Originally Posted by Pink Poodle

First off, Gaia Online is failing. Second, SOE now owns PoxNora.

Also GameInformer is sold [read: nagged until you buy it] by GameStop employees. Yeah...

Originally Posted by Blanka

...half the time I fail.

Originally Posted by Sylvanking

EQ2 was totally broken at release.


SOEs greed has destroyed any chance of a recovery.


WoW catered to the masses.


Did I miss anything ?

Originally Posted by Blanka

...half the time I fail.

Originally Posted by Traxor

SoE owns Vanguard.

Anyone else feel to derail and name off all the shitty games soe makes?

Originally Posted by Pink Poodle

who is them

Originally Posted by Aeren

Please don't post this on the official forums. If you really want to make a difference, write something convincing.

Don't take it personally. Some people just write better than others.

Originally Posted by Corto

Not to defend Aeralickckck, but I hope someone writes to the papers and puts your real name in there and tells them how much you suck at what you do.

Originally Posted by Diknak

Second, if you plan on writing a well thought out essay and posting, you need to make your objectives very clear. Your thesis is that the game is losing its uniqueness, but then go on a rant about RMT. Stick to your point and if you think that those projects removed uniqueness, then say why, instead of just saying that RMT sucks.

I don't mind LoN, and I hated Station Cash, but they don't back up your point. The spell name change isn't changing a core functionality of the game. I don't think that it removes uniqueness, but if you think it does, you need to explain why.

Originally Posted by Kantaris

Also, I don't know what community college you went to, but an an essay should be like 5+ pages, not 2 tiny paragraphs.

Originally Posted by Niber

That's another point I neglected to bring up in my first post. The thesis declares that; "the owners and playerbase" are what make EQ2 unique. Yet, the whole essay is not built on that premise, instead it contradicts itself by later proclaiming class individualism is what makes EQ2 unique. Which is it? The playerbase? Or class individualism?

I, like you, also found no correlation between spell name consolidation and class uniqueness. It doesn't matter if it's fireball and firebolt or fireball I and fireball II, to me the class still remains unchanged in its functionality.

I realize I'm kicking a dead dog by critiquing this mess, but it's so bad that I cant help myself.



I'll look into getting that for you, but individual rights aren't easy. You might be better served posting an update and I can change the OP.

Originally Posted by Diknak

QFE. RoK was the real turning point of the game imo. Before, leveling was a healthy combination between soloing and grouping. Post RoK, it is solo until max level then farm instances for gear. Until they nerf soloing or give a significant reason to dungeon crawl without quests, they are never going fix the risk/reward system. People have no reason to group at low levels because they will lose out on AAs.

If you want to write an essay that goes beyond contestation, you need to write about how the screwed up risk vs reward, especially while leveling.

Originally Posted by Stormsinger

Um... the reason SOE has implemented these things is because they don't make enough money off of subscriptions, they have money problems. This is one of the first good things they have done for the sake of this game alone because it will allow them to spend more money on making it suck less. They need to do MORE of this, because the more money they make the better they can make the game AND eventually they can even fucking advertise.

I agree with alot of the other things you've said, but SOE needs to make enough money to keep this game going and maybe even increase the player base, and that's not going to happen with them sitting around trying not to offend your roleplay experience. Think about the last 10 game updates, and think about how so many of them just made this game more like WoW.

Now I don't like WoW, I think it's too simple and too easy but it is succesful for some reasons, and one of the biggest ones is that they advertise, and another is that they've found out how to make insanely massive heaping piles of money off of their subscribers.

Originally Posted by gandulfy

You have titled your essay
"To the Developers of Sony Online Entertainment's "Everquest II""

So therefore I read this imagining that I was a developer for EQ2, and I have to say I got nothing out of it. The points are light to say the least, there is no large underlining point that is being gotten at. In general it seems like a mesh of things that you currently think hurt the game. You need to explain why your writing the essay and then give proving points to your general thesis.

Outside of that, I don't really agree with alot you say. EQ2 has been around 5 years alot of things have happened in that time to cause players to leave. I mean I know TONS of people that quit the game on release because it was super buggy compared to WoW, so they just went to WoW at the time. And now have no reason to come back to EQ2. And not all of us thought KOS was "great" either.

Originally Posted by Mockingbird

WTB Thesis

Originally Posted by Pokie

Negative attention is still attention.

Originally Posted by Rampagious

You could just say that you are an attention hungry faggot in place of your age every time you post.

Originally Posted by Kriptini

This is a work-in-progress essay that I eventually plan on uploading to the official forums for everyone to see. I'd appreciate any feedback anyone might have, especially if it helps to improve the points I make in this essay.
----------------------

Let's start this off with a little riddle, shall we? What are the differences between Maplestory, Fly For Fun, Runescape, Combat Arms, Drift City, Gaia Online, Ragnarok Online, Puzzle Pirates, Toontown Online, ArchLord, Forumwarz, PoxNora, and Everquest II? Give up? The answer is simple: The owners and the playerbase.

Ever since Legends of Norrath was released, Everquest II has had its ups and downs with game additions, but until the recent release of The Shadow Odyssey expansion pack, it hasn't made too big of an impact on the playerbase. Around three years ago, Everquest II made took the second position on the Top 10 List of MMORPGs in the magazine, Game Informer. Today, Everquest II is mentioned in Game Informer as "...not living up to its immense hype, but using publisher and fan support to continually refine the game and serve its fans well." (Issue 193, May 2009, pg. 24) But do we really refer to refinement as having the "Mechanics Guy" preview some new content to the community, only to have it shot down by 90% of the playerbase and creating a flame war so bad that the senior producer has to step in and cancel the entire project?

On another note, what's with all the real-life money to in-game item transactions? These, more than any other additions to the game, are causing Everquest II to sail dangerously close to the Ocean of Generic MMORPGs. At first, Legends of Norrath caused the game to elevate to a "borderline" status, where buying in-game items with real-life money had a chance (but no guarentee) of receiving in-game bonus items for another game. But with the recent addition of the Station Cash feature, it now seems like the plan is to skip the middle man entirely and just have people spending real-life money on in-game items with less than fifteen clicks of the mouse.

What still seperates us from becoming a wholesome generic MMO, then? Two things, one of which is the core of the game itself (whether intended or not): Pay-to-play subscriptions, and 24 unique classes.

Attempting to balance and improve 24 different classes is an impossible task, but it is definately the bragging right of Everquest II, whether or not it was intended to be. But even with something so small as universal spell name changes, a little part of this core piece of the game dies.

Perhaps the single greatest achievement this MMORPG has ever seen was the release of the expansion, Kingdom of Sky, and the live update that came with it. Among the many changes brought about, we finally created a major difference between each class's counterpart (especially Illusionists and Coercers) and the ability to start out as your final profession added even more beautiful variety to the game.

Developers of Everquest II, I implore you to recollect the original vision you had for this game, and to be more cautious of implementing additions that will cause Everquest II to hop on the bandwagon of MMOs racing down the long road to ruin.

Kriptini Llusion
Veteran Player
-----------------------------

Also, I e-mailed the writer of the Game Informer article. If his response contains anything that can help prove my point, I'll be sure to add it in. A copy of my e-mail can be found attatched.

Originally Posted by Locke

Some constructive criticism:

1) Your opening paragraph does not contribute in a way that enhances my understanding for the point that you are trying to make in the essay.

2) The Body of the essay seems to have ideas that are loosely strung together that do not guide the reader towards a point that you want to make.

3) In the end, remember that developers change and that most of them and that the romanticizing 'the vision' does not help when it remains a vague floating idea in the MMO collective psyche.

Comments aside of the constructive criticism:

- I read the vision, it became Vanguard. The original launch of EQ2 was the closest incarnation of 'the vision' that I read.

- I'm likely the only person that will ever understand the extent of the mechanics disaster EQ2 was at launch. It was a political environment back then and I had to tread lightly until the climate settled and I landed in combat mechanics May-June of 2005 (following the 'boat tutorial' and new itemization diversity rules) to pull LU13/DoF, through KoS/EoF. Not everyone is a coffee drinking, sushi inhaling, 80-100 hours/week, roll out of bed and drive 1 mile to work, then back just to sleep and repeat, overachieving obsessive-compulsive/perfectionistic personality with a personal mission to fix and balance everything that also happened to play the game in a raiding guild. I hit the ground running, starting the week before that I had to talk at Fan Faire about upcoming changes, and 4 months out to DoF. Prior to LU13, most devs did not have an interest in playing the game and only one or two other devs than me had a level 50, thus the team (at the time) as a whole were largely unaware of the specific interactions causing the problems, but everyone knew that there were severe problems at launch.

I was given carte blanche to fix/balance the classes and all abilities by my supervisor after I brought up that I wanted to do a combat revamp (original discussion prior to my involvement was to fix mitigation/resists only). There is no armchair design; anything I wanted to change had to be done by me on my own time. How I justified working though mostly voluntary hours through fixing and making changes nobody even knew were issues in the first place; I believed deeply at the time that putting myself in that position would save EQ2 in the long-run from steep bleeding post-launch and benefit everyone in the company and the fans that were loyal to the game. New talent and changes in team structure also arrived and contributed to the changes in zone populations, quests, encounters, raids, and storyline at that time. Rather altruistic thing to do, and something I would never put myself in a position again. Balance was just one of the things I worked on, much of my work went into expansion planning, mechanics functionality, and ultimately achievement design KoS-EoF. I left the 24 classes in as balanced of a state with an identity for what I could reasonably achieve with the time that I had available for them before I left and that also met the demands of other team members (such as Enchanter control limitations I had to work with).