SoE is missing money

[Cribanox]

All they need is a little marketing, and people would play. SoE's arguement has always been that they don't believe people will play on a classic server. They are obviously wrong. Also, 100-200k a year is nothing to scoff at, especially if you're talking about 1,000-2,000 people playing, that'd be 2x-4x as much.

I've always argued on EQ Official boards that, the reason why people can't play classicly on live servers in their own special guilds, is because there are way too many people who wouldnt know where to go to get the best classic experience. I've always said once SoE puts out an OFFICIAL server for everyone to focus on, the interest would grow. Even now, years later, you couldn't even goto a live server and play classicly if you tried.

[Modus]

Originally Posted by Hasbinbad [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

10k a month is 120k a year, which is probably something like a LOW salary of ONE of their execs..
Why would they spend ANY money at all for that?

Originally Posted by jkfranklin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

troll more

Unfortunately he's exactly right.

By the time you add up bandwidth costs, and the salaries of 3-4 programmers to do the work this dev team does for free, that "$10k a month" in added revenue (which is a baseless figure really, as likely most of the players would be current subscribers anyway) still leads to an unprofitable situation.

Look at EA - one of the biggest companies in the business, and they reported insane losses for this quarter.

Modus

[Slake]

SoE tried this once. The opened 2 servers with no content open except classic and they put a "time line" in place. They said that Vagy and Nox had to be killed before they would open Kunark....I am not sure of how long it took, but SoE had to scramble and put in a "set period of time". Seems two guilds did a zerg fest on both dragons and got them killed in weeks.

Kunark was same thing. Then Velious, etc etc. Both of those "classic" servers are caught up to the rest of the servers if I am not mistaken.

I seriously doubt SoE would ever consider rolling back the clock for a server.

What we should be talking about here, is everyone contributing some cash so Rogean will quit his job and work solely on getting Kunark out for us!! (insert funny sarcasm here)

[Haynar]

The important thing to remember, is most of the people playing here, wouldn't play on a pay to play SOE server no matter what kind of server it was. Even if Sony had a classic server, the majority of those here would prefer to be here.

A lot of people cannot stand SOE.

Sony is not losing any money here.

Its like the recording industry. They have this fascinating idea, that everyone who downloaded a song for free, would have bought it if they couldn't download. That is so funny of a concept. They can keep fooling themselves on that one.

Haynar

[mokfarg]

Originally Posted by Hasbinbad [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

10k a month is 120k a year, which is probably something like a LOW salary of ONE of their execs..
Why would they spend ANY money at all for that?

Don't forgot we are talking about 500 people on peak hours without advertisement on an emulated server. I imagine if this server was advertised on MMO sites you would have to open an additional server for all the people playing.

[Finawin]

Originally Posted by Haynar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Its like the recording industry. They have this fascinating idea, that everyone who downloaded a song for free, would have bought it if they couldn't download. That is so funny of a concept. They can keep fooling themselves on that one.

Haynar

That ALWAYS cracks me the fuck up in copyright arguments.

[Gwence]

Originally Posted by Slake [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

SoE tried this once. The opened 2 servers with no content open except classic and they put a "time line" in place. They said that Vagy and Nox had to be killed before they would open Kunark....I am not sure of how long it took, but SoE had to scramble and put in a "set period of time". Seems two guilds did a zerg fest on both dragons and got them killed in weeks.

Kunark was same thing. Then Velious, etc etc. Both of those "classic" servers are caught up to the rest of the servers if I am not mistaken.

I seriously doubt SoE would ever consider rolling back the clock for a server.

What we should be talking about here, is everyone contributing some cash so Rogean will quit his job and work solely on getting Kunark out for us!! (insert funny sarcasm here)

They opened 2 progression servers which was initially one but had to make a 2nd one because of the mass interest. I was on combine there was alot of people on it (like 5k+ at least) for the first few weeks. It took a little over a month for kunark to open and I think most of the people were discouraged about that because they wanted more time to enjoy the old world.

Of course I was one of the people that helped burn through it all super fast, but I probably would've enjoyed having longer timelocks on everything.

[Cribanox]

Originally Posted by Finawin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That ALWAYS cracks me the fuck up in copyright arguments.

I think that not counting an illegal download as a stolen item is a step in the wrong direction, you have to count downloading a full album as the same thing as shoplifting the album from the store, or downloading a movie as shoplifting the dvd from a store. If you don't count these things as actual items, I think we are going to suffer as consumers in the long run. (DRM is a good example in the video game industry)

[Tsuken]

Can we get "SoE" off the main page? Thank you.

[Ghesta]

Originally Posted by Cribanox [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How can SoE not think that 500+ people at peak times, and 200-400 during off hours, is not enough to make an official classic everquest server?

Everyone that's posted on this thread has missed one very obvious, and HUGE point. Bear with me while I explain.


If they opened a classic server, hell let's call it the p1999 server, they wouldn't get 1000 old players to return. What would instead happen would be they might get 900 old players to return, then they'd have 6,000 to 10,000 of their CURRENT players switch from the luclin server, Rathe, etc over to their p1999 server.

Now those other servers which had a good balance load are now unbalanced. Players on the Rathe start bitching that there's no one playing there and some switch servers, but others decide that it's time to quit EQ.

Meanwhile half of the people on their p1999 server bitch that it's too crowded on p1999 with 3000+ online at peak hours, giving SOE one of two choices. Choice 1: they open a SECOND server - the P1999b server. This generates another problem as 3/4ths of the p1999a server jump ship and now p1999b is overcrowded. More people like you, me, and others on this thread get frustrated and quit everquest again. SOE nets $30 to $45 from us "returning" players who quit again. Choice 2: they ignore the problem, leading to the exact same problem, but save themselves the time and cost of setting up the second p1999b server.

In the meantime back on the normal servers server population has dipped on 1 or 2 servers so badly that they now have to combine servers in order to prevent any other playerbase bleeding. This costs time and money.

Eventually the player population swing levels out somewhat. With the gain and loss of players, an optimum estimate would be to say they would gain 1000 players for over a year.

Now they have a VERY challenging server that needs GM staffing, and special attention. Do they put rubi in the game? How often do they release the expansions? Do they let manastones work anywhere / no where? There's a lot of questions to be asked, and for every single one of them, there's going to be 3 people; the guy who loves the decision, the guy who hates the decision, and the guy who thinks SOE is retarded and should let him have a full set of rubi since his main character is level 352 with 19,023,236 AA points on the prexus server.





Considering ALL that, if the other choice is to simply sit back, and let the servers that they have keep on bringing in cash as they focus their time, resources, and money elsewhere........ can you really still wonder why SOE isn't doing this?