74 thoughts on “Rum Cellar Beta is Now Live”

  2. So not only is the payment model changing, they are now using a third party site for official game feedback? Seriously reddit? I refuse to use reddit on the grounds of it being a cesspool of trolls.

    Why are they deliberately making it more difficult to participate in the feedback and community of EQ2? 🙁

  5. I won’t be spending more money after paying for the xpac and my monthly payments just to have content that I wont be using. I am paying for the regular holidays that come with the regular monthly payments and hoping for some new quests or recipes to use on my houses or cool clothing to change my characters looks. I do like the options of the solo zones or grouping with others but not everyone goes out raiding and to be honest you guys are killing this game. People are leaving, you are not listening to suggestions that are being made or maybe you are listening but you don’t care and want to do what you think will make you money. Well if you want money then give people what they want and not what you thin they want, open your ears and not your pocket books.

  6. I’ll test it if they can wave the $15 (Remember back in the day when game companies actually PAID you (or gave you the game free/Substantially reduced price?)…Aint dumping another dime into this game. I /MIGHT/ start my sub up again once it runs out in 6 months for EqNext… but even then that’s pretty remote.

    Love this game don’t get me wrong! But I do NOT like where SOE/DBG has taken it lately.

  8. @Blueiris
    They listen to feedback, sometimes to their detriment. Players tend to be internally referenced and have a very limited field of view. Maybe they just aren’t listening to YOU. 😉
    The biggest change I noticed is that the free content updates are likely to be less free. $15 a time or two a year isn’t impossible to swallow…unless it’s followed by a pricey expac, too. With entertainment like Netflix and Pandora offering all-you-can-eat buffets for around $10, EQ2 subs aren’t looking as inexpensive as they once did.

  9. No one cares about a expac when you can’t even have proper servers without lag working.all eq2 susbscribers are not getting there money worth.and the customer service is gone.where is the hotline gone too.answering you don’t take call no more is a joke.why pay for anything anymore

      1. I remember when we had over 50 (Kunark), then over 25 (CoE). I just really feel for the current team who are still passionate about the game despite all the constant cuts and culture of wastefulness surrounding them in other departments.

      1. EQ2 Flames isn’t even running any more except for the few that update their own content. And as you mentioned above, none of the the respected sites are even mentioned. I have no need to read trolls on reddit.

  13. I noticed that with this test they are not waving a carrot in front of the community to get us to test and the 3rd party site for feedback seems silly I guess the beta forum pages were taking up too much space. I will test but use the regular channels to report although I may check out that reedit I have never used it but I will give it a look see.

  16. $15 isn’t that much considering how many hours of entertainment I get from eq2.

    I think using reddit is a great idea. If you think it’s “a cancerously atrocious third party service trollfest”, I’m being that you don’t know how, or haven’t tried, to properly utilize the site.

    2. I will say depending on what section your in Reddit can have some strong communities that are very helpful, but like any thing it’s only as good as the people watching over it…. and some Reddit threads are just trash. I’m disappointed by their choice to swap to using Reddit (if thati s what they are doing) because to me it seems unprofessional as a business. I felt the same way regarding how H1Z1 is handled via mostly reddit, it’s unprofessional and honestly seems like the cheap approach I’d expect from a low budget game that doesn’t want to fork the money for forums/moderators.

      I’ve never liked how the layouts work for reddit but I do find it funny after wanting to restrict the forums to only those who login to play regularly they are interested in using Reddit where they can’t mediate who the input is coming from. Seems kinda skewed up to me, after all that wanting to hear from the players who actually play crap 🙂

      1. We had 9 Community people and a half dozen SOE-MOD folks contracted from Metaverse. Now its just a few Community people. The removal of forums, the requirement of logging into EQ2, it’s strictly a cost control so that those remaining people can somehow manage the communities for 6 games. Basically, Daybreak can no longer afford to run their own forums. The handwriting is on the wall.

        1. would you please expand on the handwriting on the wall. I think were already at an all time low with folks working on the project. My main concern is that when folks don’t pony up the cash for the dlc’s that we would be headed for maintenance mode. If they are this desperate, I don’t have a clue what to think.

          1. You already are headed for maintenance mode. This DLC and the next constitute the last output of the recently fired EQ/EQ2 Creative Director. Unless they appoint a new one that is it. At least that is the way I read the tea leaves.

  18. I won’t be testing the adventure pak and I won’t be buying it either. It just is not worth my time and money at this point. I didn’t buy the original adventure paks either. What makes DBG think we have changed? And Reddit for feedback? That seems to guarantee that they will only listen to their preselected pals. You know those folks who always give feedback they want to hear and not the feedback from regular players. They claim to be more open and then have secret forums for their buddies. I think they have their collective heads in dark places.

  21. Also just spent like close to 2 hours working on doing the solo, had tons of issues and bug reported them *shrug* The new solo is very scripty and most the things I thought would break did break, putting barrels on the elevators was a gamble I shouldn’t have made 🙂 Also the detriment you get from running through the fire never goes away until you die so once you lit that fire don’t play with it (I did for science) Overall it’s not an experience I’d say I’d enjoy doing regularly I’m hoping to test out the heroic at some point to see if it’s less scripty…. cause the getting thrown in the storage room thing got old 🙂

  22. For a company so intent on censoring people on their forums, I find it hilarious that they want to shift feedback to the EQ2 subreddit, where no DBG employee is a moderator. So I say everyone who doesn’t want to use Reddit go ahead and post your displeasure over there anyway. It’s not like they can remove your post.

    1. I, too, found this amusing. Guess that perma-ban they handed me Friday will be a hollow victory.

      Reddit is filled with more scum than the shills on the forum though…so there’s a down side here as well.

  23. I gather you must have had some bad experiences with Reddit, Feldon. I’ve never used it as a resource for EQ2 or any SOE/Daybreak games so I can’t comment on the way it works for those. I do use it extensively for Guild Wars 2, however, and I’ve found the community there to be largely thoughtful, insightful and helpful. I’ve seen little sign of trolling – certainly less than I would expect to see on GW2’s own forums and much, much less than historically has been the case on SOE’s official forums.

    Times change and social media changes faster. The age of company-owned and moderated forums in general may be in decline. It’s not as though they’ve ever been a model of good behavior and helpful information anyway, is it? Remember when SOE’s own forums were so damagingly toxic to the company’s commercial fortunes that they were closed down entirely, then re-opened weeks later with ultra-strict moderation?

    The thing about Reddit, as I understand it, is that it is a collective of separate communities. The experience one has in one reddit won’t necessarily reflect the experiences others have in others. The real issue I see here is that EQ2 (and Everquest) has a relatively older, less social-media aware audience, who may be resistant to changes of this kind.

    Reddit is almost certainly a good choice for Daybreak to use for communicating with H1Z1 players and, I’m sure, also for the audience they hope to attract for EQNext. Whether it’s appropriate for the audience they already have for EQ2/EQ is another matter, as is whether they can realistically hope to attract a younger audience for those elderly titles.

    I have no intention of buying Rum Cellar anyway so this is all a bit theoretical for me at this point. If they don’t add open-world zones then I’m not interested anyway.

    1. Late to the game with this post but, I agree with you about reddit. The stigma drives people away at the same time, the community needs to be driven to moderate. Who cares at this point if they do or they don’t.

      Also with Guild Wars. I believe their main site was/is a fan site called Guild Wars Guru. They had/have ArenaNet developer presence there but I think that the onus is on the player community to effectively moderate the forums which I feel they had always done well.

      I feel EQ2 could have taken a similar path – the development team deciding to favor a fan site for discussion with the players but driving the community to keep it clean and meaningful and not needing to impose their corporate BS speech policies driving people away from the game and company when doing so.

      So it’s sad that the only site with the best class information was created out of anger and elitism (which i admit to participating to in my time :P). Since there’s nothing really Qeynos Harbor /flex worthy in the game to draw that crowd anymore, that information is now never updated. Also the people that really needed to use that information were usually driven away by trolling or even told by their peers to never go there. It’s a shame really that an equally informed and active source never developed that would have been respectfully moderated.

      Using the official forums for de-facto class discussion was always difficult because they gave you terrible tools to manage that discourse. Is reddit any better for a game? I really don’t think it can match a vbulletin type format. Sony’s forum architecture never got better, it always managed to get worse.

      Choosing reddit is also going to drive people away because of the stigma. I honestly thought the rum cellar and reddit discussions were april fools jokes taken to an extreme.

      BTW Feldon your blog and those that help you maintain it, and those that have built and maintain the tools you link to to are integral to getting the most of EQ2 now. However it’s not the same as a full on forum site for community curated info and DBG seems like they’ll just continue to follow never being able to provide a useful company driven site for EQ2

  24. Ok, so I popped over to the Reddit and all I can say is it just looks so unprofessional. 🙁 Oh well, guess we will see how things go, but so far I feel like I am on a sinking ship.

  26. I dislike Reddit – it has it’s moments but there are too many immature people who like to answer ‘works fine for me, noob’ or equivalent when you ask for help, or attack reasonable criticism with repeated personal flames – the one & only thing I don’t mind getting modded on the official forums.

    On the plus side, the official MODS are way too twitchy (and getting worse) and the forums these days seem friendly/useful only if you are a DBG groupie and never disagree with a decision, or ask an awkward but relevant question.

  27. I had never been to Reddit, so I went and had a look. I went through several threads, and I just had to quit. It looks so amateurish and unprofessional. It’s like the 1990’s. I think the site is stuck in a time warp. I will not return.

  28. I like Reddit, but I worry what effect this will have on how issues are addressed. The current forums already represent the vocal minority, and the people who actually bother with Reddit will be a subset of that. While the opinions of the people who do engage with the EQ2 subreddit are of course valid, it does mean a large number of voices will go unheard.

  30. I see this as a bad model going forward. This is going to fragment the community and guilds. People who spend the money will have the content, but those who don’t will be left out of groups & raids. After a few campaigns done this way, LFG messages will turn into a list of what content a person does & doesn’t have.

  31. Reddit is ok for an occasional look see, but I find it very frustrating to follow any sort of discussion.

    Some sub reddits are better than others – some seem very helpful and the community puts in a lot of time and effort.

    Unless DBG plans on getting Mod access, and set it up so that it can be a little more manageable, I fear that Reddit will be useless for anything meaningful. The EQ2 sub reddit in it’s current form looks like a dumping ground.

    Here is a sample of a sub reddit that looks to be fairly well organized – http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/

  32. This is the xpac that was meant to be free content as expressed by SOE since AoM so horribly short on content (as was ToV), right? This has been talked about openly as the additional zones still coming UNDER THE CURRENT CONTENT.

    I am guilty of buying the collectors addition, which was a mistake. Do not make me feel like I should also regret it because I’ve trained a company that I’m willing to open my wallet.

    I’m not paying for this. I already paid for this.

        1. I only recall DoV having free additional content – and that’s only because they wanted to change their model – give away the content, and expansions would be paid for features.

          But people didn’t like that model – they complained loudly about having to pay for features and no content. So they went back to their traditional model.

          I would be interested to know what content after every past expansion pack has been given free – could you provide some links so I can read up?

          2. Ok so the extra raids that we got in TOV. The extra quests, and raids, and solo quest in dov. Then we can rewind back to SF. The extra ice box quests that were added for both zones, then the sig line for the upcoming dov, also the added content of not having to run the original quest for your epic weapon giving you the broken weapon to start with to fast track folks. Kunark we added the rime quest/content afterwards. I could go on but I think I made my point for the last few xpacs.

  35. My main concern is as follows. 15 bucks per dlc, Maybe 4-6 in DLC’s a year. That is 15*4 60 bucks or 15*6 = 90 bucks. Then after that are we going to have another xpac at 65-95 at the end of the year. If we have to pay for dlc and an xpac that is possibly 180 bucks per year, on top of a subscription, and that would be a ripoff. AOM was short in so many ways, I was hoping we would get additional stuff just like all the other xpacs in the past, instead now we got to pay for it. I just want to know are we,or are we not going to have xpacs on top of the DLC. I know that DBC has money flow issues but ripping off your customer base is not the way to make cash, it sure is the way to make them very angry.

    1. My you are being optimistic. I think I saw Holly say no more Xpacs and she has only promised one other DLC. Nothing about anything beyond that, although she said future content would follow the DLC model but not when any future DLC could be expected, or how often.

  37. WHY would they buy a franchise just to shut it down? HOW does that make ANY sense as a business to do that?

    There may be hard times at first. They may muck it up and HAVE to shut it down, but I can’t conceivably believe they bought it out so they could shut it down.

    That being said, I tried the solo quest for the DLC . . . it’s a puzzle zone / don’t-get-caught-or-you’ll-have-to-start-at-the-beginning kind of zone. If you like that it’s okay, but many people were getting frustrated because they kept getting caught. Didn’t get a chance for the heroic content. IT’s not a “must have” but more to do when you’re bored.

    1. There is a hidden assumption in there, they did not buy a franchise. They bought a company with a number of franchises. They may not regard EQ/EQ2 as valuable.

      After all the main asset in the franchise is the creative content and didn’t you notice the sacking of Creative Directors and the like?

  38. As I pointed out elsewhere, unless you’re bleeding-edge there is no point to buy each adventure pack…just buy one, skip one, buy the next which will inevitably have some “Get Everything Up To This Point!” promotion on it.

    This will also cause Gear Inflation (or MUDflation if you prefer) to advance even faster, as each adventure pack will need better stats than the last or nobody will buy it.

  39. My husband and I have been playing Eq2 for years. Recently we started playing DCUO because our all access account allowed us to play it free and with all access there. Aside from more character slots than even I can use they have DLCs which are given to All Access for free where as Eq2 is giving us a $1.50 discount…. and we have been getting new stuff around this time for free… as for Reddit… never been there but looking on my husband’s screen it looks a mess and they want to post feedback here? I don’t like where all of this is going.

  40. Hmm.. guess my EQ2 days are done.. im not paying for a DLC for a decade plus old game.. a full expansion, maybe.. if they did this oh 10 ish years ago, then it may be ok.. but not now. this is pretty ridiculous really,

  41. WOW I am 100 finally and I was so looking forward to the new zone until I went into it. It was not at all as the hype was for a solo player. Also I still can’t find anything about the new tradeskilling quests or recipes are there any? It is sure difficult find out any current info about the new game I even went to the new web site that was hard to follow also. Also what happen to the housing leaderboards? they went haywired. All my houses that had gotten trohpies lost their lvls I had some 5 and lower lvls what happen?

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