Anevania

You are very right you do have to deliver the minimum that you advertise for a product to become a success. And yes I did Oversimplify a complex problem, but if you get too into details then you tend to usually lose someone. Even though you have done some very reputable work you speak in "layman's terms" . Like when asked about what you have accomplished.
"monitoring software for multi-Billion dollar dams" for example, I am sure there is quite a bit more to it than merely development, IE, testing, drafting, training reference material, etc... However, what I have said generally is true, EQ has had quite a few major problems since the release of PoP, other than supposed patches that are fixing the problem, and causing mostly downtime for people on limited playing times *shrug* I have yet to really see an improvement. And what you have said about "marketing FACT" your right a lot of people have left EQ. Those of us that remember the patch free days/months/years are happy to move on and pick up EQ2 hoping that the lack of service with EQ wont carry on to the next EQ.

Weskat

Anevania, I'm gonna take this one piece at a time:

General - You are correct, SOE is a major corporation and as such they have (at a minimum) a 5-year plan in place. This 5-year plan will delineate how they are going to get LONG TERM profit. As another poster stated, consistantly not delivering the promised product/delivering a faulty product will not keep you in business for long.
edit to add this portion:
B - No playing grounds for level 65 characters other than GoD? I guess I completely missed where Halls of Honor, Bastion of Thunder, Droga, Veksar, Sol C, Vex Thal, Hate's Fury, etc. became no experience zones for a level 65 character.

A - I am far from being a child, and would be willing to bet that my children understand this concept
B - I am level 65 on my main. I have a many small goals in this game (visit every zone at least once, finally beat the RNG and get the SEoC to complete my epic, etc) I have been to several GoD zones and before the "retuning" a full group (CLR, WAR, PAL, RNG, BST, ENC all 65 but PAL (64)), not Ele+ geared, resulted in a 3 hour CR.

In short, in this section YOU are stereotyping (Racial profiling is also stereotyping) everyone that has said "Hey, the emporer has no clothes on" into one of two groups and many of them do not fit into either of those groups.


A - I think I understand your points, but your logic is flawed which makes the conclusion flawed.
B - Who is paying for for the account someone is playing on has no bearing on the validity of the complaint(s).
C - GoD, if carried out right, could have added a new level of playability, unfortunately it was not carried out right. The Dx9 implementation, if carried out right, could have added a new level of playability, unfortunately it was not carried out right. Just two recent examples of the faulty product they have delivered (this establishes history)
D - Yes, we do pay to play. We also pay for new content. We have a choice, we can hand them ~30USD for what will (from the recent track history) be an unfinished/poorly implemented product or we can keep our money. In my case I am going to keep my 30USD (x4 accounts.)

Ultimately it comes down to "cheat me once, shame on you; cheat me twice, shame on me."

Regards,
Weskat

Vemanos

Im almost lv 65 Now id ive yet to see many adventures do GoD To me it seems to hard... I havent tried it so i wouldnt now obviously but for some odd reason PoP seems less scary then GoD heh :P GoD is still new and Mysterious and yea there gonna make another one on that.. yea not a good idea for NUMEROUS reasons.

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~~Vemanos Tigerlord~~
~~Beastlord of the 68th Season~~

Gandanor

Well we can see that SoE has decided to try and tackle the grahpics problems first as evidenced by the letter Mr. Smedley. This was a MUST, a good decision even if it was a hard one to make. It may disappoint some people who were not experiencing the problems but there certainly seemed to be enough people who were and every fix seemed to move the problems from one set of people to another.

Now the only fear I have is that this is not something that the SoE developers can fix. What if the problem is in fact NOT in SoE's code at all but is at least partially in DX9? It certainly wouldn't be the first or last time that Microsoft has released a product that is fundamentally flawed and left their customers, and in particular the vendor's who write on their platforms, holding the bag.

Again I feel for the developers ( again I've spent so long developing software from writing code, testing code and managing the process) that I can't help BUT empathize with the guys trying to meet the deadlines and find complex bugs in huge masses of code. It's worse yet when you're trying to hit a moving target and at least one letter has implied the Sony uses a two team system one to write new code and one to find bugs in code? Ever tried to find a logical error in say ten thousand lines of code written by someone else? Makes you wonder if "would you like fries with that" wouldn't have been a better career choice.

Good luck and god speed guys I hope the extended deadline gives you some breathing room and that in the end the opportunity to fix the problem actually lies within your reach.

Inokis

Anytime you attempt to spearhead new technologies, a growth period is needed for our abilities to adapt to the technological capabilities of the devices. With the new cards and such coming out, it will be several years before the games take full advantage of the capabilities of these new cards.

I was reading a bit on EQ2, and i read that if you enable every feature; high-end graphics options, voiceover, every model, etc. There is curretnly no machine that could run the game. EQ2 is the first game to attempt to take full advantage of these new cards, but the game is so intensive, that currently, no device can keep up. Hopefully when the new line of graphics cards are out, there will be further developments.

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