What would it take for you to feel confident/optimistic about the future of EQ2 again?

Get rid of Kander, Gninja and Caith. Get new, possibly young devs, that give a crap about their customers. Beg Domino to come back.

Introduce the PoP tradeskill line. Pathetic.
Tbh I'm over it, I'm hanging on by a thread.

 

Thank you, Shmogre for bringing this up. I don't think that games like this have to die just because they're old. That's single player PC game thinking. I also don't think that only the endgame matters. In particular endgame is meaningless to families bringing up children to have a sense of wonder and appreciation for courage and legends. You're not going to introduce an 8 year old to raiding first and incidentally oh yeah there are fairies in this game, ho hum. So the level 100 boosts are a bit disruptive. So is the veteran bonus. So is the lack of will toward powerleveling limits. Sorry, it's just the way I feel. We're throwing away content.

Whenever I've complained in the past that loot tables in old zones are changed in an unhelpful way to people playing the content, I've been brutally shut down in the official forums. It just hasn't been my purpose to "level" - if I play Butcherblock, I want to be able to find at least a duo for Kaladim, not blow off the content that can't be done with a merc.

I feel more comfortable now with so many characters at 100+ because the stress is gone, such as: "oh great, that's broken too and if I complain I'll be told that nobody cares about old stuff." That stress isn't something that should even be a factor. Treating the old content like something you can temporarily bring back in a new form using TLE, but otherwise ignore, is just not right. Although I'm very glad that TLE has had a positive effect on the loot tables of Live servers. But instead of listening to those who were playing the content on Live years ago and pointing out where improvements could be made, they had to create a whole new system of TLE to fix anything. Wasted effort if you ask me.

When a level 100+ groups with a level 35 for any of the fine dungeons at that level, it shouldn't be a "powerlevel" session, it should be a "make it easy so I can get some more quests done" session. That said, some easy helpful things would be good: in the old content, we were coming out of EQ1, with convoluted quests that made you travel quite a lot to complete them. TLE has a similar issue, with people who don't know where to get the quests so it hampers leveling even more than necessary. Would it hurt to have some location triggered quests? Especially for things like the Qeynos Guard faction? OK you have to go back and complete it to do it again, but it will help you remember where it is.

Most important, we can't have it both ways... it can't be both twinking (derision) to group with mixed levels, and permitted pwerleveling. We now have a situation where we both look down on it when people of mixed levels group, and we shrug and permit powerleveling to occur. This is just cognitive dissonance, with the connotation that we tried but failed to limit PL and 'what ya gonna do?'.

OK enough about old stuff... new stuff/engame:

I think they're doing a wonderful job on art. I've never loved a game's art as much as this one. They're very good at evoking emotional responses to the art. Think about the gloom around Twark and compare it to the wonder in PoM. They're very good at writing an epic story and meaningful conversation (although some of the conversation in PoM has been bug'd but not fixed yet). I've never had an issue with the story or art. Even stories I don't participate in because they're too gory for me, I see that as a valid story that others enjoy.

I think there has been too much that has been silently denied us though. No explanation given. I think because THEY don't trust US. They think offering an explanation of why they can't do something will just bring out the trolls. So that's true. But it will also open a conversation with those who aren't trolling. The number one thing they can do to get back to a place of trust is transparency.

All trust goes both ways. We have to be aware of when we're just talking from a place of frustration and not from a place of solutions. We have to be transparent about when we're asking for something because we just want the game to be easier. And there is no law against wanting an easier time of things.

So back to them, they can stop treating all requests for making things easier as lazy or "press one button and win" etc. If something is unpleasant to do then their audience isn't having fun. Sometimes easier is just easier. An example would be the current crafting situation that is blossoming into a FUBAR. We just came out of an expac where crafting was imperative. Now we have to do so many combines to level, that we're draining our harvest boxes and guilds have to come up with fair ways of doling out materials so that people must gather, but not gather so much that they get frustrated and blow it off or leave. The guilds are working on making the issue suck less, but it still sucks.

The crafting/gathering is a direct result of giving people more materials than they're able to reasonably gather - during Beta. Those crafting mat packages had way more mats in them than any human could ever gather. So nobody had a chance to say... hey, this is using up way too many mats. Beta should be longer so people have a chance to notice stuff like that.

The developers should be given "play days" so that they must level a character through the content and have a chance to notice the problems. This isn't paying people to play, it's honest QA time. I won't out them, but during beta I had a couple of interactions with developers that told me they don't play often enough to know our situation. They absolutely must know what we go through. It didn't make me mad so much as sad. I'd be pleased as punch to have a public schedule that has "where is (developer) playing this week?" It's not like there aren't parental controls in place to give them privacy, you can turn off tells and other things right? or you could at one point, haven't looked in a while.

We and they must keep in mind that some choices are a matter of preference, and others are a matter of willingness to put effort in. My husband didn't craft until it was made easier. I did. When we played on TLE, I loved the remembered difficulty, but it forced him to rely on others crafting for him. He simply can't deal with the hardmomde crafting, though he crafts just fine on Live. People have different playstyles and often that's due to level of effort required. He even experiments a bit on live, and that's definitely hardmode. So it's partly the reward for effort. But not entirely.

It's also a choice to put effort into something. We are one person doing one thing at one time. If I'm leveling my crafters, I can't be running PGs to buff my tank up even if it's an easy buff (though boring).

OK that's enough. maybe after I read more comments I'll reply more. I'm sure there is a lot I'm leaving out, but wow this is getting long.

 

Wow if this is true then I'd say I'm on the side of management on this one. I've had employees, even creative ones should never threaten the business. By the time you're threatening to quit, you're pretty much done helping anything (how many times have people said that to frustrated people on the forums?). But the worst of this is the attitude that only they are the content writers. Which is bull already, because of the times that content was inspired by something people said on the forums, even in EQ1. Simplest example: Burning Woods.

If they can't acknowledge that their ideas do not occur in a vacuum, they're self deluded.

 

This points out something that makes communication hard for us. If they've been told not to spend time on something, but internally they're upset because they know they broke it, that's bad management and can lead to all sorts of freaky communication. People should be given a chance to solve a problem they set out to solve. Personally I'm not built to ignore issues I cause, or any issues really. There are small issues I can ignore, but generally I do both my A list and B list. And if I were told not to, I'd probably hate that, and resent my employer... when the playerbase called me out on it. That's just toxic.

One of my favorite books on programming is Code Reading which treats code as literature, which I think is basically right. Having been an Undergrad teacher assistant, I used to tell students "pretend you're having a conversation with the machine, imagine what answer it will give you for a request." I also think programming makes one a better parent, for a machine you have to specify everything to make up for the lack of experience. Ditto kids. I think anyone with a code=literature attitude could pick up from where others left off.

 

Nail on the head. Bottom line: They are the professionals. If you don't want to be screenshotted or quoted saying something, then don't say it. If you don't want people to spread misinformation, you need to provide good information. If you want people to stop asking the same questions over and over, you need to make the answers easier to find.

If you want your playerbase to be more respectful, you need to treat them with respect. It's a cycle that can be either crappy or empowering...it all depends on what you put into it.

 

I have a feeling 2018 will be difficult for DB with PUBG killing H1Z1...

 

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT? noooo... that can't be true...



At this point, H1Z1 is really competing with, like.... idk, Skyrim?

 

Perfect management opportunity for staff rotations to broaden skills and improve the studio offerings

 

"Gentlemen, welcome...to Daybreak Antarctica!..."

 

Except that I keep hearing that no one on the existing team seems to know where all the band aids and half-assed quick fixes are buried.

This seems strange to me. When dealing with a bazillion lines of code, and if this is the case, why wouldn't there be some kind of documentation on the outside?

 

Because for IT people, including programmers, maybe especially programmers.... keeping a technical secret = job security.

 

This ^

Why would the current Dev team make anything easy, or spend time documenting for others, when not doing so guarantees them a job for as long as DBG consider their position tenable.

EQ2 is effectively in a long term sunset mode. Milk the cash for as much as possible with near 0 investment. When the cash coming in stops being XYZ% more than costs to run, full time sunset.

 

The old joke use to be that code is self documenting

It is true that some languages are more readable than others but the coding style of the developer can make it more or less clear. Probably still a hot topic among software developers and it would be a long discussion to deal with the topic fully. Just remember that the code is normally the expression (implementation) of the design however due to step wise refinement it might be many times removed. The original design documentation should exist as should the set for each expansion but you would have to ask an ex-EQ2 developer to find out.

Due to subdivision of tasks a software developer will only ever know in detail the section of code that they have worked on. If large sections/modules of the code require little maintenance and the original developer has moved on then any change to that code will be a voyage of discovery for those involved. Any documentation that exists will only be a guide as its currency is always suspect since the first thing that gets cut from any development running behind is the documentation or that's my personal experience anyway.

My experience has been in COBOL for government, Assembler/C for OS Internals (IBM Mainframe), various Unix Shell languages, Perl etc so I may have a non-mainstream view of software development.

 

I understand what you guys are saying, but it doesn't excuse it it. To me, I just reinforces and illustrates another example of why this game has been so poorly managed.

As an executive, one has a responsibility to both the ownership and customers.

Seems like what you guys are describing is an environment where the foxes are ruling the hen house.

Management should be responsible for reigning **** like that in so they can protect the product.

Not arguining with you guys. Just saying saying that is really bad, and really stupid management.

 

Just trying to provided a bit of context for you and I agree there are some management issues at DB. I expect some of them to come to a head this year. Currently they are trying to development the next big thing while some of there existing titles revenue is declining in my opinion.

 

So, to summarize the points made:

1. In general, programmers are resistant to documenratation because (1) good code should explain itself, and (2) lack of documentation = certain amount of job security... ... Am I the only one that sees the contradiction there?

2. The eq2 franchise was at the front of the newly born mmorpg industry, so it was rushed to market and built largely without a formalized methodology or process. Under such conditions, there is no time to document code - it's been pretty much fire drill mode ever since. I.e. fire drill -> no time to document -> creating layers and layers of undocumented changes and fixes....and layers up on layers of fire drills ...and o it goes.

I admit, I'm no programmer. I'm a business economist who practices in data analytics. Still back in the dark ages when I was in grad school, I was expected to turn in my stastical programming along with the output. If it wasn't clearly documented, it was given right back to me.

I never lost that habit, and to this day, even writing fairly sophisticated prediction packages, anyone can look at my programming and know exactly what I am doing with it, without having to guess.

I understand writing games is complex stuff, far more than what I'm doing. But, in that case, all the more reason to create a simple database that logs short descriptions of what was done, why, how it was done, and roughly where to find the code. Would take less than a minute and save hours down the road.

I look at this situation, and all I see is pathology in the development process.

 

Just want to reinforce the fact that I'm not arguing with you guys, and you all know more about this stuff that I do.

For me, economics is the logical structure that I am comfortable with. And to an economist, wasteful, inefficient, or generally unproductive use if resources is horrifying

Which begs the question, why an I wasting time on stuff like this?

Compounding. I have a lot of time on my hands,these days .

Well, that and I just can't help myself. I see stuff like this and it drives me nuts..

 

Documentation isn't some magical panacea, though. Okay, I have a log of changes made. Is it actually useful for finding changes? What if I use different terminology to write my description than the person searching the documentation uses? Documentation can also disagree with reality (someone making a change that does A while thinking it does B, or someone else makes a change to that part of the code without updating documentation) which can be a huge time waster as well. And then there of course deadlines, which are not a problem unique to EQ2 and has probably only gotten worse thanks to how much money is thrown into marketing these days (well, not in EQ2's case lol, but there's still those annual expansions!).

All this isn't to say that documentation isn't useful, it's just one of those things that tends to crack under the weight of real world development.

 

I agree, the only way to really deal with it is to be sure the programmers you hire are realistic enough to know that documentation is a mine field as much as the code, and slick enough to be able to read the code and "process/imagine" it to a logical conclusion without being distracted by what it's "supposed" to do. This imagination process is probably the connection between game players and programmers. It's certainly why I love both.

Logic is the trickiest weasel in the pumpkin patch. People have to enjoy hunting that tricky weasel if they're going to be good at programming. They also have to be able to laugh when they fail to catch it. There's no space for ego in programming. It works or it doesn't. Unfortunately work places aren't run on logic so much as for business reasons. But the more the management appreciates the kind of mind programmers have, the less they will do dumb things like tell them not to fix stuff. If it makes the programmer look bad when s/he knows s/he could fix it, that's just going to create toxicity.