SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown
- Thread starter Laerazi_sl
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Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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If you filter out the references to Smedley, this is what's left. Are you sure you are not blaming the devs? If you want to put the blame on the middle management that kept pushing their pet projects, you should not include lines like the second half of that quote.
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In recent years the gaming industry has managed to actively run EQ, Mass Effect, Dawn of War and various other long lasting franchises into the ground.
Its not that these franchises fell out of favor with consumers, or that the concepts became outdated, people were asking for "more of the same", but the people working on these projects decided that consumers are idiots, and went through a great deal of work to not give people what they wanted.
The progression servers are probably the biggest source of revenue EQ1 has, the game might even be in beter shape if they could somehow rollback the last 15ish years of development.
Pretty strong indicator of the quality of work delivered.
Its not that these franchises fell out of favor with consumers, or that the concepts became outdated, people were asking for "more of the same", but the people working on these projects decided that consumers are idiots, and went through a great deal of work to not give people what they wanted.
The progression servers are probably the biggest source of revenue EQ1 has, the game might even be in beter shape if they could somehow rollback the last 15ish years of development.
Pretty strong indicator of the quality of work delivered.
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Yea, GoD was an awesome expansion - everyone loved it, people were just tired of EQ.
Wait no, GoD was terrible, which caused a mass exodus towards WoW, on top of that SoE managed to cannibalize what was left of EQ1s playerbase later in 2004, by launching EQ2, which simply wasn't a sequel to EQ1, a huge mistake by itself.
Launching a shitty product in the same year your competition is launching their new game, and cannibalizing your own playerbase, in the same year .. its actually amazing EQ1 survived 2004, despite SoEs retarded moves.
In hindsight I can only conclude that SoE wanted to kill EQ1 by launching GoD in the way they did, hoping everyone would move over to EQ2 so they could focus on that game .. but of course the core game of EQ2 didn't appeal to the hardcore EQ1 crew .. which happened to be the people that bothered to struggle through GoD, so that plan failed, and they ended up with two games with a low-medium population, neither game deserving the investments necessary to compete with WoW.
That, or they were just actually full retard.
E Elidroth I'm actually curious about your view on these events, perhaps it wasn't all bad?
It absolutely didn't, notice how progression servers are still very popular these days.
The EQ of 2004 ran out of favor due to above reasons .. EQ itself did not.
Wait no, GoD was terrible, which caused a mass exodus towards WoW, on top of that SoE managed to cannibalize what was left of EQ1s playerbase later in 2004, by launching EQ2, which simply wasn't a sequel to EQ1, a huge mistake by itself.
Launching a shitty product in the same year your competition is launching their new game, and cannibalizing your own playerbase, in the same year .. its actually amazing EQ1 survived 2004, despite SoEs retarded moves.
In hindsight I can only conclude that SoE wanted to kill EQ1 by launching GoD in the way they did, hoping everyone would move over to EQ2 so they could focus on that game .. but of course the core game of EQ2 didn't appeal to the hardcore EQ1 crew .. which happened to be the people that bothered to struggle through GoD, so that plan failed, and they ended up with two games with a low-medium population, neither game deserving the investments necessary to compete with WoW.
That, or they were just actually full retard.
E Elidroth I'm actually curious about your view on these events, perhaps it wasn't all bad?
It absolutely didn't, notice how progression servers are still very popular these days.
The EQ of 2004 ran out of favor due to above reasons .. EQ itself did not.
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Malakriss
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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GoD came out well before WoW's launch, OoW was the one that finished murdering the population as they raised the level cap to 70, focus scaled all the gear that raid guilds worked for, and then butchered grouping with how hard shit hit plus made everything summon.
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Agreed on OoW being a great expansion, it released one month before WoW did but the GoD damage was already done.
Reht
Molten Core Raider
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Since there is some 'fuzziness' on dates, here's the timeline for that era:
- Gates of Discord launch - Feb 10, 04
- WoW Beta - Feb 04 - can't find confirm-able date beyond Feb.
- Guildleader Summit - Jun 5-7ish, 04
- Omens of War launch - Sep 14, 04
- Everquest 2 launch - Nov 8, 04
- WoW launch - Nov 23, 04 (NA/AUS)
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uniqueuser
Vyemm Raider
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Probably because AR is an even shittier gimmick than VR when it comes to actual games.
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pharmakos
soʞɐɯɹɐɥd
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ZyyzYzzy
RIP USA
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Yep wasn't GoD originally planned to raise the level cap to 70?
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Reht
Molten Core Raider
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pharmakos
soʞɐɯɹɐɥd
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and rushed out the door by "corporate" or w/e rather than letting the developers give it the attention it deserved.
really, most players were casuals and still working their way through Luclin... hadn't even breached PoP yet when GoD came out. they were fools for not just riding out PoP for a bit.
Melvin
Blackwing Lair Raider
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That's only half of the truth though, the rest of the story is even sleazier. GoD was deliberately pushed out earlier than the actual content developers were ready for because the bean counters still had massive hards on from being able to milk people for so much money with LoY and LDoN. SOE realized people would pay for (less than) half of an expansion, so they cut the next expansion in half and charged people for it twice.
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Rolling back 15 years is precisely what the emus are doing, yet the official TLPs get all the play. For the life of me I can't understand this.
I'll spend 10 hours to parse statistics on a single NPC while Daybreak could merely pull up anything they need from Al'Kabor's source in minutes.
Daybreak slaps 'mitigation of the mighty' effects on raid bosses instead of taking the time to do things like implementing classic skill caps, monk fist damage, spell damage etc. Frankly calling this half-assed would be generous, yet they get plenty of subscribers. The two best emus are far more accurate and classic yet the best PoP emu hasn't broken 300 CCU. I can only conclude that players don't give a shit about mechanics accuracy. That or they don't genuinely want a classic experience and insist on instancing and mousewheel, even at the cost of putting up with all the unclassic behavior they don't like.
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