New EQII Producer Announced

[Dolby]

Our friends at ZAM earlier discovered that Alan Crosby had left SOE. About an hour later word from SOE made it official...

Originally Posted by SOE

After many years of service, Alan "Brenlo" Crosby has decided to leave SOE to pursue other opportunities. And while it is sad to see him leave, we wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors.

At this time, we'd like to take a moment to introduce EverQuest II's new producer, Dave Georgeson. Dave is excited to join the EQII Team and will be posting an introduction in the near future.

Wherever Alan is going, EQ2Interface wish him the best! We also welcome David Georgeson to the EverQuest II Community. You can read more about David over at ZAM.

[lordebon]

Wow, that was pretty abrupt and unexpected. This was either dropped all of a sudden (either by him or SOE) or he's one heck of an actor at not letting his decision to leave slip. (Edit: Interesting... looks like Georgeson has been at SOE 3 months -- since February. I wonder if this has been planned since then?)

Fan Faire won't be quite the same without the jolly Halfling to Emm Cee things.

[dragowulf]

I have to say good riddance. Everything promised by Alan came either extremely late, poorly implemented, or hasn't come at all. Think about what was promised during Fan Faire.

Also the quarterly update cycle is a complete fail. Scott Hartsman was able to pull off on average about ten LUs(GUs) a year that came on time and worked. Crosby gives us four updates that aren't even in comparison to the updates given with Scott in Producer role.

Extremely monotonously buggy updates, lack of content in updates, lack of non redundant content in expansions, server performace failures/stuck at zoning/general server lag, PvP changes flopped, and exploits still unfixed after months (think battlegrounds). I feel as if the quality of the EverQuest franchise has been compromised to no return with Alan at the helm. Does anyone else see the fault?

I never though I'd say this again since Alan took over for Bruce, but...is there any possible way this new guy can be worse?

I say just put Rothgar in charge. He might not have the experience, but he sure as hell is competant to get the job done, and get it done right.

[Landiin]

ROFL, Don't hold back Drago, tells how you really feel:P

[dragowulf]

Sorry, but it's the truth. I mean we've had like what, three producers since launch? Scott, who was awesome in my opinion. Bruce who was /afk. And then we had Alan who somehow managed to make EQ2's developement slow down to almost a halt; releasing what was it, one decent/mediocre expansion and an adventure pack sized expansion (that came late in February, not November like the previous four expansions) as well as significantly reduced the frequency of update cycles that has ultimately resulted in epic failure? Remember when huge exploits were fixed on the dot?

Wasn't Shader 3.0, Halas, and a whole lot of goodies suppose to come with the expansion? What the hecks???

Georgeson though. He's been with SoE for a few months as a developer. I believe I read somewhere saying he was a producer for games like Gaia and Tribes 2, right? Chances are SoE hired him as EQ2 producer just temporarily because he's the only one qualified with all that past experience and they need someone right now.

We'll definitely see how this turns out, hopefully Smed has fixed the problem with this last yes-man Producer and we might see some positive progress to EQ2 as a game.

[lordebon]

I liked Alan Crosby as a CM -- I think that was the job he was best at. I was kind of surprised when he was tapped to take the senior producer role (it didn't seem the right kind of job for him).

With that said, I do have to defend the quarterly update cycle somewhat -- the amount of 'free' content released in each is far more than you'd get in one of the old monthly GUs. The main issue I have with them is that any art-asset fix has to wait for the GU to be pushed (which means 3 months instead of ~1 month), but from what I've heard that is something they are looking to change. Yeah some of what we got with it so far wasn't that great (one was just a two-month "bug fixer" that didn't fix many bugs) but that doesn't mean the 3 month cycle as a whole is bad. This next GU promises to be pretty huge, although some of it (Halas) will be stuff that should have came last GU.

I do agree on exploit fixes. It really bugs me when things do not get fixed and people just continue to willfully exploit. But don't get me started on my opinion of battlegrounds...

[thisisnotneeded]

Good f'ing riddance, Alan. You screwed up EQ1 by doing jack and something that whymes with "sit", and you screwed up EQ2 by doing the same thing. You'd be perfect to take over Silirrion's old position as lead dev of Anarchy Online.