Fair points, but it's still not what the community wanted, and while it's nice to talk about the business cases, I want to talk about good games, and EQ used to be one. What they have now is a compromise, while that's nice, it's not really what folks were looking to recapture from EQ.

These new changes do nothing for a new player, they don't help anyone approaching EQ from new to give it a shot. It's confusing, beguiling, an people do like to have the sense of growth. What they have done is to make experienced players replay some of the old content, which really dictates where EQ is right now, it's in subscriber retention mode, rather than trying new things to reinvigorate this once wonderful franchise.

SOE missed the boat in spectacular fashion by reworking EQ into a browser based free to play MMO with RMT. Given the depth, the design and the community, this would have been a huge hit for people who were outside the tween market they are hell bent on solely focusing on, but alas, it's all fairy wings and race car games now at SOE. It's a pity really, as EQ doesn't deserve to be left hanging like this, and content wise it really does compete with WoW, it just doesn't look as nice and has some archaic game play mechanisms that need a overhaul.

There might be a EQ3 in the wings, but SOE need to take a tip from Blizz on this one and evolve their games, not just pump out xpac after xpac hoping that more people don't leave. The major failing was reinvestment in their own technology, unfortunately the scope of MMO's was not realized at that time, so SOE can't be directly blamed for this oversight many years ago.