Feldon When prodded about upgrading the graphics engine of EQ2, if not to improve the graphics, at least to address the spate of flickering graphics and shadows which seem to have plagued the game for some players (including me) since the launch of Velious.
SmokeJumper addressed this concern and others including graphical glitches and performance slowdowns in Public Quests:
We redirected our efforts yesterday to trying to resolve some of the PQ issues. We fixed one issue last night, and although I had been getting similar behavior to what you describe on my home rig, I couldn’t make that duplicate last night, so I’m hoping the improvement we made was a good one. (Admittedly, I was still turning my graphics down to High Performance when multi-raid groups were in the PQ area.) We’re not done yet and there will be more improvements next week.
Engine improvements are also on our list for this year. Those definitely take time to accomplish but there are some obvious things we should do to bring the engine up to par with other modern engines.
Server upgrades are something we want to complete also. In the last six months, we’ve upgraded Antonia Bayle, Crushbone, Nagafen, and Freeport because they were the most highly populated servers. Since the merges, it’s obvious that Splitpaw and Unrest (at least) need upgrades also, and we would like to just go ahead and upgrade all of the remaining worlds. Budget requests have been made.
Stay hopeful.
As for Freeport (the EQ2X free-to-play server):
We love the free-to-play model and consider EQ2X to be a great success, actually. This is the most highly populated server on either service, and as you say, the community is a completely different tone than on Live.
EQ2X gives players that are uncertain they want to commit to an upfront purchase and a subscription commitment a way to sample the game and see if they like it. We think EQ2X is doing exactly what we hoped and consider it a very worthwhile part of the franchise!
If we decided to push for more players, Qeynos and Neriak might still open up. But right now, we’re focusing this year on content and making our current players happy. We’ll see how things go in the future.
Is it just me or does it bug anyone else that the free server gets hardware upgrades before the pay subscribers who have been limping along for years?
Yeah it’s a little troubling. I am also curious as to how many EQ2x players actually upgrade to EQ2live?? I will say that since DoV, I have seen a lot more people on, but only for the PQ’s and not so much instance runs.
Maybe SOE could offer up some type of bonus similar to Recruit a Friend that works for several players to “betray” the F2P for the Live?? Sort of a group recruit reward??
You’d be lying to yourself and SoE, if you think they would take people away from their most profitable enterprise.
If you want to make your current players happy, stop being lazy and go back and fix all the broken gear that has useless stats on it now.
Thanks.