I wanted to say, "Thank You" to all of the players who had so much fun on April 1st. We threw in the new player models and had a great time putting it together for everyone to have fun with. It was a fun joke and something that many players will remember for quite some time. I can say that we did learn a lesson though; giving the players an option to disable such a feature will be included in the future. With that being said, I continue to get IM's about adding a stick figure spell which makes me laugh each time.
I have been paying quite a bit of attention to the Customer Support team as well. I know that many of the players feel that the CS team doesn't always communicate to the development team. It may not be obvious that the communication is actually constant and collaborative. I am working with the CS team and our Community team to better communicate to the players the reporting and fixing of CS related issues. The development team fixes multiple bugs each week that have been sent to us from CS and the players should know that we are listening and reacting to make your game play experience better each day. Look for new callouts of CS related fixes and make sure you submit game play issues to the CS reps. Many of the players assume that "someone" else has submitted the problem. Trust me the more reports the better!
Our team is hard at work on addressing Live game issues and working on discussing future expansions and plans. Along with the normal meetings that we have every week, we also have two meetings each year to discuss the future plans for EverQuest and create goals based on community feedback and team desires. In our last meeting the mood was different. We had a renewed passion for the game and were proposing big, exciting ideas that we didn't want to compromise on due to dates. We presented our ideas and new vision and received 100% support.
In this Producer letter I am proud to announce that we're changing our tactics so we can accomplish what we have set out to do and do it with the quality we know we can deliver. Our next expansion will be released in November. This will give us more time to polish the game content and features. I am also happy to announce that November will be the month for all future expansion releases as well. We realize that many players want more content but would like to be able to play through the last expansion before feeling like they are falling behind when a new one comes out. Our goal is to focus on the overall quality and let the players have time to enjoy the great work that we put into each release.
This is absolutely great news for our team and for our players as well. I look forward to giving everyone an inside look of the development of the next expansion so you can see the hard work going into the release.
Clint "Jourdian" Worley
EverQuest Producer
Sony Online Entertainment
