Couple problems with your estimate:
1) Verant has already stated that they are hiring new GMs for this server specifically so the GM staff for the regular servers shouldn't change at least in number.
2) $300,000 a year on employees sounds way too low. $300,000 a month sounds closer.

I am also curious as to how you came to $50,000 for the servers. I hope they using something better that a $2,000 server.

Well thats partially correct. Not everything is done to **** you off, but most of the anger is a result of what isn't done. As in fixin broken quests, ie Wakizashi of The Fozen Skies quest in sbm. Verant "fixed" the foragin tables so the quest items would be a rarer forage. Sorry to say but no one has been able to forage any of the quest items since then. I personally have been foragin my epic quest items more then food in the zones that they are in. Customer service was supposed to be upgraded and improved with the Luclin Expansion. It wasnt, still the same rude individuals up there. Hell there are some damn rude GM's on xegony too. One of my friends got married almost 2 and a half weeks goin on three now and still hasn't had her name changed. They send petitions everytime they log on, gm's answer,but none will take the few seconds to changer her name. Its not the big things that verant has a problem doin, its the little things that get under the skin and burrow to become festering, and still get ingored. And now they are gonna sqash the peons and focus on the high end customer base?! Yes the consumer controlls which is "in" and which is "out" but its the high end customers that make the dicisions. not the peons like us with 2 mabey 3 accounts. Trust me i love playin EQ as much as the next addict seekin a fix. ( I wont deny its a big addiction :o)..... as far as some of the gm events... well lets say they leave something to be disired after some of the player quests i have been in or ran myself.

Here I will quote.

"..between VI and the gaming public while intensifying the hate that is so apperent in many posts for VI that most players have"

If you hate the company, why are you playing their game? Why are you posting on a website dedicated to that game? If most players hated the game as you say, then how come there are so many people on the servers?
Now, I must say, I remember the days when quests happened once a week, and people got together for birthday parties and weddings. When was the last time a wedding was announced on a server? When was the last time there was a party?

I agree with you in the words "we are customers". First and foremost that is exactly what we are. Customers who are willing to trade a certain amount of money for an object or service we feel are of equal value. We, the customer, have already purchased the object, which is the physical material and electro magnetic information to be able to play the game in the first place. Most of us have chosen to not only purchase the game, but by the very nature and premise of the game, become, in fact, citizens of Norrath. However the point of whether we would be citizens or not is purely acedemic, because we ARE the customers, thus the very base of Everquest's foundation.

As a customer, I expect a service. One of the services I was promised was customer service and quests. As a cleric, I have had to ask for GM support, petition, for a variety of bugs that deal with corpse rezzing. Some of the problems I have come to recognize early and can suggest a few things the person needing to be rezzed can do for me to actually rez him. As for GM support, seldom do I get a response in a reasonalble time frame. Sometimes I never even get an acknowlegement that anyone even knows I petitioned. As you may know, even trying to find out if anyone is even online to asist, yields only 'you may have only one petition in the que at a time'.

Personally I have been stuck in the smokestack of the Icebreaker in Iceclad Ocean and in the rocks in the Infected Splitpaw Lair. I took me over an hour to get out of the stack and had to camp to get out of the rocks. Both times I never got a single response from a GM.

How to get into smoke stack. Sit near the stack and leave the computer for the 15 minute ride and you may soon return to see nothing but the inside of the stack. Otherwise I imagine it would be very difficult or impossible for a player to enter the stack of his own free will.

I have come to the realization that Verant does not intend to fullfill their stated promise of in game support. Or if they do it is after a sufficient period of time when their service is no longer required. Whether this is caused by a large quantity of programming errors and too few GMs or whether it is caused by too many players petitioning about in game situations like KSing and inter-player aspects and too few GMs to handle the case loads, the result is the same. For the majority of the players, no response in a timely manner is the normal. And the responses that do come seldom resolve the being issues involved.

One quest that I have been working on, I have been completely stopped in its conclusion. After many hours of killing untold number of the wolves to get a blood wolf in sight, the Broodmother is now !Broodmother. Simply saying now that Verant knows the quest is broken and have changed her name to let it be known that they do in fact know the quest is not working properly. I have now waited over four weeks and the Broodmother has not been fixed. Were I as good a player as most people, I would have already pasted the point of needing to do the quest, I would have already gotten something much better from a different location and mob. The Broodmother is just one example of many that exist in the game. Verant's has apparently decided not to address the issue promptly.

For others there is the idea of doing quests. The notion of going someplace and killing some mob and looting some object. Verant's apparent response to the customer's desire for enjoyment is to have the game such that you go to the area, and if you survive that, you have to kill something over and over and over until you are sick of the location, to get the mob and then it might, might mind you, have the desired object.

An example of this was our guild trying to assist a Ranger in getting something from a blond mermaid (?). We were in purportedly the correct location and killing many cycles of spawns. After hours of playing, having to have to have other members of the guild come to relieve the ones assisting the ranger, we never saw a mermaid spawn. Nada, not a single solitary one. Were it not for the social 'citizenship' aspect of Everquest, the evening would have been considered a complete waste of time. I am sure, since I have myself spent days on end camping something I desired, Aegis of Life, Fishbone earing, etc, there are many other citizens of Norrath that are getting very fustrated at Verants solution to problems in the game.

To be honest, perhaps some of the fault comes because of the citizens of Norrath and their willingness to pass down items to their children, often times called twinking, thus causing a power inbalance in the game. Instead of making the items nodrop, thus actually forcing players to quest and play the game, rather than finding their niche and farm objects to sell and be able to purchase their desired character upgrades, Verant decided to severely restrict the influx of items by decreasing the rates of the desired spawns or making the spawn less likely to have the object when it does finally show up.

Then you have on top of tedium camps, the quest bottlenecks and the complex interactions on a server. In my case primarily it is the Dragon, I presume, Ragfire. Not only do you have to quest and tediously camp for parts of the quest. You have to establish a commadrie or relationships with others on the service to form a force of sufficient size to over power the mob. Thus you, should you desire to complete your character, need to become a citizen of Norrath. You simply will not get your epic without forming relationships between yourself and other people. I expect that and desire that.

The problem comes when Verant method of providing the mob in a manner that people, as customers, can play as citizens, to gather together and overcome the mob. Reading the boards concerning Ragefire, it is a camp very nearly requiring you to take a vacation from real life for up to 96 hours assuming to patches and zone resets. We are not only talking about needing to find a way not to go to work in real life to earn the money to pay to play the gane, we are expected to deny ourselves even the needed physical functions of sleeping. Or find someway to cover the camp 24 hours a day with up to 30 custermers willing to instantly communicate between themselves and log in to finally be able to attack the dragon.

Granted Verant has finally done something about the Ragefire issue, but they might have seriously jeopardized what little server wide citizenship that has been established on most servers to accomodate the aspects of the game where Ragefire, in this instance, is wanted by a significant number of customer citiizens.

With the complexity of Epics, comes the obvious inter-customer complaints. Complaints, perhaps not anticipated at the creating of the game, that Verant has decided to deal with or not at their leisure.

I believe Verant has tried in some ways to appease players desires for new adventures. I find it impressive that I have played seven characters and still my cleric queries a voice desiring assistance, 'where the heck is that?!'. And now there are even more locations that will mystify and impress me in SoL. So they have managed to keep me as a customer for that reason. Despite its many faults, I enjoy the game and the citizenship.

However, Verant has decided to become a shady dealer. You know the kind. Like a car mechanic that promises to make your car work like new, only to leave their establishment and have the car break down, thus needing to get it back to the mechanic for him to fix it and charge you another time. Verant has put a nice little twist to the game here. If you pay more, every month, they will gladly fix the game. Their response is that they simply can not afford to fix the game for the ten dollars a month, but they can afford to fix a server size game for forty dollars a month. And maybe, if they so chose, a discovered fix might be used on all the servers.

I find this practice highly questionable. Verant created the game. They have thousands of customers that are constantly testing the limits of their programming. Yet, the car mechanic, is now saying 'Hey bud, pay me some extra money and I WILL fix your car.'.

I would have understood it more if they had come to the customers and admitted they have simply gotten over their heads in the complexities of Everquest and desperately need to increase the playing fees for all customers to fifteen dollars a month. Thus being able to hire more GMs and developers to get the game back in shape. Instead they have opted to fix one server, advertizing services that are not needed, and hinting that problems may be fixed in other services.

Verant, as they have frequently done in the past, has elected to 'fix' a problem by making the game Everquest more complex. Perhaps to the point where customers will leave the game. And for you citizens of Norrath, 'customers' ARE the groundwork of Everquest.