Part of what keeps the community engaged with progression servers like the most recent EverQuest pairing of Ragefire and Lockjaw is the idea that the community determines the pace of updates. If the players don’t want the game’s next expansion available on the server, it’s not there. Unless, of course, a community vote says that it wants another six months before the expansion is added and the developers just decide that another vote won instead.
The justification is that while the six-month option won the vote, the three-month and ASAP options for the next expansion had a majority, meaning that most players wanted things to change sooner rather than later. The compromise is to keep Lockjaw on the six month progression and Ragefire on three months for this expansion. Check out the full justification in the official posting discussing the polls.
Speaking to Massively OP’s own MJ Guthrie at E3 for an article we published yesterday, Daybreak’s Holly Longdale addressed progression server choices, suggesting that the studio hoped to curb multiboxing and avoid instancing bosses because “casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen” as “that diminishes the achievement of others.”
