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delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
SOE never cared about retention, only box sales.
In case you have not noticed, SOE makes a new expansion for EQ2 about every year, charging $40 each. I have not seen the back of the box for the latest expansion ( Sentinel's Fate ) however I'm sure they made it sound new, fresh and exciting, sucking in new players even if it does not have any content for new players.
People think EQ2 is a rival to WoW in numbers, yet if you log into the popular servers and do a search for players by level you will find that their are not near as many as you may think, add to the fact that their not that many popular servers ( population may be temporally higher because of the expansion ). Everquest boards are always booming here at mmorpg.com, and that's because the same ten people have been keeping it that way for years. My opinion on that is because their is something in it for them, but that's only my opinion.
In real life I worked a job with over 3 thousand people, I moved to another job that also has 3 thousand people, and I've only met one person that had ever played EQ2. Many people join month after month only to get discouraged and quit after 30 days.
SOE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT PEOPLE WAISTING THEIR MONEY. It's all about the box sales, I'm beginning to believe that they don't like paying for servers anyway.
Vanguard.....Now Vanguard..... The world is already big. SOE can't justify a $40 expansion. I'm sure it killed them to fix bugs, and add the Trial Island for no profit but it had to be done, and that's most all you would ever see. Now that EQ2's Sentinel's Fate is released you may see some love coming to Vanguard, but not much.
SOE does not advertise, they don't spend time fixing their old content,THEY DON'T WORK THAT WAY, its all about the box in the stores..... Their greedy !!
Comments
We all knew this years ago, and all play World of Warcraft. The SOE posters are paid employees here, we knew that too. You should have actually posted this is "Why we all hate SOE", but we all knew this to.
Beware of Obrak on SWG forums;)
Vanguard never had a chance. Does anyone really think $OE was going to make a real effort to develop a game made by an ex-employee that directly competed with their precious EQ2 and had way more potential to be an incredible success?
SOE hate, esp when its only half informed is the funniest of all. If you actually followed the lead up to EQ2, SOE's model was based off maintaining around 300k subs for EQ2. There was no intent to compete with wow (EQ2 cost about 1/10th of what WoW did to develop). SOE is a evil faceless corperation, its true, but Vanguard's circling the bowl rests 100% on Brad McQuaid and Sigil's shoulders. SOE put it on their "life support" system and then just maintained the servers and let the cash flow in. no one else wanted Vanguard when Sigil bought it (the reason it was in such a bad way was because Microsoft bailed out of the deal and left Sigil rushed, SOE came in when Sigil asked it to distribute the game. Sigil cratered after launch, and SOE got a deal). There is no need to make a big SOE conspiracy out of what for them was win win, scoop up a game for almost nothing, maintain the servers, fix a few bugs and keep the subs.
GO back to hating SOE for SWG, nothing to see here....
I actually agree with you, thats pretty much the way it happened. My gripe is that it was a *edit* thing to do to just leave it on life support. I stand behind my statement on why I think SOE did it. Its like taking in a sick animal that no one wants and never taking it to the vet, just play with it till it dies, cause god knows vets cost money.
It's a $40 bundle of every expansion they've released so far. Easy for people to come back and get caught up. Back when I played if you had everything prior, it was a $20 upgrade. If not, it's a better deal to buy the bundle, anyway.
Also, out of those 6,000 people, somehow I doubt you asked each and every one of them if they played EQ2. If you did, you should have asked if any of them played Vanguard.
I mean, you probably don't understand how business works (judging by the whining), but it's all about supply and demand. If they don't have the demand in Vanguard, they aren't going to put tons of people to work on it. Not gonna happen.
I mean there are plenty of legit reasons to not like SOE, but these are a stretch.
Since so many people hate SoE for thier treatment of Vanguard, what if someone bought the rights and everything from SoE and took it off this "life support"? I've read about it but never seen how Vanguard actually is, so I dont have a opinion since I dont know.
How much would it cost? 10mil? 15mil?
I played EQ2 for about 2 years when it first came out but I saw the direction it was going. They would come out with and expac every 3 months that you had to have because of the items but they didn't stop there they always had these little adventure packs for some cash. Everytime I turned around I was having to get these expacs and adventure packs and paying my monthly sub. Finally I had, had enough of getting nickeled and dimed to death. That's why I don't play the "Free to Play" games because it feels to much like the Sony system of the nickel and dimeing.
In America I have bad teeth. If I lived in England my teeth would be perfect.
New players buying the latest expansion always get the previous expansions for free.
Nah, I hardly think you connected or even asked 3000 people at your work if they played EQ2. My employer have 25 000 employees I've only met one that plays WoW. Hence EQ2 > WoW... Cheez.
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"
Talking about SOE, if we compare EQ2 to WoW I believe we are quite lucky in having so many updates & expansions for EQ2 since the game was launched, with a lot of love from the Dev team.
In addition, if SOE didn't buy Vanguard after Sigil went down most probably the game would have been shut down a long time ago as well. Vanguard is definitely a pure gem but so complex in its coding that it must be a real challenge to improve anything especially now all the dev team is gone .
The issue is: we are requested to pay the same monthly fees for Vanguard than we are paying for any other game such as EQ2, but we clearly do not get the same level of service. There should be only one server and a reduced monthly fee.
The question isn't how much it would cost to buy it. The question is how much would it cost to *fix* it.
Even now, Vanguard is still plagued with a lot of the same technical problems they had at launch, largely because of whatever they did to the source code when they dropped the Unreal engine. Buying the game is one thing. Going through the game's code line by line to fix the issues it has is another. Is there enough interest in the game or in keeping it alive for anyone to take that kind of time and effort? Will there be enough subscriptions to maintain the game after the fact?
so many missleads in this thread in their hate against SOE -.-
SOE is very proffesional for the good and the bad....they NEVER released expansions every 3rd month. they used to have free updates every 3 months for eq2 + a 5$ adventure packs twice....once every 6 month as a mini expansion. they stopped that.
when it come to vanguard they have worked HARD on the game, that they this year just gave up on ppl ever wanting to give the game a 2nd chance, and put it on life support...well proffesional buisness imo.
all this said. still hate the direction they pushing EQ2...instance grindings gah!
EQ2 was absolutely poised to compete with wow. That is why soe rushed eq2 to market half finished just to beat wows release date by a few weeks. Soe really thought eq2 was such a great design it would kick the crap out of wow. EQ2 was billed as the "casual players" game and I serious doubt soe had any intentions of releasing a sequel only to be less popular than the original.
As for the budget of eq2, you may want to check your facts.
LINK "We've invested heavily on development of the game to ensure that EverQuest II has the highest production values of any online game produced to date. We want to deliver a game to our players that will provide an experience like nothing they've ever seen." -John Smedley
EQ2 had plenty of funding and time. It just sucked and that is why it didn't do better.
As for Vanguard I will say this.
Sigil is the root of the failure as they screwed up with a pile of money and time, but they are not alone in that failure.
Soe is just as much to blame. Vanguard should have died under microsoft, but soe continued funding the project. Keep in mind they continued funding a massively failed project without taking ANY corrective measures to fix those problems. No rational investor would do something so stupid. That was the first time soe failed vanguard.
The second comes when they bought the game and immediately moved it to life support. Despite promises of treating the game exactly like their other titles, the first actions soe took was to move the best sigil developers to other soe projects and then try to lure away vanguard players with free client and game time for eq2. Those are the actions of a company that intends to mothball a game and simply strip it of any value.
At least Sigil failed TRYING to make a decent game. Soe failed twice, because they never even tried.
SOE can't pull off their crap with Vanguard as they do with EQ2. " expansion packs sales ". Vanguard is already a full game so they cant justify their trick to lure in more profit.
1) Log into EQ2.
2) Create a character on every popular server.
3) Do a search of player levels 1-10, 11-20 and so on.
You will find less than three thousand players total ( could be higher now with the resent expansion release, however this will be temporary as it always is ) They only need about fifteen hundred of this three thousand players to keep the appearance of an MMO that's alive. Millions have quit this game, time after time, expansion after expansion, with no end in site.
Does SOE care ?.......No... they are in if for box sales only, over and over again. Who knows maybe they will try pulling off an expansion for Vanguard some day. That's the only way Vanguard will ever get any love. SOE does not care about you, they don't care if you stay. They don't fix their problems unless you pay more for expansions.
op !lot of soe emploe care as shown in all the update we get ,one problem thos
smed cost cutting is in the way !they use very old server very old stuff wrongly set et how can gamer have a good experience if at soe end its wrongly tweaked
they need to do a full check on their server
if you have access to sof collector edition check evercracked
in there the dude speak to the black guy doing the show right in the middle of the interview the game crash
another exemple ,at the lunch of sof to promote the game some employe finally conviced smed(i heard it took a long time to convince smed)but since soe game never really worked with streaming game they ended up with a bad experience
and as all gamer here know if you cant even do something as simple as streaming a game trough ustream imagine the title themselves.the prob is smed he does too much cost cutting
check eve they upgrade their gear regularly and they always check for ways to improve server
smed its the reverse he always search for ways to boost revenu without cost (or the least possible and getting away with it
so you end up with the character shadow issue in eq2 ,you end up with low memory speed proccessing(very needed for a game like eq2 or you end up in th 5000 )
the game maker at soe are fair but the technical dude for server,stream,and network in there such or receive to much cost cutting
witch is a shame because some title are nice but so many issue plague them that you end up not able to play smoothly
check these 2 simple setting
gamma setting and brightness setting!how do you adjust them .with the nosemeter!
there is no graphical gage like in warhammer the chessboard looking thing
so no mather what you do you end up looking at a bad looking picture because of just these two setting
dont believe me go do the unlimited trial in warhammer online and play with those two setting dont look at the gage!
now play with them and set it the way the tip of war say at the bottom
if you did you ll see a game very diff and way darker and gloomy then what the games comes with
ton and ton of stuff like this .i love war for this simple tweak when i see war i see the same game that war maker see
i dont see ugly graphic when i know the game is supposed to look great and since all game are designed diff brightness
gamma,and contrast are the on ly 3 setting that cannot be bypassed!
dont get me wrong i baught eq2 s.o.f collector ,i baught underfoot i dont like their other title(that just me their good but for other gamer)but when i see smed doing the wrong choice over and over it gets under my skin
gees if he doesnt know how to stream in 1080 men call a 1080 streaming success like athene(athenewins,youtube)
he stream wow game and he stream with exess of 4000 player watching him so if any knows this tech work its him
same for server if your not sure about server call microsoft call ibm ,call intel (no not amd since intel is way ahead if tweaked properlly,has eve online has shown )
there are ton of good site to tweak system there is no reason for a company like soe to such in that segment unless there is one problem in the way (the lack of fun)
even wow a game way simpler then eq2 as to upgrade their server regularly and os ,io,networking stuff.
in that end war as more player (a lot more)and look way better and lag isnt there
so in my book the problem is the lack of comitement from smed,he work so hard at cutting cost that he forget to make sure everything works.often ending up with issue that should never have happened but did because of his twitch to cut cost!
they had money at dev that was before wow launched
but the most critical time is after its lunched.dev cost is always there you cant cut cost there but after a game is lunched the first reflex of smed is to cut cost !its very easy for soe to prove their game is smooth
just stream it in HD!they tried once they had to forfeight because they just were not there technically
smed thot (again)he could stream the game without cost!you cant .he missed a good chance there to prove the game
played smooth.the further we go in the year the rulestick will be this in the futur
player will expect games to be streamed via media player use such as xfire,ustream,live stream etc
no player wont take notice of wow stream since that was financed by the satellite industry for the pay per view
player will expect to see stream in the stream service they use because they know what it take and the effort needed to stream a game espacially if you end up like athene with 4000 player doing event with you
you need a sturdy system fully optimised for this.i bet athene doesnt have a brand new computer but
the technical dude working on his gear is a very good technical guy
hell thats one dude i d like to see work for soe (smed division)after hes trought we get very good game(if smed doesnt cut cost like his usual self always do)i play eq2 right now so yes i know what i talk about .at least the artist doing the game correct the game but lot of issue we get are at the server and networking end so not much game designer can do there .
QFT
I remember liking the idea of Vanguard but being continually turned off by the rabid fanboys of this game before launch. For whatever reason, McQuaid seemed to attract these hilarious die hard gamers who had only a tenuous connection with reality. The world *had* to be seemless with no instances, it had to have a hard death penalty and make you do a corpse walk, etc etc. Then I think somewhere mid project McQuaid realized he was headed for disaster and tried to modify his message and make it more palatable to the masses a year or two before launch. This just led to a game that seemed half finished though as (cf. Tabula Rasa) fundamental game changing mid-develepment rarely works out well.
Vanguard's diplomacy system was nice and a fun idea. Kudos to whoever thought that up. It was a nice break from the traditional crafting mini-game. I hope other developers try to get more entertaining mini-games in their games as well.
But at launch Vanguard was just kind of icky. You obviously did have zones even though there supposedly weren't any. You would see creatures go berserk near the lines, necro pets would go crazy and run in a random direction whenever you zoned, and there would be different weather/light effects across them. I honestly think loading screens at those points would have been better.
I remember one time near launch when I logged in clicking on my character whose whole costume/look/etc was bugged and so looked like a different character, tried to do a crafting quest but was told it was broken in region chat, fought some monsters, died, tried to get my corpse but it was buggy and wouldn't let me click on it, and then logged thinking, "This is absolute bull****."
The final nail in the coffin for me was when the RP server was killed despite a clear vote saying not to kill it. What exactly was the point of the vote given to Florendyl then? Nothing makes me quit like my server getting axed, especially if there is no other server available with the same ruleset. The only option at that point is to get on some non-RP server and have to have yucky names because all of the ones I like are gone.
This is the same reason I won't ever ever go back to Warhammer now. Phoenix Throne is gone so what is the point?
I agree that SOE seems to be getting worse regarding it's "Station Credits" and moneysucking it's playerbase dry. "Let's charge a monthly fee, and have an item shop, and release small expansions every 3 months for more money and.... and... and...
I feel violated everytime I revisit SWG, EQ2 or Vanguard. FreeRealms is even worse... because it's not only fluff items in that station credits store... it's really good weapons etc. SOE just makes me feel dirty... they're like hungry car salesman always trying to get to your wallet.
No bitchers.