Quote:
Originally Posted by cd288
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How old are you? And I don't ask that in a condescending way, but you seem to not have either been around for the classic era or been much more than a kid in the several years leading up to EQ release. Which would explain why you have this weird fixation that the devs designed EQ to keep subscribers paying.
EQ was basically a 3D, online version of MUDs/D&D. In MUDs and D&D, you get together as a group and go on adventures crawling through dungeons. As previously shown, the devs thought they might get like 30k people to play EQ max. As a result, if you open a bunch of servers there is plenty ability for a group to get together and do a crawl through the whole dungeon. Sure, that might have taken people awhile to level, but that's not why the game was designed that way.
And, again, as already stated, the subscription fee wasn't even originally intended as a huge profit driver. It was there to offset the at the time very substantial cost of running the servers etc. Once the game really exploded and subscription cost became a big cash cow for SOE, you saw them start making changes that could arguably be geared towards keeping people subscribed and stuck in the game (basically around the time of Luclin release).
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I played at Launch and I think the $9.99 fee was shocking for most people. Imagine paying for a game then paying more each month to play it.
I started watching some of these interviews on YT and the consensus was that Brad himself wanted this game to be hard. He wanted HP gained every level to be a roll of the dice..so like it could range from say 10-50. Imagine being a warrior and only gaining 10 hp per level and another guy got 50.
The devs on the other hand did not want all of this loot to be super rare. They did not want mana to regen as slow as it did. They ran this by Brad and he said no. And here is the problem..one dude was making all the decisions regardless if others said different.
Sure it was new at the time but UO was around for a while before this, so they had to have some frame of reference. And yeah, people played blind but eventually figured things out. They should have adjusted the game based off of what players were doing. But camping say the Arch Magi is not "hard" what is hard is that you have to site for hours if not days for the robe to drop. It's not hard it is just time consuming. Imagine you are in line for the next drop and you sub is coming due tomorrow. You are surely gonna resub.