Everquest 2

[Chaos]

Anyone here play it besides me? i did not see a topic based on this and decided to create my own.you may speak about any of the everquest's if you wish *even 1* tho i have not really played 1 and am more into 2 but it does have its link along with a good story line.

I love the people,they are very nice and helpful,very funny and goofy but of course like all mmo's,you have your bad apples.over all tho the game rocks and the graphics are wicked.If you havent tried it then you are missing out.

[Emily Aster]

I tried it years ago, but lost interest. Right now I'm waiting for 2 more MMOs that are supposed to come out this year and hopefully one of them keeps my interest. Neither are EQ though, so I won't mention them.

[Annah]

I played beta and into the game for the next two years. I was even a game master for Everquest 2 (got three expansions for free from it and a nice little paycheck). It just got too boring for me. I tried to stay interested but I couldn't.

I even resubbed a year ago...i lasted 2 days.

[Chaos]

Ah i see.i have been playing it since omg O_O um 2009 i think.its an old mmo and more for classic type of people (its been around since eq1 so its been on the market for awhile) and Emily thats cool,but sorry you lost interest.for me,the interest was mainly in the people/community and it allowed me to reach for more things in the game.

[Annah]

When the game first came out in 2003 it was really good. Then Sony Online Entertainment kept on screwing with it and making it worse and worse and worse. I was good friends with the Community Relations manager at the time and she was so upset over SOE messing things up she resigned because she could not, in good conscious, keep the community uplifted when she felt it was wrong. The added PvP with broken mechanics, the expansions really felt lack lustered. When one expansion was introduced with a starting area, the prior starting areas becomes obsolete because they add better items in the newer starting areas. (Which is a shame because the original starting areas were absolutely gorgeous...now it's empty).

Another friend of mine, who was the Community Relations manager for Star Wars Galaxies (also SOE) got fired for voicing her opinion. That game, too, was really awesome but the longer it was out, the more SOE destroyed it...to the point of loosing 375,000 subscribers in the month after the "New Game Experience." That's over 5.6 million dollars a month...gone...in just 30 days. 3 developers of SWG resigned after that.

I used to work for them...so sadly, I saw the ugly underbelly of the beast lol.

Now, I used to work for CCP back in 2003-2005. Now they were awesome. They are based in Iceland but has an office in Tx. I worked from home as a Polaris Team member (Game member). Those guys were top notch and honest people. I worked in the game called "EVE Online."

[Annah]

here was the review i did for Star Wars..and I was being very nice lol

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/6/view/reviews/load/26/Star-Wars-Galaxies-New-Game-Experience-Review.html

[Annah]

this eq2 review i made will probably make more sense since its Everquest related. I did this review prior to me working for SOE so there wasn't a conflict of interest at the time.

This was also the second expansion..which was awesome...but with each expansion, SOE just did more bad things

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/2/view/reviews/load/31/EverQuest-2-Desert-of-Flames-Review.html

[Emily Aster]

Ahh nothing like a little SOE bashing. I didn't stick around long enough in eq1 or eq2 to see them destroy it. What really turned me off of eq was the ridiculous amount of ads you were pummeled with when you logged in. I did play swg for awhile and liked it when it first came out. I don't know how it looked on the inside, but on the outside I remember everybody complaining that they weren't listening to the customer. I actually got the opposite impression, that they didn't know how to say no. Everybody wanted to be a jedi, so they provided a way for everybody to be one, but then everybody complained that it was too much grinding, so next thing we know it's a starting class and your jedi is being destroyed by wombats. I was actually a developer on a project called SWGEmu, which was a private server to take the game back to the way it was when it was first released, before sony changed the foundation... twice.

[Annah]

yeah they are notorious for not listening.

Actually, people begged them NOT to add Jedi as a starting class. I got the first Jedi on the Starsider server after grinding for MONTHS lol.

When I found out they were adding Jedi as a starting class, I sold my account for 2500 dollars and used it for a down payment on a car.

[Chaos]

When the game first came out in 2003 it was really good. Then Sony Online Entertainment kept on screwing with it and making it worse and worse and worse. I was good friends with the Community Relations manager at the time and she was so upset over SOE messing things up she resigned because she could not, in good conscious, keep the community uplifted when she felt it was wrong. The added PvP with broken mechanics, the expansions really felt lack lustered. When one expansion was introduced with a starting area, the prior starting areas becomes obsolete because they add better items in the newer starting areas. (Which is a shame because the original starting areas were absolutely gorgeous...now it's empty).

Another friend of mine, who was the Community Relations manager for Star Wars Galaxies (also SOE) got fired for voicing her opinion. That game, too, was really awesome but the longer it was out, the more SOE destroyed it...to the point of loosing 375,000 subscribers in the month after the "New Game Experience." That's over 5.6 million dollars a month...gone...in just 30 days. 3 developers of SWG resigned after that.

I used to work for them...so sadly, I saw the ugly underbelly of the beast lol.

Now, I used to work for CCP back in 2003-2005. Now they were awesome. They are based in Iceland but has an office in Tx. I worked from home as a Polaris Team member (Game member). Those guys were top notch and honest people. I worked in the game called "EVE Online."

there was alot of things changed because wow was new and sony needed something,along the way they pissed off alot of people and lost alot of their online base BUT since then *at least by now* they have slowly worked hard to make up the mistakes they have made and are rebuilding their player base again.i think they learned,choices that lead to more money is not ALWAYS the best choice.the way to make more money is to make your paying players happy.

[Chaos]

Ahh nothing like a little SOE bashing. I didn't stick around long enough in eq1 or eq2 to see them destroy it. What really turned me off of eq was the ridiculous amount of ads you were pummeled with when you logged in. I did play swg for awhile and liked it when it first came out. I don't know how it looked on the inside, but on the outside I remember everybody complaining that they weren't listening to the customer. I actually got the opposite impression, that they didn't know how to say no. Everybody wanted to be a jedi, so they provided a way for everybody to be one, but then everybody complained that it was too much grinding, so next thing we know it's a starting class and your jedi is being destroyed by wombats. I was actually a developer on a project called SWGEmu, which was a private server to take the game back to the way it was when it was first released, before sony changed the foundation... twice.

Odd i dont get these ad's.not as a paid player anyway,i do know tho that as a *free* player,you are given ad's in hopes of encouraging you to become a paid player but these can be ignored just like everything else.

[Annah]

I remember the controversy SOE had spurred back in 2003 when they named the starter zones. Much of the names in the Freeport Starting zones were utterly stolen from WoW. WoW did come out 3 months later but they had the names of their places down a half a year before Everquest 2 did. The lead gamemaster confirmed with me back in 2006 that SOE indeed "borrow" the names.

For example

Starting zone for the "bad guys" were the Badlands.
There was a small settlement called Crossroads
There is a starter dungeon (almost the same exact distance as was with both Crossroads in WoW and EQ2) called "Wailing Caverns."

I always got a snicker out of that. To be honest, I don't know how SOE got away with that.

However, I am very proud to say, I had made EQ2 history from a very famous Thread I started.

Feel free to read it....it made for a lot of good laughs



Im still finding a workable link lol

But here is an ingame screenshot of the cat they added into the game in honor of my dead one lol. You can find her in Freeport

[Chaos]

I remember the controversy SOE had spurred back in 2003 when they named the starter zones. Much of the names in the Freeport Starting zones were utterly stolen from WoW. WoW did come out 3 months later but they had the names of their places down a half a year before Everquest 2 did. The lead gamemaster confirmed with me back in 2006 that SOE indeed "borrow" the names.

For example

Starting zone for the "bad guys" were the Badlands.
There was a small settlement called Crossroads
There is a starter dungeon (almost the same exact distance as was with both Crossroads in WoW and EQ2) called "Wailing Caverns."

I always got a snicker out of that. To be honest, I don't know how SOE got away with that.

However, I am very proud to say, I had made EQ2 history from a very famous Thread I started.

Feel free to read it....it made for a lot of good laughs



Im still finding a workable link lol

But here is an ingame screenshot of the cat they added into the game in honor of my dead one lol. You can find her in Freeport

I find this odd,as you stated-wow did not come out until much later.this only leaves a few reasons on how eq2 could have even gotten such information,do you not agree? this is claiming that someone within blizzard had leaked such information for a price.hmm tho this may explain.so blizzard hired a man from eq to work in wow? seems to me the information might be backwards.but this is a subject i dont wish to touch on as it can lead to much *unwanted* finger pointing.

(Kaplan was hired by Blizzard Entertainment because of his former status as the leader of a guild in EverQuest known as Legacy of Steel.[5] The guild was formerly run by Rob Pardo (another game designer at Blizzard Entertainment) and was well known in the EverQuest community for its accomplishments in the game. Kaplan was also known at the time for his various commentaries about EverQuest posted on the website of said guild.)

(In a surprise announcement this afternoon, World of Warcraft's Game Director Jeff Kaplan (whom you may know from the forums as "Tigole," and whom those of you with a longer memory may remember as the guild leader of Legacy of Steel back in the EverQuest days) is leaving the WoW team to work on a their unannounced MMO. )

[Emily Aster]

Odd i dont get these ad's.not as a paid player anyway,i do know tho that as a *free* player,you are given ad's in hopes of encouraging you to become a paid player but these can be ignored just like everything else.

I was a paying customer and it happened to me with both eq1 and eq2. I don't remember if it was the loading screens or the after login because it's been a very long time since I played either. It wasn't ads in the sense that they were trying to sell stuff for other people. It was all ads for eq. Stupid crap like t-shirts and figurines. It also wasn't several ads on the same screen. It was one screen after another of them.

I find this odd,as you stated-wow did not come out until much later.this only leaves a few reasons on how eq2 could have even gotten such information,do you not agree? this is claiming that someone within blizzard had leaked such information for a price.hmm tho this may explain.so blizzard hired a man from eq to work in wow? seems to me the information might be backwards.but this is a subject i dont wish to touch on as it can lead to much *unwanted* finger pointing.

IT industries are very small places. I work in IT healthcare and within my specific area of healthcare, I know most of the developers across several different companies. I know them because we collaborate on projects. When people leave one company, they just end up at another one in the same industry, working with the same people. I'm sure the gaming industry is just as small, if not smaller. And where do companies go to seek talent in small industries? They go to people that work at their competitors and try to entice them to leave.

Games, like other IT projects, take literally years of design meetings to even get off the ground. Some companies have larger development teams that can whip out a product faster. Hitting the stands first doesn't necessarily mean you were the first to have the idea. And with such a long timeline, all it takes is one person looking to make a name for themselves at a competitor to take your secrets with them.