It's pretty hard to be excited about TOB. You could have said that for quite a few expansions now, but I think what's particularly disappointing to me is that the growth in the design team has paid no dividends in terms of quantity or quality of expansion content and class development. The bar just keeps getting lower, and it's deemed "enough" regardless of the team size.
For five expansions - EoK through CoV - the team had between 5 and 7 designers. This led to 6 - 7 zones, ~6 quests per zone, 4 missions, 8-9 raids, and sporadic class development. There were some highlights, including expansions with significant class changes/feedback (primarily EoK/ToV AAs), evolving items, etc., but they largely stuck to the mold.
Starting in ToL, they increased the design team size to 9. One of those designers left since, but the other 8 are still here, and this year they added 3 more for a total of 11. That's
double the design team size from those aforementioned expansions. While I understand that training takes time, the designers hired during ToL development have now been on the team for over four years. It's a bit crazy that there are
no dividends in terms of actual content. Here's that expressed graphically in terms of pure quantity of content (RoF -> TDS content is adjusted for what was released in each year):
View attachment 820
In VoA, there was a progression server launch during the development cycle that required far more manual work than most current rulesets, there was a level cap increase, new spells and AA for every class, twice the zones, more than twice the quests, 5 times the missions, and almost double the raids. That was with the same number of designers. I get that expecting the 3 new ones to put out that level of content is probably unfair, but it's
insane to me to be okay with the same output as when the team was half the size.
This is especially notable on the spell/AA front. We get
no communication from class developers after Beta ends, and now they ghost us in Beta too despite having done almost nothing in terms of spells/AAs all year. The AAs in TOB are copy/pastes of TBL, when we effectively had a part time AA dev (he was only dedicated to design for 3 months of the year, and also did achievements and the faction window during that time). Ganzito isn't dedicating 75% of his year to the engineering team like Dzarn was; what did he do with the rest of his year? Aristo in VoA did a level cap increase (before a number of optimizations to make the process faster), did parts of the Rubak Oseka zone, did actual spell changes/tuning during beta, and made new spells for every class. In TOB, he made 1/10th the spells he'd normally have to make on a level cap increase, absolutely no new spells, did no spell tuning, and had help from other designers starting and finishing spell development. What did he do all year? What did he do for a month during Beta? Why are other designers not even allowed to help with class development?
I honestly don't know the answers to these questions, but with unexceptional content, classes in woefully inadequate states, and very little communication explaining why this has to be the case despite all facts indicating it
doesn't have to be the case, it's hard not to be extremely pessimistic. I know we talk about resources a lot, but I think there's a point where we have to accept that the people with the ability to make these changes - including their managers, etc. - truly do not care about EverQuest classes and are not interested in doing the work required to make them better.
