Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Nirgon said:

It's a weird version of something for sure. See you on the pvp shard I hope.

Rather give my money to a true mmo startup than Bobby's Dirty McDonalds of Horror.

Zinc and others have contributed to 2477 pages of emotional investment, and counting.

See you launch day.

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Honestly? I hope they succeed. But you know where I stand on that likelihood.

Chris said:

Yeah I haven't played any of these games (Everquest, Vanguard, Pantheon) but this is what I have gleaned from reading these threads:

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Pantheon:

Chris said:

Thanks for the reply. So how much of EQ was actually because of Brad and what was he responsible for?

Sounds like an Ion situation where an excellent raid designer was promoted beyond his competence to company leadership.

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Most credit for the actual work and success should go to Steve Clover and Bill Trost with spell design going to Zatkin.

dizzie said:

Brad and co hit lightning in a bottle with EQ. Afterwards he became King Midas in reverse, everything he touched turned to shit. He became a pill popping junky and blamed a lot of his failings on other things. Vanguard had a lot of drama whilst it was in development and after the game was released. It was a good game in many ways but ran like shite and was completely unfinished at launch. He burned through all the earmarked development cash way earlier than anticipated due to shitty financial management, even Microsoft ended up telling him to get to fuck. They have very deep pockets and could have quite easily forked over more cash to complete the game if Sigil had managed it properly.

I'm not even sure that the good things about Vanguard were actually down to Brad, by that point he was nicking pills from people at work by all accounts.

It is pretty sad, but it's a tale we see all the time with addicts who don't have the fortitude to face their demons/addiction and seek professional help. EQ's success was probably the worst fucking thing that happened to the guy in the end, it clearly enabled his addiction financially and mentally.

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Almost NONE of the folks who worked on EQ went on to do "great things". It could be argued that maybe Hartsman did, but that's literally about where it ends.

EQ was a whole metric shitload of "we accidently". Don't get me wrong, a lot of it was a VERY unknown space at the time, so it made sense that EQ was rife with issues in its own right. But, decades later? Very few of these guys are still in the industry at all, some of them are working in grocery stores, etc. That's pretty telling as to how much "talent' they really had.

EQ was basically a D&D campaign among a bunch of mega nerds that all played MUDs together and had the thought, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could play this in 3D?!". Fortunately, Brad ran into Smed. I still believe Smed is 99% of the reason EQ existed at all and continued to exist for years after its shelf-life had basically "expired".

BoozeCube said:

One think we tend to forget around here is that at it's very very tippy top peak Everquest had about 500k players at the pinnacle of success. That shit is a tiny tiny fucking number, while it had quite the impact on those of us here. This game was never a giant success.

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I just don't get how EQ made the money that it did. I know that Smed had worked in profit sharing for most of the folks there at the time, but with only 500k subscribers (and these were the days of mostly $9.95/m subs, later increasing to $12.95, between Luclin and when they hit their "peak" sometime around Ykesha), considering your overhead, no MTX, very little merchandising, etc. I still don't get how Brad was able to race around in Ferraris and shit.

On top of all this, it basically ALSO funded the development of EQ2, Planetside, SW: Galaxies, all the shit MMOs they gobbled up like The Matrix, Pirates of the Burning Sea, etc. (including all the failures like EQNext, Sovereign, etc.) . I really don't get how - even if you were paying your employees like absolute shit (and most accounts from that period say that while they weren't paid extremely well, it wasn't exactly slave wages either).

Ravishing said:

1 expansion a year at retail pricing back then was another $60 / yr per subscriber. So that's 30 million just in box pricing.

$120 / yr for each subscriber is another 60 million.

Most of the dev team likely got paid peanuts, just like today.

Easy for the top execs to get a huge sum.

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Except you aren't clearing 90 million in profit - there's still a ton of overhead and EQ didn't have a MASSIVE team, but it was pretty fucking big, especially for the time. Also, I'm pretty sure I remember expansions being $40-50 at the time? And I seem to recall Ykesha being only $20-30 because of its size and their whole "online" distribution at the time being a big marketing ploy for that time period.

And from most accounts they didn't get paid peanuts. Shawn Lord has talked about how they were actually paid decently and like I said - profit sharing was also baked in. From interviews, it sounds like only Customer Service people were paid "peanuts".

Kirun said:

I just don't get how EQ made the money that it did. I know that Smed had worked in profit sharing for most of the folks there at the time, but with only 500k subscribers (and these were the days of mostly $9.95/m subs, later increasing to $12.95, between Luclin and when they hit their "peak" sometime around Ykesha), considering your overhead, no MTX, very little merchandising, etc. I still don't get how Brad was able to race around in Ferraris and shit.

On top of all this, it basically ALSO funded the development of EQ2, Planetside, SW: Galaxies, all the shit MMOs they gobbled up like The Matrix, Pirates of the Burning Sea, etc. (including all the failures like EQNext, Sovereign, etc.) . I really don't get how - even if you were paying your employees like absolute shit (and most accounts from that period say that while they weren't paid extremely well, it wasn't exactly slave wages either).

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Yeah it was a different model. We didn't see content patches with EQ - just some live events. Once an expansion was sold, investment went into the next expansion which was gated with artificial bugs anyway to increase the time it would take to get to end game of said expansion, as the previous was populated by a minimal live staff given 2 months to make work as everyone leveled up to get there - but that revenue when not concentrating on content patches can add up to be profitable as a result. EQ also had 95% of their customer service being volunteers as Guides/Senior Guides. Guides were like front line workers at call centers. And most of the time (I'm sure a lot of us were guides) we would file reports on behavior, provide a 100% rez if their corpse was at the safe zone (Where all CS/Guides would spawn when they would use the /zone command) and guides were the live event actors up to and including the troupe idea they had around the tail end of SoV. Very rarely was a petition escalated that a guide couldn't handle. Apprentice guides would funnel green to guides, and if a guide couldn't handle it (Lost item or something) only then would it hit a paid Customer Service rep - that's a large amount of cost savings.

On average at peak you were looking at 66 million a year in sub revenue - full box sale of the expansion (21 Mil a year) and obviously cheap labor for Customer Service (95% volunteer - but given a free sub and free expacs) and much lower development costs at the time compared to now on an engine they modified and owned and didn't have to pay licensing costs on (Tanarus). Much cheaper art - and very little changing development until instancing came in in LDON. Average game development costs including marketing back in 2000-2002 hovered between 1.25 to 4 million on a 12-36 month dev cycle.

Very easily profitable given the time frame and business layout they had.

Utnayan said:

Yeah it was a different model. We didn't see content patches with EQ - just some live events. Once an expansion was sold, investment went into the next expansion which was gated with artificial bugs anyway to increase the time it would take to get to end game of said expansion, as the previous was populated by a minimal live staff given 2 months to make work as everyone leveled up to get there - but that revenue when not concentrating on content patches can add up to be profitable as a result. EQ also had 95% of their customer service being volunteers as Guides/Senior Guides. Guides were like front line workers at call centers. And most of the time (I'm sure a lot of us were guides) we would file reports on behavior, provide a 100% rez if their corpse was at the safe zone (Where all CS/Guides would spawn when they would use the /zone command) and guides were the live event actors up to and including the troupe idea they had around the tail end of SoV.

On average at peak you were looking at 66 million a year in sub revenue - full box sale of the expansion (21 Mil a year) and obviously cheap labor for Customer Service (95% volunteer - but given a free sub and free expacs) and much lower development costs at the time compared to now on an engine they modified and owned and didn't have to pay licensing costs on (Tanarus). Much cheaper art - and very little changing development until instancing came in in LDON.

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Yeah, fair enough. I guess that makes sense for Brad's situation too, since he was basically gone by the time Luclin was out of concept phase and actually being developed - which is right around the time they started getting a little more "serious" as a company in terms of development, toolsets, team size, etc.

This game looks good. Nirgon what class you gonna roll?

Nirgon said:

Depends what the pals are rollin. Wizard is usually a good first class in a Bradquest. I like ports.

Convince those worms who conspired against you to correctly update the thread name.

Ppl is maaad.

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Think I’m gonna be a human dire lord.

This is pretty tempting… If I pledge 10k I get to help them make a dungeon or raid. Imagine you all playing a dungeon/raid that I made.