The Rathe-from the Eqlive Forum

[Hayley McGinnish]

Originally posted by Zorg
Of course, companies keep on doing it because the gamers who are bitching about broken and buggy games are the exact same people who are bitching that the release date on a game got pushed back a month.

They are also the same people that bitch day in and day out about a game that they faithfully log into every single night! I'm sure that SOE is cackling, "just STFU and shell out your 13 bucks a month asshole!"

[kasey]

I think it will be totally normal for companies selling raw games and having us test and test and test us all the way for this genre.
Any of you people unloading your agression on verrant been playing a mmorpg that has been fully tested out and not changed and tuned its content? anyone?
think about it, i am not saying its okay this way but it seems the amount of work testing and tuning needed for such games simply gives the coding team two options.
Make the customer test and tune the game while you play it or test it before.
That cost money and since money doesnt grow on trees the product will become more expensive.That would imply sony doesnt use eq as cash cow,before you throw mud.. do you have numbers? anyone? thought so, me neither.Who knows /shrug
Not my point.
So far the other games ive tried and checked out are far worse balancing wise.Everquest is far from perfect but the class balance on the Pve environment seem superior to any game ive played.

I would really love if someone can tell me a better balanced nice mmorpg,i am serious because i quit eq and look for a new game atm.
Help is appreciated

[hasublood]

I'll help ya Kasey.. get yer ass back to EQ and teach the world how to play a cleric.. pulling, tanking and healing at once while still screaming for more shit to keel

You rocked, case closed

[csdmmnt]

PoTime, finished or unfinished.

I don't mind being blissfully ignorant (PoTime not finishted). I play along and go through the hoops and jump the candles no problem.

I do mind having my bliss burst by a company's lack of ability to utilized additional time (the time from day one PoP to the time Rallos Zek AND Agnarr are killed by one group for the first time in game) to finish off content that didn't need to be realized until then.

NONE of this would be an issue, PoTime finished before release or after release, if it WAS FINISHED by the time the first group of people tried to access it legit. No one would of been the wiser if it had been finished.

What impact does this have?

I've been dealing with these people for nearly 5 years now - I basically have been "with" the company longer than 90% of their operational teams. This is nothing new or special. Unfortunately, in an expansion like PoP, where we probably have had the worst itemization of any expansion combined with catastrophic cockblocks of various content, holding the player's attention becomes more and more difficult each passing day

Furor got it straight up there. It is getting insanely difficult each passing day to hold players attention. By the time Verant gets their shit together they may find no one left to play in PoTime. That PoTime will go unrealized for another few months while those 2nd / 3rd tier guilds finally achieve ability to knock on the door of PoTime. By then you are talking ~100 people per server having faded away.

But whats ~3400 customers out of 500,000? Kibbles and bits.

Again, it wouldn't matter if a zone is finished or not UNTIL I get there, UNTIL SOMEONE gets there. THEN the god damn thing better be fully implimented with minor bugs or implimentation issues to iron out (i.e.; AE blind on trash mobs in VT).

Kinda reminds me that Star Wars Galaxies ... a game of spaceships, space empires, and avatars with skills for piloting space crafts and shooting lazers is going to be released without Space but that Space will be patched in later ...

[Justy]

Originally posted by csdmmnt
Furor got it straight up there. It is getting insanely difficult each passing day to hold players attention. By the time Verant gets their shit together they may find no one left to play in PoTime. That PoTime will go unrealized for another few months while those 2nd / 3rd tier guilds finally achieve ability to knock on the door of PoTime. By then you are talking ~100 people per server having faded away.

Which is better, to have some players leave never experiencing content, while others stay just to see said content, or to let em in, disappoint em and drive em off with boredom while they wait for the next expansion?

Let the ubers cool their heals farming Elemental armor, weapons and focus items for a little bit, they will still be around when PoT is released to upgrade that farmed gear in PoT.

[Araxen]

Kinda reminds me that Star Wars Galaxies ... a game of spaceships, space empires, and avatars with skills for piloting space crafts and shooting lazers is going to be released without Space but that Space will be patched in later ...

The best summarization of SWG I've seen and the one reason I'm not getting the game. Sorry to jump off topic..continue on!

[Camo]

I don't know that alot of gaming companies will keep using it's customers as beta testers....I mean, to a point, yeah, certain bugs will always be found by the masses that a small group of dedicated testers can't find. I just don't think beta testing by players to the extent SoE has used Everquest customers will become the norm.

The downfall of all the competitors can be blamed, at least in part, to that idea. AO...released buggy as hell and nobody bothered playing after the first couple months; there big selling point now to try to lure players back (other than the free month) is their content is fixed. DAoC, same story, released buggy as shit so people stopped playing. Big selling point now for people that do still play and advertising is all this new content that wasn't there when it was released. Course, one could argue they sold one product for the price of two. My counter would be if they released the content up front they'd have a much bigger subscriber base. Long term commitments, or in this case getting people to sign on to 6 to 12 months of service, is always > then a one time payment.

The reason I think EQ gets away with it is because at the very least the content players are tackling RIGHT NOW works, which is more than what the previous competitors could boast. So yeah, Buggy EQ expansions will probably continue to be released. EQ will get away with it too until that first game that comes out nearly bug free with enough bug free content to keep players interrested for a couple of months. If a game can't do that, and dedicate the time from release to a couple months down the road to come up with new content to add, the game becomes nothing more than a Diablo or an RTS game that's fun for a while, but doesn't hold your attention for more than a couple months. Given the choice, what do you think gamers will choose? A 40 dollar game they can install and play, or a 40 dollar game they have to pay an additional 10 to 15 bucks a month to play? Seems pretty clear to me.

[Kromagnon]

because at the very least the content players are tackling RIGHT NOW works

Really?

[euda]

After Valve decided to use its faitful players to test out things like 'net code' and 'new game physics' 'new player modles' in Half-Life, TFC and Counter Strike for their upcomeing vapor-ware of a game known as TF2, I gave up on most gameing companys. Half Life was 'the beta you play.' EQ is 'the beta you pay to play.'

But you know what? When I look at Sony and see that they even changed the encodeing on thier own PS2 discs (to the blue backs) and that what that basicly did was stop OLD PS2s from being able to read the disks and screwd over all the loyal OLD school games... I can't help but laugh. Don't worry though, you can pay $120 for them to flash the rom on your old PS2 and be good to go.

It's all about the bling. They mention no numbers, they dont release any information on how statistics realy work. Its not like AD&D where you can sit down and break it away to understand the mechanics of the game if you realy want to. (Lets not even forget that NWN was "broken" on release and you had alot of patches for that nighmare of a game too, but at least the player could log on in GM mode skip the problem themselfs if they chose to do so.)

[Liz]

Originally posted by Camo
The reason I think EQ gets away with it is because at the very least the content players are tackling RIGHT NOW works, which is more than what the previous competitors could boast.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WTF are you smoking?

[Jaytee Bushwacker]

I've been dealing with these people for nearly 5 years now - I basically have been "with" the company longer than 90% of their operational teams. This is nothing new or special. Unfortunately, in an expansion like PoP, where we probably have had the worst itemization of any expansion combined with catastrophic cockblocks of various content, holding the player's attention becomes more and more difficult each passing day.

The only thing that blurb on EQLive meant was "We're still not ready for you guys to enter Time, therefore Rathe will remain broken."

Amen brother, amen. The following dialoge from a typical late afternoon at work IRC session clearly displays how engrossed and attentive we are to the game at the current moment:

[JT|Work] Hey there anything up I should head home for and log in?
[RandomFoH] just the usual - Jack and Shit.
[JT|Work] K, gonna stay at work then.

[Lauraliane]

Everquest is far from perfect but the class balance on the Pve environment seem superior to any game ive played.

I think that's why every new MMORPG (or almost) are PvP oriented, they know they can't rivalize with EQ in terms of PvE and content, unfortunatly they didn't understand that focusing on RvR (DaoC), Siege and wars (Shadowbane) etc wasn't enough to balance the lack of content.
Or well at least for me it isn't, PvP get boring fast, players interest need to be renewed with the content, that's what EQ managed to do for 4 years and that's pretty impressive imo.
Now for another game...well (sadly ?) I only see EQ2 going for PvE and so for content and not trying to keep us busy fightning each others with some boring PvP shit, but who know maybe WoW, Horizons or Lineage 2 will have some content even if they announced PvP, which is not a good sign.

[Ishrafael]

Originally posted by Zorg
The problem of companies releasing unfinished games is not specific to Everquest and SoE, it's an industry wide problem.

With MMORPGs, the problems that come from releasing a game before it's truly ready are greatly amplified it.

Of course, companies keep on doing it because the gamers who are bitching about broken and buggy games are the exact same people who are bitching that the release date on a game got pushed back a month.

God, yes. There have been several games I had anticipated the release of, and some of them were nearly unplayable in their "off the shelf" state. (Pools of Radiance was a let-down in its unpatched state. It took months for a workable patch to be released. That's just one example of many.)

My system isn't some bastardized conglomeration of shit I've thrown together. Might and Magic 8 (or was it 7?) was a good example of this. I never could get it to run on my machine, before and after patch.
I realize that developers put serious time into games. It is a shame that potentially great games are plagued with these problems. (and moreso that games over the years have been getting worse and worse in their "off the shelf" need for patching.)

I think all gamers can agree on how much it sucks to have to deal with busted shit, and have little recourse on getting problems fixed. (having wasted $45, or more.)

[Qhue]

Most of PoP has been consumed far faster than I think SoE intended. Tiers 1-2 were trivial at level 60 after marginal experimentation and Tier 3 was made trivial rather rapidly at 65 -- once the bugs in the zones themselves were fixed.

Had the Rathe been killable a month ago its quite likely that Timeb would be reached by now and then the high-end game would be on hold again (and risk loosing many more customers) in the months between now and when the next as-yet-unanounced expansion is released.

Tier1 was made far too trivial, but done so because they wanted the 46+ crowd to feel they got a good value in buying the expansion.

Tier2 access was again made too easy to access because there were many people who didnt want to deal with the hoi-paloi in Teir1. Imagine the monkey-wrench if you still had to do ALL SIX trials and defeat the 7th Hammer to get access to Honor and Storms? If you had to kill the real giant bosses in Storm for each and every key to the Bastion of Thunder etc etc. They whittled away content and made half the newly released expansion non-viable after less than a month into the release...now they are relying on the 4 Tier4 zones to keep the playerbase busy and can see their supply of content dwindling.

Legacy of Ykesha? Great little storyline there and really pretty zones...but it kept people busy for what? 4 days? The expansion is less than a month old and the zones are deserted even by the 30-50 crowd that complained so heavily that PoP disenfranchised them. Its a good thing for SoE that their online sell-though system worked and they got everyone to buy it because the direct-cost of the expansion is the ONLY revenue LoY will generate for them. No accounts will be maintained for additional months due to LoY content.

The bottom line is that they wasted a ton of new zones and ways to keep people entertained in the initial release of the expansion and are now having to STRRRREEEEETTTTCCCCHHHH out the last remaining morsel of content for quite a long time.

To them its a balancing act as they string out the addicts with Time. They'll release time just when people are starting to actually cancel accounts, not when people simply don't log in.

[Patrician]

Legacy of Ykesha? Great little storyline there and really pretty zones...but it kept people busy for what? 4 days?

It is just the accessibility that screws LoY. It is a real pita for a melee class to get to and from the bazaar, I would love to hunt there more, the exp and loot is pretty damn nice at my level. Why they didn't add a PoK book for LoY I do not know. Then you have the multitude of high hp aggroing greenies to run through. Bleah.