Everquest TLP - Aradune and Rizlona Servers (Now with real customer service)

Here is SK:

Druid:

Weird, it is treating it as media, is it grabbable like that?

Kharzette said:

Since everything is embiggenized, it should work pretty good for a 4k monitor but I use it on 1080p because I'm blind as a bat.

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Getting old, time for glasses. I used to make everything bigger too.

Heard some interesting information that I hadn't heard before regarding MQ2. I know we had a little tangent recently talking about it. Apparently, eqmule gets paid $60k/year by DBG to make sure the release doesn't get used on servers DBG doesn't want it to? I thought it was some behind-the-scenes handshake deal with Holly a while back. Didn't realize it was so official. He then gets like 2% from RedGuides which apparently comes out to a thousands/month. Dudes raking it in.

Sieger Any idea about this?

That doesn't sound like rumor at all.

im sure a company in san diego can easily pay 60k a year for employee. i mean a shitty high school public teacher in FL makes 45k

Crone said:

Heard some interesting information that I hadn't heard before regarding MQ2. I know we had a little tangent recently talking about it. Apparently, eqmule gets paid $60k/year by DBG to make sure the release doesn't get used on servers DBG doesn't want it to? I thought it was some behind-the-scenes handshake deal with Holly a while back. Didn't realize it was so official. He then gets like 2% from RedGuides which apparently comes out to a thousands/month. Dudes raking it in.

Sieger Any idea about this?

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It was a flown-out-to-San Diego-style deal. That wouldn't surprise me.

That's also likely why mqnext was made. The rest of the folks like brainiac & other RG devs may have left out of that cut if it exists. I recall mq folks going along with it because of two reasons:

1) They wanted some legitimacy to MQ2 as its usage was majorly prevalent.
2) They didn't want to get in an arms war with JChan/Daybreak and eqmule was threatened that Daybreak would start making an aggressive anticheat and would wind down content / feature development if they had to invest time into fighting them unless they made the agreement. eqmule subsequently made an anti-cheat that integrated with Daybreak's server code that detected folks attempting to bypass.

I don't blame other MQ devs for doing that, especially if there was a double dip, and eqmule received regular donations to keep MQ2 up to date from its community, and if they were misled.



Fun fact: Plazmic's (MQ's original author) dying wish was that MQ was never closed source.

Crone said:

Heard some interesting information that I hadn't heard before regarding MQ2. I know we had a little tangent recently talking about it. Apparently, eqmule gets paid $60k/year by DBG to make sure the release doesn't get used on servers DBG doesn't want it to? I thought it was some behind-the-scenes handshake deal with Holly a while back. Didn't realize it was so official. He then gets like 2% from RedGuides which apparently comes out to a thousands/month. Dudes raking it in.

Sieger Any idea about this?

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Lol you are crazy if you think they can afford to pay some dude 60k to "not let hax on certain servers." Not even in their prime would they pay that.

They basically just allow MQ2 at this point. They know how widespread it is on live. They can't afford to fight it (nor should they, MQ2 + live is fun and keeps people playing). And MQ2 is smart enough to disable certain plugins for tlp. I think it's likely just a rather simple, logical compromise.

Morrow said:

Lol you are crazy if you think they can afford to pay some dude 60k to "not let hax on certain servers." Not even in their prime would they pay that.

They basically just allow MQ2 at this point. They know how widespread it is on live. They can't afford to fight it (nor should they, MQ2 + live is fun and keeps people playing). And MQ2 is smart enough to disable certain plugins for tlp. I think it's likely just a rather simple, logical compromise.

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It’s doubled completely on all tlp servers except Rizlona. Afford? Didn’t they recently announce revenue of $7M? I mean the game is making the new owners money and has been.

Crone said:

It’s doubled completely on all tlp servers except Rizlona. Afford? Didn’t they recently announce revenue of $7M? I mean the game is making the new owners money and has been.

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I refuse to believe they made $7m. Where are you getting this apeshit data.And they certainly didn't make $7m from EQ LOLOLOL.

Morrow said:

I refuse to believe they made $7m. Where are you getting this apeshit data.And they certainly didn't make $7m from EQ LOLOLOL.

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When EG7 bought them out they were super transparent in regards to their revenue here. They did 11.5m in revenue YTD in September of last year, with ~$7m of that coming strictly from subs(something most people didn't expect - they figured most revenue came from the shop).

Keep in mind I'm pretty far removed from the "MQ2" dev community, I read the Redguides forums and Discord. It seems like a lot of the non-Mule dev community now views claims Mule made about his meeting and "deal" with Daybreak with a great degree of skepticism because it was discovered his MQ2IC plugin was transmitting user data (including account names and character names) to Daybreak. What is widely known as true is Mule did travel to their offices and did have a meeting with some people there. There are doubts now that any formal deal ever existed, and because there has developed a bit of a "cold war" between the Next devs and Mule I don't know how forthcoming Mule will ever be on clearing it up.

At the end of the day MQ2IC from a high-level perspective has the same issue that Truebox does. Combined with Daybreak's poor track record at finding the people who know how to bypass it, it mostly just benefits people like Elderan and other big RMTers who casually bypass, while making the game annoying and hard for "normie" players who don't want to fuck around with their own custom MQ2 compiles or Truebox bypasses. The actual position of Daybreak/Darkpaw on cheating and enforcement is fairly terrible.

Every game has cheating and some people get away with it, but EQ seems to have a bad track record of very blatant cases going unaddressed for months. My view on MQ2/Cheating is until the company actually has a system in place where most client hack cheaters are quickly caught and autobanned (which is the norm in many games), MQ2 and boxing should be both tolerated and done widely as an equalizer between normal players and RMTers. What's bad is it does seem like they stepped up "enforcement" with Aradune/Rizlona release, but also increased cases of people being banned for going AFK and not logging out, even if they're just feigned on the ground with /afk up.

The issue is they really didn't up the enforcement of the truly bad actors. They upped the enforcement of people who are basically too dumb to be using a tool as powerful as MQ2, that much is true. Until people who are openly warping to open world spawns, far taunting, no rooting, and the other extreme abilities some complies of MQ2 allow I don't believe Darkpaw is serious about anti cheating.

I fully support MQ2 use to remove the tedium of EQ. But I do believe we should still be playing within the scope of what someone without MQ2 could more-or-less do.

Foaming said:

The issue is they really didn't up the enforcement of the truly bad actors. They upped the enforcement of people who are basically too dumb to be using a tool as powerful as MQ2, that much is true. Until people who are openly warping to open world spawns, far taunting, no rooting, and the other extreme abilities some complies of MQ2 allow I don't believe Darkpaw is serious about anti cheating.

I fully support MQ2 use to remove the tedium of EQ. But I do believe we should still be playing within the scope of what someone without MQ2 could more-or-less do.

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The problem is when it becomes so widespread, that you feel like you just can't compete without it.

I remember the reason I first buckled to use MQ2 was when I just didn't care about the game anymore and wasn't having a lot of fun. MQ2 ingested new life into the game for me. I bought 2 more cd keys + a ton of expansions at the time, and started paying for 3 subs. So it was a win/win. That lasted for a good six-12 months. I was doing all sorts of crazy shit though. Then I quit for a while and when I came back, I merely used it for navigating/traveling and that lasted for a good year or so. I wouldn't have played at that point without it. I haven't used it in a very long time though. I've never used it on TLPs, and the fact that so many people do use it on TLP makes me not want to play without it. And I've been too lazy to get it set up again so I'm just playing p99 instead.

So they are pretty smart to not allow a lot of stuff on TLP. I wish none of the compiles worked on TLP whatsoever. On live, who gives a fuck.

Ikkan said:

When EG7 bought them out they were super transparent in regards to their revenue here. They did 11.5m in revenue YTD in September of last year, with ~$7m of that coming strictly from subs(something most people didn't expect - they figured most revenue came from the shop).

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I forgot about all the people that will subscribe to something and then never unsubscribe. AOL still rakes in millions every year from subscription fees.

I don't believe EQ made $7m from active subscribers. No way.

Whether they made 7m from active subscribers or not isn't really relevant. They'd definitely not lie on publicly released documents like that, so we can be fairly certain those numbers are accurate.

Either way, they're definitely making good money from EQ.

Krono likely count as subscriptions in a big picture model.

Most people pay directly for their sub. It takes a significant amount of grinding to buy a Krono on live, and if you're playing on live you're are vested in the game so the 1 year sub model is attractive and barely more expensive than black market Krono with zero of the risks of the secondary market. A lot of TLP players are not the power gamers we have on this forum. They might hop from TLP to TLP but they never amass more than a few Krono at any point which they promptly use to gear an alt or such.

I really think the Krono market is a smaller piece of Darkpaw's revenue stream than this forum would lead you to believe. Significant, but not the end all that gets touted here.

Foaming said:

Most people pay directly for their sub. It takes a significant amount of grinding to buy a Krono on live, and if you're playing on live you're are vested in the game so the 1 year sub model is attractive and barely more expensive than black market Krono with zero of the risks of the secondary market. A lot of TLP players are not the power gamers we have on this forum. They might hop from TLP to TLP but they never amass more than a few Krono at any point which they promptly use to gear an alt or such.

I really think the Krono market is a smaller piece of Darkpaw's revenue stream than this forum would lead you to believe. Significant, but not the end all that gets touted here.

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I would agree as far as actual account subscriptions go - paying for these using krono is probably more of a tlper thing and more of a hardcore subset at that. But there ARE people buying krono and those count as months of subscription. I realize there's gonna be details when you break out the ledger, but at a big picture (annual gross) level, they're subscription payments. If I buy a year sub they're going to mark $120 or whatever, and if I buy a handful of krono they're gonna mark $85 or whatever they cost. If they have 45-60k active subscriptions (assuming my math isn't awful) they can get to 7m from that, but I suspect the number is a touch lower, and people buying krono make up the difference. Bear in mind that a krono is significantly more cash for a game month than a sub, especially annual subs.