I'm talking about video game development, not software development.. sure they are the same thing technically, but they aren't the same at all in reality.

..and there are tons of dev teams that apparently do this all perfect or good and they cancel half way through development because no one wanted to play the game they thought the customers wanted.. EQNext being one where they listened too much, catered everything to helping players help them or some weird shit, just a failure really..

And tons of games stall like Camelot Unchained because they worry too much it seems about customers, I have seen it more times than I can remember so I dunno, maybe that way of doing things is good to keep a paychecks coming, but it isn't good in reality of what makes an actual good MMORPGs.. Seems there is no one developing that next MMORPG game other than New World but Smedley is on that team and id bet he is part of why that game might actually have a chance to be the success that something like EQ was because he knows what actually made that game good, and it wasn't the players opinions.

...

But if we're going to min/max our usefulness in life, perhaps complaining about the work of volunteers on their forums (and offering no solutions) should be at the very bottom of that to-do list, if on it at all.

Those eight years were already being wasted by the hurry up and wait of civilian life, so the in-person time was salvaged online. But even so, any time/energy put towards fostering or being involved with a community (even one as deviant and argumentative as this) is hardly a waste. Also, the thousand some odd posts span over those eight years; each one didn't take three days to type out. If you want to do the math and estimate how much time was spent typing all of them, by all means.

I'd argue the exact opposite happened: SOE didn't listen to what their customers wanted (a better WoW/EverQuest), and instead they gave them what the SOE devs wanted to build ... a MMOG-item-builder :(

..they created a sandbox because they wanted to give the players what they wanted by giving them the ability to create it themselves.. It was literally their whole narrative just creative creative after a while hence Landmark.. I built qeynos for fun and one of the devs came into my stream back then and said it was nice, like wtf sure they weren't listening to the majority of people yelling about combat and things like that, but ultimately they were listening and from what I saw that was part of why it stalled so heavily and went towards this Landmark idea because a lot of opinions were hard on about the creative side of things (including myself) and devs gravitate to creating a eco system for all kinds of creative people. They are very inclusive, very kinda, and ultimately just want you to have what you want.. While the reality is you need to create something they don't know they want..

that said I 100% agree they didn't listen to ME yelling JUST MAKE EQ1 IN A NEW ENGINE!!!!!!!!! but they were listening to who they wanted to listen to. Which is why I find its an easy way out kind of thing, like the echo chamber bubble situation people are in right now and also why it shouldn't be done in context of video game development. They had an elitist kind of mindset from a perspective of someone who was just looking in at it, Only listening to a certain creative people.. But that is my point, it caters to this selective process of development that goes too far from the core first principles of the product that was sold to begin with. But also why Fuck Blizzard.

I think you're conflating "listening to customers" with "doing exactly what a customer says" ... but the two can be very different things.

I'm arguing that successful companies (gaming or otherwise) do the former; I am not arguing they do the latter.

And I think you are over simplifying it and in reality I am not arguing anything, just stating opinions on what I have seen and what I think actually exists. Don't care either way weather you agree or I agree with each other. I know you think you are Right.

So yeah, cool story bro's - anyway... about those mage pets...

I didn't see plane of sky mq's addressed in the patch notes. Back in August 2020 there was a post by Telin referencing that this change was made pending update. Was it included in this 5/7/21 patch?

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...60#post3169360

I'm pretty sure all of the Sky quests have been MQ-able for some time now.

Really saddens me seeing these pixels being farmed to sell for mqed to people that won’t do their time having fun in sky. That’s classic i guess.