Daybreak’s Horrible Kunark Poll Decisions

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I’m having a blast on Ragefire. I still play every day, and I am leveling my Magician with plans for multiple alts in the works. I’m stocking up gear for those alts and preparing a plan that could easily last me another 5+ months without Kunark.

Well, the results of the Kunark poll are in and I am not too happy with how Daybreak is handling things. You can find the entire post here, but I’ll break it down for you.

On both servers, the 6 month option got the most votes by far, meaning a very large percentage of you like things as they are and want to continue on that path. Ragefire’s second choice was to unlock Kunark ASAP, but Lockjaw’s second choice was to unlock Kunark after 3 months.

Awesome! This is how I voted. I want to extend classic as long as possible. Glad to see the 6 month option won by far.

Here’s where it gets really good.

With such a significant portion of the active players on these servers voting to keep progression slow, we will not be changing both servers. We plan to keep Lockjaw on the six month schedule that was originally voted for by the populace at large.

For the other half of players, however, we are going to decrease the wait for Ragefire to vote to unlock Kunark from 6 months to 3 months. The voting period for Kunark will thus become available on August 23rd and end on September 6th.

What the …. ? You literally, verbatim, just said that on BOTH servers the 6 month option got the most votes BY FAR. Your words! To top it off, they “investigating” server transfers… does that mean there’s a chance they won’t be possible? Even so, why would I leave the server community I chose to join and stay on since day 1.

Why are we voting? Seriously. That’s TWO polls where the players spoke and Daybreak chose to ignore it and go there own way. You combine all of the other options in a poll to say, “Oh it looks like the winning vote doesn’t win after all.” You throw out the results of your own poll while Holly Longdale puts her foot in her mouth by showing what the executive producer of EQ really thinks about the vast majority of players.

“What we don’t want to do is instance raids, which is what casuals want us to do because they want to fight Nagafen. Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen… that diminishes the achievement of others. That’s part of the challenge: You have to be better than the other guy; you have to be more strategic that the other guy.”

I’m sorry, are you then insinuating that a dozen people boxing multiple Mage accounts have more strategy? Is sitting at a spawn 17 hours a day to kill the mob in seconds a challenge? Have my 161 hours (some of that spent afk) in the first month been too casual and undeserving?  Casuals should absolutely be allowed to fight Nagafen. If instead of playing my own way I had decided to go the route of raiding, I STILL would not have been able to kill Nagafen due to how the server handles the kill, yet I would be more “hardcore” than several people who have participated — several of the mere handful of people.  Where do they find some of these people who say crap like that?

EverQuest, specifically my experience on Ragefire, is amazing. The devs, however, have proven they are disconnected from the players and are running a very amateur show. If Daybreak continues down this road I probably won’t last long. I enlisted to play on the 6 month per expansion server. I’m not interested in playing live EQ, and that’s where this server is quickly going.

  • Right on.

    If transfers open to LJ, will you go?

    My feeling is that if they open, I will go. If they don’t, I will quit. They got my money by stating that after the bosses went down, there would be a 6 month period followed by the vote to unlock. They’ve lost about all my trust with this. I think I’ll stay on board if there’s free transfers, but even then…. I’m not happy right now.

    On the casuals/raiding…

    EQ was designed in 1999. It did not have krono, and people did not own computers that could run 6 or 12 or 18 instances of Everquest. Multiboxers existed, like Sammancer Deathwalker and his 6 computers. They were rare enough that I can name one 15 years later. Also, mages (the class I played in 1999) were not overpowered.

    What you have now, that any game designer should be able to spot from a thousand miles away, is a massive problem. You’ve given people an easy tool to dominate areas by themselves – 1 button class, no positional requirement, highest dps in the game, no heals required. In 2015, you don’t need 6+ computers, your parent’s crappy dell can run 6 instances of EQ. And the last barrier, 6x $15 subs? That’s the biggest tragedy. The game incentivizes the locking down of all high end tradable gear in the game. Lock down the loot, trade it to the filthy casuals for kronos, play the game for free while making sure no one else can access content.

    A cynical me would say this is by design so DBG can sell more kronos. In reality, I just don’t think their team has any idea what they are doing.

  • I don’t think Daybreak’s definition of “hardcore” includes boxers, since in the same interview Holly Longdale also says they are investigating ways to mitigate the effects of multi-boxing on the Progression servers, possibly by limiting log-ins to one per computer (not per IP address, which would, for example, prevent both me and Mrs Bhagpuss playing together). I think they mean the large Progression guilds of which EQ has quite a few. What they mean by “casuals”, though, is anyone’s guess.

    Leaving that aside, I’m not sure you need to panic about any of this. I agree it’s an odd decision but if as they say “On both servers, the 6 month option got the most votes by far, meaning a very large percentage of you like things as they are and want to continue on that path” then there’s not really any reason to think that will have changed by August, is there?

    The most likely outcome would be that the vote then will go the same way. If it doesn’t then, well, a lot of people must have had enough of Classic earlier than they thought and it probably would be better to move on.

    That said, I think the whole having a vote thing is farcical. Everyone knew what they were signing up for. The servers should run on as per the original remit. The only reason I can see for having these votes at all would be if the servers are already bleeding population so fast they are worried there won’t be enough players left to keep them commercially viable. Does it seem that empty?

  • Lol. Welcome to SOE/Daybreak, say one thing and then do another. This is nothing new and I was hoping with the company change/redesign this pattern would change too.

    I am not sure you will ever get them to admit about the botting problem. There are plenty of threads about it on the EQ2 forums as well. I think their quote is them picturing a large raid force where each char is played by one person. That type of commitment and coordination should be rewarded in their eyes.

  • If you are upset about the direction of the private server keen, I strongly suggest you dont look up anything about Landmark lol…

    It essentially has halted any sort of growth in development since we played in Alpha. It is currently 100% a “Build this style building contest” which really is just a easy to detect ploy to have the players make buildings/scenery for EQN.

    IMO Daybreak is in big trouble, I genuinely fear for the fate of Everquest Next. I dont think they have the staying power to release a big budget MMO, I think it will be rushed and fall short of the Everquest legacy.

    But again, I am just a disgruntled player so what do i know.

  • @Jenks: I’m definitely considering the transfer. I’m just worried that most of the players wouldn’t move and we would end up on a ghost town server with no way back. Everything else you said is spot on.

    @Bhagpuss: They later clarified that such ideas of limiting logins would be for FUTURE servers. And at first I was agreeing with you that we can just vote and extend it, but here’s the catch… what if the server transfers open and there aren’t enough people to make that vote a reality on Ragefire? And if they’ve thrown out two of their polls, who is to say that a poll to extend would not be veto’d again?

    Server is not losing people from my perspective. If anything, I wish a few hundred people would leave. I still can’t find a place to get exp during my 2 hour window each night. 😛

    @Table: Too late, I already did. I should have seen that coming. I definitely have buyer’s remorse over Landmark. This company gives me so much damn cognitive dissonance it’s ridiculous.

  • @Bhagpuss

    Holly clarified on the forums that the anti-boxing method would only be considered for future servers, not Ragefire/LJ.

  • They said in your quote that “Lockjaw” had the 3 month option as the second highest vote.

    So they choose to do the 3 month vote on Ragefire.

    That company is full of win.

  • 😐 <—- my look of surprise when it is suggested DGC can't be trusted with anything.

    This Ragefire thing was for subscribers only, wasn't it? So you pay a monthly fee and have your solicited voice be ignored. (As a Landmark buyer, it was buy once, then ignored. It must feel worse to be paying monthly for the pleasure.)

  • Surprising they are ignoring the vote. I’m actually more surprised though that they are forcing the 3 month thing on the first server to come up. Why not the second?

    Holly, though, is absolutely right as a general principle. If you make raids and raid loot easy for everybody, nobody raids for very long. They are a pain in the ass and nobody would do them if a bunch of casuals could.

    Which it sounds like is really your problem here. A bunch of casuals with overpowered mages can drop Naggy. Jenks is right. Mages were pretty good in early eq but a group of 12 never would have beat that dragon. Their power tailed way off before that level.

    So I kinda agree with them on the raid issue, but think they seem to have seriously broken classes, and are doing something strange at unlocking at 3 months.

    Speaking of 3 monthers…….

  • Here’s where the issues really come from: The game is a frankenstein of patch version. We have the classic era operating under many of the assumptions of Live EQ servers. In theory Nagafen would be quite difficult, but the code is too messed up to make that a reality. To then make a blanket statement that in its current state there is such a thing as a casual and that the people killing Nagafen are more deserving due to strategy makes no sense.

    EQ, even with the devs behaving this way, is not a 3 monther. A 3 monther is not simply a game you play for three month. Time is not the reason a game is a 3 monther. It’s a 3 monther because of design issues. What we face here is a dev issue. Regardless, even with a dev team disconnected from the players, I could play EQ for another 6 months easily. Maybe more if they hold off Luclin.

    3 Monthers aren’t fun. I find EverQuest incredibly fun. Even right now I’m in a group in Lower Guk at the Frenzy spawn trying to get a FBSS for my alt. I love groups in EQ. I love combat. I love how this game plays.