Anyone Seen This??
 

I wonder if this is going to work ? whats your thoughts?


EQ Petition



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No. They've got threads on the Sony forums hundreds of pages long and it's all been ignored. They considered it early this year but the developers said it would take too much time. Essentially, Sony isn't investing much into EverQuest I anymore.

I'd much prefer to see Sony just release boxed emulators. Sure, maybe it would end our purpose here, but I would pay $50 for a standalone Sony released server emulator (with proper editing tools, or at least the ability to play well with third party tools), that other people could connect to LAN or IP if they had also purchased the same box. I would be willing to pay additional for expansions (the ones I'd be interested in, anyway; RoK and SoV maybe even the full $50).

I've thought about writing something up as a petition for this. I know that Sony probabably wouldn't make a huge killing on this, but I bet it would would generate more income than a Classic server. In the end, I think they ought to do it to immortalize EQ and give it to the community, because eventually (could be years, I know) the live servers will become just a single server, and then the population will slowly drop, and finally they will have to pull the plug.

Instead of a boxed emulator and dev tools, I would rather see them release a configurable, more open (-source?) client and publish protocol information.

Even in its prime, the SOE EQ dev team has not shown itself to be terribly effective at getting things solid the first time and I doubt anyone would continue pouring money into it to make it a worthwhile product.

This project is great and the best thing for it is to have a client whose inner workings are published and well-understood.

I know many of the current SOE players already think that an emulator-like system run by SOE would just further dilute the player-base and they don't seem to care for the idea much:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/po...opic_id=130077

:P

Na, the key is to get EQ out of SOE's hands, with their "blessing" so to speak. More along the lines of Diablo 2 - if you want to play on Battle.net, knock yourself out, but if you want to play on your LAN (or connect over the net via TCP/IP) that is cool, too. Take that concept, and also borrow from the way Blizzard has really fleshed out the idea of players customizing their games (see the progression from WC2 to SC to WC3 when it comes to map making).

The caveat would be that if you want to play on official SOE servers, you pay a subscription. It would also be important to mark player hosted (LAN or TCP/IP) servers as either custom or legit (kind of like we do here, but it would be easier to standardize that from SOE's perspective), legit being denoted by era.

Yes, it would be a large undertaking, but would make a nice grand finale when it comes time to pull the plug, or, even better, something to go ahead and throw out now as we see live servers merging and the game's sun slowly setting on an MMO scale.