EQ and New Player Population

[stormlord]

I originally attached this to another post, but thought I'd make a thread about it to see what others think about what caused EQ to crash. This could be a great troll thread, burning flames and spewing guts. Up to all of you.

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This site estimates the rate if you look here:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

(this is an estimate, it could be wildly wrong or close to right, but it's all we got!)

You see that the rate in EQ declined at a slight pace until mid 2001, where it took a dive. I don't know how to explain the dive. I took a look at another chart, and I saw that Lineage gained over 500,000 subscriptions around that time period. Anarchy Online launched summer 2001. (I recall in late 2001, early 2002, near S Karana, someone asking me to join them in Anarchy Online.) Anyway, hard to know. EQ never recovered, for lots of reasons. It could be that sony wasn't advertising, but i think what was more important was that dozens of mmo's were firing up and stealing away potential new people before they ever got to even see it. Secondly, the game was growing older, attrition was eating away at the veterans, and the group-based play of EQ really hampered its survival in this kind of compromised environment. Sony has tried to reduce the ceiling a bit so new players could better accommodate their needs in a crippled world, but it's a losing game.

Imagine a new player coming into EQ after 2000-01. The world they would see would have less people. No, i'm not talking about Kunark or Velious. I mean places like Qeynos and Freeport and Greater Faydark. It would have been harder to find a group. By then, the population would have been very top heavy, and without advertising, new players are going to come up empty. There'd be lots of zones, and they wouldn't be sure where to start. And then, in the spirit of exploration, in late 2001, they log into DAOC and servers are crawling with people, by comparison. Back then, DAOC had a babies butt and was shiny new. Things aren't so brutal in DAOC. Given a choice, i think most new players would stay with DAOC, as just one small example. I don't see how EQ could have been saved, unless the whole package could be redone.

WOW is a phenomenon. Absolutely. It's not even listed on that chart because it would make them all look like ants in comparison. It bit bigger and bigger chunks like some kind of Goliath. It brought MMORPG to the world. It even got at one of my sisters (her poor dear soul). But, I'm wondering at what point people will start saying things like, "You know, WOW isn't what it used to be, " or things like, "WOW sucks now." You know, everything gets old. It gets harder and harder to update and manage old software. It gets harder and harder to keep old players with the same name without a do over. I'm wondering what will come after WOW? Will Blizzard make a sequel, or will someone else poke out their nose from behind a bush, and steal the world??

But WOW didn't kill EQ. EQ had been dying for a while. It's still spitting blood and crawling forward