It's been about a month since my last post here. Since then, we've made several changes and additions to the game, both in response to the community's requests and in preparation for the launch of Omens of War in September. These changes have included everything from tweaks to Lost Dungeons of Norrath and Gates of Discord content to the complete overhaul of the back-end systems that make up our Alternate Advancement system.
During the recent changes to the Alternate Advancement system we can see one example of how our team's constant communication with you, our player base, can positively impact the game. In changing the way that Alternate Advancement works on our end, we affected over 300 different abilities. These changes had plenty of potential for disaster. Yet, with your help we were able to spot and address few issues that popped up almost immediately. Having less than a dozen issues pop up during the reintegration of a system that affects hundreds of thousands of players in literally hundreds of different ways is a major success. Your help and patience made that possible. Thank you!
It's changes like these that will enable us to keep EverQuest growing strong for years to come.
Some of you may be reading that and thinking, "that's great, but what about class balance, solo instanced adventures, etc...!?"
Please remember, even if we're not posting or discussing certain topics in the forums, we're listening. The team not only reads your posts, but discusses them internally on a daily basis. Unfortunately, many of the requests and issues you present to us do not have easy solutions. With every change, update, and addition, we must consider all of the possible ramifications on nearly 8 years worth of content and systems. Because of these risks and the shear scale of the game and our player base, we have to take our time with certain changes.
When dealing with hundreds of thousands of customers, who have been playing the game a certain way for over 5 years in many cases, you try to be as careful as possible in your approach. This means that sometimes we may discuss ideas with the best intentions, only to find that it may take several months or years to properly integrate the concept into the game. That doesn't mean that certain things are never going to happen or that we've forgotten about them. This is expecially true when it comes to introducing new ways to play the game. It's one thing to make a minor tweak or add new content to existing game systems, but adding something that may appear to be simple can often turn out to be a really huge challenge. So, before we can promise something like Solo Instanced Content, we still have work our the kinks on something as simple as the Omens of War Task system. Then we'll need to monitor this system's affect on the game.
"Absolutes statements" and MMO development don't seem to work well together. During Planes of Power, we told you that instancing wouldn't work in EverQuest. At the time, it wouldn't. A year later, we created Lost Dungeons of Norrath. We've seen similar incidents with items, class changes, and just about everything else. It's going to happen. When you're dealing with something as organic and sprawling as EverQuest, there's no way around it.
As the Live Team works with you to find zones, events, or quests that require reworking, it's my job to find a way to make it possible for them to make those changes. A current example of that is Tacvi, one of the zones in the Gates of Discord expansion. After the original designer of this and several other Gates zones (along with the "Breakdown in Communication" Quest) moved on to other opportunities, several designers were tasked with looking at this work and determining a course of action. The immediate goal was to make this content function properly (no, Tacvi crashing wasn't a plot to slow people down it was simply bad scripting), while transforming it into something that is actually... well... entertaining and challenging. To do this, we shifted some resources away from Omens development and contacted several of the guilds that were banging their heads against the old content. It's my understanding that people are finding many of the smaller issues resolved and enjoying the changes that Rashere has made to Tacvi so far. Look for posts from him about these changes.
While addressing the issues we've found with Gates of Discord, maintaining the Live game, and creating new expansions, we've also been focusing on another set of goals. In the coming months, our team must continue to find ways to improve our internal communication, update our procedures for implementing and testing content, and look for ways to avoid making the same mistakes repeatedly.
Your feedback in these areas is being heard and we thank you for your patience.
EverQuest is a very different game than it was when I started playing it 5 years ago. Yet, even after all these years our company is still extremely excited about this product and its future. I've been asked by my bosses to determine what resources and changes we need to help push EverQuest even further into the forefront of online gaming. I can't think of a more exciting time in the product's history.
In the two months since I've been back on the team, we've given more time for the development of Omens of War and had several more people added to the team. Even as we make preparations to enter the Omens of War beta on the 9th, we are looking for ways to improve the way we do things. Sure, we're going to make mistakes in the years to come. Sometimes we'll fix one thing and we'll break something else. It's unavoidable with a product and community that are this large. EverQuest is a massive game and continuing to grow at a monstrous rate.
Just remember, because of you we're still America's #1 MMORPG... and we're just getting started.