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You should post this on the official Soe forums. No one from SoE will bother to read it here.

A) the game has not had this big of a population since pre 2004
B) Do you think servers and bandwidth are free? Nothing is free...

Running a 1/8 populated server missing half the expansions worth of content with 500 people sure is comparable to a dozen or so fully populated servers with probably 100k+ people right now right?

Thats without mentioning paying devs for bugfixes etc., customer service reps, advertising etc.

Edited, Apr 6th 2012 1:38am by TouchinMyself

Touchin, none of that stuff is exclusive to EQ. EQ's devs "help out" with FreeRealms, EQ2, and a few times, DCUO (in the run-up to free to play). The CS department covers ALL of SOE's games. Advertising? WHERE? When was the last time you saw an EQ1 ad anywhere? Bandwidth costs are also shared across all the titles so you can't charge EQ1 for its bandwidth, EQ2's for theirs, etc. Besides, bandwidth at SOE's level is cheap as dirt (it's cheap as dirt at NCSoft's level so you know Sony's probably paying even less. Wait, this is SOE we're talking about. Forget I said that).

As I said in another thread, most people who play have no idea that free to play models are more profitable than their subscription counterparts with smaller subscriber bases. Essentially, if you have less than about 600,000 recurring subscribers, free to play would make more money. Now, when that's mentioned, most people refer to the model Turbine innovated (and Paragon Studios copied for CoH and NCSoft farmed out to Lineage 2 & now Aion). Even Age of Conan's model has made them a ton more money than they had been making previously.



Actually it is different. EQ1's model is archaic in comparison to EQ2, which is odd considering the fact that EQ2's model is older. They took zero lessons learned from EQ2 for EQ1's conversion. That makes it very different. It's like car models within the same "family". If one car gets an upgrade that's well received, it's almost guaranteed that the other models under that nameplate will see that upgrade when it comes time for their next model year/relaunch. In this case, EQ1 does not have EQ2's "upgrades" and it very well could have (and IMO, should have) them. "All that different" is highly subjective, much like "rich", "hardcore", "beauty", and the like. EQ does have gear ranks, they're just not delineated like they are in EQ2. What level of gear does your main wear? If you say anything like T2 VoA group or T4 HoT raid, my point is proven. In my view, nothing prior to SoF should be prestige, not even raid gear. The reason being, by today's standards, the gear prior to SoF is largely junk (and yes, I have a ranger in Gleaming Energeiac earned on many trips to Solteris when it was current) so that would basically only push the paywall back to 75ish. Sure, make non-HZ augs prestige, that's fine because you can sell an unlocker for that (preferably a temporary one, say $5 a month). But the initial implementation was daft, which is why they're changing it (it's on Test right now). Was this news....or had EQ2 made the same changes months prior?

EQ2's "Extended" period allowed them to see what worked and what didn't and make changes to the model for the full-on "free to play" launch. Those discoveries could've helped EQ1's launch but they chose to do it blindly. It didn't have to be that way. So now you have people who came back and left again because their characters were beyond gimped. That didn't have to happen.

Edited, Apr 6th 2012 10:08am by Remianen