SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

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Abazagaroth

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Elidroth, I'm sure I gave you some shit over the years, but I always appreciated that if you were given a rational argument with factual backing, you would either make a requested change, or something to address the issue, or would clearly state if you disagreed with the balance premise or if it couldn't be done.

I can't stand Prathun, Aristo, or Ngreth as eq developers, not in particular due to the content they make or decisions they made, not them as people, but because of how they flat out ignored players, ignored facts, and were seemingly more interested in doing what they wanted versus what players wanted.

Absor I always liked, for the same reason. You send him a PM with some actual info or relevant feedback, he answers. Do beta with him, he took your feedback versus just used you to test mechanics of the script. With a game like EQ, where the players often know the game better than the devs (not the code of course, but the content), ignoring feedback in favor of some ideal you have is not a great idea.
 
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Regime

Regime

LOADING, PLEASE WAIT...
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pharmakos said:
this woman?

350px-MargaretKrohn.jpg


dude she's gorgeous
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Luperza was cool. She hosted our Future Crew outfit quite a bit. She, Higby, and TRay would hang out with us at that shitty PB? bar with the mechanic bull. Smedster even would pop in to talk shit about Future Crew/AC killing him.

The Fan Faires were a blast especially when you or your clan won money at them.
 
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pharmakos

pharmakos

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Abazagaroth said:
Elidroth, I'm sure I gave you some shit over the years, but I always appreciated that if you were given a rational argument with factual backing, you would either make a requested change, or something to address the issue, or would clearly state if you disagreed with the balance premise or if it couldn't be done.

I can't stand Prathun, Aristo, or Ngreth as eq developers, not in particular due to the content they make or decisions they made, not them as people, but because of how they flat out ignored players, ignored facts, and were seemingly more interested in doing what they wanted versus what players wanted.

Absor I always liked, for the same reason. You send him a PM with some actual info or relevant feedback, he answers. Do beta with him, he took your feedback versus just used you to test mechanics of the script. With a game like EQ, where the players often know the game better than the devs (not the code of course, but the content), ignoring feedback in favor of some ideal you have is not a great idea.
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welcome to the board, man.
 
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Schags

Schags

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Elidroth said:
Honestly, nothing would have happened if they'd pumped money into EQ. IT WAS AN OLD GAME. People are fickle.. So many people want pretty over good. EQ could have the best gameplay mechanics ever in a game, and a subset of people would still not play it because it's ugly by today's standards.

The other problem is EQ was developed when nobody had a clue HOW to engineer a game for scalability or reasonable updates. They were shooting from the hip the entire time. I tell people this all the time.. To make major changes to EQ is an effort beyond description. Unless you've worked on EQ, and seen HOW the game gets made, you simply can't understand the difficulty of doing basically anything in the game. Simply putting an NPC into the world required entries into 7 different database tables, usually done with Excel. Before I joined the team, you couldn't export that data into the zone without preventing everyone else from doing the same thing. Here's an example.. I put a couple NPCs into a zone, and export the zone so those NPCs appear. In the early days of EQ, that export would take HOURS, sometimes DAYS to complete depending upon the amount of data involved. I'm not making excuses, just explaining how insane the game was to work on back then. The work the engineers put into making that easier over the years has been incredible. Oh, and when I first joined, if you made spell changes, and exported the spell files, NOBODY could log into the game until servers were restarted, because the system would see you had a different version of the spells file than on the system, and prevent you from logging in.

Every expansion made it even harder. People asked, "Why don't you upgrade EQ's graphics engine?" as if somehow a new engine would make the zones, character art, weapons, spells, etc update as well. EQ has over 1,000 unique zones now.. The amount of work to update it could simply never be recouped financially. Anyone remember the DX9 update? A HUGE percentage of the player base suddenly couldn't play the game at all because of performance. Granted, those people were playing on crap computers, but that's not relevant to them. One day they can play, the next day, they're getting 3-5 FPS. That's a REALLY good way for people to say, "Fuck off" and quit your game.
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Including all the tribal knowledge that was never documented. I shit you not, some fields on a monster def, if you put a -1 in, it did some complete different shit that you would never know about unless told. I remember working on the expansion that added tasks and the designer who was making that system had to basically update every zone in the game. He'd run a script and go to lunch and fuck everyone over while zones dropped and came back.

The DX9 update was in testing for like 6 months or so. The biggest problem with it is it totally fucked all of the collision in the game. It took forever for them to fix most of that stuff.

The funny thing about the EQ engine is it was upgraded for Free Realms. Most of the engine advancement stuff that happened around that time for EQ was directly tied to them upgrading it for Free Realms.
 
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E

Elidroth

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Schags said:
Including all the tribal knowledge that was never documented. I shit you not, some fields on a monster def, if you put a -1 in, it did some complete different shit that you would never know about unless told. I remember working on the expansion that added tasks and the designer who was making that system had to basically update every zone in the game. He'd run a script and go to lunch and fuck everyone over while zones dropped and came back.

The DX9 update was in testing for like 6 months or so. The biggest problem with it is it totally fucked all of the collision in the game. It took forever for them to fix most of that stuff.

The funny thing about the EQ engine is it was upgraded for Free Realms. Most of the engine advancement stuff that happened around that time for EQ was directly tied to them upgrading it for Free Realms.
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And then Free Realms went on to use the engine that became the Planetside 2 engine.

You're completely correct about the random fields data. Several fields were that way. It was nuts trying to keep track of it all.
 
Kuro

Kuro

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The "A Muffin" => "Muffins" change breaking bard spells for like a week has to be one of the best wtf moments.
 
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tyen

tyen

EQ in a browser wait time: ____
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Far left pumping out the Columbus Nova stuff now, because "collusion."

This whole thing is much derper than Trump tho, tbh.

 
tyen

tyen

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LOLOLOL this comment:

"The website didn't go far enough with this, imo. In light of recently discovered facts I would argue that Everquests entire development from the hiring of Brad Mcquaid to the original investment by Sony Entertainment was planned out from day one to be nothing but a massive money laundering scheme. The Russians have their claws into the fabric of Western society deeper than any of realize, and we have been (literally) playing right into their plans. "
 
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Aaron

Aaron

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Very interesting insider info on MMO development here. Thanks to all who chipped in. While I've never been a developer, I did know a few guys who worked for CCP (Eve Online) years ago, as well as attended a few of their Fan Fests that included talks on the back end design. My take on all this is that these "first tier" MMOs which I include from Albion Online, EQ1, Eve and even WoW, they were all pretty much inventing shit on the go. Some of it worked out (well, enough worked out that the games worked and did well), but a lot of shit came back to haunt them. In CCP the term "legacy code" was almost a swear word, and about 5-7 years ago they spent a HUGE amount of time trying to fix it. You can also see this in WoW in how much effort went into Cataclysm. Elidroth's comments on how hard it was to add NPCs or spells in EQ1 remind me of a Dev explaining how much fucking work went into creating ONE deadspace encounter in Eve (aka a dungeon). They didn't have any tools for it, so everything had to be placed and coded by hand. Shit was unreal.

It reminds me of reading a few articles about the early days of game development (the 80s) where such basic things such as databases didn't even exist. Everything was hard coded into the games. Say you wanted to add a new sword to your RPG, it wasn't just adding a line to a database and a reference in the code, you had to hardcode that shit in.

You then get people complaining about why old MMOs don't spend time re-doing old shit to make it better, well, the payoff isn't that great considering the often gigantic amount of work involved. WoW did this with Cata, for what? How much % of a typical WoW player's time is spent in the old world, they rush through it as fast as they can.

Having said all that, I do think magic could happen if, say, one day the EQ1 code was made free. You can bet your bottom dollar that a bunch of nerds would take the assets, fix it up in their spare time, and create a decent version. Would love to see that happen to a bunch of old, even defunct MMOs, just as has happened to a lot of old abandonware singleplayer games.
 
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pharmakos

pharmakos

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Aaron said:
Having said all that, I do think magic could happen if, say, one day the EQ1 code was made free. You can bet your bottom dollar that a bunch of nerds would take the assets, fix it up in their spare time, and create a decent version. Would love to see that happen to a bunch of old, even defunct MMOs, just as has happened to a lot of old abandonware singleplayer games.
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EQEmulator :p
 
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tyen

tyen

EQ in a browser wait time: ____
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pharmakos said:
EQEmulator:p
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eqemu is WAY better than EQ code, but in terms of security...your users info will be stolen and your servers will be forever crashed.

It too needs some major development to have mainstream stability.

P99 could remain offline for months at a time if someone like S Secrets was pissed off enough, for example. If extrapolated, eqemu would die within the first 6mos if it had 10k concurrent users
 
tyen

tyen

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I believe, 100%, that we will see what Akkadius, Rogean, and all the other Eqemu nerds are made of.

EQ is going to shut down, guaranteed. Eqemu has no plans, it will be bombarded, it will crash. When loginserver stops crashing p99 will crash nonstop. After those two are done being unreliable, people are gonna swarm the forums asking questions how to run servers.

That is why you need to setup a web manager to create servers by just entering in details in input boxes. More servers, bigger community, etc.

While EQ is owned by the US treasury, charge users for the manhours. Charge server owners that use the web editor. Take a % of RMT in a cash store if owners want to run one.

You can easily get paid back for the time setting up a server if you dont worry about a C&D
 
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pharmakos

pharmakos

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tyen said:
I believe, 100%, that we will see what Akkadius, Rogean, and all the other Eqemu nerds are made of.

EQ is going to shut down, guaranteed. Eqemu has no plans, it will be bombarded, it will crash. When loginserver stops crashing p99 will crash nonstop. After those two are done being unreliable, people are gonna swarm the forums asking questions how to run servers.

That is why you need to setup a web manager to create servers by just entering in details in input boxes. More servers, bigger community, etc.

While EQ is owned by the US treasury, charge users for the manhours. Charge server owners that use the web editor. Take a % of RMT in a cash store if owners want to run one.

You can easily get paid back for the time setting up a server if you dont worry about a C&D
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The Roger Stone of EverQuest?

More like the Nostradamus
 
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