SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

ZyyzYzzy said:

You were an occidio day on lanys? Explains a lot you being a cuck and all

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Did I steal your lewtz?

I don't think that word means what you think it does...

I've been in the top guild of every server I've played on. Hate me.

a_skeleton_03 said:

@Torrid the people like Secrets and Tyen and a few others that constantly hover around P99 or any other emu are enough to make people want to avoid it at all cost no matter how accurate it is.

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Honestly, I'd avoid P99 and the players but been casually playing on TAKP since it launched and it's the exact opposite of the Aspergers fest of P99.

Granted if you try to play 8 hours a day, it's not gonna be fun since it's easy to get geared and max out a char but is a blast to stroll down some nostalgia.

a_skeleton_03 said:

You can also look at this forum. Several people did not want to come on over because they were very worried that we would just shut down. You don't want to get invested into an Emu and then the admin just wanders off or actively shuts it down.

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To be fair, this site did shut down on fohguild, rerolled, and rererolled. You only took up the reigns because you cared about this community. I created servers because I cared to give folks that were disillusioned with a company, whom, judging by this thread has done their fair share of undesirable behavior.

Story time: I applied to SOE once in 2013... it didn't work out. I was too happy to want to work there. They just wanted quick help they could abuse for whatever purpose, and it showed. They ended up laying the guy off that got hired instead of me a year later. I dodged a big bullet. They wanted an employee, but I sought a family of game developers that I could relate to, similar to the relations in the hobbyist emulator scene. Getting rejected by the people that I once admired only fueled my passion to create games. I think I am a bit lucky that I missed that bullet, though I don't think anyone wants to play Russian roulette with Columbus Nova.

Making MMO and FPS worlds is therapeutic for me. Creating EQEmu servers helped me through my angsty teenage years, and taught me skills that I quite frankly wouldn't have without the EQEmu community. I only hope that the lasting impact I had is enjoyed through servers like P99 and fragments of memories of content I have created.

I had no concept of anything like retention, KPIs, etc, when I first started out in emu, as do every other amateur server owner does when they first start. I made things because I cared about giving a lasting experience. I didn't realize that shutting down things I made would have a long-term impact. Hell, when I started doing this I was 16, and didn't have life experiences that explained a lot of my feelings... let alone providing something creative for others to play.

But now I do. It's life-changing and freeing in a way when you ship your first title with a team. I wouldn't have done my life any other way, because I would be a miserable wreck.

Chanur said:

Who the hell is Ponytail?

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Dave Georgeson. He was the Director of EQ1/EQ2.

ZyyzYzzy said:

This is the last thing an adult brags about.

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Yet here we are on a gaming on forum dedicated to such things...

And what guild were you in?

More troubling news for Columbus Nova - It looks like they are tangled up in the Stormy Daniels / Special Counsel investigation now.

Mueller's team questions Russian oligarch about payments to Cohen - CNNPolitics

No wonder Daybreak Games jumped through hoops to distance themselves from Columbus Nova - They must have known this news was going to come out in the very near future.

Zarlore said:

More troubling news for Columbus Nova - It looks like they are tangled up in the Stormy Daniels / Special Counsel investigation now.

Mueller's team questions Russian oligarch about payments to Cohen - CNNPolitics

No wonder Daybreak Games jumped through hoops to distance themselves from Columbus Nova - They must have known this news was going to come out in the very near future.

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They're just vacationing in Norrath. That's what the Russians are doing. Nothing to see here!

gugabuba said:

Isn't this a huge failing and Smedley's fault? What could have been if that cash was pushed back into EQ rather than into repeated failed projects? WoW has redefined how long one of these games can keep going with a healthy population, and certainly EQ never would have challenged it in raw numbers, but it could have had a very different, healthier run the last decade, instead of its steady decline into a team that afaik can no longer make new zones.

"Really wanting to make great things" is a pretty low bar for running multimillion dollar companies. Making good bets seems like the core competency for someone in his position, and his track record is pretty bad.

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Honestly, nothing would have happened if they'd pumped money into EQ. IT WAS AN OLD GAME. People are fickle.. So many people want pretty over good. EQ could have the best gameplay mechanics ever in a game, and a subset of people would still not play it because it's ugly by today's standards.

The other problem is EQ was developed when nobody had a clue HOW to engineer a game for scalability or reasonable updates. They were shooting from the hip the entire time. I tell people this all the time.. To make major changes to EQ is an effort beyond description. Unless you've worked on EQ, and seen HOW the game gets made, you simply can't understand the difficulty of doing basically anything in the game. Simply putting an NPC into the world required entries into 7 different database tables, usually done with Excel. Before I joined the team, you couldn't export that data into the zone without preventing everyone else from doing the same thing. Here's an example.. I put a couple NPCs into a zone, and export the zone so those NPCs appear. In the early days of EQ, that export would take HOURS, sometimes DAYS to complete depending upon the amount of data involved. I'm not making excuses, just explaining how insane the game was to work on back then. The work the engineers put into making that easier over the years has been incredible. Oh, and when I first joined, if you made spell changes, and exported the spell files, NOBODY could log into the game until servers were restarted, because the system would see you had a different version of the spells file than on the system, and prevent you from logging in.

Every expansion made it even harder. People asked, "Why don't you upgrade EQ's graphics engine?" as if somehow a new engine would make the zones, character art, weapons, spells, etc update as well. EQ has over 1,000 unique zones now.. The amount of work to update it could simply never be recouped financially. Anyone remember the DX9 update? A HUGE percentage of the player base suddenly couldn't play the game at all because of performance. Granted, those people were playing on crap computers, but that's not relevant to them. One day they can play, the next day, they're getting 3-5 FPS. That's a REALLY good way for people to say, "Fuck off" and quit your game.

Short version: I loved working on EQ because it was a game I'd invested so much time playing before getting into the industry. Through all of its faults, I still had a lot of fun making content for the game, and working with some incredibly dedicated people.

Someone here talked shit about Absor earlier, but fuck man, that guy, for all of his grumpiness is a seriously creative and talented designer. We did shit in EQ that simply wasn't possible using the scripting equivalent of bailing wire and duct tape. EQ's scripting is iterative, meaning it isn't compiled, but instead the script runs, in its entirety every game cycle (6 seconds). If we wanted to store data to use in the next iteration, we had to save it on the server, or save it on the character, then reload it when the script ran again.

As an example, remember the discussion the gods had when people first entered PoT? That was a script with text hooks in it, but it was WAY more complicated than it needed to be if we'd had a reasonable script processing system. Our script cycle ran every 6 seconds, but because 6 seconds would be an eternity for a call/response conversation, we used a command to schedule that same script to run again in 2 seconds, thereby bypassing the 6 second script cycle. Again, doing all of the saving and reloading of script variables on the server or invisible NPC script controller (remember the invis NPCs in ToV? Those were script controllers). Yeah, it was janky as fuck, but it worked.

I need to go fly right now, but I'll post more later.. The way EQ worked was THE example of 'overcome and adapt' in my opinion.

Elidroth said:

Anyone remember the DX9 update? A HUGE percentage of the player base suddenly couldn't play the game at all because of performance. Granted, those people were playing on crap computers, but that's not relevant to them. One day they can play, the next day, they're getting 3-5 FPS. That's a REALLY good way for people to say, "Fuck off" and quit your game.

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The game has run terrible since DX9 was introduced. I'll attest to that. The EQMac DX8 native windows client would've ran SO much better than the current live build. The one DX8 client I hacked together loads zones nearly instantly.

Regarding the tools for content creation, I can't imagine what you guys go through.
I've spent hours revamping backend services where I work and turned spaghetti code into something modern. Typically from what I have seen in industry, the tools that companies make pale in comparison to the enthusiasts just because there's a budget and feature set that needs to get completed. After everyone agrees on 'we're implementing that thing', it typically gets done and there's no room for innovation unless you do it on your spare time. Assuming the same for everywhere at this point.

Appreciate those posts. The innerworkings of EQ always intrigued me.

cucks