Alan Answers Questions About Legends
This is from Alan on the Developer's Corner.
I guess I knew that this announcement would bring a lot of questions.
I'll see if I can answer them to your satisfaction.
Alan:
Nice. I hope you guys will release more details about the dynamic events. That by itself is probably the strongest inducement for people to pay $39.95 per month.
Saeul
P.S. It was nice to see some of the ideas in one of the emails I sent you reflected in the Legends feature list. Not claiming responsibility or asking for credit, just saying it was nice.
We get a ton of great ideas from players. We're more than willing to use the good ones.
I can't believe you're not offering the equipment pages and such to the regular servers. What a great tool this would be. I'd even pay extra per month to have this on normal servers too
*sigh*
Terinnia D`Levier
P.S. I'm guessing that players from PvP servers won't be able to take advantage of the transfer. As usual. :P
Well, it's really a simple matter of economics. Without the extra fee we can't afford to provide all of those extra services. Hosting and administering web sites for a few hundred thousand people (and for each of their characters!) just isn't something that we can afford to do for free. And I'm not at all sure that every customer would agree with you about paying more on Live servers to gain this feature.
Having said that, it's important that you understand that the addition of Legends server(s) will only have positive effects on Live servers. Some of the content designed for the Legends server(s) will eventually be moved to the Live servers.
gavving12 wrote:
The service looks really neat. But is the moving of characters to this service/server going to have the same limitations that character moves currently has? I.e. no gear goes with you, and no moving between servers of differing rulesets?
We'll be allowing any character from any server to move to a Legends server, stuff included.
I'll answer this next one within the body of the message.
Lord_Sicon wrote:
I like the idea of it and all, but are you bascially saying we need to pay more to play the game the way it was intended? We already pay to play this game, and some of this already happens.
Im not trying to sound like im completely against the idea, its just that your present paying customers should get most of these benefits as it is.
As I said above, we can't afford to provide all of these services for the current monthly fee. I would argue that we're doing a very nice job providing the existing services for the low monthly fee that we currently charge.
"Our dedicated team of Customer Service & Development staff will not only be providing in-game support to our Legends players, but also running new quests and adventures for players of all levels to participate in."
So we have to pay to get ingame support or is this on all your servers? The quests isnt something im worried about but is this saying that we dont get in game support on a normal server or do we need to pay extra?
The dedicated team that is mentioned is indeed something that requires an additional fee. This is a dedicated team of content designers and GMs, a large number of GMs for a single server so that they can provide more than just customer service (answering petitions). We've been hiring new GMs just for the Legends server. The customer service level on our Live servers is great and it will continue to get better. But for the Legends servers we're providing extra staff to handle things like events, quests and other content items that we can't afford to provide on the Live servers based on the existing fee.
Personally, i like alot of what you guys of done. Yet i feel that some should be allowed to all of the people who play EQ. We dont just pay to play, we pay to play and have a good time. Alot of what this legends server is about should already be happening. Im not trying to flame, just trying to see a little more whats this about.
And I understand that some people will feel that way.
But the only way to provide all of that extra service is to charge for it. We provide a large customer service staff for our Live servers. Despite common myth, $10 a month is a rather low fee for such services. I'm not sure I should make comparisons, but you might want to look at your cable bill each month and think about how many times you talk to a customer service representative from your cable company during that month.
It's important to understand that the release of the Legends server(s) won't harm the Live servers in any way. And there will even be a few benefits for Live servers.
Brierlea wrote:
While on the surface your EQ Legends servers seem very nice, it is also quite upsetting. There are numerous bugs STILL being worked out since SOL came live, the promised new interface is no where to be found, and the new bazaar functionality is MIA. And why is that? Because your developers seem to be working on EQ Legends instead.
Seems to me it would have made a lot better sense to do what you had promised, and to fix (really, finally FIX) current issues/bugs, before bringing something like this out to the marketplace. Ever heard of trying to juggle too many balls?
SOL's been live not even 2 months, has a lot of issues to be resolved still, and you do this.
*Walks away shaking head in bewilderment*
I wanted to reply to this so I could stress this point.
The Live team and the Legends team are two different teams, though these teams work together and keep very close ties. The Live team has done nothing but grow over the last few months and at the same time we've also built the Legends content team. We have also been hiring new Customer Service people incrementally to cover the Legends server.
What all of this means is that we now have a service for people that are willing to pay for a more active server, one with more live quests, more dynamic events and a bunch of web-based features (and tons of other stuff I'm surely forgetting to mention).
The team working on Legends will be building new content, working on new concepts and all sorts of things like that. This content will all go onto the Legends server(s) first. But some of it will also appear on Live servers eventually. It will be an excellent breeding ground for new ideas and content. Certainly a lot of that content will be exclusive to the Legends server(s), but we'll also use some of it on Live servers after it's run its course on Legends.
Obviously we see this as a win-win situation.
Alan
