What happened to intellectual honesty?

Desperate is right. The art folks will get snapped up quickly (I have no idea why some of them haven't moved on yet). The rest, especially the long timers, are dead-enders.

 

Which wouldn't be shrinking half as rapidly if they'd just stop breaking systems that have worked fine for nigh on 15 years!

 

The non-official moderator of the OF is often saying that the raid community is a large minority of the game... why she does that I have no idea. She maybe believes that the game have a lot of active players? Have she forgot already how few instances of the new map that were open when the x-pac hit (if my memory serves me correct, it was around 4-7 instances open, might peaked to 10ish on maj'dul)? I am sure the raid community is a large majority of the game atm, I doubt there is more then 3k active subs on the live servers. Wish I had the time to study the census and code something to check how many unique accounts logs in each day and monitor it over a period of time.

 

{server activity estimates from census aren't allowed. Sorry! - moderator}

 

I think she sounds as if she is just "broken". She is a passionate crafter and they took that away, than she is passionate raider and that content is also broken. Now in order to progress with raiding, she realizes how much of that is gated behind "RNG"....

Also there seems to be a misunderstanding of what "The raider" or " Raiding Community" is . There are 3 categories at the moment.
1.) The high end top player, and ultimately the P2W crowd, to min max, passionate player, with knowledge and skills about classes. I sincerely think they are probably only 50-60 % of today's raiding community.
It's not like the good old days anymore where if you wanted to learn your class you would speak to player from the server's top raidforce. There is no Eqflames anymore where you would meet the "Big Boys" and gain the knowledge. You don't have a huge pool of talented player anymore to recruit from.

2.) Those player raiding because there is nothing else to do, as in no engaging longlasting content. But some of them also didn't find any other game that caught their interest.
In regards to the first reason you see a lot of Fun/Platin raids on weekends. I believe there are 3-4 on Thurgadin now.

3.) You have old Raidguilds/forces that exists for over 10 years and the player have become friends and family for each other. It is more of being together than semi-competition.

 

Holly has said that they would shut down census if people started using the data to find a rough estimate of player numbers. I think thats the only reason Feldon has not touched it much.

I can't imagine playing eq2 without census and this is why I havent tried to mess with the data because of that.

 

Ding ding ding. Don't eat from the apple tree.

To clarify a little, when this came up while I still worked there, Census wasn't going to be shutdown but it was going to be changed in a way that would've made things very difficult on EQ2U and Dragon's Armory from a developer perspective and also damage the functionality of those sites from an end user's perspective. It's possible that'd still be the outcome now, especially given the shitstorm completely shutting it off would probably cause, but I wouldn't chance things.

 

I was just responding to Cindrax, so I apologize for any encouragement in bringing down eq2u!

 

And that is why I have him on ignore too.
Some people really irk me, and he is one of them, he's irksome.

 

Raff did again the other day. First it was a "generational Thing" now he insulted all player by saying its the player fault if they don't like / make the best of this "framework" game. What a slap in the face of the crafting community.

 

I don't think Raff has actually had the primary motivation of defending the game or the company in a long time. He just takes opportunities to passive-aggressively, and often indirectly, insult and 'dismiss' other people's comments.

 

I guess I wasn't clear enough in my post. I have no intention to harm this or other eq2 sites that is dependent on the census data. It was the curious monkey in me that spoke. A project like that is so far down my priority list of things to-do that it will most likely never happen.

Although, I personally doubt that Holly would do anything if anyone did such a thing, the outbreak among the few customers they have would be to much. But they are clearly not good at knowing what their customers want.. so what do I know?

There is a site up for Planetside 2 that does exactly that.. it's been up for a long time:
All - Population - PlanetSide 2

Just know that if I start to dabble into such a project, it will be done in a private maner.

 

I think its different for eq2 because the higher ups have been lied to by Holly for years about how many people actually play the EQ2 title and if people started having actual numbers they would be in deep poop

 

It was definitely a thing that was going to happen before (though the edict came from Smokejumper, not Holly), I just deferred on making the change long enough that it kind of blew over and then layoffs. lol.

 

DBG knows what the numbers are.

The people she wants to keep in the dark are customers and potential customers because population numbers are influential.

 

Ha yea, I replied to that on the OF

Raff Said:
“No one can make a game that addresses every single player's life, job, personal, monetary, physical or play style circumstances. All the devs can do is present a framework based on their imagination & fiscal requirements. It is solely your (the gamer's) responsibility to figure out if you can find enjoyment in that framework or not”

My Response:
This is a fair enough statement... and that is exactly how it has been for years. BUT... When the framework you have laid out drives people away, and you want to retain people or get new people into the framework, then its time to reconsider your framework.

 

Welp, I guess we're back to business as usual. One of my posts was ninja'd with no warning, pm, or explanation. It was on the rng is garbage thread, mirrored a post I made here.

 

All your posts are belong to... them?