StationCash, LoN Items Were Done by Main EQ2 Team All Along

In response to a conversation about the division of development time between EQ2, StationCash items, and Legends of Norrath, Calthine of EQ2 ZAM made a statement that elicited a response from SmokeJumper. That response confirmed on Thursday what many of us have believed but been unable to prove.

Since the introduction of StationCash Marketplace, StationCash Items have been designed and tested by the main EQ2 team and not, as has been posited, by a separate team of artists and programmers. SmokeJumper indicates that this is changing, and with the revenue from SC/LoN, SOE have been able to justify hiring an artist to create said items.

Editor’s Note: Post has been updated with 2 additional quotes.

Sirlo from Najena raised the issue with this quote:

Your logic is akin to saying “pay no attention to the fact that we’ve taken dev time away from your content to create stuff for people who are buying wildly overpriced items from our cash store.” I think you’re smart enough to see that’s a losing argument. People know this stuff isn’t creating itself, and every minute someone spends working on that is a minute he/she DIDN’T spend working on the game we’re paying for every single month.

Calthine responded with:

Actually, way back when the Marketplace was introduced Grimwell posted that it was initially so successful that they have an actual SC department making SC stuff. Seperate from development. Now, that was a couple years go, but I bet it’s still true.

Kinda like the server merger guys aren’t people who would be otherwise working on Velious.

SmokeJumper shattered the myth with this statement:

To be honest, Calthine…that was definitely not true when I started as Sr. Producer on the project. But it’s almost true now and we’re working on it.

We’ve been fed a line that development for StationCash and Legends of Norrath items don’t take time away from development of EQ2. Myth busted!

SmokeJumper added to the thread later:

Please do note that I said it’s almost a truth now. That’s something I can actually claim to have improved on my watch.

and…

We don’t usually talk about our internal dev team member structure, but you should know that we brought in extra art talent just to work on marketplace items (so that they wouldn’t impact content pipelines) and we’re in the process of getting extra talent approved for LoN items so that they don’t impact us either.