When they lost the most hardcore players. Furor from FOH for example. Up until the release of WOW, EQ was the l33t game where the most hardcore raiders played. People like Tigole and Furor became lead developers on WOW. The reason being that with the launch of Luclin and AA's, SOE had become arrogant and made development decisions that were open cockblocks/fuck yous to their player base.
When EQ lost forums like FOH and the most influential communities, they started to go downhill. I worked at SOE at the time WoW came out and EQ2 was being developed. Up until that time, SOE was the king of MMOs. 60 minutes even did a documentary about the game. It was a revolutionary product.
SOE made 2 major mistakes with the development of EQ2 that forever changed their future.
1. A graphics engine that was too realistic and even the top PCs at the time couldn't run it. It still runs like shit today. WoW was polished and artistically stylized. It ran on low end machines very well. It was a polished product designed to attract as many players as possible. You had to do a serious upgrade to run EQ2. EQ2 was had ugly horrible character models that looked like they had down syndrome.
2. The newbie experience. EQ2's Newbie experience was pathetic. The ISle of Dawn was boring and repetitive. Leveling was abysmally slow and you couldn't even pick a class until lvl 10. It was a huge grind just to pick a class. The 2 starting cities were a mess. Tons of "race city" zones around the huge castles that were barren and empty and difficult to fund your way around. Constant zoning over and over in the newbie areas sucked balls. It wasn't a centralized hub for social gathering. That's why there was "Barrens chat" and everyone leveled. A huge zone that felt like a community. Yes, I understand it got annoying, but you enjoy these games more when there is a real sense of community. Not a buggy POS cluster of bad zones with too much ugly brown and mobs like "crabs" and "snails" to endlessly whack. It was terrible game design.
SOE was oblivious to this. I rememberr George Scotto at the time would make fun of WOW. We weren't allowed to lay it at work. His exact words were "We've seen WOW and we're not impressed. Let's just say we're not worried about the competition."
They had lost their touch on the pulse of gamers, and started developing games to feed the addiction of their play base. Cock block them from content to keep them playing. Take their money. Where else are they going to go? EQ was it at the time. As soon as another option game that was from gamers who knew what people wanted, EQ was finished. WOW pre BC was the shit, and fuck anyone who thinks otherwise. It was a bad ass game with raid content that was a lot of fun. Naxx pwned faces and will always be the pinnacle of MMO raiding IMO.
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