I am no longer recomending EQ to friends. The early phase is always the best - when you don''t really know much about the world (1st char in any game is the most fun, barring stuffups). But being a SW engineer and a net-head and a RPer and a late night coffee-fueled thinker I eventually couldn''t help from looking behind the scenes a bit (it started with figuring out suitable quests and it ended with patches and re-patches and disconnects and nerfs and mis-information perhaps even to the point of dis-information, and, and, and.... The high-level design or structure of the Everquest SW is poor. Rush to market is blamed, but the design just doesn''t show the cohesion of a creative masterpiece of a small team of SW wizards who kept a consistent world-model or goal in mind as they built their baby. The major factor was to get to market first with right keywords in their product (M, M, O, and RPG all in one!). Perhaps Microsoft disinformation about AC release fooled them (why release months before MS - a month before (even a month after) would have been good enough (particular if EQ had been several man-years more mature =tested (i.e. test to written spec by 3rd party)= quality), it may have lost them little real market share. The real creative minds behind EQ have probably long since moved on from EQ (designers don''t dirty their hands with coding, or uggh, testing and maintenance, or (barf) customer support - these are 2nd string people running EQ). (Oh dear, what if it was actually 2nd rate designers who got 3rd rate coders to build it, and test their own work?) The best people are working in secret (probably EQ2 or STarWars) and I think this secrecy has greatly contributed to the division at various levels - the power hierarchy in Verant is expressed in layered access to the secret(s) at the core - a more clear case of information being power is rarely seen. However , the low-rung (EQ1) people are not really close to the core and tend to emphasize what they know over us plebs as a mark of rank to compensate for being low rung on the inside. The more that Abashi knows (or rather pretends to know) that the players don’t know, the more secrecy power he has. He may not be really in the loop at the core - but by golly! he says he knows more than we do and plans to keep it that way! My personal last straw with Abashi was when he described the Qeynos teleporting MOB bug at one time as "cannot be fixed" – Hmph! I bet the SW engineers would NOT say it like that, but either: 1. We haven''t found the bug - if MisManagement comits our man hours we will look, meanwhile its back to important stuff like reverb in caves that they want. 2. We have identified the bug, if MisManagement comits our man hours we will fix it, but back to crucial expansion pack they ordered. It is actually a puzzle how EQ could have gone so bad - here is my take.... EQ was a reasonable idea, put together in a hurry by a varying mix of people with the major goal: 1.Get a game to market soonest with M, M, O, & RPG (2.Hidden Goal: Build the real killer EQx from what we learned and earned from EQ1) I think Brad tragically underestimated what level of internal consistency (a fundamental issue to a SW guy surely?) a RPG world required, or perhaps how much work it would take or both - perhaps Brad''s idea of RPG came from Heretic which was sometimes called "Doom with RPG" when it was really Doom with FANTASY - many people tragically confuse the two (perhaps Verant’s idea of RPG came from Magic card game? not D&D? I hear reading is dropping right off in the US - maybe they hadn''t even read LOTR?) Verant also tragically misread or confused the markets - the RPG consumer is very different to the shoot-em-up customer, an RPer if treated right with a really good game has a very high budget (I''ve spent many hundreds on hardware improvements lately to maximise EQ enjoyment and performance) - the mature professional audience of RPers has a very high standard, but if the game was really the best of D&D and EQ and AC and SB & NWN then we would be happy to pay HUNDREDS of dollars for the killer SW with professional support - my PC costs $2000, SW at $50US is peanut money to adult working dedicated RPers Perhaps they did not confuse the markets, merely target for both, to maximise the profit. But Verant could probably have 60 servers nicely full right now, why did they destroy customer satisfaction by failing to add more. If EQ worked right, players would RP to take it easy to enjoy the world for longer. But now surely the credibility loss for Brad and Verant will not be erased by any game they are capable of producing next (maybe Brad did have great design vision which was spoiled by MisManagement and contract coding - I don''t really know for sure - Brad could have built something like Linus or Woz or Ritchie did - instead he''s just another Bill wanna-be). Anyway - I think there is a whole layer of secrets which underpins Verant’s company structure and has tragically left its relationship with its customers about as polite and trusting as between Sinn Fein and the Windsors. A Star Wars setting holds little interest for me (what is Star Wars but a cowboys and indians movie in the future) - what does the Star Wars universe have to show: Pirates, Vigilantes, Corruption, Imperialism, Hierarchy, Classism, Slavery? Vader, blackest of villians, who comitted the most vast of cold-blooded murder (billions - orders of magnitude greater than Stalin or Hitler) is revealed as just a misunderstood boy - a victim!? And if Verant et al are involved: double no thanks. A world which is just made up there and then has little interest for me either - can''t imagine much value in AC. My suggestion for SciFi future MMORPG world: Frank Herbert "Dune" - now there is a future world which is bizarre enough to be ''realistic'' - long-term (k-years!) power groups conspire to use technology, biology, drugs, mindtraining, secretlanguages, battle, medicine, religion, sex... to the extreme of extremes (as people do) to get an advantage - a ready set made of classes, races, skills, worlds, themes - I really hope this is the newest game to be suddenly revealed next week (sigh...). Space is big..really big - no SciFi has really captured that size - for a realistic (i.e. long-range = long-term) space battle try Larry Niven Pak Protector - one man/ship vs 1 pak/ship - first contact is YEARS out (telltale emmission bands in the stars spectrum shows exhaust cloud of certain type of ship coming straight at him for at least some decades (ohoh...an alien foe who can drive a personal spaceship (=no-stasis=awake!) for decades...extra care then...he manoeuvres around Mars for a better look (takes 2 years)). The best story of a realistic big-scale (in parsecs, not numbers) battle I have read. Remember the Golden rule of Traveller - NO instantaneous messaging or transporting EVER! Hyperdrive is fast, but not a teleport (a SciFi game with instant messaging anywhere violates causality - I don''t think it could work right) A space game has to be big and empty. I nearly barfed when Striker flew the Enterprise (300+metres!) with a joystick (400 year old tech) like a crop-duster. Star Wars and even Star Trek barely rate as SciFi in my book - their future is just like the present only more so. Anyway, look forward to next killer MMORPG (SB is still front runner isn’t it?) Role On, Quentin David Jones quentinj@iinet.net.au

There were much better places for this post. Say the GDNet Lounge or Game design forum. Or even, *gasp*, the Everquest official boards.

Ok, thanks for your suggestions.
It was an Everquest posting response which lead me here.

This was my first post, wasn''t sure where it fitted...

If the billions you were referring to was the people of Alderaan, that was Tarkin that killed them, not Vader.