to the industry as a whole, because of how games are (and can be) classified few of them do much to give a clear picture of a specific genre, let alone a particular title.

Also keep in mind that individual questionnaires rely heavily on 'self reporting' by those filling them out.