Producer’s Letter – April 30, 2007

Odenathus

Producer’s Letter – April 30, 2007

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
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Odenathus

The bold text in the letter is mine, not theirs - I did this to point out the obvious, 1 expansion per year. This is both good and bad!

Good; in that each expansion has more time to be worked, prior to release.
Good; in that each released expansion, players now have more time to explore.

Bad; if this is merely a cost saving modal, then the extra time is wasted and we'll still get poorly developed expansions.

We'll just have to wait and see <muhahahaha>

neschria

Thanks for posting this for us!

I agree that this could be very good news. I hope this means that we'll see expansions that are deeper and more polished. And I am certainly glad that they are breaking from the February and September model, from a player point of view. There's already so much content in the game I haven't seen and the pace was a little hard for me. Everytime I felt like I was making progress and seeing some stuff, there was more to see and everyone ran away to do the new thing. It was like trying to run a race where the finish line keeps moving further away, and worse, more and more routes you could take to get there keep appearing.  

It could be really bad news if what it REALLY says between the lines is, "We're putting EQ1 on the backburner and reassigning half the devs somewhere else."

BTW, I do second the use of /bug and /feedback. If 500 people /bug something that isn't working, it isn't likely to slip between the cracks, and if enough people /feedback what they like, what they don't like, and new ideas, then at least maybe someone out there is hearing it. I've seen ideas I've /feedbacked implemented-- I am not saying I gave them the idea, but it couldn't have hurt.