Yeah this is 2020 and we will skip 2019 to hopefully get more people there.
Those of you completely uninterested in the Everquest portion feel free to vote if you want to come to FireCon.
I am completely torn on this subject.
On one hand, I put a good 17 years of my life in to EverQuest, and it holds nostalgia strings to my heart that are damn near impossible to sever.
On the other hand, I the last round of TLP servers was the straw that broke the camel's back for me with DBG. I feel that the current management has run EverQuest in to the ground so far that they are about to pop out the other side of the planet.
Out of the two decades this game has been running, they have put most of the profits from EverQuest in to other projects like EQ2 and H1Z1 rather than putting it back in to EQ, and it infuriates me. I mean just fucking go install a new copy of EverQuest today, and you will see that the installer is so old that it still tries to install BING BAR on your computer. I mean really? BING? Jesus Christ. They haven't bothered to revamp the character models since Shadows of Luclin, and the game client is so insanely old that it doesn't even scale for HD monitors which at this point are old technology with everybody doing 4k now.
So, yeah I am damned glad to see them putting any effort in to EQ like bringing Fanfaire back, but at the same time, the current DBG management has not shown that they truly give one flying fuck about EverQuest and it's customers. It's almost too little too late.
On that note, the customer service is anything but service. It's more akin to customer disservice. The insanely rampant botting going on across all of their servers, and rather than policing their servers to get rid of these bottom feeding dung heaps, they instead give temporary bans to the honest players that train the bots. What message are you sending to your customers when you ban the honest player and do nothing to the cheaters?
Besides, I have been ultra critical of DBG and their management crew over the years, and I tend to think they wouldn't even let me in the door at Fanfaire anymore because of it lol.
I pray that some company who gives a fuck buys EQ eventually, but I doubt it will ever happen.