Garth_of_Sarlona
07-23-2009, 01:15 PM
Ask The Devs #9 Transcript
As heard on DDOcast Episode 126, July 18th, 2009
www.ddocast.com (http://www.ddocast.com/)
Note: If you have a question you would like asked on “Ask the Devs”, please send Jerry Snook an email at ddocast@gmail.com. Please include a name (character name or real name, whatever) in your email.
Jerry: Welcome to the ninth edition, yeah, can you believe it - it’s been nine times we’ve done this - of ‘Ask the Devs’. A chance for you to ask some questions and get some answers from the Turbine community team and dev team and production team. You know, I just thought about that recently, that we call it ‘Ask the Devs’ but it really encompasses more than just the DDO developers so maybe I guess you’ll have to take the name with a little bit of a grain of salt.
Jerry: Alright who‘s with me this week? Well first off, I really want to welcome to DDOcast for the first time Fernando Paiz, co-executive producer for DDO. How you doing Fernando?
Fernando: Hi Jerry how’s it going? Doing alright!
Jerry: I’ve been reading a lot of articles - you’ve been busy in the press doing tons of tons of interviews and it’s my first chance I think to really sit down and talk to you here, so it’s really good.
Fernando: Yeah that’s right we’ve been having fun talking up Dungeons and Dragons Eberron Unlimited with all kinds of people and I think it bodes well for our launch. So we’re very excited thought - it has been a bit of a marathon launch so far.
Jerry: Not to get too distracted here but I know that for some of us veterans here you’re a relatively new name although I guess you’ve been with Turbine for a little while, can I ask how long you’ve been on the DDO production team here?
Fernando: Yeah no problem, I’ve been with the DDO production team since the end of last year. So, a pretty good long while now and, you know, I guess I joined sometime in the last quarter of last year. I’ve actually been with Turbine for quite a long time. Sometime in September it’ll be my five year anniversary in Turbine, and DDO was actually the first game I worked on when I joined Turbine as director of game technology so I feel like I’ve been on the DDO team for almost five years.
Jerry: Well that’s cool, and, well thanks – and of course you’re married as well to Kate Paiz, the other co-executive producer at DDO, we’ve got a husband and wife team. It’s a classic in fantasy, we’ve got a lot of husband and wife teams writing books and making movies and now producing MMO video games based on D&D. So congratulations and thanks for being on the show. Also with us is producer Glin. How you doing Glin?
Glin: Doing good Jerry, I’m glad to be back on the show, it’s been several months since I’ve had a chat with you at all.
Jerry: Yeah I know! I was actually looking at the archives it looks like March was the last time we had an Ask the Devs. Now obviously you guys have been really quite busy and so the scheduling hasn’t worked out for either of us but I’m really glad we’re able to do it.
Glin: Yeah I think that was the time we really started to hunker down and get ready to release all the news about what our next release was going to be, so we didn’t necessarily go radio silent we were just preparing to do all the media blasts and all those things that we’re seeing now in Beta.
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. Also with us is MadFloyd – how you doing?
MadFloyd: I’m doing well, nice to be here.
Jerry: For those who may be not as familiar with you, what in particular would you say your focus is on DDO?
MadFloyd: I’m a design director, so basically I’m working here behind the scenes to make the game as good as possible. I’ve been here for about a year and a half now.
Jerry: Finally with us here is Tolero. How you doing Tolero?
Tolero: Oh not bad how about you?
Jerry: Doing great! Thanks for helping me get this ninth edition of ‘Ask the Devs’ under way, and let’s get underway - we’ve got a long list of questions and we want to get as many answered as we can this week. Just a quick note at the start, if you want to ask a question to ‘Ask the Devs’ send it to me in an email, I pass it along to Tolero and we work to put together these questions for the show, and the email is ddocast@gmail.com.
Jerry: Alright first question comes from Zadkiel: Previous modules were less about revenue generation and more about customer retention. Now that DDO Unlimited is being released and modules will generate revenue via the free to play player having to buy them, will that mean more new content being released faster? I guess maybe we should kind of turn this into a two-parter a little bit? Well we had, kind of in the early days of the game, three to four month-ish sorta release date schedule. Do you guys see that being sort what we might see with Eberron Unlimited?
Fernando: Well first of all Jerry, I’d be very hesitant to commit to a particular sort of timing cycle because we’re always trying to do the right thing for the service, and for the given update that we’re working on and some things take longer than others and that’s just a reality of development.
Jerry: Sure, Sure
Fernando: But that said, yeah absolutely we’re looking to get back into a rhythm of much more regular updates, the time between module eight and Eberron Unlimited going live is absolutely an anomaly, believe us, we hate is as much as you guys do, we would have like to have been releasing new stuff to you all the time and since we’re mostly all DDO players on the team as well, we’ve all been itching to get our hands on the new stuff to play on live, so that continues right now: we’re eager to do it.
One thing I would like to share with you is some details on our first update, so we’re going to start numbering again and call it ‘Update One’, and you may have seen in some of the other press articles, we’re working on a new set of adventure packs right now tentatively titled ‘Dreaming Dark’, and so the ‘Dreaming Dark’ is this really cool story line that we have worked out for high level players, wherein there’s these creatures coming into Stormreach and essentially trying to take over the minds of some of the citizens of Stormreach and find their way to brainwash people almost into this cult sort of thing. And the players get to go in and investigate these guys and even wander into some of the nightmares that they’re trapping some of these other characters in, and it’s really fun, we’re having a great time providing, you know, different kinds of gameplay and enemies than what the players will be used to with all the demon and devils and stuff like that, that they’ve been playing at high levels.
Jerry: That’s cool…
Glin: And if that doesn’t give it away Jerry, Fernando mentioned that we’re already in there playing it, so it’s not like we’re coming up with the ideas; we know what it’s going to be like – it’s something we’re going to be having ready for the next release and we’re going to be working on this next release as soon as we’re out the door with this current one which we’ve put the release date out of early August.
Jerry: That’s excellent. You know, I think a lot of us probably assume that, I mean, development cycles work in phases so while you’re polishing up mod9 you’re probably already working on mod10 at least probably in the planning stages, I think that’s what most people would probably assume here. In the past, I can’t remember where it was said, but is mod... well I guess mod 0 – the adventure cycle previously known as mod9 - is that going to end the Shavarath story line? I seem to recall that the answer is ‘no’ on that one – do you know if that’s the case? Do you know? I think I read it in a past interview that someone had said that it was not – and we would be continuing it after this, but do you know, if that’s…?
MadFloyd: Yeah it’s not the end of it. When we first created the Shavarath storyline we envisioned it as a multipart – well at least more than one part and so far we’ve done part one so we’re not exactly sure when we’ll return to it, but we will at some point.
Jerry: Yeah it’s probably something like your other releases, I suppose in general asking this question here, it’s not like you didn’t have a financial incentive to get new content out the door for the past three-some years, but I imagine there probably is some fundamental truth to this especially as you want to encourage free to play players to explore the game and you know pick up these new adventure packs that is a bit of a financial incentive for you guys to basically, you know, get them out polished, but get them out probably as quickly as you can, you know?
Fernando: Absolutely, and that’s one of the neat things about the new business model, we’ve always had our subscribers out there and different subscribers come and tell us what they want and for some players it’s new races and for some players it’s new content at level cap and for some players it’s actually new content in the middle of the game and it’s always been all over the map and a little bit hard to quantify. With this new model we’ll simply be able to see what are players are buying and you’re essentially voting with your wallet, now that’s not to say we won’t always have our subscribers and we will have to keep paying attention to what the subscribers want and feed that into the mix, but a big part our decisions going forward will be about seeing what works in the current store and what people are buying up.
Jerry: Sure. Alright let’s move onto the second question here.
I don’t have a name unfortunately on this one but this person writes in regards to Eberron Unlimited,
“Let’s say I’m playing DDO as a free player and I buy whatever I need to, to unlock some content I can’t get to otherwise.” He’s probably talking about say, you know, adventure packs,”How long does that content stay unlocked for me? If the answer is: once you unlock content then it stays unlocked forever, then doesn’t that mean I should just get a free account, and buy everything in the game and turn my free account into kind of a lifetime membership account?”
That’s sort of a fundamental question I know a lot of players are asking, you know, you guys have talked to quite a few in your interviews about incentives for VIP players – is there an intention potentially that, especially maybe us hardcore folks that will be playing until you guys shut down the servers in 2050 or whatever, that maybe we would just go for kind of a lifetime membership option here?
Fernando: Well, I don’t know about intention. We certainly built the model with an eye towards letting more casual players be able to come in and play at their pace. So that was our intent. But like so many things we start something with one intent and it ends up having more than one use so yeah the answer is absolutely: If you buy the Sharn Syndicate, you can play the Sharn Syndicate on every game world with every character that you create from then on, and you essentially have a subscription, if you want to think of it that way, to that piece of content for the life of the service. So that is like the lifetime subscription option that was offered in Lord of the Rings at launch, for example.
Jerry: yeah
Fernando: Now, again, there’s an interesting dynamic here where those purchasers will be either the very casual players, or the very hardcore players who say ‘I know that I love this game and I’m going to play it for two years – so I’m going to go ahead and buy everything with a onetime fee’ – but that’s the trade off – you’re either committed for a couple of years or you’re just sampling early on and sort of everything in-between… if you’re playing very hard core but not committing for two years, the subscription is still a pretty good deal to pay one fee as you go per month.
Jerry: And you guys have worked to build in some nice VIP incentives it seems as well, with essentially free turbine points, potential a little bit of early access to some new content – at least we get, you know, Eberron Unlimited a few days early here.
Fernando: Yeah that’s right and we’ll keep working on what those VIP incentives are, there’s things like the shared account tab which are given for free to the VIPs and you have to purchase if not – some of these you can buy into, but some of them, like getting the content a few days early will always remain VIP exclusives, and it is important for us that our VIP players feel valued and important because they absolutely will be the backbone that we’re gonna expand this community with.
Jerry: I don’t want to sound too much like a PR person here, but it seems pretty obvious that what you guys are trying to do with Eberron Unlimited here is basically give people flexibility and options, you know, whatever, however, you want to play the game, we’ve got a system and an easy way to do it.
Fernando: That’s pretty much our mantra. Play and pay however fits your lifestyle and your playstyle.
Jerry: Sure. Alright let’s move onto question number three. This one comes from Kistilan:
Says: “Is the DDO dev team considering the option to offer a full character respec service? If yes, do they think it would be a premium service or a free in game service utilizing questing, items and in game currency?”
We’re heard a little bit about character respecing in the past, but with Eberron Unlimited coming here, could we maybe see it in the store, someday, down the road?
Glin: That’s actually one of the things that we’re targeting for release – it’s really going to be something that our VIPs are looking for – I’m sorry our current subscribers – but it’s actually going to be something we have as a store option. Those players who, at various levels, feel like they want a ‘respec’ as we’ll call it until we release all the features, will be able to either early in the game or late in the game take advantage of our new concept for respeccing their character.
Jerry: Do we have any, sort of, general thought on the timeline here? Is it kind of far off or maybe a little bit sooner would you describe it?
Fernando: It’s going to be on the sooner side but we can’t necessarily commit to whether it’s going to make Update 1 or Update 2 at this point. (Jerry adds in transcript: you can actually hear my gasp here…)
Some of these things are still in the middle of development and we’re trying to figure out when they’re going to get out of QA. But, needless to say, we heard the cries of the community that they want respec – it’s something they’ve been clamoring for, we’d like to give it to them. It’s a perfect type of feature to offer in the store and we’re going to find a way to do that, sooner rather than later, but don’t hold me to a specific timeline.
Jerry: Now obviously you guys probably aren’t ready to get into too many details but we’re talking a full character respec are we talking about things including, like, levels and skills which you currently can’t respec in DDO?
Glin: We’re talking about taking your experience and rebuilding your character is kind of the quick summary of it. We have several systems in play here but I think that’s probably the elevator pitch.
Jerry: Well that sounds great – and I won’t press you for too many more details but thanks for actually talking about that on DDOcast, I think you’ve made a little bit of news here and probably a lot of players pretty happy.
Glin: yeah, vague but exclusive!
Jerry: Yes, exactly! Ok next question comes from Corsec who writes: is there any possibility that items could be locked in the inventory itself? He comes up with an explanation but I sort of thought I’d try to summarize it more succinctly. Right now, when you equip something and then equip something else it sort of moves somewhere else in your backpack. Is there any thought about having a permanent location so it would go back to where it was, things like that?
MadFloyd: I love this question – I think about this every day, because it’s one of my pet peeves. Yeah, we’re actually looking at various ways we can potentially address this issue. I can’t say when it will come because, like anything else we have so much on the burner here and everything sort of gets prioritized and some things are more complex than others, but inventory management and sort of improving the player experience with regard to that is definitely a hot issue here.
Jerry: Sure. Part two of his question: Has it ever been asked or planned to get the damage output of summoned creatures into your combat log?
MadFloyd: Yes it has. It’s another thing that we’re definitely considering doing. The question is – when?
Jerry: Sure. Sure. Alright let’s move onto the next question here. This one I also didn’t have a name for - actually I think I did have a name at some point but I lost it in my notes. So sorry that I’m not naming you by name, but short and quick – the next question is: ‘Please repeat the half-orc question!’
So, what about half-orcs – do we have any kind of status update on them?
Fernando: Yeah, half-orcs have been a long time coming, and we know that.
The truth of the matter is, we went down an implementation path with half-orcs that we couldn’t get all the way to fruition and other things ended up taking priority and were bumped ahead of it so, don’t want to lie to our listeners here, half-orc is not coming in the very near future, we do have design documents and prototypes floating around the team, and, you know, it’ll sort of depend on what gets agreed on between the development team and marketing as what our next priorities end up being for the next several months.
I guess the best thing I say is, if the warforged and the drow and the like sell well in the store, you’ll see a better chance of us kicking up the half-orc pretty soon because it is the next one queued up.
Jerry: Yeah bet so, bet so. I imagine that’s fairly common in video game development too where, you know, things get shuffled around like that where, ‘ok, well, we’re working on the favored soul, we’re working on the half-orc maybe we have some technical issues with half-orc, favored soul is coming along great so let’s, say, push that sort of thing forward.’
Fernando: Exactly right, and we’re making those tradeoffs all the time – for every feature that you guys see go live there’s probably another one or two that were left at some stage of development further back.
Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Gaulston from the Thelanis server. He writes: Are there any plans to introduce two handed puncturing weapons, in particular, he writes, spears?
MadFloyd: well we probably don’t have plans to introduce entirely new weapon types, but we do have a two handed weapon that deals puncturing damage that will come as a reward in update 1 actually
Jerry: Really?
MadFloyd: We do. I believe it’s a ‘bladed staff’.
Tolero: All I know, the first time I saw it I ran in and said ‘SPEAR!’
Jerry: I know, I think you’ve just floored me here – my jaw’s on the floor.
People have been asking for that one for, a certain segment of people have been asking for that one for, quite a while. That’s pretty exciting news there actually… so.
Alright, next part of Gaulston’s question is: In regards to the Shroud raid, are there any plans to increase the drop rate of large devil scales? He goes onto explain a little bit about basically how difficult they can sometimes be to get in the Shroud raid so do we have kind of a thought on large devil scales?
MadFloyd: Well, they pretty much drop at the same rate as other, non horn, large ingredients, so we don’t really have any plans to change the drop rate at this time.
Jerry: kind of in regards to the Shroud raid question, Xiloscient from DDOcast noticed on Lamannia while running one of the new Shavarath quests – and I can’t remember if he saw it in the outdoor area or not – that a large devil scale dropped. So can we assume that this wasn’t a bug and maybe these large scales are going to be moving into the Shavarath plane as well?
MadFloyd: That’s correct. That’s not a bug – that’s intentional!
Jerry: That’s er, I guess that makes sense, because if they’re hoarding them in the Shroud they’ll probably be hoarding them in their home plane as well?
Tolero: You would have to imagine that where devils live they shed some scales.
Jerry: yeah.
Fernando(?): or for that matter where they’re beat up on the battlefield. It’s the devils’ battlefield!
Jerry: yeah that’s right, that’s right. Alright, next question here comes from Devastation 2 from Khyber.
This is a particularly crunchy question, I hope you guys can answer it, I’m just going to read it straight:
“Rogues get their subtle backstabbing enhancement, where level one gives you 10% hate reduction, level two is 20% and level three is 30% hate reduction. Treason, the named short sword form the Stormreaver has an ability which is 20% hate reduction. My question is a two-parter: 1. Does Treason stack with subtle backstabbing, so if I have two levels of subtle backstabbing and wielding Treason will I have a 40% hate reduction?”
MadFloyd: Actually it does stack but you have something like a 36% hate reduction, so you would have 20% for the subtle backstabbing and you’d get 20% for treason, but they’re not purely additive so basically it’s sort of like 80% times 80% so you sort of get like 64% as a result.
Jerry: Oh ok, so it would essentially stack on top of that other 20%
MadFloyd: that’s correct.
Jerry: Question 2 here: Does the treason effect affect weapons in your offhand – so wielding treason in my main hand and welding a +2 dagger in my offhand would my offhand gain the benefit of the treason’s 20% hate reduction?
MadFloyd: Yes, it would because basically what that does is reduce thread generated by any melee damage, and that would include whatever your offhand is doing as well.
Jerry: Alright. Nice.
Glin: I gotta tell you MadFloyd I’m impressed with that - that was so crunchy my teeth are just hearing it, so, you fielded that really well.
Jerry: Yeah I agree that was very well done, thank you.
Jerry: Next one comes from Errick, from the guild I happen to be on Sarlona, Sacred Flame Guardians – he sent in a question, he wanted to see about offline guild chat, outside of the game. He writes: Say I’m at work and don’t have the ability to login and play, or maybe I want to hit the chat and talk with his fellow guildies. He says: I know this would be extra and some would argue probably not worth it, but still a bit of fun. So what do you think? Any possibility of offline guild chat?
Tolero: Um, one of the things you’re going to see once we bring DDO Unlimited is we’re going to be introducing a lot more activity that you can still feel connected with the community and connected with the game even when you aren’t able to play, besides just forum interaction and compendium interaction, one of the new things we’ll be bringing to DDO is my.ddo.com – and what that’s going to allow you to do is in addition to be able to make player blogs and have a record of your character offline, you’ll also be able to have guild blogs where you can get all of your guild members together to hang out on the my.ddo page – a lot of this web tech is going to be the groundwork for more and more features that we can bring to help you feel like you’re part of the community even when you can’t be there.
Jerry: Wow you weren’t kidding Fernando! I guess I read in an interview a couple of months ago that you were hoping to bring more social networking to DDO and it looks like that’s what we’re seeing here.
Tolero: Yeah exactly, you know, for a lot of players it’s really important for them to be able to stay connected with their friends and with their guildmates, you know, a lot of people like, you know, you want to plan that raid ahead of time, you know, you want to find our ‘Oh I was on vacation for two weeks, what am I missing out on?’ things like that.
Jerry: yeah, Yeah
Fernando: Yeah this is actually something that we haven’t spent a lot of time talking with the press of the community but I think really our players are going to be blown away by the level of features that we’re going to be bringing to the websites in support of DDO.
If you’ve ever looked at my.lotro.com – you’ll get an ideal of the feature set that they have there with the player blogs and pages and tracking your achievements and viewing your character and equipment while you’re offline, and that’s just the beginning: We’re going to launch with a similar offering of feature set but you can expect that to get better and better over time and it’s going to get really cool, really fast.
Jerry: Just the idea of being able to look at your character sheet offline is going to just absolutely… probably thousands of people are cheering right now as they’re listening to this!
Tolero: It even gets detailed – I’ve seen some of the prototypes work from a lot of the web devs, you can see things like your inventory offline, you can mouse over and say ‘Oh,they’re wearing the such-and-such item on, you know, their eye slot’ or ‘Oh, they’re wearing such-and-such boots’ – you know, they’re still refining a lot of what you’ll be able to see but, you know, the aim is to be very detailed.
Jerry: Well I think that’s good for helping to put together DDOcast shownotes! I don’t know how many times I’ve thought ‘Oh, I was going to write this down, and now I have to log back into the game, you know, get the thing, log back out’ – so fantastic news there.
Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Jeremy, saying: Can we can get an update on the forums with our signatures? For the DDO.com forums apparently so maybe there’s a few signature issues?
Tolero: Yeah, so that’s another area where a lot of the tech that we’re going to be using for the my.ddo is going to help us with the signatures. There were some issues with the way that the game was trying to talk to the website, so you would see some kind of, you know, anomalies in your signature such as characters who weren’t there or characters that should be there, showing up in strange states, and a lot of the tech that we’re using with my.ddo is going to help us resolve a lot of those so you’ll see more of those character signatures as a result.
Jerry: Fantastic! Alright next question comes all the way over from Sweden. This is Stefan Blomberg, who writes:
“I wonder, are there any plans to make returning characters more attractive to play? And by returning, he means, say, returning throwing weapons.” Any thoughts on that?
Tolero; You mean like returning shuriken, returning arrow, things like that?
Jerry: Yeah exactly, things like that.
MadFloyd: Well throwing weapons are generally intended to support a character by giving them some ranged options rather than being their primary focus, but we’ve been experimenting with a few grenade like weapons that rogues may be able to make from scavenged trap parts in a future update sometime down the line, but we’re hoping that the thrown weapon focus characters may enjoy those, but typically with the shuriken and stuff like that, it’s never intended to be a primary role, per say.
Jerry: I keep a returning shuriken on my cleric, so that when I run out of ammo I still have something to throw.
Tolero: Yup, I do the same thing.
Glin: Yeah I kept a returning axe on my fighter for like, level seven before it was finally just so useless in damage, but I was really hooked on that thing.
Jerry: Yeah Stefan in particular, he writes in this email that he has a returning speced character on the European devourer server called ‘Pingy’ – a funny rogue that uses returning weapons, I thought we’d give a shout out to Pingy there for being unique, fighting the good fight for all of us.
Jerry: Ok next question I believe comes from Phlor, although I didn’t write that down in my notes unfortunately. A bit of a philosophical and also a bit of a crunchy question. He writes something that I bet many people have asked: “Why is it so difficult to pull a bloodstone?”
<laughs>
Jerry: Let me, I guess, ask philosophically first. Do you have an answer to the age old question of why it is that the things we most want to obtain are often the hardest to get?
MadFloyd: <Sighs> Because: ‘The chase is much more fun?’. I don’t know how to answer that, as a matter of fact It’s an interesting question. I sort of looked over to Eladrin and said ‘Can you help me with this one?’ so his response was ‘One: Because your luck is terrible!’ And I think also – ‘If Xilo pulls a muckdoom and nobody see does it really exist?’
Jerry: Exactly
Glin: Well if you have a screenshot!
MadFloyd: Well his answer to that ‘If I didn’t see it either, then it probably rotted in the chest, very sad!’
Jerry: Yery good point. I guess probably in terms of the sort of hard answer to this question, it’s one of the more powerful items in the game, so it’s probably on that, you know, you have to roll probably pretty high on the loot tables to get it. I’m assuming – I’m speaking for you but I assume that’s the case, right?
MadFloyd: Yeah, and I think the rare items exist throughout the game so, I guess, you get that moment of feeling special and you can have something to chase after if you really want it, so, you know, you never [I]have to get it, you don’t need that bloodstone to succeed in the game necessarily, but if it’s important to you then you’ll find it sooner or later or you’ll buy it off some friend off the auction house or something.
Jerry: Yeah, you know, there was actually one other aspect of this whole bloodstone question I wanted to bring up. I assume you guys are familiar with the iPhone and the concept of the app store? There was a while back, there was this “I’m rich” app – it was like $5000 just someone put out there and all it did was, you hit a button and it, I don’t know, gave you a little dollar sign or something. And the guy sold like five of them, so literally a nothing app that just says ‘Give me $5000 and get nothing in return essentially’ the guy made like $25,000.
Tolero: Hmm
Jerry: Now I know that you guys have done a very nice job on the DDO Store balancing, but it occurred to me last night as I was brushing my teeth, just theoretically, if you guys put that on the DDO Store (the Bloodstone) and let’s just not be realistic here: let’s say charge $200 for it, I bet you’d have some people who would plop down that money.
Tolero: I’m sure there’s a lot of things, you know, in theory you could put something in the store that you’d be like ‘No one would ever ever buy that’ and somebody would do it inevitably that’s just Murphy’s Law.
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. Alright, next question here. Tim asks:
“Can we fix quivers so they can be hot-swapped via hot-keys and not opened so that we can quickly swap different types of arrows in our quivers out to be reloaded.”
MadFloyd: Well I think that’s a good suggestion actually, you know, I would appreciate that myself, I think that’s… honestly I don’t think we have that on our list of to-dos but we can put that on the list because I think that’s a great idea.
Jerry: Sure. Alright, last question – well one of the last questions I guess I have on my list here, and again I don’t have the name, see it’s been since March since we recorded this and I’ve been getting emails and questions and copying and pasting them into new documents, and unfortunately somewhere between March and July here I lost a whole bunch of names so I don’t know who asked this question either I’m sorry. It says:
“Playing in Linux with DDO as it stands right now, runs fine. Thanks to LOTROlinux.com since the DDO launcher doesn’t work in WINE.? But, “he says he tried to install the mod9 unlimited beta, with no luck. ‘If they’re going to break my ability to play my favorite game, I will be not very happy about it – not sure what I’ll do then’. So, have you guys given any consideration as to whether it works in Linux or whether it may be something you deal with in the future here?
MadFloyd(?): Yeah, I guess I’ll address that briefly. The first quick thing to say is, you know, Linux is only half supported as the guys over in LOTROLinux know – they found a way to basically get the patching to work and get in game, and our tech guys, some of which are pretty hardcore Linux guys themselves have taken it upon themselves to support that community and help keep people playing in Linux and so I guess the short answer is, if you have no trouble patching up mod8 there’s no reason that you should have any trouble patching up mod9 or Eberron Unlimited when we go live with that.
What is true is that you probably can’t use our background downloader application, which is the Turbine Download Manager, in Linux right now just the same way you can’t use the launcher really, and I don’t expect we’re going to put much effort into fixing that but at the same time I don’t think that community will be out of luck once we go live.
Jerry: Yeah I’m not really techie enough to give a really good answer but I seem to recall, I know in my own experience, there is a way you can just launch the game without going through the Turbine Download Manager if you really want to and I’m sure a quick check of the forum will help you out on that one.
MadFloyd: Well our current community doesn’t have the download manager, and there are no plans right now to make everybody get the download manager. It’ll be new players who will have the option to come in with the download manager.
Jerry: Oh is that right? I thought we had the download manager in beta on Lamannia here?
MadFloyd: And we were all new players on Lamannia!
Jerry: Ok I see what you’re saying.
Glin: That was the way we were distributing the build and it was also a good way for us to get a lot of hands on testing on the download manager so we’re comfortable putting the mass amounts of people that are going to come out and try the new DDO and game quickly.
Tolero: Yeah, and there might even still be players, maybe they played DDO back in, you know, 2006 and they hear about free to play and they’re like ‘Ooh – I want to check out DDO’ but you know maybe they uninstalled DDO and maybe they’re going to try and fire it back up again, so it was really good for us to see feedback not only from brand-brand new players but also somebody who’s going to download it from the sites you know, not knowing any better and try to go through that TDM experience with an existing account.
Jerry: You know, we’ve seen the TDM, as it’s being called in shorthand here, really improve dramatically, I think - because we saw it, was it earlier this year, briefly?
Tolero: Yeah, I think early in the spring we had it out a little bit.
Jerry: You can really see the changes and it’s a lot more stable and a lot more… well it works a lot better for a lot more people. So that’s a good thing.
Jerry: Ok let’s see here, I guess maybe I just want to ask you guys, since it’s been six months, is there anything else you might be able to reveal to us today here on DDOCast?
Fernando: Well Jerry, there is actually one thing that we’ve continued to keep super secret here and maybe not vast and mysterious but certainly been a little secret from our community and I do have some news to break exclusively with you today.
Jerry: ooh.
Fernando: So, the new that I want to share is that, Kate, my dear wife and your beloved producer on this game for the last three years is going to be leaving the project for a while and the reason for that is because we’re actually having our third child, a new daughter that we’re welcoming to the world and, in fact, our ‘launch day’ for that release turns out to be exactly the same day as the Eberron Unlimited launch date, wouldn’t you know!
Jerry: Oh, wow!
Glin: As fate would have it.
Jerry: Wow you’re going to be a busy busy person that day, although obviously the family comes first, so I imagine it’s going to be one of those things where ‘Don’t call me unless the servers are in flames or something like that’.
Fernando: Actually, Kate and the baby have been well notified that they have to deliver early, unlike the game which will not come before August 4th. The baby needs to show up about a week sooner than that.
Jerry: Well congratulations! That’s very exciting news I’m really pleased to hear that and I want to congratulate you on, I guess what, your new hireling?
Fernando: Yeah exactly, right, well level one human anyway!
Jerry: Yeah exactly. Well fantastic, ok and that’s going to wrap it up for ‘Ask the Devs’ this week. Thanks so much for being on this show. Just a quick reminder to the listeners here again that if you have a question that you want answered on Ask the Devs send it to ddocast@gmail.com, we’ll add it to our big old list – can’t promise we’ll get to every question but we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can on the show. So Fernando Paiz, Glin, MadFloyd and Tolero – thanks so much for being on DDOcast this week.
All: Great! Thanks for having us.
--
DDOcast is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license. Feel free to post any or all of this document on your web site, forums, etc, but please let people know that it came from DDOcast. In terms of the “non-commercial” license, if you aren’t trying to sell this stuff on CD or make an unethical buck off of it, don’t worry about it and distribute this transcript as much as you would like.
– Jerry Snook, host DDOcast
Transcript by Willphase (Garth on Sarlona).
Additional formatting and transcription title work by Jerry
July 23rd, 2009
As heard on DDOcast Episode 126, July 18th, 2009
www.ddocast.com (http://www.ddocast.com/)
Note: If you have a question you would like asked on “Ask the Devs”, please send Jerry Snook an email at ddocast@gmail.com. Please include a name (character name or real name, whatever) in your email.
Jerry: Welcome to the ninth edition, yeah, can you believe it - it’s been nine times we’ve done this - of ‘Ask the Devs’. A chance for you to ask some questions and get some answers from the Turbine community team and dev team and production team. You know, I just thought about that recently, that we call it ‘Ask the Devs’ but it really encompasses more than just the DDO developers so maybe I guess you’ll have to take the name with a little bit of a grain of salt.
Jerry: Alright who‘s with me this week? Well first off, I really want to welcome to DDOcast for the first time Fernando Paiz, co-executive producer for DDO. How you doing Fernando?
Fernando: Hi Jerry how’s it going? Doing alright!
Jerry: I’ve been reading a lot of articles - you’ve been busy in the press doing tons of tons of interviews and it’s my first chance I think to really sit down and talk to you here, so it’s really good.
Fernando: Yeah that’s right we’ve been having fun talking up Dungeons and Dragons Eberron Unlimited with all kinds of people and I think it bodes well for our launch. So we’re very excited thought - it has been a bit of a marathon launch so far.
Jerry: Not to get too distracted here but I know that for some of us veterans here you’re a relatively new name although I guess you’ve been with Turbine for a little while, can I ask how long you’ve been on the DDO production team here?
Fernando: Yeah no problem, I’ve been with the DDO production team since the end of last year. So, a pretty good long while now and, you know, I guess I joined sometime in the last quarter of last year. I’ve actually been with Turbine for quite a long time. Sometime in September it’ll be my five year anniversary in Turbine, and DDO was actually the first game I worked on when I joined Turbine as director of game technology so I feel like I’ve been on the DDO team for almost five years.
Jerry: Well that’s cool, and, well thanks – and of course you’re married as well to Kate Paiz, the other co-executive producer at DDO, we’ve got a husband and wife team. It’s a classic in fantasy, we’ve got a lot of husband and wife teams writing books and making movies and now producing MMO video games based on D&D. So congratulations and thanks for being on the show. Also with us is producer Glin. How you doing Glin?
Glin: Doing good Jerry, I’m glad to be back on the show, it’s been several months since I’ve had a chat with you at all.
Jerry: Yeah I know! I was actually looking at the archives it looks like March was the last time we had an Ask the Devs. Now obviously you guys have been really quite busy and so the scheduling hasn’t worked out for either of us but I’m really glad we’re able to do it.
Glin: Yeah I think that was the time we really started to hunker down and get ready to release all the news about what our next release was going to be, so we didn’t necessarily go radio silent we were just preparing to do all the media blasts and all those things that we’re seeing now in Beta.
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. Also with us is MadFloyd – how you doing?
MadFloyd: I’m doing well, nice to be here.
Jerry: For those who may be not as familiar with you, what in particular would you say your focus is on DDO?
MadFloyd: I’m a design director, so basically I’m working here behind the scenes to make the game as good as possible. I’ve been here for about a year and a half now.
Jerry: Finally with us here is Tolero. How you doing Tolero?
Tolero: Oh not bad how about you?
Jerry: Doing great! Thanks for helping me get this ninth edition of ‘Ask the Devs’ under way, and let’s get underway - we’ve got a long list of questions and we want to get as many answered as we can this week. Just a quick note at the start, if you want to ask a question to ‘Ask the Devs’ send it to me in an email, I pass it along to Tolero and we work to put together these questions for the show, and the email is ddocast@gmail.com.
Jerry: Alright first question comes from Zadkiel: Previous modules were less about revenue generation and more about customer retention. Now that DDO Unlimited is being released and modules will generate revenue via the free to play player having to buy them, will that mean more new content being released faster? I guess maybe we should kind of turn this into a two-parter a little bit? Well we had, kind of in the early days of the game, three to four month-ish sorta release date schedule. Do you guys see that being sort what we might see with Eberron Unlimited?
Fernando: Well first of all Jerry, I’d be very hesitant to commit to a particular sort of timing cycle because we’re always trying to do the right thing for the service, and for the given update that we’re working on and some things take longer than others and that’s just a reality of development.
Jerry: Sure, Sure
Fernando: But that said, yeah absolutely we’re looking to get back into a rhythm of much more regular updates, the time between module eight and Eberron Unlimited going live is absolutely an anomaly, believe us, we hate is as much as you guys do, we would have like to have been releasing new stuff to you all the time and since we’re mostly all DDO players on the team as well, we’ve all been itching to get our hands on the new stuff to play on live, so that continues right now: we’re eager to do it.
One thing I would like to share with you is some details on our first update, so we’re going to start numbering again and call it ‘Update One’, and you may have seen in some of the other press articles, we’re working on a new set of adventure packs right now tentatively titled ‘Dreaming Dark’, and so the ‘Dreaming Dark’ is this really cool story line that we have worked out for high level players, wherein there’s these creatures coming into Stormreach and essentially trying to take over the minds of some of the citizens of Stormreach and find their way to brainwash people almost into this cult sort of thing. And the players get to go in and investigate these guys and even wander into some of the nightmares that they’re trapping some of these other characters in, and it’s really fun, we’re having a great time providing, you know, different kinds of gameplay and enemies than what the players will be used to with all the demon and devils and stuff like that, that they’ve been playing at high levels.
Jerry: That’s cool…
Glin: And if that doesn’t give it away Jerry, Fernando mentioned that we’re already in there playing it, so it’s not like we’re coming up with the ideas; we know what it’s going to be like – it’s something we’re going to be having ready for the next release and we’re going to be working on this next release as soon as we’re out the door with this current one which we’ve put the release date out of early August.
Jerry: That’s excellent. You know, I think a lot of us probably assume that, I mean, development cycles work in phases so while you’re polishing up mod9 you’re probably already working on mod10 at least probably in the planning stages, I think that’s what most people would probably assume here. In the past, I can’t remember where it was said, but is mod... well I guess mod 0 – the adventure cycle previously known as mod9 - is that going to end the Shavarath story line? I seem to recall that the answer is ‘no’ on that one – do you know if that’s the case? Do you know? I think I read it in a past interview that someone had said that it was not – and we would be continuing it after this, but do you know, if that’s…?
MadFloyd: Yeah it’s not the end of it. When we first created the Shavarath storyline we envisioned it as a multipart – well at least more than one part and so far we’ve done part one so we’re not exactly sure when we’ll return to it, but we will at some point.
Jerry: Yeah it’s probably something like your other releases, I suppose in general asking this question here, it’s not like you didn’t have a financial incentive to get new content out the door for the past three-some years, but I imagine there probably is some fundamental truth to this especially as you want to encourage free to play players to explore the game and you know pick up these new adventure packs that is a bit of a financial incentive for you guys to basically, you know, get them out polished, but get them out probably as quickly as you can, you know?
Fernando: Absolutely, and that’s one of the neat things about the new business model, we’ve always had our subscribers out there and different subscribers come and tell us what they want and for some players it’s new races and for some players it’s new content at level cap and for some players it’s actually new content in the middle of the game and it’s always been all over the map and a little bit hard to quantify. With this new model we’ll simply be able to see what are players are buying and you’re essentially voting with your wallet, now that’s not to say we won’t always have our subscribers and we will have to keep paying attention to what the subscribers want and feed that into the mix, but a big part our decisions going forward will be about seeing what works in the current store and what people are buying up.
Jerry: Sure. Alright let’s move onto the second question here.
I don’t have a name unfortunately on this one but this person writes in regards to Eberron Unlimited,
“Let’s say I’m playing DDO as a free player and I buy whatever I need to, to unlock some content I can’t get to otherwise.” He’s probably talking about say, you know, adventure packs,”How long does that content stay unlocked for me? If the answer is: once you unlock content then it stays unlocked forever, then doesn’t that mean I should just get a free account, and buy everything in the game and turn my free account into kind of a lifetime membership account?”
That’s sort of a fundamental question I know a lot of players are asking, you know, you guys have talked to quite a few in your interviews about incentives for VIP players – is there an intention potentially that, especially maybe us hardcore folks that will be playing until you guys shut down the servers in 2050 or whatever, that maybe we would just go for kind of a lifetime membership option here?
Fernando: Well, I don’t know about intention. We certainly built the model with an eye towards letting more casual players be able to come in and play at their pace. So that was our intent. But like so many things we start something with one intent and it ends up having more than one use so yeah the answer is absolutely: If you buy the Sharn Syndicate, you can play the Sharn Syndicate on every game world with every character that you create from then on, and you essentially have a subscription, if you want to think of it that way, to that piece of content for the life of the service. So that is like the lifetime subscription option that was offered in Lord of the Rings at launch, for example.
Jerry: yeah
Fernando: Now, again, there’s an interesting dynamic here where those purchasers will be either the very casual players, or the very hardcore players who say ‘I know that I love this game and I’m going to play it for two years – so I’m going to go ahead and buy everything with a onetime fee’ – but that’s the trade off – you’re either committed for a couple of years or you’re just sampling early on and sort of everything in-between… if you’re playing very hard core but not committing for two years, the subscription is still a pretty good deal to pay one fee as you go per month.
Jerry: And you guys have worked to build in some nice VIP incentives it seems as well, with essentially free turbine points, potential a little bit of early access to some new content – at least we get, you know, Eberron Unlimited a few days early here.
Fernando: Yeah that’s right and we’ll keep working on what those VIP incentives are, there’s things like the shared account tab which are given for free to the VIPs and you have to purchase if not – some of these you can buy into, but some of them, like getting the content a few days early will always remain VIP exclusives, and it is important for us that our VIP players feel valued and important because they absolutely will be the backbone that we’re gonna expand this community with.
Jerry: I don’t want to sound too much like a PR person here, but it seems pretty obvious that what you guys are trying to do with Eberron Unlimited here is basically give people flexibility and options, you know, whatever, however, you want to play the game, we’ve got a system and an easy way to do it.
Fernando: That’s pretty much our mantra. Play and pay however fits your lifestyle and your playstyle.
Jerry: Sure. Alright let’s move onto question number three. This one comes from Kistilan:
Says: “Is the DDO dev team considering the option to offer a full character respec service? If yes, do they think it would be a premium service or a free in game service utilizing questing, items and in game currency?”
We’re heard a little bit about character respecing in the past, but with Eberron Unlimited coming here, could we maybe see it in the store, someday, down the road?
Glin: That’s actually one of the things that we’re targeting for release – it’s really going to be something that our VIPs are looking for – I’m sorry our current subscribers – but it’s actually going to be something we have as a store option. Those players who, at various levels, feel like they want a ‘respec’ as we’ll call it until we release all the features, will be able to either early in the game or late in the game take advantage of our new concept for respeccing their character.
Jerry: Do we have any, sort of, general thought on the timeline here? Is it kind of far off or maybe a little bit sooner would you describe it?
Fernando: It’s going to be on the sooner side but we can’t necessarily commit to whether it’s going to make Update 1 or Update 2 at this point. (Jerry adds in transcript: you can actually hear my gasp here…)
Some of these things are still in the middle of development and we’re trying to figure out when they’re going to get out of QA. But, needless to say, we heard the cries of the community that they want respec – it’s something they’ve been clamoring for, we’d like to give it to them. It’s a perfect type of feature to offer in the store and we’re going to find a way to do that, sooner rather than later, but don’t hold me to a specific timeline.
Jerry: Now obviously you guys probably aren’t ready to get into too many details but we’re talking a full character respec are we talking about things including, like, levels and skills which you currently can’t respec in DDO?
Glin: We’re talking about taking your experience and rebuilding your character is kind of the quick summary of it. We have several systems in play here but I think that’s probably the elevator pitch.
Jerry: Well that sounds great – and I won’t press you for too many more details but thanks for actually talking about that on DDOcast, I think you’ve made a little bit of news here and probably a lot of players pretty happy.
Glin: yeah, vague but exclusive!
Jerry: Yes, exactly! Ok next question comes from Corsec who writes: is there any possibility that items could be locked in the inventory itself? He comes up with an explanation but I sort of thought I’d try to summarize it more succinctly. Right now, when you equip something and then equip something else it sort of moves somewhere else in your backpack. Is there any thought about having a permanent location so it would go back to where it was, things like that?
MadFloyd: I love this question – I think about this every day, because it’s one of my pet peeves. Yeah, we’re actually looking at various ways we can potentially address this issue. I can’t say when it will come because, like anything else we have so much on the burner here and everything sort of gets prioritized and some things are more complex than others, but inventory management and sort of improving the player experience with regard to that is definitely a hot issue here.
Jerry: Sure. Part two of his question: Has it ever been asked or planned to get the damage output of summoned creatures into your combat log?
MadFloyd: Yes it has. It’s another thing that we’re definitely considering doing. The question is – when?
Jerry: Sure. Sure. Alright let’s move onto the next question here. This one I also didn’t have a name for - actually I think I did have a name at some point but I lost it in my notes. So sorry that I’m not naming you by name, but short and quick – the next question is: ‘Please repeat the half-orc question!’
So, what about half-orcs – do we have any kind of status update on them?
Fernando: Yeah, half-orcs have been a long time coming, and we know that.
The truth of the matter is, we went down an implementation path with half-orcs that we couldn’t get all the way to fruition and other things ended up taking priority and were bumped ahead of it so, don’t want to lie to our listeners here, half-orc is not coming in the very near future, we do have design documents and prototypes floating around the team, and, you know, it’ll sort of depend on what gets agreed on between the development team and marketing as what our next priorities end up being for the next several months.
I guess the best thing I say is, if the warforged and the drow and the like sell well in the store, you’ll see a better chance of us kicking up the half-orc pretty soon because it is the next one queued up.
Jerry: Yeah bet so, bet so. I imagine that’s fairly common in video game development too where, you know, things get shuffled around like that where, ‘ok, well, we’re working on the favored soul, we’re working on the half-orc maybe we have some technical issues with half-orc, favored soul is coming along great so let’s, say, push that sort of thing forward.’
Fernando: Exactly right, and we’re making those tradeoffs all the time – for every feature that you guys see go live there’s probably another one or two that were left at some stage of development further back.
Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Gaulston from the Thelanis server. He writes: Are there any plans to introduce two handed puncturing weapons, in particular, he writes, spears?
MadFloyd: well we probably don’t have plans to introduce entirely new weapon types, but we do have a two handed weapon that deals puncturing damage that will come as a reward in update 1 actually
Jerry: Really?
MadFloyd: We do. I believe it’s a ‘bladed staff’.
Tolero: All I know, the first time I saw it I ran in and said ‘SPEAR!’
Jerry: I know, I think you’ve just floored me here – my jaw’s on the floor.
People have been asking for that one for, a certain segment of people have been asking for that one for, quite a while. That’s pretty exciting news there actually… so.
Alright, next part of Gaulston’s question is: In regards to the Shroud raid, are there any plans to increase the drop rate of large devil scales? He goes onto explain a little bit about basically how difficult they can sometimes be to get in the Shroud raid so do we have kind of a thought on large devil scales?
MadFloyd: Well, they pretty much drop at the same rate as other, non horn, large ingredients, so we don’t really have any plans to change the drop rate at this time.
Jerry: kind of in regards to the Shroud raid question, Xiloscient from DDOcast noticed on Lamannia while running one of the new Shavarath quests – and I can’t remember if he saw it in the outdoor area or not – that a large devil scale dropped. So can we assume that this wasn’t a bug and maybe these large scales are going to be moving into the Shavarath plane as well?
MadFloyd: That’s correct. That’s not a bug – that’s intentional!
Jerry: That’s er, I guess that makes sense, because if they’re hoarding them in the Shroud they’ll probably be hoarding them in their home plane as well?
Tolero: You would have to imagine that where devils live they shed some scales.
Jerry: yeah.
Fernando(?): or for that matter where they’re beat up on the battlefield. It’s the devils’ battlefield!
Jerry: yeah that’s right, that’s right. Alright, next question here comes from Devastation 2 from Khyber.
This is a particularly crunchy question, I hope you guys can answer it, I’m just going to read it straight:
“Rogues get their subtle backstabbing enhancement, where level one gives you 10% hate reduction, level two is 20% and level three is 30% hate reduction. Treason, the named short sword form the Stormreaver has an ability which is 20% hate reduction. My question is a two-parter: 1. Does Treason stack with subtle backstabbing, so if I have two levels of subtle backstabbing and wielding Treason will I have a 40% hate reduction?”
MadFloyd: Actually it does stack but you have something like a 36% hate reduction, so you would have 20% for the subtle backstabbing and you’d get 20% for treason, but they’re not purely additive so basically it’s sort of like 80% times 80% so you sort of get like 64% as a result.
Jerry: Oh ok, so it would essentially stack on top of that other 20%
MadFloyd: that’s correct.
Jerry: Question 2 here: Does the treason effect affect weapons in your offhand – so wielding treason in my main hand and welding a +2 dagger in my offhand would my offhand gain the benefit of the treason’s 20% hate reduction?
MadFloyd: Yes, it would because basically what that does is reduce thread generated by any melee damage, and that would include whatever your offhand is doing as well.
Jerry: Alright. Nice.
Glin: I gotta tell you MadFloyd I’m impressed with that - that was so crunchy my teeth are just hearing it, so, you fielded that really well.
Jerry: Yeah I agree that was very well done, thank you.
Jerry: Next one comes from Errick, from the guild I happen to be on Sarlona, Sacred Flame Guardians – he sent in a question, he wanted to see about offline guild chat, outside of the game. He writes: Say I’m at work and don’t have the ability to login and play, or maybe I want to hit the chat and talk with his fellow guildies. He says: I know this would be extra and some would argue probably not worth it, but still a bit of fun. So what do you think? Any possibility of offline guild chat?
Tolero: Um, one of the things you’re going to see once we bring DDO Unlimited is we’re going to be introducing a lot more activity that you can still feel connected with the community and connected with the game even when you aren’t able to play, besides just forum interaction and compendium interaction, one of the new things we’ll be bringing to DDO is my.ddo.com – and what that’s going to allow you to do is in addition to be able to make player blogs and have a record of your character offline, you’ll also be able to have guild blogs where you can get all of your guild members together to hang out on the my.ddo page – a lot of this web tech is going to be the groundwork for more and more features that we can bring to help you feel like you’re part of the community even when you can’t be there.
Jerry: Wow you weren’t kidding Fernando! I guess I read in an interview a couple of months ago that you were hoping to bring more social networking to DDO and it looks like that’s what we’re seeing here.
Tolero: Yeah exactly, you know, for a lot of players it’s really important for them to be able to stay connected with their friends and with their guildmates, you know, a lot of people like, you know, you want to plan that raid ahead of time, you know, you want to find our ‘Oh I was on vacation for two weeks, what am I missing out on?’ things like that.
Jerry: yeah, Yeah
Fernando: Yeah this is actually something that we haven’t spent a lot of time talking with the press of the community but I think really our players are going to be blown away by the level of features that we’re going to be bringing to the websites in support of DDO.
If you’ve ever looked at my.lotro.com – you’ll get an ideal of the feature set that they have there with the player blogs and pages and tracking your achievements and viewing your character and equipment while you’re offline, and that’s just the beginning: We’re going to launch with a similar offering of feature set but you can expect that to get better and better over time and it’s going to get really cool, really fast.
Jerry: Just the idea of being able to look at your character sheet offline is going to just absolutely… probably thousands of people are cheering right now as they’re listening to this!
Tolero: It even gets detailed – I’ve seen some of the prototypes work from a lot of the web devs, you can see things like your inventory offline, you can mouse over and say ‘Oh,they’re wearing the such-and-such item on, you know, their eye slot’ or ‘Oh, they’re wearing such-and-such boots’ – you know, they’re still refining a lot of what you’ll be able to see but, you know, the aim is to be very detailed.
Jerry: Well I think that’s good for helping to put together DDOcast shownotes! I don’t know how many times I’ve thought ‘Oh, I was going to write this down, and now I have to log back into the game, you know, get the thing, log back out’ – so fantastic news there.
Jerry: Alright, next question comes from Jeremy, saying: Can we can get an update on the forums with our signatures? For the DDO.com forums apparently so maybe there’s a few signature issues?
Tolero: Yeah, so that’s another area where a lot of the tech that we’re going to be using for the my.ddo is going to help us with the signatures. There were some issues with the way that the game was trying to talk to the website, so you would see some kind of, you know, anomalies in your signature such as characters who weren’t there or characters that should be there, showing up in strange states, and a lot of the tech that we’re using with my.ddo is going to help us resolve a lot of those so you’ll see more of those character signatures as a result.
Jerry: Fantastic! Alright next question comes all the way over from Sweden. This is Stefan Blomberg, who writes:
“I wonder, are there any plans to make returning characters more attractive to play? And by returning, he means, say, returning throwing weapons.” Any thoughts on that?
Tolero; You mean like returning shuriken, returning arrow, things like that?
Jerry: Yeah exactly, things like that.
MadFloyd: Well throwing weapons are generally intended to support a character by giving them some ranged options rather than being their primary focus, but we’ve been experimenting with a few grenade like weapons that rogues may be able to make from scavenged trap parts in a future update sometime down the line, but we’re hoping that the thrown weapon focus characters may enjoy those, but typically with the shuriken and stuff like that, it’s never intended to be a primary role, per say.
Jerry: I keep a returning shuriken on my cleric, so that when I run out of ammo I still have something to throw.
Tolero: Yup, I do the same thing.
Glin: Yeah I kept a returning axe on my fighter for like, level seven before it was finally just so useless in damage, but I was really hooked on that thing.
Jerry: Yeah Stefan in particular, he writes in this email that he has a returning speced character on the European devourer server called ‘Pingy’ – a funny rogue that uses returning weapons, I thought we’d give a shout out to Pingy there for being unique, fighting the good fight for all of us.
Jerry: Ok next question I believe comes from Phlor, although I didn’t write that down in my notes unfortunately. A bit of a philosophical and also a bit of a crunchy question. He writes something that I bet many people have asked: “Why is it so difficult to pull a bloodstone?”
<laughs>
Jerry: Let me, I guess, ask philosophically first. Do you have an answer to the age old question of why it is that the things we most want to obtain are often the hardest to get?
MadFloyd: <Sighs> Because: ‘The chase is much more fun?’. I don’t know how to answer that, as a matter of fact It’s an interesting question. I sort of looked over to Eladrin and said ‘Can you help me with this one?’ so his response was ‘One: Because your luck is terrible!’ And I think also – ‘If Xilo pulls a muckdoom and nobody see does it really exist?’
Jerry: Exactly
Glin: Well if you have a screenshot!
MadFloyd: Well his answer to that ‘If I didn’t see it either, then it probably rotted in the chest, very sad!’
Jerry: Yery good point. I guess probably in terms of the sort of hard answer to this question, it’s one of the more powerful items in the game, so it’s probably on that, you know, you have to roll probably pretty high on the loot tables to get it. I’m assuming – I’m speaking for you but I assume that’s the case, right?
MadFloyd: Yeah, and I think the rare items exist throughout the game so, I guess, you get that moment of feeling special and you can have something to chase after if you really want it, so, you know, you never [I]have to get it, you don’t need that bloodstone to succeed in the game necessarily, but if it’s important to you then you’ll find it sooner or later or you’ll buy it off some friend off the auction house or something.
Jerry: Yeah, you know, there was actually one other aspect of this whole bloodstone question I wanted to bring up. I assume you guys are familiar with the iPhone and the concept of the app store? There was a while back, there was this “I’m rich” app – it was like $5000 just someone put out there and all it did was, you hit a button and it, I don’t know, gave you a little dollar sign or something. And the guy sold like five of them, so literally a nothing app that just says ‘Give me $5000 and get nothing in return essentially’ the guy made like $25,000.
Tolero: Hmm
Jerry: Now I know that you guys have done a very nice job on the DDO Store balancing, but it occurred to me last night as I was brushing my teeth, just theoretically, if you guys put that on the DDO Store (the Bloodstone) and let’s just not be realistic here: let’s say charge $200 for it, I bet you’d have some people who would plop down that money.
Tolero: I’m sure there’s a lot of things, you know, in theory you could put something in the store that you’d be like ‘No one would ever ever buy that’ and somebody would do it inevitably that’s just Murphy’s Law.
Jerry: Yeah absolutely. Alright, next question here. Tim asks:
“Can we fix quivers so they can be hot-swapped via hot-keys and not opened so that we can quickly swap different types of arrows in our quivers out to be reloaded.”
MadFloyd: Well I think that’s a good suggestion actually, you know, I would appreciate that myself, I think that’s… honestly I don’t think we have that on our list of to-dos but we can put that on the list because I think that’s a great idea.
Jerry: Sure. Alright, last question – well one of the last questions I guess I have on my list here, and again I don’t have the name, see it’s been since March since we recorded this and I’ve been getting emails and questions and copying and pasting them into new documents, and unfortunately somewhere between March and July here I lost a whole bunch of names so I don’t know who asked this question either I’m sorry. It says:
“Playing in Linux with DDO as it stands right now, runs fine. Thanks to LOTROlinux.com since the DDO launcher doesn’t work in WINE.? But, “he says he tried to install the mod9 unlimited beta, with no luck. ‘If they’re going to break my ability to play my favorite game, I will be not very happy about it – not sure what I’ll do then’. So, have you guys given any consideration as to whether it works in Linux or whether it may be something you deal with in the future here?
MadFloyd(?): Yeah, I guess I’ll address that briefly. The first quick thing to say is, you know, Linux is only half supported as the guys over in LOTROLinux know – they found a way to basically get the patching to work and get in game, and our tech guys, some of which are pretty hardcore Linux guys themselves have taken it upon themselves to support that community and help keep people playing in Linux and so I guess the short answer is, if you have no trouble patching up mod8 there’s no reason that you should have any trouble patching up mod9 or Eberron Unlimited when we go live with that.
What is true is that you probably can’t use our background downloader application, which is the Turbine Download Manager, in Linux right now just the same way you can’t use the launcher really, and I don’t expect we’re going to put much effort into fixing that but at the same time I don’t think that community will be out of luck once we go live.
Jerry: Yeah I’m not really techie enough to give a really good answer but I seem to recall, I know in my own experience, there is a way you can just launch the game without going through the Turbine Download Manager if you really want to and I’m sure a quick check of the forum will help you out on that one.
MadFloyd: Well our current community doesn’t have the download manager, and there are no plans right now to make everybody get the download manager. It’ll be new players who will have the option to come in with the download manager.
Jerry: Oh is that right? I thought we had the download manager in beta on Lamannia here?
MadFloyd: And we were all new players on Lamannia!
Jerry: Ok I see what you’re saying.
Glin: That was the way we were distributing the build and it was also a good way for us to get a lot of hands on testing on the download manager so we’re comfortable putting the mass amounts of people that are going to come out and try the new DDO and game quickly.
Tolero: Yeah, and there might even still be players, maybe they played DDO back in, you know, 2006 and they hear about free to play and they’re like ‘Ooh – I want to check out DDO’ but you know maybe they uninstalled DDO and maybe they’re going to try and fire it back up again, so it was really good for us to see feedback not only from brand-brand new players but also somebody who’s going to download it from the sites you know, not knowing any better and try to go through that TDM experience with an existing account.
Jerry: You know, we’ve seen the TDM, as it’s being called in shorthand here, really improve dramatically, I think - because we saw it, was it earlier this year, briefly?
Tolero: Yeah, I think early in the spring we had it out a little bit.
Jerry: You can really see the changes and it’s a lot more stable and a lot more… well it works a lot better for a lot more people. So that’s a good thing.
Jerry: Ok let’s see here, I guess maybe I just want to ask you guys, since it’s been six months, is there anything else you might be able to reveal to us today here on DDOCast?
Fernando: Well Jerry, there is actually one thing that we’ve continued to keep super secret here and maybe not vast and mysterious but certainly been a little secret from our community and I do have some news to break exclusively with you today.
Jerry: ooh.
Fernando: So, the new that I want to share is that, Kate, my dear wife and your beloved producer on this game for the last three years is going to be leaving the project for a while and the reason for that is because we’re actually having our third child, a new daughter that we’re welcoming to the world and, in fact, our ‘launch day’ for that release turns out to be exactly the same day as the Eberron Unlimited launch date, wouldn’t you know!
Jerry: Oh, wow!
Glin: As fate would have it.
Jerry: Wow you’re going to be a busy busy person that day, although obviously the family comes first, so I imagine it’s going to be one of those things where ‘Don’t call me unless the servers are in flames or something like that’.
Fernando: Actually, Kate and the baby have been well notified that they have to deliver early, unlike the game which will not come before August 4th. The baby needs to show up about a week sooner than that.
Jerry: Well congratulations! That’s very exciting news I’m really pleased to hear that and I want to congratulate you on, I guess what, your new hireling?
Fernando: Yeah exactly, right, well level one human anyway!
Jerry: Yeah exactly. Well fantastic, ok and that’s going to wrap it up for ‘Ask the Devs’ this week. Thanks so much for being on this show. Just a quick reminder to the listeners here again that if you have a question that you want answered on Ask the Devs send it to ddocast@gmail.com, we’ll add it to our big old list – can’t promise we’ll get to every question but we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can on the show. So Fernando Paiz, Glin, MadFloyd and Tolero – thanks so much for being on DDOcast this week.
All: Great! Thanks for having us.
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– Jerry Snook, host DDOcast
Transcript by Willphase (Garth on Sarlona).
Additional formatting and transcription title work by Jerry
July 23rd, 2009