It seems that Rod Humble left SOE, even if I don’t know exactly when. He was the producer for EverQuest Live.

He now works as Executive Pruducer at Maxis.

I archive here something that Rod wrote and that I quoted on a comment at Mobhunter about the mudflation and EverQuest that I also brought up recently on a thread on F13 (about EQ2) that I’ll save soon too (I was waiting Scott Hartsman reply, but it seems I won’t get it).

Loral writes:

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A few older zones had their experience modifiers increased including Shadeweaver’s Thicket, Kurn’s Tower, Unrest, Crystal Caverns, Solusek’s Eye, Katta Castellum, Lower Guk, Nagafen’s Lair, and Umbral Plains. These new hot zones should help get newer players into zones they might otherwise skip for newer content. I like the idea behind hotzones. Without too much effort, older zones become much more desirable than they once were.
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Rod Humble writes (answering to myself):

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As for the hotspots, no, the original intent was not to change populations in underused zones. It was to assist a more casual playstyle (whatever “casual” means in this case it just meant how some folks including myself play.)

Many of us in at SoE are casual players, its been an ongoing joke that I play a character upto level 23 then restart, then I discovered another person who played that way, then another, then another. Obviously we were not doing something right for people like us. If there were 4 people in the studio who played that way there must surely be many others out there.

This combined with the refrain I kept hearing from experienced players that “anybody can get to level 50 in a week” started to grate on my neves after all I know I cant do that….. so we took a look around..

We did some data farming and sure enough there was a big dropoff around certain key levels in player activity as a percentage of their numbers which shot back up again at later levels (when for various reasons there is a ton of more stuff to do).

Well EQ is in a pretty rare position of having more content than most casual players can ever handle so why not hit the level ranges where casual players have the biggest barren patches and give them a boost?

This combined with Marks comments about “why are developers afraid of letting players get to the top?” struck a chord with me. After all “hardcore” players get to the “top” anyway and they can still enjoy playing so why not extend that to a wider audience?

After all we WANT people to succeed and experience all of the fun content, we have years of it just waiting for folks to experience we dont want to put roadblocks in their way we want to take barriers away and give them a boost.

My initial suggestion was to alter the experience tables but the design team prefered “hot spots” as it would also bring people together so they were more likely to meet friends on the way up.
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And it was a reply to something I wrote (beginning of May) that was mirroring what you say here:

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Weren’t hotspot introduced because of the basic problem of the umbalance of the PvE?

With the infinite and continuous addition of more zones and content it’s obvious that large parts of these games are left completely unused. This is a general design problem that every PvE game presents. FFXI, DAoC and EQ. In general the new zones provide better rewards, so they simply replace the old ones. But the true result is that large parts of these worlds become obsolete, and the content, even if expanded continuously, is simply lost in a zero-value zone.

I thought that hot-spots were being added to recycle the value of unused parts of the game. If this is true the purpose is good but the application poor.

In my opinion you need “substance” even below the PvE. World of Warcraft is addressing the problem right at the base. The world is balanced because you move through the PvE with quests. Quests are equal to a value of *use*. You move around to *do things*. Each thing you do is connected to a part of a zone. So each zone is kept “balanced” because it has a solid role and value in your story and gameplay. The quest system keeps the world alive and working and, if done right, it means that no part of it will turn obsolete.

This is how I “read” the “hotspot” implementation and the supposed problem behind it.