Daybreak Sues The Heroes Journey EQ EMU Server Devs

Regime said:

Where’s all the THJ guys going now the server is down?

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Back to playing single player games, outside of the tests for Monsters and Memories and Adrullan Online. I stopped playing THJ a month+ before the lawsuit even dropped though (was done with PoP and would have played again once they moved onto the next xpac).

GuardianX said:

Why not just make the leap to Monsters and memories when it releases? It won't ever be EQ, thats the point though.

You also have "Adrullan Online Adventures" in the works, and even though it has MC graphics, the world is amazingly fun.

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I get nostalgia but the EQ that most of us grew up on is dead, long dead, the company milks it every so often for people that haven't figured out it's dead.

TLP's are filled with Boxers, Botters, and Krono lords. "Server First" races are filled with exploits and bug abuse. Nearly every "Hardcore" guild or even "Normal" guilds are filled with so many autismo's it's insane.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe those reasons are the reasons you all play "Live".

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I’m not saying it’s bad but I feel like MnM is the opposite direction of what made this server popular and doesn’t make much sense as a THJ alternative.

I am just playing Erenshor. Quite similiar in a way to solo EQ.

Fight said:

Jchan might have been the most essential employee at one point, but to make her the leader of the entire EQ1 franchise tells you just how clueless, desperate, and pathetic the owners of EQ are.

Daybreak gutting THJ is a straight up bitch move. DB could have worked with THJ, they could have brought them into the fold and made money, created an EQ resurgence, and even learned from their passion and skill. Instead, they just killed them.

Jchan, you are the the leader, this is on you. You want to stifle innovation, creativity, passion, and take your ball and go home? Then this is probably the end of your pathetic career in gaming. You killed a 26 year franchise with millions of fans. Congratulations...

EQ died in 2025 and Brad would not be proud of sloppy, embarrassing, incompetent, and greedy people that brought the franchise to its end.

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Back when I was TLPing on Lockjaw, Jchan was known as the "good dev", because almost all their devs were crap. We'd have SOE/DBG tell us "we can't create a login queue you just have to suffer through nonstop login server crashes." Then Jchan posts "actually I can probably make a login queue." She had it made within literally 1 day and pushed to production.

She was one of the few competent engineers on that team, but it's kind of a meme in the software world that your best engineer is often not a good candidate for management, they are different skillsets. Holly wasn't particularly technical, and I bitched about Holly regularly when she was in charge, but she was way better with at least trying to get stuff done the customers actually wanted, Jchan seems to have that engineer's arrogance that the customer is always wrong, and it's reflected in how they make decisions.

They basically mocked the experienced TLP guild leaders who were telling them in official Discord Fangbreaker was a DOA ruleset, they ignored almost all feedback and barreled ahead.

Holly is good at talking with people and bridging the gap between the autistic retards that play the game (like us here), the autistic weirdos that develop the game (like Jchan) and selling it to the higher ups to make it make sense for everyone.

I never got into the WoWC stuff but Holly's job with WoW is a lot easier than her job with EQ, due to WoW just being a much more profitable / successful game. If a random person ran Microsoft for a year I doubt they'd do a good job, but it also wouldn't cause the company to bankrupt because big successful enterprises kind of run themselves to a point.

The big difference between EQ and WoW in general, business wise--EQ is purely what I would call a legacy product. There is nothing that can ever be done to grow it again. Even things people here praise like THJ were just tapping in to "ancient nostalgia", that isn't a recipe for genuine growth. The best EQ can ever do is to slow its decline (through natural attrition, sometimes literally because their players are dying of old age), there's nothing there in the base EQ engine that is going to ever be the foundation for some big explosive growth.

How long it lasts is hard to say--games with way more active subs than EQ1 have been shut down (see: Wild Star), and games that appear to be nigh-empty still operate: DAoC, Age of Conan etc. They've proven with EQ2 they can scale the staff down to a skeleton level and still make a profit, eventually the math doesn't math and that won't be the case but EQ2 has a much smaller player base. Expect it to go away before EQ1 stops development. Even in that case, you'd probably see a process where EQ2 is left open but they announce they won't be releasing new expansions. Then years later it finally shutters. At that point EQ1 would likely be in danger of having new development pulled from it, but even once that happens it could still exist for years and years. DAoC and Age of Conan haven't received content updates in like a decade, but still receive security / bug patches and are still open to subscribers.

WoW has enough money behind it, that it can still actually do things to grow its player base and even bring in people who have never played it before. It's probably never going to be back to its 12m subscriber peak or whatever it was, but when WoW lands a decent expansion it actually can push big growth in sales, EQ just isn't able to do that.

Maybe some other game company could take the EQ IP and make a successful game with it, but in spite of my own EQ nostalgia I'm skeptical the IP is really that amazing, if you take away your personal nostalgia for the game EQ1 is the IP equivalent of any number of generic home D&D campaigns people make, it isn't some great narrative.

I think you're wrong about THJ just tapping into nostalgia. To some degree yes, but I've played EQ (up to like OoW/Don only) for like 20+ years and THJ captured something more than nostalgia for me. Well at least I think it did because I've been doing the same content for 2 decades.

THJ tapped into the casual dads... thats why quarm is a success, that's why faceless guilds are a success. thats why wow is a success (and thats why M&M will not be a success)

Okay boomers

servers down yet?

Sieger said:

They basically mocked the experienced TLP guild leaders who were telling them in official Discord Fangbreaker was a DOA ruleset, they ignored almost all feedback and barreled ahead.

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“What we don't want to do is instance raids, which is what casuals want us to do because they want to fight Nagafen. Casuals shouldn't be allowed to fight Nagafen… that diminishes the achievement of others." - Holly Longdale

Holly wasn't good either.

The reaction to THJ's closure will only encourage companies to crack down harder on all emulated servers so they don't become popular enough to create another PR problem. People react negatively to having things taken away from them, but if there were nothing given to them in the first place they won't know what they've missed to be angry about.

THJ fucked all emus by doing this. They spit on all the EQEmu devs who contributed for free by taking that much money. The more they resist in court the more it motivates game companies to crack down on private servers immediately, particularly ones with any custom content. This is already scaring other admins away from making or keeping up servers. It's absurd to make the argument that Daybreak doesn't defend their IP while they're defending their IP. Sony and Daybreak have been more generous to fan servers than Blizzard has, but THJ put them in a difficult position. The conclusion they will take from this little protest isn't "gee we should have let it stay up", it's "gee we should have stopped this sooner".

Yeah good job supporting that total retard or buying stuff if you did, I tried to tell you