Last night we held a Dev Chat where MMORPG.com members had the opportunity to talk with the good people from EverQuest. Today we present the transcript of last night's chat.

MMORPG_Kunou: Howdy and welcome to MMORPG.com's Live Chat on irc.coldfront.net! I'm your host, MMORPG.com's Community Manager Richard "Kunou" Cox. Joining us today are members of the Everquest dev team!

MMORPG_Kunou: Our guests will do their best to answer as many questions as possible, but due to limited time and a high volume of inquiries, they may not be able to answer every single one. Users are limited to two questions at a time,and you will be notified if your question is rejected or discarded.

[EQ]Ngreth: Hello! I am Adam "Ngreth" Bell, Game designer specializing in tradeskills and general content.

[EQ]Absor: Hello all. I'm Alan VanCouvering, known as Absor on the boards. I'm the assistant lead for content on EverQuest. I have been known to SMASH things and I have wielded both the Ban Hammer and the Nerf Stick.

[EQ]Merloc: Hello, I'm Keith Turkowski; I work with items, faction, and other game systems as well as content.

[EQ]Aristo: I'm Ed Hardin, content designer and patch wrangler.

[EQ]Prathun: Good afternoon, everyone! I'm Jonathan Caraker. My duties include content, spell design and distribution, and washing Absor's car.

[EQ]Zatozia: Greetings Everyone! I'm Lydia "Zatozia" Pope, Community Relations Manager. The torturing will commence shortly.

Read more here.

OK. I'm officially confused. I thought this dev chat was listed specifically towards the devs of EQ1. And even the article is posted under news for EQ1. But  how come its in the Everquest 2 section?

EDIT: Ahh, I read a bit and it is definitaly EQ1, Its just a mistake I presume.

The RSS feed names it as an EQ2 Dev chat as well.

I don't know why they bother with these chats if they are going to limit the questions and have separate chat areas for people to actually chat in anyway. Once they add in all the limitations this might as well be just another private interview with questions that were pre-submitted to MMORPG staff.  The same thing could be accomplished by having players submit questions to MMORPG staff via email, and then have the MMORPG staff submit the questions that they deem important to the SOE developers. Then after they edit and compile it all they could just post it on mmorpg.com as an email transcript.

But then that wouldn't make everyone feel so warm and fuzzy inside would it.

Regardless: glad to see good old EQ is still rolling along.

That said I'm not surprised to see that many of the problems of 4 years ago are still present in the game and are still central issues for the player base. I'm also not surprised to see EQ1 developers avoiding or shrugging off questions with general wide based statements that elude to a notion that the players don't know what they are talking about. Developers in general (and especially SOE developers) must really accept the fact that the MMORPG player community does know what it is talking about and can't be so easily blinded by generalities. Truth is the player base likely know the game better than the developers do. At this point (for EQ1 anyway) I guarantee that there are players who have been involved with the game for longer (years longer) than some of the current staffed developers. Regardless of reasons good CS simply demands that perceived authority does not shrug off anything.... ever. At least not in public.