No, I pretty much know more than anyone about everything, nice try cuckles.
Fanra's Wiki lists all the old devs and where they ended up, I know people at Amazon making $300-400k/yr as developers. I know everyone on the internet is a millionaire with a limitless supply of young virgin wives and 14" cocks, but in the real world where I live that's doing pretty well for yourself and probably way more than most game developers make. As someone who's actually in software development and had friends of mine go into game dev work--from what I've seen game developers universally make less money and work longer hours, so to my mind a larger more traditional software firm like Amazon/Google/Microsoft would be a major step up in $ and lifestyle than working for a games company.
Well, then you would have known that Smed properly funded EQ and it was never under funded. It was believed in during and after development. The only thing they wish they would have taken back was using Tanarus's engine (First person tank sim) as the core due to a complete lack of Z-Axis design control. Yes, Bill Trost is at Amazon. Since he is the one that actually designed EQ (Not Brad although he took the credit) I will give you one of your points. "Cuckles". (Ha love that word now) And the lore was an idea taken from one of Brad's old dungeon masters.
The development also took a more serious turn and was being taken seriously and that shows when they realized the team had to split from 989 and be treated as a separate division for this genre's development. Obviously you know them as Verant Interactive subsequently brought completely in house as SOE when Sony saw the success.
What happened after was a complete lucky strike of events. Game play emergence from lack of foresight but hit a triple twenty on the dart board thrown from 56 feet out none the less. (Kiting, FD pulling, Quad Kiting, Training, Multi-Questing, the list goes on) came from the players and never by design, rather an engine limitation and lack of code base memory. They even had trivial loot lined up and ready to go, but didn't pull the trigger because twinking became a game mechanic and was fun for players - hence, they stayed subscribed. (Which was the end goal obviously)
From there you always knew a naked human was an unpopulated art asset. Want to know a funny story? On server restarts at least until 2003, the reason some of them took so damn long was they had to have GM's go in and use this little command "/become_##" (with ## being the art variable) to reload an art asset on bosses since half the time they didn't pull from the database correctly. NTOV was notorious for it.
Keys for finals were instituted not as a success or accomplishment meter. It was deployed to stall advancement until they could populate and itemize, and sometimes geographically construct, the end zone in an expansion. Course everyone knows this now.
So yeah, Bill Trost is a good solid reason to follow amazon game development and a few other mentions of talent. But for the most part, SOE was a breeding ground for shit. Not because the talent couldn't have been there. But because the solid good ol boys club rang down a hap hazard style of development that turned anyone who wanted to advance into a pony tail yes man, and we all saw how great pony tail was don't we. As a result you saw the clusterfuck of SWTOR when SOE austin was let go and Vogel took his posse over to Bioware. After that we saw a fantastic showing out of "Bethesda Austin" with Fallout 76. The greatest hits of the island will continue on I am sure. Battlecry, which was a bust, shifted to Fo76 and retooled. (Low and behold, same SOE designers FYI just a brand new name (Again)
We could go on and on here, but aside from a very select few - The apples in that barrel which could have had promising careers got pissed on by the likes of George Scotto, Rich Vogel, Alan Crosby, Raph Koster, Pony tail, and many other countless dip shits who kissed ass to the select few for promotions rather than prove their worth in the development pit. Then carried that methodology with them for the future developers. Christ, those developers who worked there never stood a fucking chance, and I honestly, seriously, feel bad for some of them.
Reading that AMA reminded me a lot of that bullshit and with regards to your PvP argument, you sound just like them too. Let me clue you in since you missed the memo. World of Warcraft had more populations on the PvP servers than on PvE. And just because some jack wagons tried to throw in a PvP server in EQ and call it a day, doesn't mean they can go to a spreadsheet and make design decisions around a piss poor design and deployment. If you make A, B, and C the core of your game and turn the quality towards that design, it doesn't take a genius to know if you hap hazardly throw in option D without any thought behind new game play design decisions that no one is going to play it and your "Data" miraculously says "Boy howdy, D sure isn't popular in the throughput popularity matrix we have here"
