Wow, I agree. I think this is actually an awesome idea. If game is good enough people will put their money into it and may actually INCREASE their subscriptions. It would at the minimum drastically increase the number who play and thereby open up far more outlets for revenue.

I actually like this model to be honest. It is a consumer option that makes far more sense than SOE's current weekend plan.

It might cheapen the game Eric, but I sure as hell would be back in EQ2 in a heartbeat if it went Free to Play.

They already do.


That being said though I personally would love the F2P model to come to EQ2.

I'd be wary of such a change coming to EQ2, the busiest servers would get hit hard to start with, but since I don't play on them its not my problem.

My problem though would be the players, the free trial is the worst thing to happen to Planetside with the rampant cheating that its used for, without a cost and some sort of repercussion for peoples actions I fear the community in EQ2 could go downhill really fast. With the subscriber "exclusive" club model its rather pleasant in comparison and Runnyeye on the whole has the best MMO community I've experienced.

Maybe if they did it the best bet would be to implement it like station exchange on certain servers giving subscribers the option to move away if the community standards took a dive (helloooo gold farmers!).

As for LOTRO's change I'm very surprised, they did brag about having 300k players one point and everyone had their subscriber base growing, so if they were making money hand over fist like that why jepoardise things with a change in business model? (although they moved into Asia so I'm wondering if they are all paying the same price).

I think the mess the new Hobbit movie is in with MGM and the loss of the director though has hurt them, so I wonder if that is an influence.

I don't know anything about networking or servers. But isn't this a function of graphics?

EQ2 is so much more graphically intensive than WoW it would seem that the same server population would be much more difficult for SoE to deal with than for Blizzard.

I would guess all MMO's would all seek to do that, is it just AB and Nagafen though that run into problems?

Playing both of them I'd say that Blizzards is much easier to handle numbers with, an EQ2 player executes abilities 2-3x faster on average then the WoW classes I played, too fast I think (I had one instance in a BG where a Necro was starting and ending his abilities before I could react and complete a interrupt). That's got to be a big load on the server.

The other difference is that EQ2 has a much bigger world to support, a lot more stats to pass around, plus player housing/guidhalls to support all the time, on WoW's side I'm sure now its a conscience decision to limit the size of the world (as they have the money to easily develop something 2-3x larger).

Even then pre-dungeon finder it was common for me in WoW to have to wait for 5-30 minutes for an instance to be available when entering a dungeon, after it was launched things were improved. Problems that don't occur on Runnyeye at least, the worst I had this year was a bit of lag in Sundered frontier on launch when there were about 500 or so there, and I had my first crash during gametime just last week (offline for 30 mins, its the first time my play has been interrupted part way).

Before when they were talking about server merges I was thinking how the technology should scale from 2005 to handle more players, now I wonder if each expansion is adding quite a load. WoW definitely added a new computer to each server when TBC launched, as every so often Outland would go down while the rest of Azeroth carries on working, I've not noticed that effect in EQ2 so I'm guessing they run some sort of cluster for each server?

One other thing, I'm wondering what SOE are planning to do with the 18 or so EQ1 servers that are being freed up due to the current server merges with no big MMO's heading for launch yet.