The point of the Rivervale server is...?

First and foremost, i am glad for ALL of the people who play and are active in the game. They make the world and the chat seem more alive.
I do not have any animosity or hate for f2p people.

With that said, i have subbed since the game came out up until i bought a lifetime subscription. Had the lifetime not been an option, i would have continued to sub.
If something is worthwhile to invest hundreds of hours into, i believe that it is worth investing in. At the worst, 15 dollars month, is not going to break most peoples banks.
With that, i have no worries about the paywall and can just concentrate on having fun.

Now another issue is the so called "end game". People are frantic about leveling everything to some magic degree, having the correct amount of potency and fervor or whatever they are called, and being raid capable.
To me, and i am probably part of the majority, this is a non issue.
I refuse to make the game a job.
I will dip my toe into high level things on occasion, but if it requires angst and making side purchases just to be able to play a raiding game? I will pass.

My personal viewpoint on the magic stats of potency and whatnot is that they are a lazy developmental method to slow people down from eating up the content too quickly.
I can see why the devs want this, because if they do get it all done, the player may leave the game.
Still, the race to the end game type is actually the minority when it comes to people who put money into the game.



End game, in my opinion, is the destroyer of mmos.

If the devs were smart, and they had eso type money, they would rip eso off and just make every single encounter in game match the level of each player.

Why not play eso? Because even with its ugly bits, eq2 is far more fun than eso will ever be.

Wow that is a wall of text. Sorry.

Anyway, i hope that people like Siren and others who face the paywall can find ways to have fun and not lose their minds over it.

And i hope that rivervale is a troll and drama free server. A man can wish, no?

Actually, Isle of Refuge Server was great for new and returning players. It is a much friendlier ruleset, allowing players to catch up more rapidly. The population really took a dive with the launch of Fallen Gate. Many from my IoR Guild have moved toons back to AB.

With a new server being intro'd, perhaps they will finally offer a server merge for IoR?

I hope so for you guys on IoR Kittybock . I also wished DB would come out with something like heirloom removers so we could trade those on any server .
hey it's something else to make money with .

That would be a substantial hit to my income, I to am on Social Security, if I paid that once a year fee. Cheap per month, but thats about 15 meals for me.

I have a few toons on IoR, but I transferred most of mine to AB last Frostfell as well (and got that Santa Glug house on two servers free). Sadly, it appears most people use the 500 SC transfer there to load up on free trade items, then transfer back to their home servers a month later with all that loot using a full priced transfer token. Daybreak appears to leave it up and running to cash in on that; I doubt they will shutter it anytime soon.

In fact, I asked them last year to add more bonuses to IoR (such as double XP 24/7 or something) to entice more players there as it's so dead, and they said on Discord that there were already enough perks on that server and refused to add any more.

Yeah I've never understood why this community seems to dislike free to play users so much. I played free to play for a while only buying broker tokens, it's not that I didn't want the perks from a sub but money was tight and besides that I didn't think the game was going in a great direction. And the thing is you really can't play end game for free, there's so many things gating you at end game - which is totally fair of course but my point is that it's not like they're getting the same thing subs are but for free. Double currency by itself is huge even without the gating.

I do however fully understand the criticisms of Daybreaks free to play model. It's honestly one of the worst free to play models I've ever seen.

have you played for free at the beginning ? when all you had was 2 character slots , you could only wear up to treasured
for free and you only could have maybe a plat and a half with you and the same amount in your bank , only 4 bag slots and only 2 bank slots and I think no shared bank or only one slot you could not use the broker to buy or sell .
People had to really be dedicated to keep on playing .
I invested in a silver membership , that gave me more slots for everything and allowed me to hold on to double the funds .
can you imagine playing with only under 3 plat , not being able to earn more from quests or drops ? I remember people not letting you in groups , because you were not able to wear the same good armor unless you payed to unlock it EACH time EACH piece . I think the idea that free to play people payed a lot of the game came from that time .

When Daybreak bought SOE, the f2p model, for all intents and purposes, became irrelevant.

It started in TOT with prestige tags on sig line end rewards and other nice items. Later, they locked out all content after AOM to the f2p crowd. Then, more stuff locked out.

If there are folks who want to run old content on free to play accounts, why care? If anything, it provides a population for all the folks who like to run through all the older content.

As to the value of sub fees to the franchise, we are talking about (excluding the lifetime people), $180 a year versus what's likely around $1000-$1500 per year in cash shop sales for average folks, and $2,000 to $3,000 per year for the heavy spenders.

This is a pay to win game with sub fees.

There are plenty of existing servers that cater to that crowd. Nobody is talking about taking those away.

I'd really like to know where you derived your 1-1.5k/year for an "average" folk playing this game. That seems...a bit much. I'd be shocked if the average player spent more than $200 above and beyond the regular subscription, honestly. The ones spending tons of money are the people in raiding guilds that want to shoot to the top of the progression lists.

My response was directed to those speaking against f2p in general.

Also, the numbers I threw out are "averages" (somewhere, if it wasn't deleted by a moderator, is a post I made where I walked out the math...). I suspect that if we broke it down, more people spend in the $50-$60 a month range (on average), but the top 20% of spenders probably pulls the average up - this distribution will be skewed. I didn't make that clear, so sorry about that.

In any case, the point I was trying to make is that sub fees are not driving the revenue. It's shop sales.

It would have been nice Kitty had they merged IoR with AB when they merged FG with AB. And left some of the perks of IoR on the ruleset for the subscribers so that the IoR people did not feel cheated. But that was not to happen.

You do NOT need to spend hundreds of dollars to raid. You DO have to spend time in game doing things other than raiding.
I raid with two toons and I have most of their acension to GM+.. without buying krono or spending extra dbc beyond the 500 monthly for subbing.

Since I know that a majority of folks playing EQ2 are older what I'd like to know is where they are getting the extra income to invest in this game?? It's only logical that a percentage of folks who play EQ2 are on SS. If Siren is correct then how in the name that is holy does anyone afford to sub if it takes hundreds of dollars at end game??!!

work in game and outside I spend hours collecting and harvesting , so I don't have to buy the stuff , and I usually make all the crafters so I can make my own supplies so yea , it's not all fun and games if you don't have a rich daddy.

It is NOT hundreds of dollars at end game. But you do have to spend TIME in game.

I hear you....I'm definitely not rich and it's very difficult trying to do simple things. But, to me, that's one of things that makes EQ2 so much fun. If you're willing to put some effort forth you can make just about anything you desire.

I understand that. I'm simply saying if Siren is correct then how can they afford it????

They I think are talking hard core people. I like alot of others don't spend real life money except for expansions and such. I came up with the money for the lifetime so I don't have to worry about that anymore. But if you don't raid and you just play casual you can get along just fine without spending any real life money. Just make lots of crafters LOL and do lots of harvesting so you can upgrade everything and you'll be fine I have been. I just wait a couple expansions and then go back and do the zones (even raid zones) that I couldn't do when they first came out.

I think most of the hardcore players are at the point that not even they can afford to spend an extravagant amount of money. Most of them have other responsibilities they have to take care of.....family, bills, groceries, etc....besides I don't think we have any millionaires playing.

The cash store model is a transfer from mobile games. Mobile games make a LOT of money by playing on two factors: time gates and specialty items. In the late 2000s the mobile market skyrocketed in the US and everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Thus, like most MMOs at the time, in 2008 we got a cash store with specialty items and in 2013 got cash store spell upgrades, though there were still plenty of ways to earn those upgrades in game easily. Time gating went into effect when DBG bought SOE in 2015 (Kunark Ascending), and drops for spells and crafted items became more rare, and the requirements for leveling spells became tier to tier, thus creating a true P2W cash store economy.

Free to play came to EQ2 in 2011. The cash store was already in effect for three years. The F2P people did not create it nor the items in it save three, Freebloods, mercs and reforging. As F2P players are spell capped, they cannot buy the time-gate-related spell upgrades now necessary for raids. F2P offered the cash store more bodies to buy the things already there, and that's it. The end game P2W add-ons are created for the subbed people and the subbed people only.

Saying that F2P people are causing lag is pretty silly. The population of the game dropped in half between 2017 and 2018, from about 200K people to 100k people, according to the census lookup data, which is a pretty accurate estimate. There has been lag since the game became raider-driven, in the zones wherever all the people are gathered, Who remembers raiding in Castle Mistmore in 2006/7, trying to zone in 24 people without crashing? It didn't happen. Two to four people crashed every time due to lag. There were no F2P people at the time. Anyone can look up past forum posts about lag and see it stretches back more than a decade. It is not something new, and it definitely isn't caused by the "influx" of F2P players.

In relation to the half drop in population, it likely correlations to the time gate mechanic that was enacted in 2015. People tried it out for a year, found they didn't want to be forced into a true P2W model of play and stopped playing all together. I would hedge my bet that the 100k who left were all subbed, as that's who the Master+ store upgrades are aimed at.

Please keep in mind that the developers and the people who run the company are not the same folks. The developers, all five or six of them, keep trying to make us the best game they can based on the resources they are given and the instructions from on high. The cash store is an obligation for them. The new server is most likely based on our forum and discord complaints about being unable to catch up to current players over these past several expansions. Making it sub-only is likely in hopes to entice the F2P players who also couldn't catch up, and who would then have the opportunity to buy P2W content that comes with KA+.

I'm not sure why I'm trying to post a rational argument on our irrational forums, but there you are. Let the trolling begin.