Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson Comments on PvP in E-mail to Player

E-mailing a Producer or Executive Producer on your favorite game is like a box of chocolates. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. A player named “Pawder” reached out to Director of Development for the EverQuest Franchise Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson and hit the motherlode.

Here’s the entirety of Dave’s e-mail as posted on the EQ2 Forums:

Hey there, Steve,

I had to do some research on this before I could respond accurately, but here goes.

Firstly, I’d just like to say that we like PvP also. You may or may not know, but I helped create the original “Planetside”, and did “Tribes 2” and some of the “Mechwarrior” games before that. I’m keen on the stuff.

You said a lot of things in your email, so I’m going to parse out your comments and questions so I can be thorough in my answer. I hope this helps. 

• You seem to think there’s basically no dev team on EQII any longer. (Your “lay off” comment.) That’s not true. In fact, the team is the same size that it’s been for years. They’re very enthusiastic, and they’re (honestly) just as frustrated about PvP as you are, and intend to make fixes soon.
• Procs are going away in PvP as of next week. (At the very latest, the week thereafter.) That’s a start in the right direction.
• Other balance improvements are coming, but I’ll leave that to Holly Longdale (the game’s Producer) to announce in her Producer’s Letter later on.

• The team has been working on the PvP (Battlegrounds) matchmaker for a bit now and are hoping to surprise your community with improvements later this year.
• Nagafen’s population? Well…that’s a trickier subject. Nagafen began its decline right about the same time that Battlegrounds showed up as a feature. Basically, many PvP fans wanted their carnage NOW instead of having to hunt through the zones of the world to find someone to gank. So they started playing BGs almost exclusively. (That’s not a guess. It’s data.) I don’t blame the dev team for that because apparently, BGs was more fun/rewarding to players than the old-style PvP so the players there flocked to it. Obviously theythought it was a game improvement. Unfortunately, that left you folks that loved old Nagafen gameplay out in the cold. So we added Warfields. And it worked. For a while. But for whatever reason, people gravitated back to BGs again.

So the fact of the matter is…EQII still has a very strong PvP userbase. They’re just not always on Nagafen anymore. They tended to drift to other servers and they play BGs most of the time now, when they desire PvP.

But more quality PvP improvements are coming in the near future, some as early as next week.

I hope this is the sort of response you were looking for. If there’s anything else you’re concerned about, please let me know!

— Dave Georgeson
Director of Development
EverQuest Franchise

As you can imagine, the publication of this e-mail sped up the timetable for EQ2 Producer Holly “Windstalker” Longdale‘s announcement of PvP changes. She posted her response to Georgeson’s comments here:

 Howdy Norrathians,

We noticed some discussion around communication from Dave Georgeson, our Director of Dev, regarding PvP and wanted to clarify a few things. We’ve made a few adjustments since Dave shared information on our release schedule and want to provide a few more details on our upcoming plans for PvP (we have other stuff too):

1. On Jan. 28 we are releasing some PvP fixes. One of them is to remove the procs. There will be a few other adjustments as well as rewards added.
2. In the first half of February, our Systems team will be focused fully on PvP issues and fixes and the results of those changes will appear at the end of February with No.3 below.
3. Provided it’s a fun experience and works well, the Design team has plans for what they call a “PvP Warzone” on tap for Nagafen for the last week of February. It sounds like a LOT of fun to me, but I’ll let Kander explain the details in the coming weeks as it gets more refined.

We as a team care and are passionate about every play style we support and we plan to address them all throughout the year. More news to come!

Sincerely, as always,

Holly Longdale
Senior Producer, EverQuest II