Daybreak Sues The Heroes Journey EQ EMU Server Devs

Sachee

Sachee

Golden Squire
45
65
Old Man Potter said:
The rest of us are here to talk about vision, legacy, and what made EQ feel alive in the first place. We’re asking why two volunteers with no budget can capture the heart of Norrath better than an entire paid studio.
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just-like-that-president.gif

It's like the old story Catch Me If You Can. In the early days of internet and innovation of the empire, the hackers are hired for their creativity and innovation. In the late stage of the empire, they are prosecuted, as the corporation censors, deflects, denies, ignores, shifts blame, and displaces creativity with corporate jargon and bullshit.

It's like I said earlier in this thread. There was a time when this kind of competency, merit, and risky innovation was noticed and rewarded or learned from. In that universe, Daybreak would be approaching them to hire these guys. But they seem content to launch servers that end up being called Fan Breaker.

Notice how dead the Fangbreaker thread is. This year's TLP thread on FOH is dead in the water. Nobody's got a damn thing to even say about it good or bad. It's just vanilla whatever.
 
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F

forehead

Trakanon Raider
246
510
Imagine being a DBG dev. You finally meet some cute nerdy girl at a social event. She's excited to learn you are a real-life video game developer. She's super interested to learn more.

But now you have to figure out a way to never, ever let her actually see the product you work on. It's better for her to just think you work on some cool game with elves and stuff. But you know if she ever installed the game and created a character, she would never speak to you again.
 
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moonarchia

moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
25,782
47,843
Sachee said:
View attachment 593339
It's like the old story Catch Me If You Can. In the early days of internet and innovation of the empire, the hackers are hired for their creativity and innovation. In the late stage of the empire, they are prosecuted, as the corporation censors, deflects, denies, ignores, shifts blame, and displaces creativity with corporate jargon and bullshit.

It's like I said earlier in this thread. There was a time when this kind of competency, merit, and risky innovation was noticed and rewarded or learned from. In that universe, Daybreak would be approaching them to hire these guys. But they seem content to launch servers that end up being called Fan Breaker.

Notice how dead the Fangbreaker thread is. This year's TLP thread on FOH is dead in the water. Nobody's got a damn thing to even say about it good or bad. It's just vanilla whatever.
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General consensus was the ruleset is ass so people had no interest.
 
D

dragonbr

Trakanon Raider
28
22
Sylas said:
Ahh cool, Thanks for confirming my numbers from before, actually I was too generous, 400 players is considered "high".

So yeah, 14 servers with nothing, 7 servers with a guild full of 6 boxers on it, and 4 total servers with at least 400 accounts logged on. that's how low/med/high breaks down, thank you for posting that.

And thank you for confirming everything I said. I know you think you are making a point but you actually are proving mine. 8.6k accounts logged in, so like 2k individual players total. lets double it for prime time rather than random monday afternoon shall we? yeah, 4k players. 16k accounts. That's their peak daily totals. less than THJ. Thanks for playing
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My guy, you never once referenced 16k as their peak active daily count. You said it was 10-20k total subs, 30k daily logins was an impossibility, and 66k was signs of money laundering. It's the very thing I've tried to explain to you over and over the last 4 pages. You've honestly sort of been all over the place on what you've claimed so there's lot of avenues for you to be "correct".

Sylas said:
They have like 3k subs, all whales, spending 750 a month
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lol
Sylas said:
There's a chart of the monthly average users that shows that its around 10-20k subs, so that means the average sub is spending ~55 a month
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4 days later, still no timestamp. 🤔
Sylas said:
Daybreak had between 10-20k subscriptions as of that 2023 video (was hard to tell on the bar graph) but lets, for shits and giggles, say it was 20k subs 2 years ago, and i'd wager they attrition out 10% per year, more on years with shit TLPs like this years, but lets say 20% for the 2 years. so lets say it's now 16k subscriptions.
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So 16k total subscriptions and like 70% of them logged into the game within an hour last night? That's not how this works, at all, in any game.

There's a multitude of things that make figuring out the DAU difficult in EQ due to some servers having afk kick and others not, bazaar characters causing play session times to be skewed, same account logging into a different character when tracking chat channels ect. In games where play sessions are short, the multiplier on CCU to get DAU is usually much higher in the 5x range.

In games like EQ where actual play sessions are considerably longer than most games and then additionally skewed by the problems described above that multiplier ends up being on the extreme low end. Last nights active total was 12,551 @ 10:00PM CST, probably not the actual peak but we can run with it for the example, and 6894.8 @ 7:00am this morning. In order to account for bazaar/afk sessions that severely skew playtime per session I've removed 35% from the avg and peak.

Between those points you divide daily peak versus average (this average will not be accurate in this example with too few data points) to get peak-to-average concurrency ratio. You then get your raw multiplier using that number along with average session length.

An average of playtime sessions hitting 5 hrs gives you a multiplier 2.93, 21,735 DAU without afks, and 25,729 with. All of this is generated from purely general #'s and not trying to guess how many left the channel or are ftp. Longer the avg session fewer the DAU. I would never claim these are remotely ironclad numbers, because there's too many unknown elements but it gives a range of where DAU will fall.

Sylas said:
And no, I said they only have like 4k active players, maybe 16k active subs (down from the 20k active subs in 2023) which matches their server populations.
A 66% loss of subscribers would put them right at 20k subs as of 2023 which is what their YouTube video presentation showed. That would also put them closer to the 1.3mil revenue that matches as well.
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400 players isn't considered high. Those numbers are not including chat exits and ftp accounts where as their server status api does. High is either 750 or 1000, but it's hard to tell as there aren't enough servers in that range to get a good read. Bristlebane is an extreme outlier for whatever reason, as their new player channel was substantially bigger than compraable servers. I know this was way too much for you, and it doesn't even touch monthly numbers or how daily numbers will drastically elevate during TLP launch and expansion unlocks.

All that said, I'd assume they have lost a chunk of revenue/subs over the last 2 years. There's been some really dumbass choices the company has made and self inflicted on themselves regardless of THJ.

  • Oakwynd started off well, but had a complete collapse with the tradeskill dupe.
  • Released an absolute joke of an UI upgrade that caused much more problems than it fixed.
  • Mischief population finally started hitting low numbers after getting deep into the expansion list.
  • Teek, while a healthy server, released with the tower than turned a lot of people off. And additionally had it's own issues with disappearing krono where GM's just handed out plat to recoup player's loss, which caused the market to get out of wack immediately.
  • Launching Tormax along side Teek, which as far as I know, is probably the worst performing TLP ever.
  • Launching Fangbreaker, which I'd say isn't horrible at the moment but in the near short term I think will bleed subs massively.
  • Over the last 18 months they've been aggressively banning F2P MQ accounts, and within the last 6 have started banning paying accounts.
Most of these things have nothing to do with Live that I'm sure has it's own set of terrible problems as well.
 
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Cinge

Cinge

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
7,465
2,542
If DPG were smart, give them some kind of permission but for a cut of the profits. Because I have zero confidence in DPG doing/maintaining a THJ type server. This way it stays alive and they still get a cut for basically zero work(tons of expansions still go to , so lots of time still). The question then would be do the devs behind THJ still want to do it for less money once they had a taste of all the profits.
 
DickTrickle

DickTrickle

Definitely NOT Furor Planedefiler
13,827
16,231
There were only a maximum 6,000 lifetime subs ever given out. They haven't offered that in years. To believe everyone is just boxing lifetime sub accounts and no lifetime sub account has stopped playing is more abject silliness.
 
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D

dragonbr

Trakanon Raider
28
22
Rezz said:
Yeah it's a shitload of boxed accounts likely on lifetime subs. They're playing all kinds of fucky with the numbers for absolute certain.
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They offered lifetime subs for one month 7 years ago they sold out at 4k and then they reopened sales of them for last 10 days of the month. Before that the previous offering was like 15 years ago.
 
Izo

Izo

Tranny Chaser
20,539
26,515
forehead said:
Imagine being a DBG dev. You finally meet some cute nerdy girl at a social event. She's excited to learn you are a real-life video game developer. She's super interested to learn more.

But now you have to figure out a way to never, ever let her actually see the product you work on. It's better for her to just think you work on some cool game with elves and stuff. But you know if she ever installed the game and created a character, she would never speak to you again.
Click to expand...
IMG_2168.jpeg
 
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M

Mrniceguy

Trakanon Raider
770
430
Regime said:
Foh lawyers

what is the chance this server gets shut down?
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Honestly pretty high IMO. I think DBG thinks THJ is pulling in cash via EOM similar to a TLP of the same size so like 7 figures annually, but i don't think THJ is pulling in even 6 figures yearly and i think when DBG finds that out they might just drop the case.
 
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Sylas

Sylas

<Gold Donor>
4,557
6,376
moonarchia said:
EOMs being needed for all the useful QOL and character changing things while being 'unofficially' sold for 'donations'.
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no problem with everything else in your post, the outcome of the lawsuit is obviously a done deal, if DB was smart they would sell THJ a license to run for oh, say 70% of their monthly revenue and let them continue, but DB is fucking retards so i'm sure they will just kill the server and then let eq die off in the next 1-2 years.

but this? This part is both fake and gay. I saw one of the youtuber content creators making similar claims and he was lit the fuck up in the comments as well, this is a straight up lie.

There was literally only a single "must have" convenience item in THJ and it costs 5 EOM, that was the ability to portal to your DZ from the floating map in bazaar. (also let you port your group). Truly just a convenience ability. You only had to buy this once on your account and it unlocked on all characters. You earn on average 3-7 EOM free just leveling to 50 much less whatever the level cap is, every character, and EOM were purchasable with plat from the bazaar. There was never any requirement to donate money for EOM for anyone.

Other than this, larger bags maybe, if you didn't use the tradeskill item to make free huge bags? illusion masks? it's all cosmetic shit.

The game is designed intentionally for ppl to play lots of alts, there's tons of catchup mechanics for AA to give massive bonuses the more alts you have and more AAs they earn so you can easily level up your next character.

people were claiming class respec, AA reset, and item unattuners being sold was some mechanism to force people to need EOMs, this is an outright lie.

Those things all sold for platinum as well, and for the respecs they had built in 1 week long cooldowns, and you could only do 1 class at a time. And any time they radically altered a class, they would give out free class and AA respecs.

You were never supposed to respec all 3 of your classes to swap to the next FOTM thing, swap all your gear, etc. There's a reason why it takes 3 fucking real life weeks to do it, 1 for each class you change.

Items were all like 1pp if not BIS and BIS ended up being like 1k each a few weeks into each expansion, there was never a need to unattune gear and you were retarded if you just kept trying to play FOTM by swapping your classes around each week and resetting AAs. Leveling items was basically the content for this game. Level up something fun, get 2ks AAs in 2 days, load up with all the bis gear for like 3k pp total spent, then level up your items to legendary will clearing all the worthwhile raid content on each of your characters, repeat while hoping for good drops to sell.

Anyone who was dumb enough to donate money for EOM just so they could swap classes and do AA respecs, or some dumb shit like swap attuned gear around between their characters instead of just outfitting each character normally deserves to get milked for every cent they have, they were obviously playing the game wrong.

oh there was 1 other item that sold for pp or EOM, the combiner thing. toward the end of my time I would literally buy normal sleeper enchants and the combiner thing, spend like 50k pp, make legendary sleeper enchants and turn around and sell those for like 100-200k pp. EOM was never needed
 
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Control

Control

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
4,254
11,511
Sylas said:
if DB was smart they would sell THJ a license to run for oh, say 70% of their monthly revenue and let them continue
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So you think they should reward pirate servers by selling them a license?? Imagine selling Disney shirts until you get caught and then hoping Disney will agree to let you be an authorized distributor because you were so successful at selling counterfeit versions. No, Mickey drags you behind the shed and beats the shit out of you so none of your friends get any more funny ideas.
 
moonarchia

moonarchia

The Scientific Shitlord
25,782
47,843
Sylas said:
no problem with everything else in your post, the outcome of the lawsuit is obviously a done deal, if DB was smart they would sell THJ a license to run for oh, say 70% of their monthly revenue and let them continue, but DB is fucking retards so i'm sure they will just kill the server and then let eq die off in the next 1-2 years.

but this? This part is both fake and gay. I saw one of the youtuber content creators making similar claims and he was lit the fuck up in the comments as well, this is a straight up lie.

There was literally only a single "must have" convenience item in THJ and it costs 5 EOM, that was the ability to portal to your DZ from the floating map in bazaar. (also let you port your group). Truly just a convenience ability. You only had to buy this once on your account and it unlocked on all characters. You earn on average 3-7 EOM free just leveling to 50 much less whatever the level cap is, every character, and EOM were purchasable with plat from the bazaar. There was never any requirement to donate money for EOM for anyone.

Other than this, larger bags maybe, if you didn't use the tradeskill item to make free huge bags? illusion masks? it's all cosmetic shit.

The game is designed intentionally for ppl to play lots of alts, there's tons of catchup mechanics for AA to give massive bonuses the more alts you have and more AAs they earn so you can easily level up your next character.

people were claiming class respec, AA reset, and item unattuners being sold was some mechanism to force people to need EOMs, this is an outright lie.

Those things all sold for platinum as well, and for the respecs they had built in 1 week long cooldowns, and you could only do 1 class at a time. And any time they radically altered a class, they would give out free class and AA respecs.

You were never supposed to respec all 3 of your classes to swap to the next FOTM thing, swap all your gear, etc. There's a reason why it takes 3 fucking real life weeks to do it, 1 for each class you change.

Items were all like 1pp if not BIS and BIS ended up being like 1k each a few weeks into each expansion, there was never a need to unattune gear and you were retarded if you just kept trying to play FOTM by swapping your classes around each week and resetting AAs. Leveling items was basically the content for this game. Level up something fun, get 2ks AAs in 2 days, load up with all the bis gear for like 3k pp total spent, then level up your items to legendary will clearing all the worthwhile raid content on each of your characters, repeat while hoping for good drops to sell.

Anyone who was dumb enough to donate money for EOM just so they could swap classes and do AA respecs, or some dumb shit like swap attuned gear around between their characters instead of just outfitting each character normally deserves to get milked for every cent they have, they were obviously playing the game wrong.

oh there was 1 other item that sold for pp or EOM, the combiner thing. toward the end of my time I would literally buy normal sleeper enchants and the combiner thing, spend like 50k pp, make legendary sleeper enchants and turn around and sell those for like 100-200k pp. EOM was never needed
Click to expand...
Congratulations, you just described the business model of every gacha game out there. You're not forced to donate for the nice QOL features or pretty glams, but you are highly incentivized to.
 
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