You're gonna go out of business!

Journal Dirtside's Journal: You're gonna go out of business! 1

Journal by Dirtside on Thursday October 17, 2002 @06:03PM

I used to play EverQuest a lot. From April 2000 through March 2002, actually, I played very frequently. In April 2001 I switched servers, from The Nameless to Test Server, and started over. My main was a rogue, and I got him to level 60 by March 2002. Once I hit level 60, I more or less lost interest in the game. I had achieved my goal, and my other activity (high-level raiding with the "uber" crowd on Test) had gotten repetitive.

I've also spent a lot of time reading EQ message boards. These are fan boards, run by the players, to discuss the myriad aspects of the game while offline. There are thousands of message boards; some are dedicated to discussing specific classes (monk, rogue, cleric, warrior, etc.), some are guild boards (for the discussion of guild activites), some are server boards (community boards for all players on a given server), etc. The class boards are probably the most active, individually; as it happens, the various class boards have mostly been whittled down to one or two "major" boards for each class.

The "major" board for monks is Monkly Business. Recently, EQ's developers decided to make some major changes to game balance. Among other things, they decided to decrease monks' defensive abilities. Monks now take more damage when they get hit (although that has been offset a bit by an increased ability to avoid getting hit in the first place).

Naturally, a lot of monks are upset about this change. More specifically, a lot of players whose primary character is a monk are upset about this change. The more obsessive EQ players tend to get very possessive about their class; anything which is perceived as a negative change is greeted with outrage, anger, flaming, screaming, and so forth. (Positive changes are usually greeted by similarly strong cheers, happiness, joy, etc.)

On some of the threads discussing this recent change, there were a lot of monks threatening to quit EQ if these changes were not rescinded. There are always a number of posts like that, whenever a negative change (also known as a "nerf") is made. How many of those people actually end up quitting is unknown; a lot of the time, I suspect, people bluster in public but have no intention of really quitting; or they're angry at first, but then they calm down shortly and decide that the change isn't so bad after all.

Mostly what I'm interested in is the player-company dynamic between the EQ developers (Verant) and the players. Obviously, the company's well-being is dependent on having lots of players play the game. Doing things which makes the players happier is a good thing, in that respect, because it increases the number of players. Doing things that piss off the players is a bad thing, because they get angry and quit. Ideally, the things Verant does should be tailored to the long-term retaining of large numbers of players; if Verant was to do things which are "cool" in the short-term, but take away from the longevity and replay value of the game, that would harm them in the long run.

It's fascinating how attached people get to "their" class. This happens because most players pick a class to start with, and then play that class and only that class for a long time. Some players will have a secondary (or even tertiary) character that they play frequently. These players tend to be much less obsessive about "their" class, since they have play experience from another perspective (i.e. that of another class). A negative change to their "primary" class won't be taken as harshly, since they don't see it as a personal attack.

So when players feel thus attacked, they take it out by threatening to quit the game. This I don't mind; what bothers me is when these players make claims that are equivalent to, "If Verant doesn't do what I want, they're going to lose all their customers and go out of business." Usually it's couched in other terms, saying for example that if Verant doesn't do what its customers want, then it will go out of business. Of course, this is always preceded by a rant about this particular change, which harms this particular player.

This is not to excuse any stupid actions by Verant; but the mere fact that so many people have played EQ for so long, and are so passionate about it, shows that they are doing something right. It bothers me when people assume that any change which weakens their class is a change that will somehow bring about EQ's downfall. (These exact claims were being made when I started playing EQ, and the game has many more members now than it did then.)

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