Everquest Raids Southern Armada State of the Game

State of the Game

Is EverQuest dieing?.

I think after 5 years of play at both the casual and so called "Uber" level I'm allowed to ask that question. I've entered the fascinating virtual world that is Everquest nearly every day for 5 years. I've evangelized about the game to my friends, I have pissed off my Girlfriend, I have lost sleep, I have bored people to death and I have obsessed over EverQuest since March (or whenever release was) of 1999.

I have watched other games come and go. I have seen the "EQKillers" come online and then fall by the wayside. I have watched players abandon the game singly and in large groups, they all eventually drag there asses back in one form or another. I've seen, watched and hoped that a game company could produce anything near what EverQuest is, just so I could tell SOE to shove their arrogance up their collective asses.

I had high hopes for Horizons until it ran out of money and about 10% of what was first promised went live. I beta tested Asherons Call, Star Wars Galaxies and Lineage 2. The only finished product that even vaguely interested me was Lineage 2 and even that really looked too easy.

I played as a "casual" on Karana for four years. I raided rarely and my gear was better than I deserved. I had loud arguments on message boards with "Ubers" about how they weren't relevant to the game that I and my friends at the time were playing. I got into fights and arguments with people over the state of the game, class balance Uber vs Casual etc.

I've been banned from at least one Guilds MB for being a dick head and saying stupid things. So I can pretty much say I have been around the block when it comes to EQ.

I think at this point I need to make the distinction between the "Bleeding Edge" guilds and the Uber Guilds. Joe the average player looks at both sets of guilds and simply lumps them into the one category of "Uber". However there is a huge difference. The "Bleeding Edge" guilds are at the fore front of any expansion and pretty much have been for years.

They were the first into Vex Thal and they were the first into Time and managed to stay and farm that zone for months. At this point in the game they are the guilds leading the push into the Gates of Discord DESPITE the fact that it was tuned for level 70's.

The so called "Uber Guilds" are really those who are in Time at this point, they have made their way through the content of POP, and probably come up from the days of NToV and Vex Thal. They aren't doing unpaid Beta Testing the way that the "Bleeding Edge" guilds are but they are capable of handling themselves in most encounters.

Currently I am technically in the "Uber" category. I am in a guild that raids Time regularly. We are not however even close to being "Bleeding Edge". We do LDoN hard's like we used to do easy's. The Tiers of Time get easier and easier every time we raid them. I am approaching 7K hit points raid buffed and I'm fairly sure that by the time Southern Armada finishes with the Elemental Plane of Time I will be approaching the 8K hp raid buffed mark. I have over 200 AA, not a huge amount I know but I am adding to that number daily and its a lot more than many.

What do I now have in common with the 3k hp, 50AA, LDoN equipped casual Necro that I used to be a year ago?, nothing. My concerns and the issues that I face every day in game have no relevance to them whatsoever. Their concerns and issues, likewise have no real relevance to me. I have switched sides, but I can still see the other side and remember clearly what it was like.

Through it all I have so far stuck with EQ.

I have had my doubts about various aspects of the expansions released by Verant/SOE over the years, but it was the gates of Discord expansion where I think SOE finally broke faith with the players. SOE has had a bad habit of releasing buggy, unfinished content, lieing about it and artificially constraining the "Bleeding Edge" guilds who were always pushing into the content first. This containment was usually done by either simply leaving content impossible to finish (The Rathe Council), thus creating a "RoadBlock", or by creating enormous Time sinks (Vex Thal Key).

Usually this containment was accompanied by SOE's claim that the content was indeed finished and there was nothing wrong with the events in question. Thus somehow implying that the "Bleeding Edge" guilds weren't in fact up to the task of finishing the events. Odd that within 8 hours of a patch of the Rathe Council event 4 Guilds had pushed past it and into Time.

The list of broken and unfinished end game content is long and illustrious:

The Sleepers Tomb (Kunark)
The Emperor of Srraezha (Luclin)
Vex Thal (Luclin)
North Temple of Veeshan (Velious)
The Rathe Council (Planes of Power)
The Plane of Time (Planes of Power)
LDoN Raid content (Lost Dungeons of Norath)
Gates of Discord (Gates of Discord)

If you add broken spells, incomplete quests, broken trade skills etc to that list the number of entries would stretch into the hundreds. Through all of this the players have persisted.

The "Bleeding Edge" guilds have triumphed through bugs, lies, SOE inefficiency and incompetence. They have forced their way through the broken content and as paying customers they have Beta tested SOE's content for them for free. The "Bleeding Edge" Guilds have given the rest of us something to aim for with their regular updates on their Web sites.They have made the game playable for hundreds of guilds below them and helped tune content for future players.

Then came the Gates of Discord. The "Bleeding Edge" guilds who had been farming Time for 6+ months moved into the Gates and began to work their way through the content. The news coming from these guilds was that GOD content had yard trash that hit like Rallos Zek in the Plane of Time. There were whole new resists needed and areas of Foci being introduced that the game had never seen before.

They also reported that the entire expansion was like one big Ldon. There was no soul to it. The lore was weak and the zones had been put toghther with some form of Kitset zone maker. There were no "Boss" MOB models and everything looked the same. Once you had seen the 10 base MOB models in the "public" zones of the expansion you weren't going to see anything new. Once again they hit buggy unfinished content and once again SOE lied about it and dragged its feet on fixing it.

Then something changed. The one thing there has never been in the previous history of MMRPG's is an alternative. Now there is, and the game company producing it started to offer the top end Guilds in EverQuest free entry into their beta test. The "Bleeding Edge" Guilds started to leave en masse. The great Guild names like Fires of Heaven, Triton, Afterlife, Keepers of the Faith, Legacy of Steel, Conquest and many others just quit. Some of them kept the Guild tags alive, some of them simply disbanded their great guilds and left the game forever. The announcements of major guilds leaving the game became an almost daily occurrence.

This was the first of a chain of events that has led to a quiet player rebellion that I don't believe SOE saw coming at all.

At this point SOE began, what I believe, was a cynical and half hearted attempt to "communicate" with their player base. In other words they started to do what they should have been doing for the last 5 years. The various player communities were contacted in one fashion or another and player "input" was requested. They introduced new web boards at the SOE site and attempted to "Hijack" the player boards, in particular the ones they don't like such as "EqNecro" and the Yantis owned sites like Monkly Business.

Why do I believe this is cynical behavior on the behalf of SOE?. Simple they have attempted this kind of "communication" before and nothing has happened.

They have announced"Class Balancing" 3 times now and never properly finished any of their attempts. The first time millions of words were poured out from the players and SOE did absolutely nothing. The second time fewer ideas came out and more vitriol was included but the INT casters got some form of help. Work was announced on the WIS casters but it just kind of trailed off and was never properly completed. The Third time was more Tank based, they made changes, announced more changes and never implemented them.

Each time SOE quite simply failed to deliver what it told its player base it was going to do, then they clammed up and ignored all requests for any further information. So forgive me if, when they come clamoring to the players and asking for us to "be patient with them" and "help them make the game better" I'm just a little bit disbelieving.

Then Woody Hearn a respected and much loved member of the EQ gaming community posted this and proposed a boycott of the next announced expansion "Gates of Discord: Omens of War". Many many good things were posted here but one of the best were the post from Wolfshead (2nd post down). Even on SOE's own forums huge numbers of posts began to flood in.

The players reaction was immediate and vocal. They supported Woodies proposal and many of them announced that they would be quitting anyway, that GOD had in fact been the last straw for them. The Woodie proposal was posted far and wide, the issue even made it outside the environs of Everquest and began to be cross posted into non EQ sites. Hell it even made Slashdot!.

Players were posting their thoughts in clear and concise form and I believe someone in SOE began to panic. Their top end was flooding out of the game due to SOE's failure to fix GOD, so there was no-one to Beta test their broken content for them anymore. Their base players the "Non Uber's" were pissed off as they were never going to see 90% of the content they paid for when they bought GOD and Planes of Power, the subscription numbers were dropping.

So effectively a truce was called. SOE put back the release of the next expansion by 6 weeks, posted a warm fuzzy message to their web site and contacted the "top 50" guilds in the game and called the player representatives to a conference to "discuss the issues".

The conference was held in San Diego, both "Bleeding Edge" guilds and mid low end guilds were invited, the big fan site owners were also invited. For many this was dismissed as an SOE attempt to "bribe" the top end people. For others it was too little too late or described as sucking up to the Uber Guilders. For many it was just SOE's typical reaction to the immanent release of a new game. Every time a new MMPRG has been released there is a flurry of bug fixing and "we care" type changes from SOE.

The meeting was held and to be honest I didn't have any faith in it. However it appears over the course of the weekend that several significant things happened. The first and largest was the admission that the Gates of Discord expansion was one huge clusterfuck. SOE stuffed this up in several ways, the largest and most obvious was that the entire content was tuned for level 70 Characters. Now I have to say, how the hell do you stuff up something like that?

I have seen comments from the various posters along the lines of "SOE has changed their corporate atmosphere so that lower level dev's can approach their bosses without fear" the implication was that such persons bringing player concerns to the bosses attention would have been fired. How do you get a company into such a situation where the developers who actually design the game are afraid to take the concerns of the players who actually play the game to their bosses?

I think I now understand why Aradune left and took the core of "The Vision" with him.

It appears that during the course of the weekend SOE put on its "game face", admitted they fucked up and seriously asked for help and player co-operation in fixing the known (and in some cases it seems) unknown to them, issues. Each of the delegates seems to have come back to their respective communities and said good things about EQ, the Dev team, the changes being made and the discussions they had.

The various attendee's were all well respected Guild Leaders and community representatives. Their respective posts and are well worth reading.

The Steel Warrior
The Paladins of Norrath
The Safehouse
Woody of /GU Comics
The Runes
Casters Realm
The Druids Grove
Keepers of the Faith
Mobhunter
Grabbit of the Safehouse Writeup
Fricka of the Safehouse Writeup

Strangely enough no-one from EqNecro seems to have invited. Apparently the Necromancers are still considered too rude to talk to.

It is worth reposting here the initial list issued by the Dev Team the day after the meetings:

June 5, 2004

Dear Guild and Community Representatives,
Thank you very much for a great Summit! By all accounts it was a huge success. I can speak for the EverQuest Development Team and tell you that we're grateful for the input you provided. In fact, in trying to generate this list to give to you this evening, we realized there was so much to go over that wouldn't be able to get a complete list together in time. We're committed to not only listening to your feedback, but working with you to make EverQuest more enjoyable for years to come.
So, we decided to list the Top Ten themes we would address starting Monday, as well as the most common themes that we'll come back with more information by mid-week next week.
A quick discussion resulted in a list of items that we will immediately address:
- Add scripting to shut off empty instances of Plane of Time
- Raid messages of the day
- Improving how we handle beta and the testing process
- Increase the number of debuffs allowed on the MOBs
- Increase buffs on players through AA
- Note field on raid window
- Improved consent & drag for raid, group and guild
- Improve corpse drag radius
- Make charms not no-drop
- Guild and individual rewards for guild beta testing
- Work on large To Do list....I know this one is a little random
Future items we will immediately begin looking at and discussions are as follows:
- Plane of Time instancing and other issues
- Back flagging's solutions to help with High-end guild atrophy
- Improved raid and guild functionality
- Auto loot all for your corpse
- Improvements to Raid XP
- Review the Epic 2.0 quests
- No more alien NPC's ;-) (focusing more on familiar Norrathians themes)
- Solo LDoN-stype instances or similar content
- Issues with item augmentations
- Possible enhancements to Guild Wars
Of course these aren't all of the items. You brought us a CD, 2 books, 20 printed sheets and a manifesto. We'll need to go through all of those and our notes before we can really get a good tally of all of the wonderful ideas and questions that were presented.
Thank you again for your feedback and participation. We've had a great weekend and a wonderful display of things to come.
Sincerely,
Robert Pfister
Executive Producer
EverQuest
And the EverQuest Development Team!


By all accounts the Dev teams walked away with "over 270 pages" of notes and ideas they had gleaned from the player base. Will this make any difference?. Was this just an SOE bullshit session designed to keep the players quiet for another 6 months?. I don't know.
The problem to me is that SOE has obstructed, misdirected and out and out lied so many times that its impossible to tell whether they themselves even have a clue about what the truth is anymore.


There are two big issues here for me. The first and largest is that SOE appears to actually be trying to communicate with their player base. Whether this is an honest attempt to talk to us or whether its all crap, only time will tell.


The second and most important is; will they actually finish what they have started?. One of the most frustrating things about SOE as a company is that they announce really cool stuff they are doing, they begin to actually implement some of the changes they have discussed, and then they just trail off.They only ever do at best 50% of what they say they will do, then when the players ask about the remaining 50% they are met with a stony wall of silence.


These issues to me are simple and will never be fixed unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift within the SOE corporate culture. This corporate mentality can pretty much be summed up in "the players will always take what we give them" and unfortunately its been true for a long time. SOE has lied, cheated and treated its player base with contempt for so long that it seems to have come close to policy to always treat their players like they are the impediment between SOE and their wallets.


EQ has become a cash cow they don't have to maintain. It was stated that SOE make's 140+ million dollars out of Everquest a year, that the staff and management at SOE "love" the game. If there is so much "Love" for the game why do they release untested, broken content to the paying public?. They continue to fail to fix known bugs and broken quests, they continue to ignore players concerns and issues.


CS is just non existent and has been a running joke in EQ for years, they force dev's to push broken content out of the door for sale, they ignore the /feedback and /bug reports from the TEST server and push out known bugs to the live servers rather than spending resource to fix them.


They reduce the resources used to maintain, fix and improve EQ to nothing, all the while trumpeting how much they care and how there is still lots of resource assigned to EQLive, they announce that they will "fix" an issue and then completely ignore it until people give up and stop complaining, they do all this and more and we continue to pay our fee's.


Well I think they finally figured out that none of the above is true and are running scared. My guess is that the take up numbers on OOW were so very bad that they had no choice but to face up to their fuckups.


Previously the player base has never had a choice, but soon they will have and I am going to say the words that I'm sure makes Smedley and his crew of gray faced blank corporate bureaucrats at SOE shake in their booties.

Worlds of Warcraft.

So what now for EQ?, Where do we go from here? I think at this point SOE has to take a step back from the game and admit they are simply fresh out of ideas. The game has now become so big and so damn complex that I don't think any one person can really know it all anymore.

I think SOE also has to start fulfilling its promises and seriously communication with its player base. They can no longer afford to simply ignore their players. I believe that with the SOE/Player meeting there has been a major power shift. No longer can SOE simply "tell" the players how the game will be, the players now have a voice and they are using it.

The EverQuest of the future needs to be an ongoing partnership between the players and the producers. I have been playing this game for 5 years now, nearly 1/7th of my life has been spent immersed in Norrath and I would love to stay there. The things I would like to see personally:

Complete revamp of the graphics textures:

Don't just use the new DirectX 9 graphics engine for new expansions. Assign someone to go back and start recoding and recompiling the textures in old world zones. Bring the level of the whole games graphics up to date.

Complete Rethink and revamp of all spell listings for all classes:

There are so many spells that are completely useless now. True North was useless on release day, with everyone having 200 sense heading now its a waste of data. All they do now is take up space in databases, just do an out and out delete, make your systems cleaner.

Take the time, think really carefully about Class balance:

Balance the classes against each other. Come up with a template, a roadmap (I hate to say it) a "Vision" for each class and implement it. So many class posts seem to say day after day "What is our position in the game?, what is it SOE expect's us to be?" This seems particularly true of Necros as we seem to switch roles depending on which school of thought is currently prevalent in the game design department.

The idea of having a class design template and balancing all game play against it allows for future planning and balancing of expansions and ongoing with discussions with the players as they will finally understand what the SOE thinks "their" place in the world is. Debates, Class Envy and the ongoing arguments between Paladins and Warriors would largely go away.

Itemization:

For gods sake get it right. The itemization in large parts of the game is beyond a joke. Stats on items for a class that just don't make sense. If all classes get a class specific item in Time, where is the Necro one?. If Necros and Wizzies were supposed to share their "class specific item in Time" then why is it a rare drop from the mob?. If two classes share an item shouldn't it be common so everyone gets a shot at it?. Its not like 50% of the games players are about to break into Time and trivialize this.

Test item drops before you put out an expansion. There is nothing more annoying to your player base than to have an item dangled in front of them and then later nerfed or outright removed.

Testing:

Just do some. I am getting sick of seeing posts from the test server players saying "we feed backed and bugged that for weeks" shortly after a game breaking bug was released to the Live servers. This is ridiculous, you have been doing it for years, fix it.

Balancing:

Stop trying to balance expansions against the top 10% of your player base. Sure give them something to do, but don't alienate the bottom 90% by making the content either too hard for them or locked behind a flagging system they will never get past. This just isn't fair and will ultimately cause the bulk of your player base to evaporate.

Fantasy:

No more fucking aliens. This is a FANTASY role playing game. If I want Aliens I will go play Star Wars.

Customer Service:

Get Some.

Fun:

There's is supposedly a scripting system that will allow dynamic events across servers. (Remember the froglok invasion of Grobb?) How about we use it?, how about a Dynamic evolving storyline that makes sense?. The Dark Elves team up with the Trolls and use orc armies to take back Grobb, in the fighting Grobb is largely destroyed. Neriak is badly dm aged as part of a Froglok Magical strike. Now the DE's, Trolls and Froggies all need a new home.

Allow players to battle each other during these events in support of one side or another. Allow non XP loss PvP in the specific zones for a period of time.

There's an entire expansion with a new playable race (Orc's) right there. Plus using a scripting system rather than just have a web site saying "oo looky a new expansion" you will have players involved in the expansion as they can take sides in the war.

SOE are the keepers of the code. Everquest has kept me entertained for 5 years, sometimes despite SOE admittedly, but I'm still here and still playing.

I would like to still be here and debating the merits of one of the 20 classes and 20 races in 5 years time. Its all up to SOE and whether they can drag this game back from the brink of death.