EQ Producer Letter for January 2008 A Brief Recap of 2007 2007 was a great year for EverQuest. We launched an expansion, provided live events, and worked on building the community. It would be impossible for me to cover everything done for EQ throughout the year so here's brief recap of some of fun:
For
Secrets of Faydwer, we kicked off a 3-month Beta that allowed both the players (you) and the Developers (us) plenty of time to focus on quality and polish the content for the expansion. We were able to do multiple passes on the high-level content and our Quality Assurance department actually reached out to work with players to ensure that the content was "fun" to play. That is a new process that you will see rolling into all future expansions. Since the development team is generally focused on balance and functionality and what we think is fun, it is refreshing to have the QA team essentially be an unbiased check and balance for the content. The Live event that took place in the
Steamfont Mountains was MAJOR! For those of you who were able to participate… I hope you had a great time with the event. We plan to do more events like it moving forward.
In March we celebrated the 8th Anniversary for EverQuest with the introduction of the Fabled Luclin NPCs and
The Fabled Adventurer video contest.
April Fool's Day… all I can say is that we had a blast with the "
new character models." Though, we did learn that a simple toggle on/off would have made everyone including us happier. Lesson learned and just wait for this year's plans *evil grin*.
Community's involvement with the game has increased and look for it to only get better; tournaments, contests and awesome in-game rewards for those of you that participate. With the latest contest,
Dawn of the Clockworks, we received some amazing entries; with the First Place prize going to a welded clockwork with a working clock crank on its back.
What's in store for 2008? The EverQuest team is already hard at work on the next expansion. We plan to have a longer Beta cycle once again to ensure that we deliver a quality product that is fun to play. More information about the expansion will be announced later in the year.
One of the goals that the EQ Dev team has is to refocus on the Live content that we give to the players. Many of you work on chewing through the expansion content and then you are left either wanting more or diving into AA advancement while you wait for the next major release. We are focusing on providing Live content on a monthly basis that you will be able to enjoy throughout the year. We hope to see everyone take part in these events and we are open to trying new and exciting things, so your feedback is welcome.
Bug fixing has been a priority that many of you have been able to take advantage of. Some fixes are tied to detective work on the development side and others are tied to amazing work done by "you" the actual players. Take the "West Bug" for example, when I mentioned to the community that we were going to take it serious and find a fix, I can't tell you how many messages I received about how the bug was "impossible" to fix and it was just part of EQ at that point. I can tell you now that through the hard work of a dedicated EQ player and one of my programmers… there is now a workaround that seems to address the bug on the majority of player's machines.
Stability has been a sore subject with EQ for some time now. Some of the issues have been persistent for quite some time and others are more recent. Part of the renewed focus on quality also encompasses stability and I can assure you that you will see significant progress on this issue in the next few months. We have tracked down a few major issues that have been under the radar for some time now and we already have fixes for them that will be rolling out in the next few weeks. With the move to the longer development cycles, we have opened up time on the programmers schedules to focus on issues like stability and everyone will benefit from it.
Server merges are always a hot topic, some are for and some are against. I can tell you that we keep a close eye on the populations on each server both at peak time and off peak time. We have target numbers that we feel are adequate for gameplay to be fully enjoyed in the EverQuest world. Once player numbers get close to dropping below those numbers we evaluate a server merge. I would like to clear the record though; we are not opposed to server merges. We just want to make sure the timing is right and it is something that will benefit the players. I will keep everyone updated on any movement with server merges once it comes up.
2008 is going to be a great year for EQ and I look forward to all of you participating with the changes we are bringing. As you notice in my letter, the words QUALITY and FOCUS are repeated over and over. We have recognized the main issues both good and bad and we are attacking them to make the game and the infrastructure as solid as possible. I get messages daily from players and I can say that the positive messages I am getting far outweigh the negative and it hasn't always been that way.
Thank you all for working with us to nail down the issues and we will continue to work on making EQ the game that you all love!
Clint "Jourdian" Worley
Senior Producer, EverQuest
Sony Online Entertainment Join the Discussion Thread
