SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

Punko said:

Yea, GoD was an awesome expansion - everyone loved it, people were just tired of EQ.

Wait no, GoD was terrible, which caused a mass exodus towards WoW, on top of that SoE managed to cannibalize what was left of EQ1s playerbase later in 2004, by launching EQ2, which simply wasn't a sequel to EQ1, a huge mistake by itself.

Launching a shitty product in the same year your competition is launching their new game, and cannibalizing your own playerbase, in the same year .. its actually amazing EQ1 survived 2004, despite SoEs retarded moves.

In hindsight I can only conclude that SoE wanted to kill EQ1 by launching GoD in the way they did, hoping everyone would move over to EQ2 so they could focus on that game .. but of course the core game of EQ2 didn't appeal to the hardcore EQ1 crew .. which happened to be the people that bothered to struggle through GoD, so that plan failed, and they ended up with two games with a low-medium population, neither game deserving the investments necessary to compete with WoW.

That, or they were just actually full retard.

E Elidroth I'm actually curious about your view on these events, perhaps it wasn't all bad?



It absolutely didn't, notice how progression servers are still very popular these days.

The EQ of 2004 ran out of favor due to above reasons .. EQ itself did not.

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Gates was a disaster at launch, for a lot of reasons. Delays in getting it finished, designers responsible for major aspects of it quitting just as testing of content was to begin leaving people scrambling to figure out just what the hell was intended, poor communication from community people on updates, and so forth. If you think SOE TRIED to kill EQ, you're a moron. Nobody actively tries to kill a profitable product. That's pure stupidity. EQ2 didn't really take THAT many players from EQ1.. although a lot of people DID try EQ2 when it launched, the majority of players who left EQ did so for a few reasons:

1) The absolute disaster that Gates was at launch. Not just game balance, but an entirely new lore that nobody gave a shit about.
2) WoW. This part is huge. WoW was simply a better game. All the years of so many classes being unable to play alone, and here comes WoW where EVERY class can play alone. Logging on and sitting on your ass sucks.
3) The game was several years old at this point. It's not unreasonable to think people just moved on. When you combine this with the above reasons, it made it much easier to move on.

EQ had been the red-headed stepchild of SOE for a long time. It made the money, but almost every game that came along afterwards was intended to be the new cash cow, and it frankly just never worked. It wasn't until DCUO really got going that ANY game made more money than EQ.. H1Z1 did initially as well once there were revenue streams in place. Those of us who worked on EQ were pretty unhappy about constantly being the revenue, but getting shit on by management. Holly actually helped to change that in a lot of ways, but it took Ponytail getting shitcanned to actually give EQ a voice in the company again. While he was in charge of the EQ franchise, we were more a necessary annoyance to him.. We paid the bills, but he preferred that we just shut the fuck up and stay out of sight.

Torrid said:

Rolling back 15 years is precisely what the emus are doing, yet the official TLPs get all the play. For the life of me I can't understand this.

I'll spend 10 hours to parse statistics on a single NPC while Daybreak could merely pull up anything they need from Al'Kabor's source in minutes.

Daybreak slaps 'mitigation of the mighty' effects on raid bosses instead of taking the time to do things like implementing classic skill caps, monk fist damage, spell damage etc. Frankly calling this half-assed would be generous, yet they get plenty of subscribers. The two best emus are far more accurate and classic yet the best PoP emu hasn't broken 300 CCU. I can only conclude that players don't give a shit about mechanics accuracy. That or they don't genuinely want a classic experience and insist on instancing and mousewheel, even at the cost of putting up with all the unclassic behavior they don't like.

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Most players want to think they are on hard mode while actually steamrolling through content because they're gud or have the sekret strat or whatever. Players don't want difficulty, they want (the appearance of) mastery over 15+ year old content.

Smed's problem was he was too trusting of people's claims about almost everything. The Agency is a perfect example. Those guys were selling THE MOST AWESOME Snake Oil ever heard of.. and kept giving the little previews of ideas that seemed really cool. Unfortunately, after several years of this, it finally was revealed that they'd been pissing away tons of money and had nothing to show for it. Sound familiar?

Along comes Ponytail, and the bullshit smoke and mirrors nonsense starts again. I'll say one thing for Ponytail; he was a master of bullshit and telling people what they wanted to hear. EQN development was 100% hidden from most of the company for years. This whole 'black box' horseshit, which included taking the entire team to MineCon in Las Vegas.. That prompted the game changing AGAIN into what was the voxel world stuff. Again, more money pissed away. Money that EQ, EQ2, and DCUO were generating, getting thrown down a black hole with no end in sight. Then when the combat demo was given to the company to test, almost unanimously outside of the team, the response was "WTF is this shit?", and soon after any requests for feedback from outside the team were stopped. You know how that all ended up. Oh, yeah.. and the Landmark fuckery. More Ponytail nonsense. He'd tell the company, "We're going to make these tools the most powerful available, AND the easiest to use" as if that's possible. I'd say a solid 50% of the things people were able to do in Landmark.

Landmark was never supposed to be a game. It was supposed to be, "Hey peeps.. here are the voxel tools.. Go nuts!", and then somehow Ponytail decided this was to be his legacy as a Game God. He ACTUALLY said as much at a team meeting with it.. Landmark was going to cement his legacy in game development. All the while most of us are like, "Stop patting yourself on the back and make the fucking game (EQN)". Sadly, all that fucking around on Landmark, coupled with the voxels, and the realization that they had no clue how to make a destructible world work in an MMO environment with hopefully hundreds of thousands of players (OH GOD THE BANDWIDTH REQUIREMENTS ALONE), and EQN never had a chance.

There are very few people in the industry that I would NEVER work with again, and he's at the top of the list.

Smed I would absolutely work for again.. He gets a bad rap here, but he really does want to make great things.. he's just been led astray a few times in succession by some REALLY enthusiastic con artists.

yamikazo said:

Most players want to think they are on hard mode while actually steamrolling through content because they're gud or have the sekret strat or whatever. Players don't want difficulty, they want (the appearance of) mastery over 15+ year old content.

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This.. People claim they want difficulty, but they really want to faceroll everything and wag their e-penis at people.

Torrid said:

Rolling back 15 years is precisely what the emus are doing, yet the official TLPs get all the play. For the life of me I can't understand this.

I'll spend 10 hours to parse statistics on a single NPC while Daybreak could merely pull up anything they need from Al'Kabor's source in minutes.

Daybreak slaps 'mitigation of the mighty' effects on raid bosses instead of taking the time to do things like implementing classic skill caps, monk fist damage, spell damage etc. Frankly calling this half-assed would be generous, yet they get plenty of subscribers. The two best emus are far more accurate and classic yet the best PoP emu hasn't broken 300 CCU. I can only conclude that players don't give a shit about mechanics accuracy. That or they don't genuinely want a classic experience and insist on instancing and mousewheel, even at the cost of putting up with all the unclassic behavior they don't like.

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I'm pretty sure it's just being the source. Daybreak owns EQ, the actual game itself. People who want to play EQ are more willing to give them money/load their version of the game. They already have an account, have played in the past, and know it works and runs safely. They know a playerbase is there, so they'll definitely have people to play with.

I don't know shit about emu's but I would never play one simply because I don't know who runs them, I don't know what the software I'm downloading is etc. Especially when it comes to EQ. You hear about P99 and all the shady shit that goes on there and it's not hard to believe why people just prefer to play on a TLP.

You're right though, I don't think anyone wants the "real classic experience" either. And I don't blame them. That shit would be horrible

Elidroth said:

EQ had been the red-headed stepchild of SOE for a long time.

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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.

It comes down to how you choose to look at it. The fact is, he launched and directed a franchise that has been around since 1999 and put out 24 expansions. Those facts alone are astonishing. You have to do a lot of good, small things things along the way to get those big results.

Wasted potential? No doubt... but if you want to focus on the positives, there is a lot to focus on.

It's always fun to watch Elidroth come in and drop truth bombs.

Korillo said:

I don't know shit about emu's but I would never play one simply because I don't know who runs them, I don't know what the software I'm downloading is etc. Especially when it comes to EQ. You hear about P99 and all the shady shit that goes on there and it's not hard to believe why people just prefer to play on a TLP.

You're right though, I don't think anyone wants the "real classic experience" either. And I don't blame them. That shit would be horrible

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Well I've poured thousands of hours of my life into recreating a classic experience, so I guess that makes me extra crazy.

After working on an emu myself for the last several years after having played p99 for some time, I'll just say this: people who are banned are fucking liars and want to take the servers down with them by getting gullible people on forums riled up. I see a lot of 'p99 is satan' on here, but I have no idea what they're talking about. I work with a p99 dev (he works with both teams) -- he's committed to squashing RMT. People assume RMT goes on without evidence, perhaps because they assume everybody is as dishonest as they are. We make huge sacrifices in time and money to make a quality server. It makes no sense to ruin it for trivial amounts of money. If I was so intent on making money I'd have worked on other projects and made far more. P99 had rogue GMs that were removed. It's VERY HARD to find people to GM who aren't crazy or corrupt and are competent and trustworthy and work for free. It's not like Sony never had rogue GMs before.

P99 has some client modifications that check for cheating. It's not exactly a secret. If that is unacceptable to you, then fine, don't play or play in a VM. (I in fact played in a VM for some time years ago) Most of the players there appreciate the anti-cheating effort. I wouldn't call this 'shady', but privacy minded people might not like it.

pharmakos said:

I'm only playing on Coirnav because TAKP runs very poorly on my laptop despite trying every known performance trick. =\

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I'm not very familiar with this issue, but Haynar has done some work recently on making the client run better on laptops. Check the 'Hybrid Graphics Support' section on the getting started wiki page for a possible solution.

Elidroth said:

There are very few people in the industry that I would NEVER work with again, and he's at the top of the list.

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Fight said:

You have to do a lot of good, small things things along the way to get those big results.

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Do you? Or do you have to fuck up really badly once you are in the right time and place like Smed was. Reminds me of Russ:


I have no clue but was pondering this counterfactual: if you took a random person off the street and put them in charge of SOE in 2003, would the next 15 years really have gone worse?

Elidroth said:

Gates was a disaster at launch, for a lot of reasons. Delays in getting it finished, designers responsible for major aspects of it quitting just as testing of content was to begin leaving people scrambling to figure out just what the hell was intended, poor communication from community people on updates, and so forth. If you think SOE TRIED to kill EQ, you're a moron. Nobody actively tries to kill a profitable product. That's pure stupidity. EQ2 didn't really take THAT many players from EQ1.. although a lot of people DID try EQ2 when it launched, the majority of players who left EQ did so for a few reasons:

1) The absolute disaster that Gates was at launch. Not just game balance, but an entirely new lore that nobody gave a shit about.
2) WoW. This part is huge. WoW was simply a better game. All the years of so many classes being unable to play alone, and here comes WoW where EVERY class can play alone. Logging on and sitting on your ass sucks.
3) The game was several years old at this point. It's not unreasonable to think people just moved on. When you combine this with the above reasons, it made it much easier to move on.

EQ had been the red-headed stepchild of SOE for a long time. It made the money, but almost every game that came along afterwards was intended to be the new cash cow, and it frankly just never worked. It wasn't until DCUO really got going that ANY game made more money than EQ.. H1Z1 did initially as well once there were revenue streams in place. Those of us who worked on EQ were pretty unhappy about constantly being the revenue, but getting shit on by management. Holly actually helped to change that in a lot of ways, but it took Ponytail getting shitcanned to actually give EQ a voice in the company again. While he was in charge of the EQ franchise, we were more a necessary annoyance to him.. We paid the bills, but he preferred that we just shut the fuck up and stay out of sight.

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I'm one of the few that actually really liked GoD, broken and all. And even hearing the rumor that it was intended for level 70s, made it that much more delicious. Mobs were rapeface, and I was in my prime, so I really liked the challenge. CQ had just reformed under the tag <Occidio>, and we gave that expansion hell, even with the turmoil of restructuring, and losing people to WoW and EQ2 Betas. I loved the Breakdown in Communication questline, and thought the lore around the Nihil was intriguing. Plus they looked super cool with the glowy tattoos using the updated graphics tech. To this day, I think Uqua is my favorite raid zone.