EQ's problem isn't EQ2.  When EQ2 launched, yes many people (myself included) quit EQ1 to play EQ2.  But we did so because we all thought it was going to be an enhanced, upgraded EQ1 with better graphics while keeping the same gameplay & lore.  But no, what we got was something completely, totally different.  So people like me ended up quitting EQ2 fast and either went back to EQ1 or went on to play WoW.

EQ1 pretty much had the edge over EQ2 in population up until the past year or so, that's 3-4 years after EQ2's launch.  It proved EQ1 was the game their fanbase would rather play.  But the ever so wise SOE aka Smed decided to gobble up more games (Vanguard) and send developers off to future games in development such as recently released Free Realms, and the upcoming DCUO and the Agency.  EQ1's problem has more to do with SOE's decision to abandon a game that got them where they are today, in exchange for some of their new ideas, including EQ2, Free Realms, and RMT in all their games.

Will that work out? Who knows.  Personally I think it was a mistake for them to throw away loyal subscribers, but they are a corporation after all, so it's always tough to understand their reasoning.

This is a weird thread, and the OP is making comments & arguments that make no sense. I don't even know where to start lol.

Let's see, WoW & EQ are different games. When WoW was released, EQ had been out for 5 years and had started to decline due to the bad expansion that got released that year.  WoW in itself was inspired by EQ, many of their original developers were EQ players and they actually met in EQ.  What WoW did very well, was they took many ideas from other games and made them just a tad better, and enhanced them.  So voila, you had WoW, a name (Warcraft) that is very popular in the gaming world, and it drew tons new players into the MMO genre.

The point is these are two different games.  I mean if you want to bring up EQ, why not bring up AC? DAOC?  UO?  Fact of the matter is, no game can really compare to WoW because it's just a freak of nature.  WoW did something that no other games have been able to do in this genre.  So there really is no comparison, no argument, and it isn't about WoW vs EQ, it's really WoW vs the whole MMO scene.

Blizzard is known for creating quality, polished games.  They live up to their reputation well and they do a good job of it.  With WoW they set a standard in which if games are not polished upon release, don't have enough content, and don't have smooth gameplay, they're gonna have trouble attracting and keeping customers.  Fair or not, that's the price everybody else has to pay for Blizzard pulling in so many new gamers into the MMO genre.

It would be a cool niche game, I'd try it.  But the sci-fi fanbase is quite....strange.  It's not like the fantasy genre fans where we play whatever comes out as long as there are elves, dwarves, humans, etc..  It doesn't matter if the name is Everquest, or popular IP's like warcraft, warhammer, lord of the rings, etc..  If it's fantasy based people tend to pour into it and at least give it a good shot.

Sci-fi fans are quite loyal to specific IP's, such as those that like star wars may not like startrek, vice versa.  Firefly (and Serenity the movie) should've done well but yet the scifi fanbase didn't come out to support it.  Low ratings caused the tv series to get cut, low movie showing made it almost impossible for us to have a second Serenity.

Scifi is just a weird genre to dive into imo, and anybody who makes a MMO based on Firefly would probably only capture a small niche playerbase.

Debatable between EQ2 and WAR.  EQ2 came out 1 month before WoW in 2004, but it underwent tons of revamps in its gameplay during the first 2 years when the game bombed pretty hard.  But this one is debatable because EQ2 had already been designed to be fairly quest-driven, with a quest-on-a-rail leveling system.  This is a completely and total change from EQ1, and EQ2 was in development pretty much at the same time as WoW.  So it's kinda hard to say EQ2 was a hyped up clone of WoW, when in fact WoW followed the foot steps of EQ1 and made an improved game out of it.

WAR I think is a clear overhyped WoW clone, and it was their attempt to be more like WoW that they lost their way...and they lost their loyal subscribers from DAOC days.  WAR ended up being not as good as WoW in PvE, and not as good as DAOC in RvR, so it really became a so-so game that fans of either games would find not satisfying.  If a game wants to be WoW, they might as well do a good job being like a game.  Not do it half-arsed.

Mythic wanted a piece of the pie so they disappointed their fanbase from DAOC (those that like RvR).  People that liked DAOC wanted Mythic to create an improved DAOC with better RvR gameplay.  What we got was a worse RvR design, bad itemization, bad class balance, and just many general bad mistakes that should not have been made from a company that created DAOC.  They end up losing just about everybody, closing 54 servers within 6 months of release.

It's too bad, I enjoyed some parts of WAR but it clearly was a true hyped up WoW clone.

Originally posted by Emhster

Global chats are fine. They should, however, be monitored more carefully by GMs, not to prevent drama but to prevent destructive chats. For example, every time I logged into Age of Conan, the global chat was littered with doomsayers complaining about how the game suck and how no one plays it anymore.

When you see that kind of chat, the strange thing is it's often true.  People who pay to play want to voice their opinions and experiences ingame.  Kinda hard for GM's to filter that out, it'd be to filter any negative opinions.

Probably has been mentioned already, but you can replace holy trinity with AC1's character design....where every men/women can have the choice to be anything they want, including a bit of healing.  You can be in a group with someone who's specialized more in melee, so you would still want to find someone who has some healing abilities.  But for the most part AC1 had it so you could handle yourself and be self sufficient, yet there were plenty of things you want to do in a group (or in many cases large groups).

If you want to heal better, spec in life magic, and put points into healing.  If you want to run faster put your points into run.  Kinda takes holy trinity out because you can be a bit of everything.

Yes, General Chat is good for communities.  Welcome to 2009.   And yes, you always have the option to turn them off.  It's just funny too many people complain about general chat yet they read it all day long because they too enjoy the drama.

Like their games or not, Blizzard makes quality games.  Be it starcraft, diablo, warcraft, WoW, they make quality games.  When they release something, you know it'll be good.  You may not like the gameplay of a game they've released, but it doesn't make it bad or make it not of good quality.  It simply means you prefer a different gameplay style.

I don't have to be playing their games currently to know Blizzard is one of the better gaming companies out there.  Not to mention they advertise their games, and they don't stretch themselves thin by gobbling mediocre games up and try to support 5+ MMO's at once like SOE is doing.

Swoogie you're slacking!  Episode 3 is out, gogogo!

video.ign.com/dor/articles/1044480/evercracked-the-phenomenon-of-everquest/videos/evercracked_prt_ep3_112509.html

Holy moly, do you like cake or pie?  Two vastly different games, try both trials and see which one feels right and which one plays more fun to you.

Those of you interested in checking out what beta testers have to say about Underfoot expansion, head over to the official forum:  forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m

Greetings!

As of 10:00am PDT Wednesday, November 25, 2009 Beta participants are now released from the confidentiality requirements of the EverQuest: Underfoot Beta Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Thank you to everyone who waited patiently for the NDA to be lifted before sharing information with their friends!

Please note that even though the NDA has been lifted, there are still some limitations. Also, the Underfoot Beta forums remain under restriction. You are not permitted to share information from that section of the EQ Forums.

Thank you for participating in the Underfoot Beta. We hope you enjoy it once it goes live!

- The EverQuest Team

Originally posted by SuperXero89 

Well, the business of Sony Online Entertainment is business, and pumping advertising dollars for failed and ancient MMORPGs just isn't feasible.  Not saying there won't be a slight bump in population for those games, but again, the money is better spent promoting Everquest II.  EQ1 as we knew it is dead, and there's really no hope of ever seeing Vanguard reclaim those 500k subsribers, though I could see PoTBS carving out somewhat of a niche with continued advertisement.  Come to think of it, I've been seeing a few PoTBS adds here and there.

Everquest is to MMORPGs like a 1979 Chevy Camero is to car entusiasts (my car knowledge sucks).  Car enthusiasts love that car, but no one expect Chevy to actually promote a thirty year old car even if their 2010 model may have problems.

Money is better spent promoting EQ2 because you play EQ2, is that the logic I'm seeing? Honestly, what makes you think EQ1 is "dead" or any more dead than EQ2 has been lately?   All SOE games are fairly low populated compared to a few top 3 games today.  When you said "failed and ancient", you do know EQ1 is by far SOE's most successful MMO title right? EQ2 never got close to half of what EQ1 had during its peak, and EQ2 is 5 years old whether you want to admit it or not.  It isn't exactly new, it's considered quite old in today's standards.

Don't bother with car examples, they don't make sense. EQ1 is still getting expansions, so you aren't talking about EQ1 of 1999, you are takling about EQ1 in 2009 with 16th expansion coming in just a few weeks. There's no good reason why they shouldn't advertise EQ1 when the game is being expanded on and getting upgraded each year.  But like I said before, SOE has been pushing to get people to play EQ1 ever since its launch in 2004.  They really haven't had very good success.  When people quit EQ1, they aren't exactly moving to EQ2.  It's two completely different games and caters to different crowds.

Majority of MMO players don't play twitch games well, that's why they're playing MMO's rather than FPS.  I came from Quake/Doom fps genre so going into AC1's twitch gameplay was easy for me.  But I know many many many others that simply can't twitch play, and they have no interest in learning, trying, or bothering with it.

Now if you ask why they can't make a twitch MMO to cater to the niche fps-mmo playerbase, well the answer is that most fps players don't like the tedium of MMO's, with leveling, questing, and all that junk.  While MMO enthusiasts don't like twitch fps gameplay.  So you are really talking about a very small faction of the playerbase that actually do like and would play a fps-style MMO.  If you look back at how many people played AC1 Darktide, you would know that is a very niche playerbase.

I'm with you, I would love to see another AC1.  But it'll be hard to convince any companies to fork out millions of funds to build one for a small playerbase.

I didn't backtrack at calling medicare pork, I'm actually saying it's broken, has lots of wasteful spending, can not be sustained, and it's one of the primary reasons why people are crying for healthcare reform.  Medicare/medicaid is part of the reasons bankrupting our system.

It IS pork what they did for this senator.  But the problem with medicare itself is without fixing it or reforming the system, it's all some people have.  So while they want to fight it, they are handcuffed by the system because they need it.  Medicare is broken, but we need to fix it, not give states $300mil here and there to bandage the problem.

I'm going in circles with you but like I said, we'll agree to disagree.  But you did a great job spinning this in a circle to make that democrat senator look like a princess for taking $300mil bribe for a vote.

Originally posted by SuperXero89 

Confused on what?  The new Everquest expansion is hardly catering to new players, nor should it really.  This April the game's gonna be like 11 years old and while the game still has a large number of players, they're primarily hardcore raiders with far too much time invested into their characters to give them up for newer games.  It's a good thing SOE still supports EQ1 the way that they do, given it's probably the single oldest MMORPG out there which still regularly gets expansion packs.

EQ2 though, is the game they're putting the majority of their resources behind, and they should. It's their newest game, their most expensive title, and the game that's most likely to attract a wider audience. EQ had it's heyday years ago, but it really only has nowhere else to go but down from here, and it's not because it doesn't get advertised. The game is simply old in every way from its graphics to it's combat system to simply its style of gameplay. EQ2, as we know it today, is either still at it's peak or slowly reaching it. Though the game has lost scores of players which subscribed at launch, it's slow bringing in new faces and bringing back old ones for an experience entirely different from what it was from the outset.

That's the thing, the game isn't (this current expansion) catered to raiders only.  In fact they have implemented many things to help casual gamers, and many have returned as a result.   Next expansion is more catered to endgame gamers yes, but it would be nice to draw some players back while at the same time advertise the expansion pack.  As we all know, buying the latest expansion flags you for all 16/16 expansions so it's a great deal for people who haven't played the game in 5 years (like me).

EQ1 supported SOE through all these years, and was their most populated game for vast majority of the past 10+ years.  But they haven't advertised the game in such a long time, I think it would be beneficial for them to try.    EQ2 didn't eclipse EQ1 in subscription numbers until a year or two ago, and that was mostly due to the number of people leaving EQ1 more than EQ2 getting a bump in population.  SOE has been trying to shift players to EQ2 ever since its launch in 2004.  But we all know the result, it just never really took off the way they thought it would, it never got close to where EQ1 was.  I think EQ2 is a great game right now, but to think EQ2 hasn't reached its peak you're really mistaken.  EQ2's peak happened when the game launched, the population right now after many server merges is much much smaller than before.  EQ2 isn't their newest game, Free Realm is.  And most of their advertising resources has been going to Free Realm's TV commercials...yes TV commercials.

I think everybody who plays one of SOE's games want them to advertise their games to draw some players.  This is a big problem with SOE, that they want to support so many games that they stretch resources thin.  I would love to see SOE say a big thanks to all their playerbase by advertising all their games for a change.

Originally posted by sepher

Originally posted by Mardy

Yes yes I get it, pork spending is fine to you.   But it's getting tiring to the rest of average americans.

 

Medicare is pork spending to you? You believe the average American is against Medicare? 

No, but if Medicare isn't broken, why do you think they're trying so hard to fix/reform healthcare?  I'm sure medicare patients can use more money in California, so where's my pork?

This is a special preferential treatment for the senator for her vote, that's it.  It isn't to do some super good, and this represents exactly what's wrong with this country.  At this point we'll just agree to disagree, I'm tired of arguing.

People want different things, and we all want everything.  The problem with gamers is that we can't seem to agree on one thing, so it makes it difficult for companies to get funding for a game when they aren't sure if it'll succeed.

I want a remake of AC1 (not AC2), I want a remake of EQ1 (not EQ2), I would love to see a DAOC 2 (not WAR).  But see, I'm sure many others disagree with me and would rather have another blockbuster popular game like WoW.  So who are the companies supposed to listen to?  We all want different things, and we all seem to want everything in our games heh.

So that's where the money we spent into Station Cash & LoN are going into... advertising EQ2.  While it's a shock and a good news to finally see SOE put a small ad on a mmo site, it boggles me why SOE would be advertising EQ2 when EQ1 is the one that's having an expansion launch in the next few weeks.  SOE just never cease to amaze me really, they always find a way to get me confused.

This is obviously good for EQ2 if it translates to any boost in population, but it's quite unfair to several other games that SOE currently holds  I guess that's what they get for trying to handle 5+ MMO's at once, when most companies only handle 1-2 huh? 

Of course they have people that read forums, they know very well what people say on the forums.  The thing is the people that post on the forums represent a very small fraction of the actual MMO population.  The vocal ones are the ones that show up on the forums, but people that post aren't always right about everything.  We've seen a lot of ridiculous things posted on mmorpg.com as well as games' official forums.  I think it's hard for them to find good information out of a bunch of junk people post & rant about everyday.

If you are talking about SOE putting money into Vanguard, that just isn't going to happen, so no matter how much you cry on the forums it won't happen unless the game somehow grows by large amounts.  SOE has lots of projects they're already spending money on, plus Vanguard really wasn't a game they made so I'm inclined to think there's a bias somewhere.  Their flagship right now is EQ2 and to them, there's no need to advertise VG when there's EQ2 with a much much larger population.

So they may read your posts, but it doesn't mean they agree or will do what you say.

Originally posted by Fibsdk

There is plenty of engame in VG and far from it's weakest point. The only people complaining about lack of endgame are from people who have been playing for a very long time and have already milked the content for all its worth. There are plenty of guilds that has been raiding in APW for months and still having fun doing it for instance.

 

You don't have to be someone playing for a very long time to run out of content to do in Vanguard.  When people ask these questions, I tend to be upfront about it so they won't get disappointed after spending their time & money into it.  It's well known that the endgame is lacking in Vanguard.  If you need proof just read Vanguard's official soe forum.  The problem isn't that the game isn't good, the problem is lack of developer resources, therefore content rolls out at a very slow pace.

So you can keep saying there's plenty of endgame in Vanguard, it won't become true unless VG receives more dev resources to pump out content necessary to support the endgame crowd.  In today's standards, for a game nearly 3 years old Vanguard has a lack of endgame content.  There is raid content sure, but that's about it, and there isn't a whole lot of it.

What you are saying is like what people used to tell others in Warhammer.  When potential players asked "is the game fun?" people used to say yeah the game is great fun for a new player.  Well when people ask about a game, you need to give them a full picture.  While the game was fun from lvl 1-20, it became a grind and badly itemized after that.  It also had a very bad endgame RvR gameplay, and you had a lot of issues finding people to play with towards the end. 

As for PvP, this game was made like all other games where you need to focus on the PvE side of things first so you have a working game.  Unfortunately with the game launching 1-2 years early, even PvE was broken badly, content was very buggy and engine was badly optimized.  So to say this game wasn't designed with PvP in mind, I disagree.  Just because the developers ran out of time to develop PvP related features, and the fact that they cut the dev team down by 90% within a year, it doesn't mean they didn't have PvP content in their design works.  They did have PvP content designed, and they were going to support PvP, but they chose not to because they could barely fix the PvE game.  That lost a lot of PvP playerbase and once you lose them, it's hard to gain them back.  I'm sure the whole Vanguard population knows that very well, because the population in VG has been on a downhill slide ever since launch.

I think right now they don't want to touch PvP because they don't know how, and they don't have the dev resources to support it.  But had Sigil succeeded in launching Vanguard, they would've had 50-100 devs capable of supporting PvP and implement the things they wanted to implement, such as PvP rewards, battlegrounds, ship vs ship combat, flying mount combat, city siege combat, etc..