We like his “attitude”. This is just a random digression that I decided was worth saving.

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Utnayan:
What about the noticable lack of players in their perspective guilds? If you check the threads, most of the complaints are dead guilds, no friends, people they played with have all but vanished. The cities are unpopulated.

Only going to address the part I can touch with facts in my realm – For starters, thanks for being civil. This kind of thing I’m more than happy to address. Two things.

1) These games churn users, usually a small percentage every month. EQ2, EQ, WoW, DAoC, CoH – They all do. There is some level of this in all games.

2) As for how it affects EQ2 specifically – The kinds of people who post on generally-hardcore-gamer boards (foh, f13, SA, etc) tend to be the most affected by problems we’ve known that we’ve had and have continued to address.

I apologize for forgetting who pointed out a number of months ago: “EQ2’s biggest problem? No carrot.” (Amadeus I think?) I very openly agreed with that and explained some of the things we were doing to improve that critical piece of the game.

The rate of improvement there directly impacts the rate of churn. Churn goes down, overall subs go up.

Compounding that, is that particular problem is most easily and quickly noticed by people who go through the most content — the same people who frequent these types of boards the most. I’m one of them. I assume you’d be one of them. Our hosts on this board are the extreme case of them.

Have we improved everything we need to in order to make that stop affecting people entirely? No. Have we improved enough over the past year to where a whole lot more are staying? Yes. Are we continuing? Absolutely. Will it get even better as we continue? I’d bet my life on it.

Malathor:
You’re doing a good job Gallenite. You should be running SOE, not Smed.

Thank you, but it’s actually the EQ2 team of “people who do real work” doing the amazing job. I’m just the one who’s in the fortunate position of being able to come here and brag about how proud I am of them every friggin day :)

And while I sincerely appreciate the sentiment, you do not want me running any company. That’s a whole separate set of problems that I’m fairly certain would end in tears if I was the one who had to deal with them.

There’s been a fair bit of vilification going on lately, and while I’m not going to say much about that (or any other topics I’m not personally involved with), I will say this much. Four years ago and change, Smed’s the one who made sure I got hired. He’s also the one who later on said, “You want a shot? Okay. Here. Take it.”

So if you like what our team is doing, please do keep in mind that no small part of that credit has to go to him as well.

I’m just the messenger. Shoot at will :)

– Scott