Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

What a bunch of nimrods that they didn't create a portable cross platform client that wouldn't need a special "mac" server to connect the mac clients to. This is the height of programming and marketing stupidity.

I am one of many people who have been playing the game since the beta. The situation has a lot worse than most have heard. High-end content has been missing from the game since day one. For those of you who are familar with the game, only Tier 1 zones are currently working. For those of you not familar with the game, roughly 25% of the zones are missing, and unfortunately those of us who have advanced our characters past level 60 require these missing zones. Promises were made, but never kept. Sound has not worked either. Sound has been so buggy since day one, that you are forced to play with sound off.

It has been the worst customer support experince of my life.

SOE is the stupidest company I have ever seen and I am never going to buy their products again. They have lost this customer, for life.

Regarding the cross platform networking:

Often times the original PC version of a game is built on a set of proprietary Microsoft networking code that Microsoft refuses to release any details of, so there is no way to convert it or write a compatible code base for OS X, Linux, or anything else. This is the reason that there are Mac games that are not networking compatible with the Windows version. It was not a marketing choice, nor was it the choice of the Mac porter. It was the choice of the original developers of EQ to use this code set instead of something that is more open and standard.

So...they give horrible customer service and make the game stink really terribly, and then you say that because the game doesn't sell, writing Mac games isn't worth it?

Now, while I'm sure some people will port games and not support them for that purpose, it's somewhat disingenuous of you to come to that conclusion based on this data.

If people would make the Mac ports good, or write good games for the Mac to begin with, more people would buy them, and they would be more profitable.

Dan Aris

How long did EveryQuest take to get ported to mac after its PC release? A pretty ridiculous amount of time, I'm sure. Other than that, all the ported games I've played, popular or not, have been plauged by bugs and support issues.

This is why I play Marathon on my G4.

The Mac only server is not and never was about the networking code. It was about the fact that they didn't know how much they wanted to invest.

It would be even more unfair to the users of the Macintosh client if we were playing alongside PC players who had access to content we did not because our client hadn't been patched or the expansion hadn't been ported yet.

The mac server was never a technical issue, it was purely economic (and btw, the Al'Kabor server is essentially a clone of a server that was running in Oct or Nov '02)

I am also one of the people that switched from PC EQ to Mac EQ, and was one of the worst things i could have done. Month after month people would send in feedback and bugs, and never got one patch to fix anything. The EQ Mac Sony boards would delete every one of our posts asking when we would get a update/fixes. They took our money and didnt give us a damn thing back. They lost me as a PC and Mac customer for EQ and also their sony products.

Uh, yeah -- sure, all that about SOE having poor customer service is correct. But according to the most recent sales figures, the MAC version of EQ has sold like 1,261 copies in the U.S. as of end of March. I think they gave away copies too, but even so, that is an insanely low number that wouldn't even justify the cost of 1 customer service guy, let alone programmers to fix the bugs. As been proven again and again, it is just not economically feasible to release games for the Mac, so I really can't imagine what they were thinking in the first place.

So boycott it. Or better yet, make a free, open source MMORPG (maybe work on PlaneShift). If you want to hurt them, your most powerful weapon is your wallet.

Okay, so they sold 1,261 copies to several hundred thousand potential customers. Is this because there is insufficient market for their product, or because they failed to advertise, failed to finish development, and failed to provide promised support and content?

I love how people (PC users) think that because Mac only represents 3-6% of the market that there is no money in developing games for the market. Tell that to Blizzard, or EA.

The miserable failing of a product with a legacy as rich as EverQuest's while other products in the genre have succeeded on the same platform shows nothing more than poor planning, followed by poor business decisions, abysmal implementation, and word of mouth advertising that depressed sales dramatically for the previous reasons.

If *any* company released a product for PC that was as poorly prepared and even less supported (something on par with what the EQ:Mac community has seen) the product might sell five times as many copies to twenty times the customers.

Raw number of copies tells one story, but when you look at those sales as compared to potential customers, they screwed themselves.

I'm one of the 60+ players on the server and I love it and I hate it. It's infuriating to be so engaged and involved with a game and a group of friends and to discover that your advancement is capped well below what it was advertised to be.

Since this has gone out, possibly due to the press, we have been given some of the spells we could've gotten in these inaccessible zones: http://www.eqmac.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3446

This is nice, but we really would like the drops and higher level of XP that we could get.

Oh -- and lied to a bit less. that would help immensely.

(edit)

by 60+ I mean level 60+. We have more than 60 players.

I don't find this surprising. Having been at MacWorld a few years ago showing our MMO next to the Sony guys I got a chance to know them. Even then there was a half baked approach to EQ Mac. Different server, not same expansions etc.

What's so shameful to me is that our company, with a measly 12 developers, fully supports our incredibly small Mac community. When we wanted to add SpeedTree to the game, the decision to drop Mac support was at hand. Afterall, the size of the community is hardly what the suits would deem profitable. In the end we swung a deal with SpeedTree to port to the Mac for them and it saved us a little green. We never got any press for it, not even from Apple, but in the end our loyal Mac fans are all the more loyal.

Bottom line, its just as easy to build cross platform that not. The questin is one of commitment. Sony, per usual, is committed to the bottom line. I'm pleased to be able to offer an MMO on the Macintosh and I encourage everyone in our industry to do so if the Mac can support their game requirements.