SOE -> ShowEQ Road Map

[Amadeus]

I personally think SoE is going to be a bit more discreet about the "mass banning" armaggedon that everyone seems to be preaching.

I mean, can you imagine a group of ShowEQ developers really pissed? I would imagine that the first time Ratt or fee are banned for using ShowEQ will be the beginning of a war that SoE will wish they had never started....

[QuerySEQ]

HACK THE PLANET!!

(sorry, tension breaker.. had to be done)

[outthere]

Here is a hint for VI. The only people that use SEQ are your long term players. If you want to piss them off into quiting the game go right ahead, but there goes your solid bank role each month.

The new players have hardly learned how to play much less learned of SEQ.

[rramsey]

A little bit out of context, but there is something to be said.

I went to FF this weekend and sat in two panels, Development and Customer Service.

Development was interesting because these guys were true and to the point and obviously played the game. Although SEQ didn't come up in conversation, it was very obvious that they are looking out of the long term of the game and seem to be putting a LOT of their efforts into balance.

CS on the other hand, were a bunch of 'save your ass' gimps. There were a lot of questions relating around rules etc. which I won't get into but the point I am trying to make is this... GM (or at least the GM lead of 'daytime GM's, the head of CS and some other guy up there, obviously DONT play the game, DON"T really care about customer satisfaction and are very metrics driven.

One guy asked if they had ever thought about having a customer satisfaction survey, and getting the opinions of the players. The bullshit that came from these GM's types about how customer service is so great, was very frustrated and i watched as two people left the panel in disgust.

So weith regards to SEQ, Im sure these 'suits' think SEQ is a massive bummer for their way of life, but as said in the previous post, it is obvious that their 'long' term' and loyal fans use this not as a way to 'cheat' the game but to enhance it.

We ask for bug fixes... What do they give us? EQIM (for pay), and a stupid mp3 player???

Suits and Money.... Check your 'logic' at the door.

[lane]

All good customer service deparments have a customer sat feedback survey that goes out after they do something for you (ie. you open a case). SoE does not have this. The reason? They suck so bad they don't want anyone outside the gaming community to know.

Just think if investors knew how poor thier customer service way. This is a sign of a company that is managed poorly and that ongoing revenue will probably go dow because of it. People say with a supplyer for two reasons. Great support or great product. I sure as hell don't stay with SoE for the support, and I'm just plain addicted to the product.

-Lane

[Shukz]

----snip----

SONY, wouldn't do mass bannings. It would hurt their profit margin

----snip---

Sony's making 100 million a year off EQ alone. With 95% of that being pure hard profit. If they ban Everyone that uses ShowEQ, thats probably less than 10% of the EQ population, if that much.

I think if they want to make a point, they'll do mass bannings and take a hit for a few million a year. After all when your making that much profit, who's counting.

[Shukz]

I hope they don't start mass bannings though. I had quit EQ for about 6 months. Sold my accounts and off I went into the realm of the Real. I had been playing since Beta 4 and to be honest I was just plain tired of EQ. I love MMORPG's, just didnt like EQ anymore. SEQ was the only thing that got me back into EQ, it made the game interesting again. I was able to look at it from a different perspective. And it was fun again I must admit that when World of Warcraft comes out, I'll be putting my EQ chars up for sale again. I can't wait for some really competitive games to hit the market. But untiull that day comes (in a few more months) I'll stick with EQ, but only thanks to SEQ.

In my opinion, instead of hasseling the SEQ developers, they should thanks them. I know Im not the only one who's taken this route and made these decisions. If it werent for SEQ, Sony wouldnt get to rob my credit card for 12.95 a month. How many thousands of dollars a month is SOE making off situations just like mine. Maybe they should consider that.

And you know, I don't even use a packet sniffer. I just use SEQ for maps to get from point A to point B a little quicker in the zones I dont usually travel in. I might run a packet sniffer, but im a systems guy, not a programmer so that realm is foreign to me.

[SomeOneWhoKnows]

There is a difference between revenue (how much money is coming into the company), and how much they are "making" (net profits).

You say they are making 100 million a year off of EQ, but even that is higher then their revenue on EQ.

They last claimed about 430,000 subscribers. Their current price is 12.95 a month. That's 5,568,500 a month, or 66,822,000 a year. However, they have several hundred employees (who they have to pay every 2 weeks (go look at the recent Game Developer article on developer salaries to find out just how much)), thousands of machines to power and maintain, and one whopper of an ISP bill.

I bet it's closer to barely breaking even... more likely still is that if they had not released PoP and made money on the box sales they would be in the red (negative profit (aka loss)) for the year.

Anyway, it's interesting that you all assume they are sniffing your memory to see what "key sniffer" program you are running and sending that info back to the servers. I would think that you could easily look at the packets to find something sending this information back to the servers. In the past when the showeq folks did that, they caused an uproar and SoE/Verant publically announced they would not scan user memory or send info back to the servers.

I think you people are drinking a healthy dose of paranoia.

[Shukz]

Lol, SomeOneWhoKnows

/em agrees on the paranoia comment


About the Income, i was refering to this post

http://seq.sourceforge.net/showthrea...&threadid=2494

Read the post, go to the link, do the search for showeq and read the article. He may have been wrong, if that's the case then im also incorrect. Oh well, should research out my sources before I go shooting off my mouth Lol

[BlueAdept]

Originally posted by SomeOneWhoKnows
There is a difference between revenue (how much money is coming into the company), and how much they are "making" (net profits).

You say they are making 100 million a year off of EQ, but even that is higher then their revenue on EQ.

They last claimed about 430,000 subscribers. Their current price is 12.95 a month. That's 5,568,500 a month, or 66,822,000 a year. However, they have several hundred employees (who they have to pay every 2 weeks (go look at the recent Game Developer article on developer salaries to find out just how much)), thousands of machines to power and maintain, and one whopper of an ISP bill.

I bet it's closer to barely breaking even... more likely still is that if they had not released PoP and made money on the box sales they would be in the red (negative profit (aka loss)) for the year.

I seriously doubt that they are just "breaking even" or are in the red. I believe that Sony would have pulled the plug on EQ the minute that it stops turning a profit. Sony doesnt screw around when it comes to profit. As soon as it becomes a liability, Im sure it will be gone....look at Betamax and all the people that got stuck with them.

Even if they have an OC768 (I doubt they have even close to that bandwidth), the bills for that wouldnt even be near one million a month.

Ok...lets look at it this way. Ill be extremely generous with these figures.

1 mil for Inet. per month
1 mil for computers per month
1 mil for salaries per month
1 mil for misc expenses (including utilities) per month
-----------------------------------------------------
$1,568,500 in profit a month or $18,822,000 profit per year.

I seriously doubt their costs are anywhere near this. I would probably estimate it to be around 3 million profit a month.

[The Mad Poet]

Yeah but I'm sure they don't have one big pipe - from conversations they have had over issues in the past it looks like they have several major pipes to the different backbones in order to keep the traffic going.

That's why sometimes you see half a raid go LD at once... they were on the wrong pipe when it went down.

560,000,000 bits per second I'm assuming (100,000 people playing at one time according to quotes and all at 56.6k connections)..

That's aprox. 560 T1s... or 9ish DS3's... assuming minimum bandwidth to support the users ...

I'm sure it's much larger than that though - they have 2 separate server farms that requires connections like that to both - then the eruo servers need connections ...

They should be making a profit though - I believe that they bragged a few months back they cleared a million in profit just on the character transfer service alone...

For a million dolars you would think they could go through the hassle of letting you take your equipment...

[FeoF()]

I would also have to agree that banning 20k users is not going to bother SoE all that much

20,000 x 12.95 = $259,000 dollars per month. (not including any that play on stormhammer or extra services like name changes, etc)

Are you serious they wouldn't mind? Over one quarter of a million dollars a month. Someone would have to explain that to those who are in charge. Those who are in charge care more about the bottom line than anything else. What company can afford to lose roughly 5% of their net income for no noticable business gains.

[maggotboy]

20,000 users being banned would undoubtedly generate several more thousand players quitting in protest, followed by untold thousands of people who would've signed up but decided not to after the torrent of bad publicity that would follow.

This in addition to the fact that AC2 has come out, and many people are already defecting.

Image is everything. Once you've lost it, you never get it back. If Verant begins the mass-bannings, it will be the beginning of the end for them.

Maggotboy

[Shukz]

I doubt that banning 20K users would cause just about anyone to quit EQ. Maybe a few Hundred people who actually have a set of descent principles (mostly SEQ users) but beyond that, these virtual characters in Norrath are the only and most important things in Life to these people.

Authority is a pack of hungry Wolfes.

We are the Sheep.

When the Predators jump in and slaughter off a few, the others just turn their head and say "poor guy, glad it wasnt me"
At least untill it happens to them.

[someoneelse]

Sony may well ban huge numbers of players, or at least enough to make a their point. If Sony can't show that EQ is secure from cheating, then this could hurt the prospects for EQ2, and SWG. They could in effect sacrifice 250K income from EQ to ensure EQ2's, and SWG's revenue.

On the other hand, if Sony bans 20,000 players, that could represent many more accounts, and thus much more $. If someone lost the account with their main, then they'd probably cancel their mule, and merchant accounts. Sony claims 420,000+ accounts, but how many actual players?