Forbes: New ‘EverQuest II’ Expansion ‘Blood of Luclin’ Marks 15 Years With Trip To The Moon

I went ahead an checked out a twitch stream yesterday. The art is really good (as always). Mermut says Gninja did a really good job on the TS quest line, and it was refreshing to see Chrol respond and communicate quickly on the solo instances.

Despite all that, I just can't see the game recovering from what it now is and lingering effects people have for how they've been treated.

For all intents and purposes, this is a p2w raiding game with a deco game. This will be fine for some folks, it's just not for me and if they continue to fall back into the old patterns of taking customers for granted, they'll keep killing the game....imo.

 

I'm trying to enjoy it. So far it's not working.

Surely the only players that think the TRADESKILL Sig Line is 'a really good job' are max level adventurers.
The fact that none of it was planned with low level adventure toons in mind makes my blood boil.
The fact that none of the rewards are recipe books make me /boggle.
The fact that it seems you need to finish the full sig line before you can even buy the general recipe books is stupid.

I read in Beta forums before it was deleted, that you could buy tradeskill recipe books after completing the FIRST adventure quest? Is that true? Has it been fixed? So stupid.

Why not also make it that adventure toons can't upgrade their spells/ca's until they finish the adventure sig line. That would go over like a lead balloon.

Every expansion I hate the smugly arrogant Gninja, and omglookatmyhairKander more. Not a fudging clue between them for anything but raids it seems.

I wish I'd never come back.

 

Some guy posted a thread that the mount obtained from the sig line is better than the mount he got from buying the CE of the expac.

Is this right? Cause well, aren't peepls grounded until they complete the sig line?? And well, even absent that, that's got to be a mistake.

 

Usually there will be an upgrade of the mount at the status merchant once you complete the sig line.

 

Ok, that makes sense. I was wondering why the forums were pretty much blowing off the thread.

Thank you

 

That is a serious crock of crap.
I had some max level adventurers, but I also had max level tradeskillers, in every profession, even though their adventure level was maybe 20 or so. KA was challenging, for Tradeskilling at low level, but completely do-able.
Why doesn't Gninja (and I really can't stand that lying little gnome) require mastering Tradeskills before being able to do anything but basic quests? No instances, no raids...
Triply glad I didn't get suckered back. And the numbers still look horrible. In SWTOR right now, and just one planet (not and end game planet either) has over 150 people on it.

 

There have been MMOs shut down with more life than EQ2 has right now, but with how pay to win EQ2 is it's very possible that the tiny population is shelling out quite a bit of money. I know when I played TLE people were just pouring money into LoN Loot Boxes and XP pots.

 

Well, They pushed me out during KA, and I had my two accounts (paid), and I was paying for two friends... that is four subs they tossed away because of crappy service, poorly thought out, boring, repetitive expansions, and of course, the Pay to Win cash shop. That was some steady income they lost, after 12+ years in EQ2, never mind the occasional shop purchase I made for fluff things. Mounts mostly. /shrug.

 

I will say that I did not enjoy KA, but I did enjoy PoP and CD.

PoP had some nice zones that was a huge step up from ToT and KA.
CD had some good overland zones and helped a lot of people catch up.

I am still wandering around Luclin, have yet to do the heroics to make up my mind about it.
If we moan enough, I'm sure they will fix the TS stuff that Mermut mentioned in another post (one can hope anyway).

Edit: More moaning needed!! /wink

 

There is no mount obtained from the sig line.
The guy was complaining about the upgrade to the PE version that is available after you finish the sig line.

 

I know many of you are upset, discombobulated, worried.

Has Siggy turned the corner? Has her steadfast and self-promoted role as DBG's champion defender against customer dis-satisfaction come to an end?

Did TS, (her goto solution for any dumb or self-serving design decision) finally lead her to question the reason for her existence?

Nay, I say! Nay!!

Rest easy good citizens. To wit:

What am I missing with this expansion? | EverQuest 2 Forums

 

Oh good. Siggy drank the Kool-Aid. Nothing to see here, its all normal for DBG and anything wrong with the expansion is all in your head.

 

To Achievements it seems.

 

Those people will defend EQ2 until the day it shuts down, and when that day comes it'll be the ungrateful community's fault it shut down, not anything the devs did.

 

I suspect that not even the whales and pay to win are what is keeping the servers on for EQ2, rather that the shut down is being staged to be as financially advantageous as possible for DBG et al.

 

Tekka, I still think DBG is being run as a tax write off. Lose money here to cover profits somewhere else in the corporation. No idea if that's possible, just something I saw on "WKRP in Cincinnati" once and I didn't understand it and my father had to explain it to me without going into great detail.

 

Its hilarious. Other than raid content I am already completely out of content to do and have so many infusers in stock I can prob get to T3 without bothering with solo content.

Crafting sucks ass except for the super rare expert spells that hardly anyone makes because the books are 900k to 5 million per book.

Hilarious awful expansion with little to no content. I have no idea why I keep playing this ****ing game. I get angry every time I launch it, but I guess I feel obligated to finish the expansion now with 23 other players relying on me to show up.

 

So, if we add in monthly sub revenue, let's call it $880,000, which averages out $73,300 per month in income. No way they are above water with that number.

What I'm interested to know is how the shop sales are doing. I guesstimated before that maybe 70-80% of their revenue was coming from the shop (iirc, was somewhere around 7.5MM total revenue).

Assuming 80% of revenue = shop sales (optimistic view), forecasted TR = $5.3MM.

That would be a guesstimated 30% drop in TR over last year.

Regarding this TS nonsense, here's what I suspect:

We all know they're using leveling systems to drive shop revenue. I also suspect they use pre-order sales and activity to forecast revenue for the year. So now, all of a sudden, getting spells leveled is.......difficult.

I keep wondering about buyer fatigue. 30% drop in customers/revenue would support the theory that they are burning their customers out.

But then again, people drop stupid amounts of cash into these p2w mobile games, so maybe the game can survive with 1,000 customers.

As we've noted before, this approach is consistent with market harvesting. However, if Longdale actually wants to keep the game around for another 10 years, then causing customers to feel like they were conned into buying seems pretty stupid.