I am not going to bore you with why I quit. With that said, I think that EQ2 has too many moving parts for both the Devs and players to keep up with. Instead of making the basics of the game better or more interesting...what has happened is there are too many complex systems that is making the game a science project. With less staff, it would seem that EQ2 would go back to their roots, and Del the Ascension and complex adorn system. Instead, focus on the actual game play and storyline. I know that I miss the old (super fun) Heritage quests, and lore. Realizing that few things can stay the same...I suppose that fading out might be the only option?
Judging by the number of raiding guilds still operating compared to last xpac, the fade-out is well under way.
I suspect, Rutro, you may be closer to the truth than you know. There's been many a thread regarding whether "the devs actually play the game," don't understand game mechanics, and so forth. Yes, there have been major cutbacks in the company over the years. I suspect what has occurred, like in many companies where you start cutting back, you start with the front line workers--those that actually do the jobs and the managers are still retained. The problem with that strategy is if you cut too far, you're left with managers who actually may have performed the work years ago, but the longer they stayed in an "oversight" role, the more they forgot about the nuts and bolts of how stuff works. And the more complicated the product is, the less likely they are to be able to work on it from scratch, much less diagnose the problem and then know how to fix it. I suspect, and it's entirely speculation, that's the situation DBG finds themselves in today. They retained their long term lead devs, but everyone else is gone. Not only may they have lost connection to the nuts and bolts of the game, there's no time to go back and figure out how it works. Put a different way, and again, I'm speculating, would you think Bill Gates has retained all of his initial code writing skills and could actually sit down at a workstation and hammer it all out? I dunno, but I suspect not. It's a simple fact: you lose what you don't use every day. Yes, simplification in the game would be extremely beneficial. I just don't see it happening, because I don't see the current crop of devs really having the time to sit down, actually be able to discuss game mechanics, make choices and then write the code to make it all happen. I do believe had they sat down some years ago with some carefully selected actual players, they could have designed a road map for this.
