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Sony has its head up its third roman numeral.
fistorm
Member UncommonPosts: 868
in Everquest II
I constantly see people waiting and talking about wanting a everquest 3. I think this company is failing to see the profits or trying to milk eq2 for every last drop of milk.... and then another drop.... and.... another one.
Get on with eq3. This is rediculous.... I would go as far as say the ceo is just as bad as FFXI listening to thier player base before FFXIV.... They did'nt.
If you look at all of thier past titles, they did nothing to continue to update them beyond holiday events.... EQ2 is dead. WE WANT EQ3
Comments
Couple of points:
SOE has no direct control over what players say.
Yes, some of them say they want an EQ3.
Some of them are wrong. Some of them are really just whiners.
This is not an issue unique to SOE or to EQ2.
MMOs don't just materialize out of thin air. EQ3/EQNext is in development. SOE has actually said very little about it. My guess is 2013, 2014 or so, maybe longer.
EQ and EQ2 are some of the best-supported games in the history of MMOs, both in terms of expansions as well as the huge volumes of additions and enhancements released between expansions. To suggest otherwise shows a disconnect from reality.
EQ2 shows little sign of dying. I see thriving populations on the Live servers and what appears to be a happy, booming free/microtransaction population on the Extended service. From FanFaire I saw a lot of very ambitious plans for the game moving forward.
I'd like to see EQNext, too; I'm very curious to see what kind of game it will be. SOE is in the business of producing multiple MMOs; a new one in develoment doesn't imply any kind of plan to shut one of the current ones down, even if it's a part of the same property as would be the case with EQNext.
This was specifically addressed at FanFaire, by Smed, in one of the EQNext panels.
No, I didn't go to FanFaire. But there's a lot of video online to watch.
I give your rant a 5.4. It's got style but fails to be sufficiently outrageous.
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EverQuest Next is in the works, but the only information given was during the conceptual stages. Whether or not it's passed that into actual development at this point is beyond me. It's in the works, but probably won't be out for a couple years easy.
Oh: http://www.everquestnext.com/
SOE is by far more greedy, and caused it's own downfall in it's race to beat Blizzard.
SOE- chose the wrong coding to make EQ2. To this day it's still somewhat of a mess. Vanguard devs used the same coding.
SOE- Makes it's money from releasing expansions. They don't like to fix there old content with FREE patches. They make something and set it as gold and never look back.. They have a Guild Wars Mind set ( Buy-To-Play ) but with a full monthly sub price added. Like more prof........Just look at how many expansions EQ1 has, what like 10 or more ?
Blizzard evolves. It took years before it's first expansion, and with many free patches along the way. Sure Blizzard is screwing up as of late, but we got many good years out of them.
SOE adds. And for a hefty price each time. They had been doing it all along.
SOE sucks. Someone should step in and take there Video games away from them !!!.....they should not be allowed to own them. You don't give pixie sticks to an infant !
The highlighted points are especially true.
EQ2 is extremely healthy, and has years left in it, which is lucky for SOE because EQ3 is a long way off.
They need that time to reskin Free Realms with a Norrathian theme.
There's little question, I think, that SOE, particularly in EQ2's case, moved in a Blizzard-aping direction for a couple of years trying to catch up. That's unfortunate, but they have, I think, been trying to move away from that and chart their own trajectory for several years now.
SOE didn't cause their own downfall. World of Warcraft did that, for whatever value of "downfall" you think is appropriate here. It did so because it was frankly a better and much more accessible product than what SOE had out at the time.
No. SOE did not design Vanguard - Sigil did. Sigil made a big effort to distance themselves from SOE as much as they could once SOE became the publisher of Vanguard. Vanguard uses an entirely different code base from EQ2. You are flatly wrong.
Veil of Alaris will be EQ's 18th expansion. The game is also in its 12th year, for a good chunk of which SOE was feeling out a literally unexplored marketplace.
In saying that SOE doesn't fix its own content with free patches, insofar as that's true it's an industry-wide phenomenon. SOE is better than most about fixing old content as well as releasing new free content outside of paid expansions. If you'd like to compare EQ2's update and release history with WoW's I'm prepared to debate this point-for-point, but at the end of the discussion you'll find that EQ2 has released way more free content than WoW has, and has fixed a lot more broken stuff as well. The only major fix of old content Blizzard did was in the context of, guess what, a paid expansion. That one quest in Stormwind City that was broken for years? They fixed it, finally, with Cataclysm, by wiping almost the entire old world and starting fresh... and introducing new broken content, still unfixed. I grant that broken quests in WoW are uncommon, but they are in EQ2 as well.
Missteps have been made, of course, which SOE was loathe to admit in the early years, but they've come a long way since then. I don't know that I'd say they are a "different company" now, but they seem to me to have matured.
*snort* Blizzard is as complacent an MMO developer as you'll find. For about 3 years they seemed innovative, but all the real innovation happened behind the curtain before WoW's release. Since then they have been playing catchup with other developers from a creative standpoint, and have been shedding subscribers are a fearsome rate, only keeping their published numbers up by first of all only releasing them when it suits them and by launching localizations in new territories. Their real subscription base in, say, North America, has been shrinking for some time.
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I don't think EQ2 is as healthy as people are suggesting. It just had another round of server mergers a few months back and if the trend holds true people will start talking about empty servers around this time next year.
The expansions for the "well supported" game have been getting smaller, further apart and generally received much worse than the previous one. The next one isn't even going to have content if what SOE says is true.
SOE has been in fleece mode for longer than is reasonable healthy for a company. As their populations have declined they have tried to even out revenues by "taxing" their playerbase with more and more additional purchases. Now that they are in financial hardship they have little choice but to find some way to increase revenues.
In short, SOE isn't going to get their head out of their ass anytime soon, because they cannot afford to do that. Their money grubbing is going to continue and actually accelerate between now and the release of PSNext/EQNext. All of their existing games have been declining for years and really only exist now to fund development of future games that have a chance to keep the company sustainable.
Just to address 3 points you made
(A) SOE intentionally chose to release EQ2 early to beat WoW to market. It was their choice to release EQ2 in the condition it was. That is how SOE operates. They look at marketing projections as the major decision making tools. Blizzard on the flip side was all about not releasing their content until it was ready and it was fun. That is why each game was received so differently.
(B) SOE has always chosen quantity over quality as an approach to developing their games. More expansion packs in theory generate more sales. Smedley has said in interviews several times that their strategy was quantity and that it caused the quality of their products to suffer as a result. As a result they slowed down their production schedule for expansions in an effort to increase quality. It would seem that all that really changed was the amount or content they can deliver was reduced and the amount of RMT/Cash Shop development seems to have increase in direct proportion to that.
(C) Cataclysm was a fix to anything, because the old content worked just fine.
Those server merges had been needed for years. I can only speak for the server I'm playing on, of course - which is Antonia Bayle, always the highest-populated server - but there has never been a need to add additional population there.
Way to cite this well out of context. The actual plan is to release features - the list of which is pretty ambitious - in the expansion and then push out the actual content for free. Will this work? I dunno - it's kind of a risky move if you ask me, and different from what they've done in the past, and so runs the risk of screwing up players' expectations. We'll have to see how it pans out.
Attrition is something all MMOs have to deal with. I see nothing to indicate that EQ2 in particular is suffering from it any more than any of another two dozen games I could name. I won't play the "cite your numbers to show this" card because we all know that SOE doesn't release numbers and therefore we are all working on gut assumptions, possibly with the benefit of some context. But ultimately I'm willing to take SOE's word that - outside of the impact of the recent hacks - they're actually doing just fine, and I think, for a variety of reasons I won't get into here, that the whole hacking thing might end up impacting SOE a lot less than other divisions of Sony.
Furthermore, I see little evidence of gouging on SOE's part. I see entirely optional fluff items in an in-game store and a wholly separate freemium service, but they're just catching up to the rest of the industry on that. They continue to release about a paid expansion a year, as they've done since launch, and push out as much free content as anybody even if one were to concede, as you claim, that free updates have been getting rarer. Their closest competitor on this count, LotRO, has also had a slow year or so of new content releases, and Turbine is only now starting to catch up - with releases that are not any more free than what EQ2 is dropping.
Too, SOE did right by those players affected by the hacks - giving them the lost time back plus a month, plus in-game goodies even in such ill-supported titles as Vanguard. They also lowered the price of the Station (now All Access) pass by $10 a month and made multi-month packages available for those subscribers for the first time. They did this, I surmise, in response to both the hacks and the impending closure of SWG, so it wasn't altruism - but neither is it evidence of gouging.
I get that SOE has a checkered history that's soured some people on them - and their feelings are legitimate, just as the mistakes made were. But that doesn't mean those feelings are really based in reality now, and it doesn't entitle people to just make stuff up. SOE right up to Smed himself has long admitted bungling various things, from "working as intended" to the NGE debacle, and from a creative standpoint, without any inference as to how well the business side is doing, I think they're moving in a steady if not wholly positive direction.
See, this is what happens when you take me out of town for a weekend, away from my blog, but I have access to MMORPG.com - tons of windy posts.
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Nobody disputes that EQ2 was released before it was ready. Nobody here speculated on the reasons for that. I will note, though, that while what you say is correct, WoW didn't launch anything like problem-free. In fact its launch was riddled with what we would consider crippling issues today, and it was only in comparison to then-extant examples (primarily EQ) that its launch seemed so smooth in comparison.
There's no question that at the end of 2004 when both games launched, WoW was providing the better player experience. Today that debate is much more interesting, but market momentum is what it is, and people tend to become entrenched in the MMO they're playing and stick with it.
Okay, but this was all stated years ago in the context of EverQuest back when it was getting two expansions a year. It's never been true of EQ2 post-launch.
That's debatable, but I'm happy to concede the point because it's not a debate I'm interested in having.
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(A) I think there are enough people in the mmo market now that are not only looking for a new game to play, but well beyond desperate for a good game to play. People keep going back to their old haunts, because most other games don't stack up. If people EQ2 were really putting out an equal play experience as wow then it would attract and retain more players. The market is ripe right now for any good game to come along and sweep away tons of subscribers.
(B)
These are quotes from John Smedley himself, the first is from an Oct 2007 warcry interview
"[We're] refocusing SOE on high quality and not rushing releases," said of his coming crop of games. They learned many valuable lessons from EverQuest II and its head-to-head competition against World of Warcraft. Fact was, while both games did rather well, WoW had the budget, time and polish that EverQuest II did not."-John Smedley
The second is from May 2007 Gamasutra interview
"In the case of EverQuest 2, it's still a very very healthy business for us. In terms of getting it in the public eye, that's the purpose of the free updates; we're trying to target several large-scale free things to add to the world.
We want people to know that we're not just slamming out expansion packs. I think that was a mistaken strategy that we had for a while. It decreased our quality level. The teams, and myself included, just get to the point where you want to be super proud of what you're releasing, and we wanted more time to polish things, and so we said 'the heck with it' and went with it that way." -John Smedley
So yeah Smedley did come out and admit that the expansions were lacking in quality and that was something they really wanted to change. Oddly enough most players say that the worst expansions for EQ2 came after these statements were made.
(A)
Antonia Bayle is well populated, because players have been conducting their own server mergers as SOE was dragging their feet to fix the population issues. That is where all new players are told to start and most people reroll.
(B)
My point was that expansions have gotten smaller, further apart and quality decreased. EQ2 is still kept up, but it is pretty clear that has been slipping for a long time.
So now you have expansions that don't have content, but rather features. Expansion content is now quarterly and free, but that was already happening in game updates. Also it wasn't to long ago that SOE slowed down the game updates to being quarterly with the promise that doing so would improve their quality and size.
The end results looks to be quarterly content updates which were something already promised and expansions with no content.
(C)
SOE isn't doing fine. They had have three straight years of sizable employee layoffs. Just closed 3 development studios and cancelled an mmo project that was in progress for 5 years and 10's of millions invested.
I wouldn't say SOE is just catching up to the rest of the genre on cash shops, micro transactions and RMT as you put it. If you really look at the history of western games in this regard you will see that SOE has been a real trail blazer in this regard. They are almost always first in these types of efforts and always pushing the boundry of what players are accepting.
Like when they said EQ/EQ2 would never have microtransactions in any way shape or form.
Like when they said EQ2 wouldn't be going F2P and then revealed their F2P changes less than 30 days later.
Like when they removed free trials from the original EQ2 servers in order to get new players to move to the F2P server over the existing servers.
Like when SOE tried to sell arrows as a cash shop items despite players saying they didn't want these things.
Like when they sold exclusive dungeon content and rewards via virtual trading loot card.
Yes I think SOE pushes and pushes and pushes beyond what most companies are doing. That isn't to say others are not getting on board with screwing with the customers, but this is old ground for SOE.
Ah, quote mining. Is that why you didn't actually link to the interviews in question? Or why you cut and pasted only the answers Smed gave and not the questions?
For those playing along at home, the first quoted response from Smed was in response to statements about overall quality of SOE releases, and referred to the lessons learned from the rushed launch of EQ2. Not to the expansions. LINK.
The second quote is, again, in response to a question about SOE's overall business strategy and a question about what SOE is doing to promote their then-existing games in the context of SOE's overall approach to quality. LINK.
It's easy to fact check this stuff, you know.
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It was a long time ago that SOE tried to beat Blizzard. Wow and EQ2 competed against eachother and Wow won due to the fact that Blizzard have a lot better programmers (many times EQ2s budget didn't hurt either).
But not even Smedley is delusional enough to think that he can take on Blizzard at this point, SOE is fighting for survival, not to be the biggest MMO company.
And sure, SOE makes loads of expansions, many bad. EQ is many years past 10 expansions... They are greedy as well, but they are not the only company, they might have been the ones that put RMT shops into P2P MMOs but Blizzard added their own just 6 months after SOE.
Everquest was the game that really started it all. It wasn't the first MMO, EQ followed in Meridian 59s footsteps but EQ is what made the genre to what it is today together with Wow. Without EQ few people would play MMOs today. And it was a great game when it released.
EQ3 is really tha game that either saves or kills SOE. I don't see PS2 as a competitor there, EQ still have many fans among MMO players and a good name. But SOE better make it a great gamne and they can't repeat the misstake they did with EQ2.
EQ2 is not a bad game, not at all. But they released it in pathetic shape, buggy and with far too little content and even today is the engine far from perfect. They can't afford that one more time. Most people actually thought EQ2 would be the next big MMO just before it and Wow released.
The future will tell us if they have learned the lesson or not. If they take the stuff that they are actually good at and deliver us a well coded and fun game they will be back in bussiness. If not SOE will join other companies that have lived long past their prime and faded away.
I was going to do another point-for-point, but when I reached this part I decided to stop taking you seriously and dismiss you as just a hater. Because "they" didn't say that.
I'm not disputing the validity of your opinion, but neither do I see the value of engaging further with someone deploying out-of-context facts and pseudo-facts, like this one, to try to prove their "SOE sucks" point. Hate away! I'll be over here, having fun.
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I've wanted EQ 3, since the week I got into EQ2's beta and saw the kiddie-land John Smedley made... zones? lol
Open world, or FAIL <---
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Shut down Vanguard;put a team on it, throw resources @ it;open-beta it, and re-release VG and there is EQ3.
EQ next/3 is a waste. EQ died with EQ classic. This is a company trying to save a sinking ship. Smedly needs to go too.
[Mod Edit]
Is EQ3 gonna be a same old boring rehash?
I was slightly interested in EQ at a time but I don't think I'll even bother glancing at EQ3 unless they're planning some real innovative stuff.
If it's just EQ with new and improved graphics I'll pass without looking back.
This thread needs more bulleted lists.
Edit: And to throw in something towards actual content to the thread. I dunno, the only major hyping that is happening with EQ3 is from the fans themselves. SOE really hasn't released much in terms of what we can expect at launch. I think that may be a good thing. The more hyping that companies do these days - the more damage it does.
I am hoping that EQ3 merges the best elements of EQ 1 and EQ 2 and uses a brand new engine capable of a seamless world by zoning in the background past the clipping planes (like DAoC or other zoneless games). I would prefer this over a fully voiced over 1 or 2 path linear game.
Indeed. All we've really seen is a couple of pieces of concept art and, I think, one screenshot from the new engine. There were panels at FanFaire, but more to get input from the community than give out information. I think the engine, which it'll share with Planetside 2, is fairly far along, but aside from that they're not much past the concept stage.
This is my hope as well. The new engine has seamless worlds as one of its big selling features. This was touted heavily at FanFaire.
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It took em six years to shoot the crippled horse that SWG became after they chopped it's legs off with the CU. They ARE milking the Everquest franchise... they are milking parents of neglected children in Free REalms... the company needs a serious overhaul.
Out with Smeaghol, I mean... Shmedley!! A decade too late.
No bitchers.
I am going to tell it like it is. I am not interested in a new EQ game. I love my eq2 just the way it is. Does anybody remember when they rolled eq2 out and the folks from regular eq wanted nothing to do with it. They wanted to stay with eq1. Sony did not expect that, and they probably will not expect those of us who are playing eq2, and yes even the eq1 guys to want to stay put.
I know I never asked soe to make an eq3, and from the screenshots and concept art I have seen it looks like a wow/rift mix, and I sure in the heck don't want or need that in my computer.
I think it is common enough knowledge that not all of EQ2 is free to play and the statement was pretty easy to follow as such.
That being said, SOE lied through omission when answering their players about making EQ2 free to play, because the players were extremely nervous when the new lead director took change and most of his history revolved around making free to play cash shop games. They could have come right out and said they were working on an alternate F2P system for the game, but they didn't. They reassured the players that their experience was not changing which is the most important statement made.
The F2P changes might not have been a big deal, but SOE most certainly did change things as a result of making the F2P server that had a pretty large effect on the players they just reassured would not have their gameplay changed as a result of F2P changes they implied were not being worked on.
SOE removed free trials to the legacy servers which effectively cut off those servers from new players. Keep in mind at the time those servers were already suffering population problems for a long time.
Then SOE revamped the UI, spell graphics, animations, starter quests, etc. The better part of 6-9 months worth of game updates focused almost entirely on making the game more accessable for new players. None of this was done in conjunction with long time players and the entire focus of it was to attract new players. Again, new players that SOE was trying to funnel away from the existing servers and onto the free to play servers.
What I am talking about are facts that will not change regardless of how you label me.
You hid it dead on GU57 was designed for the Free to play crowd with the revamped ui, and the big ugly sc button tied onto your xp bar. that entire patch was nothing but for the new players. New folks who were kept away from the live servers. Now theres talk about them being merged. I saw this comming as well.
I have linked to those posts plenty of times on these forums and have nothing to hide.
The first quote was in reference to SOE putting themselves in the position they are in, not blizzard. SOE chose to release EQ2 in the condition it was in and Smed was touching on that.
The second quote specifically talks about SOE rushing expansions out that caused those expansions to suffer in quality and how they wanted to correct that problem. At that time the only SOE games getting expansions anymore were EQ and EQ2. Yeah it is talking about the overall strategy they want to present to players, but when he specifically talks about expansions that were slammed out so fast their quality suffered and they are only making expansions for two games.... one of which was just mentioned by name I think it is pretty clear he is talking about EQ2 expansions suffering from their development process.
Take from it what you will, but all the expansions that followed those statements are generally considered the worst expansions by most players.
/shrug.
I am aware of absolutely zero talk about merging the Live and Extended servers from anyone who is actually playing EQ2. All reports - anecdotal as well as out of SOE - is that the population on Freeport is extremely healthy. So the random "talk" is just that.
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