The Spirit Realm

From http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/news_ ... m?id=50421

Producer’s Letter – April 30, 2007

I wanted to say, "Thank You" to all of the players who had so much fun on April 1st. We threw in the new player models and had a great time putting it together for everyone to have fun with. It was a fun joke and something that many players will remember for quite some time. I can say that we did learn a lesson though; giving the players an option to disable such a feature will be included in the future. With that being said, I continue to get IM's about adding a stick figure spell which makes me laugh each time.

I have been paying quite a bit of attention to the Customer Support team as well. I know that many of the players feel that the CS team doesn't always communicate to the development team. It may not be obvious that the communication is actually constant and collaborative. I am working with the CS team and our Community team to better communicate to the players the reporting and fixing of CS related issues. The development team fixes multiple bugs each week that have been sent to us from CS and the players should know that we are listening and reacting to make your game play experience better each day. Look for new callouts of CS related fixes and make sure you submit game play issues to the CS reps. Many of the players assume that "someone" else has submitted the problem. Trust me the more reports the better!

Our team is hard at work on addressing Live game issues and working on discussing future expansions and plans. Along with the normal meetings that we have every week, we also have two meetings each year to discuss the future plans for EverQuest and create goals based on community feedback and team desires. In our last meeting the mood was different. We had a renewed passion for the game and were proposing big, exciting ideas that we didn't want to compromise on due to dates. We presented our ideas and new vision and received 100% support.

In this Producer letter I am proud to announce that we're changing our tactics so we can accomplish what we have set out to do and do it with the quality we know we can deliver. Our next expansion will be released in November. This will give us more time to polish the game content and features. I am also happy to announce that November will be the month for all future expansion releases as well. We realize that many players want more content but would like to be able to play through the last expansion before feeling like they are falling behind when a new one comes out. Our goal is to focus on the overall quality and let the players have time to enjoy the great work that we put into each release.

This is absolutely great news for our team and for our players as well. I look forward to giving everyone an inside look of the development of the next expansion so you can see the hard work going into the release.

Clint "Jourdian" Worley
EverQuest Producer
Sony Online Entertainment

While I still hope for no level increase, this does increase the odds of one.

I still don't really see a connection between "fewer, probably larger expansions" and "more frequent level cap increases". Can someone explain?

If you're consuming content so fast you must have 2 expansions per year, then just what do you plan on doing if you quit eq? Nothing else out there comes even close to amount of content and nobody else pushes it out as fast.
All the complaining about not enough content is meaningless when there's nothing out there even coming close to eq.

Very true Mr grumpy kitty. WoW would drive you nucking futs if you think EQ doesnt have enough content.

Most of my time in EQ (5 nights a week) is spent raiding, with single group and solo time mainly on the weekends. I happen to love having something challenging waiting for me almost every night when I get home from work, while the single group content is a nice change on the off nights/weekends.

What I'd really love to see with a once a year schedule is expansions that are a hybrid of PoP raid and DoN/DoD group content. Have roughly half of a large expansion set up with plentiful interesting single group content for people that prefer to spend their time there, but have several zones of increasing dificulty (including at least 1 post-Solteris level zones for the top end) to entertain the people who love to raid. Access would have to be earned by advancing through the content, but shouldn't involve a lot of mindless farming. Perhaps some quests that begin as single-group tasks/missions leading up to a good reward for casuals, but then continuing into the raid content for raiders to both tie things together and give the raiders a challenge and reward more on par with what they are looking for? There's a lot that an experienced team of devs could do right with the extra time, but I guess we'll see if they can manage to pull it off.

What is being missed is the fact that if they are offering one expansion a year then that expansion in theory can be twice as big. It would at the least be bigger then the present expansions since they have a year to work on it. The number of spells and AA's added would be a bit larger then present but not as bit as 2 expansions I would think. The mobs once you tune them can be thrown in a few other places. The raids can be more then cut and paste from past raids.

Thinking they will have no raids is crazy as a large content of the players raid at one form or another. Saying there is no raiding part to it would be like saying there is no grouping being put in and its all raid zones.

At the least this does bring hope to the fact that things won't be as rushed as they have been in the past where in the last week of beta we all pretty much give up on getting changes done during beta and wait for it to go live before any changes occur. Or get the historical total re-work from when it goes beta to live.

This plan does have promise they just need to make sure they implement it correctly.

I don't think twice as big is likely, but 50% larger than the old "large" expansions (ala DoD/TSS) doesn't really seem out of line.

That said, the "class balance" issues should, in theory be fixable -between- expansions since the devs will actually have more than two weeks between "Fixing bugs in the last expansion" and "working on the new expansion".

THAT said, I hope this isn't just marketing spin on "we're cutting EQs dev budget".

Edit: Oh, and yes, I know that Arcstone was really popular and useful in PoR, and it's still a great solo XP spot for several characters at 70 (My shaman wears the BP and arms from there and loves them) but Arcstone was pretty much it. Devastation is the zone people only go to if they need their spell from it (No real surprise considering the danger and the COMPLETE LACK OF ANY SORT OF ITEMIZATIONWTF). Takish-hiz -never- seemed to get any use except for people farming their 55 aura/trap. Elddar forest, I am convinced, most people don't even know exists.

Arcstone was a success. The rest of the XP content in PoR was a flop.

Sadly, it probably is a marketing spin on lack of financial resources to support two expansions a year. I doubt that these yearly expansions will be much bigger than current ones, they will probably have fewer people working on them.