EverQuest II: Chaos Descending Expansion Announced

That's exactly what they are doing.

 

This has been my thought for quite some time now - the devs are deliberately making the game unpalatable, particularly to casual players. So less and less people play. Those who continue to are the most likely to pull out their credit cards to improve their characters etc. The rest of us are being driven away.

 

I think it's a combination of things. Some of it is likely bad management. Some of it is likely crooked management. Some of it seems to be incapable employees. Some of it is simple arrogance and obstinance. None of it is possible without people feeding the machine.

The more time that goes by with supposed fans fueling the mess the less respect I have for them or their feelings and the less sympathy for the screwing over they help bring upon everyone involved.

But I do have an interesting Tamerind soda made with real sugar instead of corn syrup and no caffeine from Mexico and that makes it all better. At least for the moment.

 

What strikes me is, it's one thing to lose customers to attrition because they are walking away from changes (like the market harvesting strategy I referenced).

It's another to, almost gleefully, give your paying customers the middle finger, over, and over, and over again.

I mean, why deliberately run paying customers off?

There are so many layers of pathology at play here that I can't seem to stop watching (I clearly have my own issues...).

I've been with Castegyre for awhile on this one: By this time (and I'm being generous), people should not be surprised by how this company treats them.

 

Hrmph. If I wasn't so unwilling to walk away from my remaining guildies and other friends in this game, I'd be long gone. But then, maybe I do just need to pull the pin and start over elsewhere.

I'm too old for this $#!+.

 

Kander shouldn't be in any form of control, end of.

Anything that is not his way, is wrong. Tell him that? Banned. (If I don't end up banned from OF or similar after this post I'd be amazed.)

This game went downhill rapidly when there was nobody else to keep him in check.

 

I feel like a lot of people are in this same boat -- not wanting to leave because of friends, and migrating to other games as a group rarely working out. Thankfully I only get along with a few people here and there so it's easy enough to keep in touch with them.

 

I stayed a couple years longer than I would have because of a few friends. It finally got to the point that I said 'I'm done. Here's a list of games we can chill in, or you have my Discord.'

We all left initially, though one has since returned to EQ2.

At some point, your own enjoyment has to come first, and if those folks are your friends, they'll understand.

 

If these are the current numbers, then this might not be a valid comparison. Do search bot views of these threads get counted in these view numbers? The older the thread the more times people and bots look at it. Does it only count logged in user views? Hmmm

Anyway, I'm sure it's less now than it was back then.

 

In theory, no. Bot shouldn't be able to increase the view numbers, but depend on the forum setup.. Because if you need a little "help" for increase the view numbers.. But, it's a silly solution, because a standard statistic analysis can discover the trick, allowing to understand the unique accesses, bots, etc.

 

There are several factors that could shift the numbers around, most of them have to do with the type of software the forums use.

In regard to the age of the posts - It's patch notes. Most folks don't look at those a few months after release, let alone a few years later.

So while the numbers aren't exact, they definitely illustrate a strong, and fairly drastic, trend that matches up with general player sentiment about the game as well as player reported decline in numbers, difficulty finding groups, guild dissolutions, etc. at the time of each expansion or major update.

 

The number are not accurate if we isolate each xpac, but we can see 50% drop beetween pop and this xpac. in only 1 year !
so this game need bigger whales

if in eq2u we can research only for chars with ascension lvl 16 or more, we will get another metric for mesure the population.

 

Even though Steam is only a representative population of EQ2, I still think the charts reflect accurately on the overall population and health.
There was a spike for the Summer Events, and another spike this month so far, for the new expansion, but compared to almost anything else they chart, EQ2 is not healty.
https://steamcharts.com/app/201230

 

I don't know that they are intentionally strangling EQ2, I think it's more that without someone actually working on story lines, and gameplay, the dev's are just making whatever they want. Hence, so much of Gninja's influence in turning Tradeskills into "Raid Avoid Aggro" Tests, since he's a raider, and according to him, that is the only way to play the game.
The rest is pure laziness.
Why make content interesting and challenging, when you can just re-itemize, and bump up HP's and Mana by 1000% each xpac, also, incidentally, making old content so trivial as to be boring.
I'm sure there are other games that do this, but I've not played them. Generally, in all games I've been in, Player Power, while it does scale with level, scales pretty much linearly, after the first 10 or 20 levels. Not so at all in EQ2. I almost think this is a conscious decision by the "Devs" to try to entice people back year after year... but honestly, it is a bad decision.
I do like the zone-level-scaling in SWTOR. Yes, you keep high level abilities, but your effective level is reduced to the zone level. For one thing, that makes it incredibly easy to group with lower level players on a mostly equal playing field. For another, it let's me go back and actually do things that were challenging, if not impossible, and still feel the challenge and sense of achievement.
Also, in SWTOR, aside from different levels of instanced content, you can effectively change the level by putting a companion in a different mode, or just not using one. I've been playing 'mains', although that is a weird term there, mostly through the story lines, which are enjoyable, and then later on, going back and doing planetary quests later on.
My biggest problem there, is I'll probably never achieve my Dark Side legacies, as I just can't bring myself to play evil Perhaps I need Meneltel to give me guidance!

 

This expac gninja actually talked to Niami Denmother to make the TS line much more attractive to tradeskillers and it's well done.

This expac, with the nerf to potency and crit bonus, PoP content is LESS doable now than it was before CD came out.. because it is still designed for the stats double what we've got now.

The bit about intentionally making content 'over tuned' at he beginning isn't the way to keep people interested though. At best it's frustrating, at worst it causes people to quit.

 

If they are some how able to justify releasing one more expansion, I would be shocked and amazed. I think my chances of getting struck by lightning would be better at this point.

 

It isn't that hard, just think of all the npcs you kill as bullies who deserve what you do to them... after all, they are stopping you from getting your well deserved loots and shinies just to deny them to you! Come to the Dark Side... oh wait... wrong game... and you don't want to become a management personnel at a noted game designer company whose game many of us still play... *looks at the eye symbol elsewhere...*

 

I could see another expansion being released. It depends on the real financial purpose of DBG

 

This is the financial purpose of DBG: