And yes, if MQ goes down EQ won't last 12 months, but there's too much money our there for MQ to go down. Someone or someone's will pick up the Mantle, we might just have a couple rocky weeks ahead.
1.
MQ devs received no financial compensation outside of donations. Not even the companies profiting off their pro bono project (RedGuides and MMOBugs) were paying them for the code. There's not much incentive for anybody resurrecting MQ to release it to the public for free again. Those guys were some old school hackers. They did it on principle! They did it for the lulz!
2.
MQ devs have outright stated it wasn't worth the time anymore. MQ and EQ have always represented a coding war. One side is salaried and has a job, the other side has a hobby and passion project. Darkpaw has recently been ramping up their coding war against the MQ devs. By making the project take up too much of their free time, Darkpaw effectively "won". This pyrrhic victory will be ironic if it causes Darkpaw to start to fail fiscally. But it really was a war. And I think the current Darkpaw team would rather shut down the studio and sell the IP than admit they were wrong on this one. Perhaps it's the hill they are willing to die on. But the idea the game is "cleaned up" now is absurd. Any caveman with Google can type Everquest hacks into the search and the first thing that pops up is...another hacking program. And the clueless fools at Darkpaw still don't even recognize the use of third-party like ISBoxer as legitimate because they are tits deep in their own warfare mentality.
3.
MQ devs have stated they are not going to work with any transition teams. Meaning all that know-how and expertise is effectively lost. And that our mysterious "someone" will have to reverse engineer it from scrap. And there's no reason why such a person should/would release their version into the public domain for free next time for RedGuides and MMOBugs to continue to profit off of. RedGuides has already seen the writing on the wall. They are trying (and failing) to hype their sub-base into transitioning into EQEmu or some such garbage. In fact, now that the MQ devs are no longer releasing it for free, the most likely outcome is the next person or team to crack the code will start their own site/company and paywall it. Now that there's no open source for it, there's a greater financial incentive to monopolize the MQ market at this time. But a couple weeks? Or even this year?
This is so much bigger than the THJ fiasco. People just don't realize it yet. Most those THJ players had already quit EQ Live and weren't coming back anyway. The true amount of MQ users was far larger than the playerbase commonly understood it to be. Most raiding guilds were using it. Most boxers were using it. Most farmers. Most power levelers. Even a lot of filthy casuals were using it simply because the increased functionality and power it gave the user turned the game into a new metagame.
This is the end of an age, but like the war between good and evil in the Silmarillion, the war between MQ and EQ will continue in the next age, and for as long as there is an internet connection!
