Top 5 Issues Affecting the Game

[Cleric999]

Top 5 Issues

I've compiled the following issues to take a general perspective of the core issues the game has. The player community has to do our part to continue to stand up for simply what is right. There are definitely players that know me than me but I've played many other MMORPGs and have a good idea on what Turbine needs to improve on. I have a lot of specific examples I could provide that have happened to me personally for each one but I try to limit the examples and take a high level perspective on the issues.


1) Customer Support Processes

There is systematic problems with the customer support processes. First, in-game GMs need to be empowered to compensate players for items lost due to bugs and also to partys who wipe on a raid/quest due to lag. The GMs should be able to make a judgment call with a case by case situation. Turbine charges non-VIP members for in-game support when the majority of tickets players submit are related to issues that GMs have no power to assist with.

Let's say hypothetically a whole party wipes due to confirmed server lag on party 5 of the shroud. A GM should be able to either re-create the part 5 instance and place the players back there, spawn the chests in a private area, give a 2x damage boost for parts 1-4 for the next run, or something of the like.

Another example would be if a player reports losing an item due to a bug. Instead of telling a player to fill out a bug report which will likely not be dealt with within a year time period if ever (e.g. abbot destroying an item), the item should be able to be restored. If it's shown in player log that they owned an equipped bound to character item and suddenly not there anymore then Turbine should assume that there was an issue on their end and not the other way around.

Second, players should be able to request a party wide chat session with a GM so that other players can confirm what the primary ticket creator is telling the GM and ensure everyone is on the same page.

I fully understand why non-paying customers would be given less priority but VIP customers deserve better support and treatment. Veteran players especially should be given benefit of the doubt and not assumed that they are idiots who are trying to cheat the system. Most players in the game are actually honest and hard working.

2) Bugs/Design flaws and Community Feedback mostly ignored

The in-game bug report form hasn't worked for some time, this is extreme irony and the epitome of everything that is wrong with the game.

To give an example of both poor communication and a core game issue, when I first starting playing the game about a year and a half ago raids such as shroud and adq would have fairly constant party wide lag. I recently came back to see what core game problems such as raid lag have been resolved. Not only has this problem not been resolved but when I contacted Turbine support about multiple raid parties in a row experiencing constant PARTY-WIDE lag they asked for my directx log and claimed they've received no reports of raid lag.... when the forum has a large amount of such unanswered posts and many players have submitted such reports.

I have yet to see any posts in the last few months from a Developer/Turbine Manager besides a basic announcement. DDO has the most knowledgeable and mature player base of any MMORPG out there and Turbine doesn't utilize that to their advantage and instead essentially ignores them.

3) No direct correlation between party skill/time put in and drop rates

There are three sub-problems here:

First, a player can consistently play with one of the most skilled and efficient partys in the game and it would still likely take over 200 hours to fully equip a single character with top items. Most MMORPGs have the equivalent to a difficult epic raid in which very valuable trad-able items are guaranteed to be dropped on the hardest quests/zones in the game. Even on a 20th raid run in the game, a player is still not guaranteed to be able to select the item you want which drops from that raid. Also, some epic raids/quests are much more difficult than others but the drop rates are equally as bad.

Second, It is understandable that some items are not trade-able so encourage players to acquire them through quests/raids but Turbine takes the item trading limitation to an unnecessary extreme. Personally, I have multiple storage characters full of non-trade-able items that would be very beneficial to lower level players in the game yet I can't give away/trade them.

Randomness is part of any MMORPG but it simply doesn't make sense how it is implemented here.

4) Lack of live events

There should be regular events such as guild competitions on completing raids, pvp tournaments, and general events. I don't see why a game which is so party/guild focused doesn't have competitions such as a weekly TOD/shroud raid whose instances starts at the same time and give guild rewards to the guild who completes it first and have a large prominent record board in-game. Could also run variations of this and do it over the course of a month or so.

As far as general events Mabar was actually good in concept but with the bugs, lag, and kill stealing it became a complete disaster. With better planning this kind of event would be a lot of fun.

With more live events there would be much more of a sense of community and would help keep veteran plans from losing interest in the game.

5) Information In-Game

DDO is the most complex MMORPG in existence and this is definitely not a bad thing and part of what makes DDO unique and such. However, there is very little information in-game regarding core gameplay mechanics related to stats/skills/feats/crafting/etc which has a very detrimental impact on the experience of new players. Some examples:

- There isn't an indicator in the quest compendium or a map of what quests F2P players can enter.
- It's not made clear that quality items cannot be bought in the store in which new players spend most of their savings on thinking they are the best items in the game.
- Third party tools that player community has created like shroud loot planner should be implemented within the game itself and creates unnecessary confusion to have to go outside of game to a third party site.
- Certain class paths such as offensive casting healers in epic raids/quests are pretty useless (I found this out myself the hard way)
- There's no mentor system like many MMORPGs have.
- There is no player reputation system or even a way to see all the other characters a player has. There's many ways of implementing a player reputation system but with a little thought this could provide an easy quantitative way to get a general idea if an unknown player is going to be a good fit. This would be especially useful for veteran players.

Most new players have to spend a large amount of hours playing the game before they find out that their character build is almost useless at higher levels and that most high level quests/raids require the map pack or VIP.



Conclusion

I've never heard of a still supported MMORPG where GMs have no power to compensate players for time lost due to lag/bugs, there's virtually no live events/competitions, little information in-game to help new players learn the most complex MMORPG in existence, core game flaws/bugs reported by many are not resolved after a period of years, and virtually no communication with its customers. Veteran players will continue to leave in large numbers to the lack of effort by Turbine in maintaining the game and new players will continue to leave out of frustration. Turbine could significantly increase their profits by being dynamic, communicating with the player base, and treating their customers like they are valued.

[blade2005]

Great Post

[Tarragon12]

3) is a non issue. Make raid and rare items even more rare and not ubiquitously common. Every other epic paladin sporting esos, every wiz sporting eardweller and bauble is quickly becoming boring. Bloodstone is now worth one lds or even less. Simply increase scarcity to promote diversity. Trade would make it even worse, though some fresh new meaningful tradeable items would be fine.


Top 5 Issues

[BrightAsh]

Great Post

Really? i dont think so at all...

First of all, ingame support is brilliant. I am no VIP and still get (great and friendly) help within 4-5 minutes of creating a ticket. What you suggest placing tickets due to server lag wipe's is crazy. No way to check if you folks had a hickup or just all agreed you want a free retry on the run. In game support will be overloaded by people trying to exploit ingame support.

Ingame support is brilliant as it is, leave ingame support allooooooohoooonnne.

Point 2: There has been miltiple comments by Dev's that lag is always an issue and they are continuely try to solve it, but that one solution can cause the next one. So keep filing bugreports.

Point 3: covered by Tarragon post before this one

Point 4: Live events: plenty of the live events you mentioned are organized by guilds. Just keep checking server forums. I (and i guess the majority of the player base) would like Devs spending time on content for everyone, than only events eligable for guilds.

- Last point is non-sense alltogether. You can see what is P2P in the LFM if quest is selected and on your map chalises are red if you dont have the pack.
- The lack of a reputation system is a blessing
- Ingame green steel planner is non-sense, the whole shroudthing is a "mystery" in the story line. Kinda crazy if there would be a recipy book huh? Be glad there are multiple planners online, which you can easily acces ingame though MyDDO
- No mentorsystem? again check forums or join a guild.

It is a MMO, an online community. Half of your issues can be solved by visiting forums and asking around. What you're asking for is the easy-button. There is none and most of us (although we whine a lot) like it that way. Easy-buttons are... well... easy :)

so /notsigned ..... at all

[Blank_Zero]

Interesting.

[Malky]

What you suggest placing tickets due to server lag wipe's is crazy. No way to check if you folks had a hickup or just all agreed you want a free retry on the run. In game support will be overloaded by people trying to exploit ingame support.


/signed: raids aren't challenging&long enough to justify calling GMs even when a wipe is clearly due to a lag spike. And like ash said, people would exploit such an ingame support behaviour.

[NinjaNeed]

1. Customer service is a BIG problem, agreed.

2. There are loads of bugs, that is true. Most of the serious ones do get attention every now and again, just not often enough. Also, they do listen to us, as was proved with the U10.1 crafting changes.

3. This makes me wonder if you have ever played any other MMO.

I have played both WoW and EQ2 and while you do have a 100% chance at a "named item" dropping each time you kill a raid boss there is no way to guarantee that that item is what you want. I had to wait over a year for one item in both games before, and that was with the same group of people killing the correct raid boss once a week (the most u can in them games). This games loot policy is far superior imho to those.

4. This game has more live events then any other game I have played. Maber, Cystal Cove, Ice Festival, Jester, Egg Hunt - to name but 5 from the top of my head.

5. I'll take each of your quips one at a time...

a. No, but in the lfm tool there IS!
b. Agreed, it is a bit of a bad thing for Turbine to sell +1 **** of **** in the store hoping to catch noobies out.
c. Semi-agree. Turbine have said they do not want others to be able to mess with the game code (hence no dps meter), which is fair enough. And its not that hard to just tab-out.
d. The whole specific class path system is a joke imho and should be removed from the game. Let people choose their own way, my first toon was forced into following one of these pre-made paths until I realised it was **** and re-rolled around lv6.
e. I have only used the mentor system in EQ2 but it was flawed and badly so. Sure I could take my lv80 toon down to lv15 and play with a friend leveling up, but then I would be power leveling him and that is what Turbine dont want. So please no mentor system in DDO.
f. They have MyDDO to check other players (when it works!). A reputation system is open for abuse and NOT needed in DDO.

My conclusion

You bring up some valid points, but also some mute ones and some completely useless ones. Yes Turbine need to change their customer service policy, amongst a few other things, but this is by far the best MMO out atm imo and most of what you said is just empty criticism.

[insaneuou]

Really? i dont think so at all...

First of all, ingame support is brilliant. I am no VIP and still get (great and friendly) help within 4-5 minutes of creating a ticket. What you suggest placing tickets due to server lag wipe's is crazy. No way to check if you folks had a hickup or just all agreed you want a free retry on the run. In game support will be overloaded by people trying to exploit ingame support.

Ingame support is brilliant as it is, leave ingame support allooooooohoooonnne.

Point 2: There has been miltiple comments by Dev's that lag is always an issue and they are continuely try to solve it, but that one solution can cause the next one. So keep filing bugreports.

Point 3: covered by Tarragon post before this one

Point 4: Live events: plenty of the live events you mentioned are organized by guilds. Just keep checking server forums. I (and i guess the majority of the player base) would like Devs spending time on content for everyone, than only events eligable for guilds.

- Last point is non-sense alltogether. You can see what is P2P in the LFM if quest is selected and on your map chalises are red if you dont have the pack.
- The lack of a reputation system is a blessing
- Ingame green steel planner is non-sense, the whole shroudthing is a "mystery" in the story line. Kinda crazy if there would be a recipy book huh? Be glad there are multiple planners online, which you can easily acces ingame though MyDDO
- No mentorsystem? again check forums or join a guild.

It is a MMO, an online community. Half of your issues can be solved by visiting forums and asking around. What you're asking for is the easy-button. There is none and most of us (although we whine a lot) like it that way. Easy-buttons are... well... easy :)

so /notsigned ..... at all


forget abt what all u told for a sec,

Place urself in seat of turbine and think in Bussiness point of view, all the suggestions make the game better or not? also profitable?

Think..hope u /sign

[~sumptingwong]

Top 5 Issues

1) Customer Support Processes

2) Bugs/Design flaws and Community Feedback mostly ignored

3) No direct correlation between party skill/time put in and drop rates

4) Lack of live events

5) Information In-Game

I slightly Disagree

1) Lag

2) Dungeon Alert

3) I happen to agree with the bad services

4) When rather new players loot torqs on their barbs/fighters without reading it, open it up, read it, then say, "Torq for roll"

5) The drop rates for certain items like mad stone boots, people run that quest over 60 times and... nothing...

It is still good to have powerful items like SOS scrolls have low drop rate and Marilith Chain scrolls, but there is a few items that should have increased drop rate

[UniqueToo]

The single biggest problem with DDO is in the character level up system and multiclassing.

How could DDO have been running so long without any implementation of the multiclassing abilities from the ruleset(s). Why add the ability to the game unless you are going to make it worthwhile?

[Dunklerlindwurm]

The single biggest problem with DDO is in the character level up system and multiclassing.

How could DDO have been running so long without any implementation of the multiclassing abilities from the ruleset(s). Why add the ability to the game unless you are going to make it worthwhile?


Saying multiclassing isnt worthwhile is funny in itself.

Welcome to DDO

[eulogy098]

Top 5 Issues


2) Bugs/Design flaws and Community Feedback mostly ignored

The in-game bug report form hasn't worked for some time, this is extreme irony and the epitome of everything that is wrong with the game.

To give an example of both poor communication and a core game issue, when I first starting playing the game about a year and a half ago raids such as shroud and adq would have fairly constant party wide lag. I recently came back to see what core game problems such as raid lag have been resolved. Not only has this problem not been resolved but when I contacted Turbine support about multiple raid parties in a row experiencing constant PARTY-WIDE lag they asked for my directx log and claimed they've received no reports of raid lag.... when the forum has a large amount of such unanswered posts and many players have submitted such reports.

I have yet to see any posts in the last few months from a Developer/Turbine Manager besides a basic announcement. DDO has the most knowledgeable and mature player base of any MMORPG out there and Turbine doesn't utilize that to their advantage and instead essentially ignores them.



This is the single biggest problem. Lack of communication between player and developer. We know of the bugs that they don't. Yet they choose to ignore us. An thus it takes often YEARS to fix very simple, minor bugs.

We know of the really simply stupid stuff that is just terribly miss labeled to the point of being absolutely inaccurate.... really how hard would it be to retype the Zeal description? My bet is that the one dev' responsible for fixing such a thing DOESNT EVEN KNOW ABOUT IT, because they fail to communicate.

There aught to be a community forum minimum responce of like 5 posts a day from someone at their company. Thereby FORCING them to make DDO better by FORCING them to learn what the players know and the developers do not.

I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they simply do not know about such bugs, as I'd hate to assume that they do know about it but are simply to lazy to work on.

[Dirac]

Interesting. None of these would make my top 10. Maybe #2, but reading your description, I don't think we are talking about the same things.

Ok, to be constructive, the top problems with the game are:

1. amount of high level content (non-epic).
2. amount of high level content (non-epic).
3. xp necessary for high levels on TRs and 2TRs.
4. no greensteel deconstruction.
5. dungeon alert.

[7-day_Trial_Monkey]

The single biggest problem with DDO is in the character level up system and multiclassing.

How could DDO have been running so long without any implementation of the multiclassing abilities from the ruleset(s). Why add the ability to the game unless you are going to make it worthwhile?

What the heck are you talking about? :confused: :confused: :confused:

[articwarrior]

/signed on everything but point #3, I believe that we have a simple loot system which does not need any help with the exception of scroll drops.

to all those who think he was talking about live events: I believe he is referring to other live events which could erupt in a day (such as the marketplace disaster of 2008). but even if he is not I still believe we need more live events because we have extended droughts with nothing in them (this spring, for example). We have festivult and ice games in both summer and winter for a month, egg hunt for 1 month a year (on average), mabar we only had for about 3 weeks but was extended for another 3 weeks because of demand, and lastly we have pirate event which was supposed to be commonly active throughout the year, yet have only had it for a month (little over 3 weeks)

so in all we only have events spread thinly through the year only less than 5 months of events to what he is referring to a more common practice of every month.

[Beld]

and then coming on and telling everyone what the problems are is, ehhh, interesting.

You were not here when the game almost died, when we lost a BUNCH of great players due to lack of content or anything resembling information due to the court battle.

The in-game support system is actually better than most other MMO's I have played (EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, SWG, CoH) and I usually get a response within minutes of submitting a ticket. Granted I usually don't submit a ticket for ticky-tack things either....when a lvl 2 quest that takes on average 6 minutes to run bugs out...here's a tip, recall and re-do, much easier than sitting around waiting on a GM to correct an issue.

I am not even going to begin to get into most of the other drivel, other than to say previous posters have hit it already, what I see when I read most of your post was, I want to be able to come into this game and have EVERYTHING that is cool/uber/great in no time so I can have all the toys the long-time vets have, without putting in the time they have.

All evolving games have bugs, it is a fact, get used to it, if you want to help try and feret some of them out, play on Lammania some, as was witnessed by the U10.1 debacle, the devs do indeed listen (and due to the fact that I have personally gotten answers on the forums, so do the mods).

As far as being compensated for a lag wipe....what if you were solo healing an elite VOD and the raid group was almost finished (last 10%) and your internet dropped, or your power went out and the raid wiped....should you be asked to compensate the other 11 people for their time that was wasted?? Same deal, understand that it is the internet, deal with it and move on.

While I do agree there are issues, none are really game breaking (they are annoying/frustrating) once you understand where to get information. I look forward to the game continuing to evolve, and as a programmer myself, try correcting bugs in someone else's code sometime, it's not as easy as everyone likes to make it out to be.

[shadowdragon00]

I have been playing this game for some time... maybe not quite as long as others.. but for some time... much more than the OP, with all due respect...

in my experience... I have never ever had any problems with In Game Support.. almost always... nearly every single time, I get a response and soultion within 4 - 5 mins... worst case was about 15 mins...

Mind you, I have not been here as long as some... but that is just my personal opinion... flame away if you wish...

ah and for the commenter about Multiclassing being not worthwhile.. I got a good good laugh out of that.. hahhahha I think you should try to make a real multiclass char before you make such comments as that...

[Crystalizer]

i only agree with the lack of live events (not those time-limited grinders instances)
elsewhere the game suffers from a decreasing quality of the content combined with an increasing grind factor
initially the game offered a much better play experience, now this is mostly some monster bashing combined with xp/whatever farming

[knightgf]

1) Customer Support Processes

There is systematic problems with the customer support processes. First, in-game GMs need to be empowered to compensate players for items lost due to bugs and also to partys who wipe on a raid/quest due to lag. The GMs should be able to make a judgment call with a case by case situation. Turbine charges non-VIP members for in-game support when the majority of tickets players submit are related to issues that GMs have no power to assist with.

Let's say hypothetically a whole party wipes due to confirmed server lag on party 5 of the shroud. A GM should be able to either re-create the part 5 instance and place the players back there, spawn the chests in a private area, give a 2x damage boost for parts 1-4 for the next run, or something of the like.

Another example would be if a player reports losing an item due to a bug. Instead of telling a player to fill out a bug report which will likely not be dealt with within a year time period if ever (e.g. abbot destroying an item), the item should be able to be restored. If it's shown in player log that they owned an equipped bound to character item and suddenly not there anymore then Turbine should assume that there was an issue on their end and not the other way around.

Second, players should be able to request a party wide chat session with a GM so that other players can confirm what the primary ticket creator is telling the GM and ensure everyone is on the same page.

I fully understand why non-paying customers would be given less priority but VIP customers deserve better support and treatment. Veteran players especially should be given benefit of the doubt and not assumed that they are idiots who are trying to cheat the system. Most players in the game are actually honest and hard working.


If we were to see the REAL GM's at work in the Turbine customer support room, I think we would agree seeing the grumpy dwarves in there would not be a pretty sight. Customer service is a joke at Turbine; if you get screwed in-game, forget getting help, it just never happens if your free or pay to play, and on VIP, it probably wont help much. You'll just have to look at the knowledge base, or, if its available, send a bug report.



2) Bugs/Design flaws and Community Feedback mostly ignored

The in-game bug report form hasn't worked for some time, this is extreme irony and the epitome of everything that is wrong with the game.

To give an example of both poor communication and a core game issue, when I first starting playing the game about a year and a half ago raids such as shroud and adq would have fairly constant party wide lag. I recently came back to see what core game problems such as raid lag have been resolved. Not only has this problem not been resolved but when I contacted Turbine support about multiple raid parties in a row experiencing constant PARTY-WIDE lag they asked for my directx log and claimed they've received no reports of raid lag.... when the forum has a large amount of such unanswered posts and many players have submitted such reports.

I have yet to see any posts in the last few months from a Developer/Turbine Manager besides a basic announcement. DDO has the most knowledgeable and mature player base of any MMORPG out there and Turbine doesn't utilize that to their advantage and instead essentially ignores them.


Bugs that have existed for years or just a long period of time have been known to be ignored. The abbot bug is one of many of them. Another infamous one is the ingrediants bag bug, where it disappears if you transfer it out of your bank. It is a shame that you can't be compensated for items that you truly lost, but thats right, like I said earlier, customer service is a joke. And I understand, of course, customer service at Turbine is a stressful thing, but when your not given the right tools for the job, things can get pretty ugly.



3) No direct correlation between party skill/time put in and drop rates

There are three sub-problems here:

First, a player can consistently play with one of the most skilled and efficient partys in the game and it would still likely take over 200 hours to fully equip a single character with top items. Most MMORPGs have the equivalent to a difficult epic raid in which very valuable trad-able items are guaranteed to be dropped on the hardest quests/zones in the game. Even on a 20th raid run in the game, a player is still not guaranteed to be able to select the item you want which drops from that raid. Also, some epic raids/quests are much more difficult than others but the drop rates are equally as bad.

Second, It is understandable that some items are not trade-able so encourage players to acquire them through quests/raids but Turbine takes the item trading limitation to an unnecessary extreme. Personally, I have multiple storage characters full of non-trade-able items that would be very beneficial to lower level players in the game yet I can't give away/trade them.

Randomness is part of any MMORPG but it simply doesn't make sense how it is implemented here.


The last few things aren't really major problems in the game, but they are annoying. Heck, to be honest, I decided to go for 20 VoD completions a while back in the hopes of getting a +3 tome, and guess what? I got jack sheet. No +3 tomes whatsoever, just a bunch of crappy items that I could only sell or destroy. It would be nice if there was more flexibility to the items you could get on your 20th reward. If Turbine can't fit all of the raid and tome items available in the reward list, they could just use a NPC vendor or a barter UI nearby the raid entrance to allow you to exchange a 20th for a item or tome choice. In fact, the barter UI is probably much better to use because it provides more detail and you dont need to go through a bunch of chat options.



4) Lack of live events

There should be regular events such as guild competitions on completing raids, pvp tournaments, and general events. I don't see why a game which is so party/guild focused doesn't have competitions such as a weekly TOD/shroud raid whose instances starts at the same time and give guild rewards to the guild who completes it first and have a large prominent record board in-game. Could also run variations of this and do it over the course of a month or so.

As far as general events Mabar was actually good in concept but with the bugs, lag, and kill stealing it became a complete disaster. With better planning this kind of event would be a lot of fun.

With more live events there would be much more of a sense of community and would help keep veteran plans from losing interest in the game.


I have to admit, the ice games are getting REALLY boring and out of tune; even the festival event isn't so boring because at least the items you can trade for change once a year. If the risia ice event had different recipes introduced each year, then I would actually like it, because it provides more incentive to run it. But...we'll just have to see if Turbine changes the recipes, now won't they?

Turbine has slowly added more events to the game; the mabar event and crystal cove were just some of the events offered. It would be nice if they had more events like the Fenrir summer games or some other types of events, but only if they can somehow put something new for it in each year it is introduced. If you want a idea of how it should be done, each year, a event such as the Mabar event should include new items that can replace some of the old ones. However, if you were at the Mabar event in previous times, you still have the option to buy or upgrade some of the old items, which is in turn, a great way to make years of playing matter in this game(Which was unexpectedly done by Turbine at the crystal cove event.). That's another problem to note, players that have played for years getting slapped in the face by Turbine, but thats another story to tell later...

As for PvP stuff and runs...well, that's up to the community, now isn't it? Besides that, I am not too fond of Turbine supporting PvP tournaments and such; the game is balanced for PvE combat, not PvP. In its current state, casters would totally dominate melee's, with rangers being somewhere in the middle. Either way, I don't mind having PvP stuff thats on the side, but there shouldn't be any major importance to it.



5) Information In-Game

DDO is the most complex MMORPG in existence and this is definitely not a bad thing and part of what makes DDO unique and such. However, there is very little information in-game regarding core gameplay mechanics related to stats/skills/feats/crafting/etc which has a very detrimental impact on the experience of new players. Some examples:

- There isn't an indicator in the quest compendium or a map of what quests F2P players can enter.
- It's not made clear that quality items cannot be bought in the store in which new players spend most of their savings on thinking they are the best items in the game.
- Third party tools that player community has created like shroud loot planner should be implemented within the game itself and creates unnecessary confusion to have to go outside of game to a third party site.
- Certain class paths such as offensive casting healers in epic raids/quests are pretty useless (I found this out myself the hard way)
- There's no mentor system like many MMORPGs have.
- There is no player reputation system or even a way to see all the other characters a player has. There's many ways of implementing a player reputation system but with a little thought this could provide an easy quantitative way to get a general idea if an unknown player is going to be a good fit. This would be especially useful for veteran players.

Most new players have to spend a large amount of hours playing the game before they find out that their character build is almost useless at higher levels and that most high level quests/raids require the map pack or VIP.


Not sure really what to say about this one...it is true that the DDO wiki has a lot of holes in it, as does the compendium, but there's still useful information. A new players best bet is to just ask and see what happens.

However, on the other hand, there are a LOT of misleading descriptions of effects by Turbine; I wish I knew where the thread was on this forum that talked about it, but a LOT of things that have descriptions are either incorrect, incomplete or misleading. You will have to be careful reading any description in-game; it may not produce the effect you think it can do.



Conclusion

I've never heard of a still supported MMORPG where GMs have no power to compensate players for time lost due to lag/bugs, there's virtually no live events/competitions, little information in-game to help new players learn the most complex MMORPG in existence, core game flaws/bugs reported by many are not resolved after a period of years, and virtually no communication with its customers. Veteran players will continue to leave in large numbers to the lack of effort by Turbine in maintaining the game and new players will continue to leave out of frustration. Turbine could significantly increase their profits by being dynamic, communicating with the player base, and treating their customers like they are valued.

Can DDO be a great game? Sure. Does it have problems? You bet. Is it the bottom of the MMORPG pile? No. It still has a few great strengths that surpass even the leader of this game's playing category. But it's up the developers to decide the fate of their own game really. They've done good at times, but they've also made some screw-ups, crafting being one of the major screw-ups.

[Vordax]

The single biggest problem with DDO is in the character level up system and multiclassing.

How could DDO have been running so long without any implementation of the multiclassing abilities from the ruleset(s). Why add the ability to the game unless you are going to make it worthwhile?

I think you forgot the /sarcasm tags.

Vordax

[cforce]

I'd disagree with most, but #2 is definitely a problem. I'm still not clear if the problem is:

1) Buggy bug reporting: bug reports getting eaten.
2) Poor population of Known Issues list or other acknowledgement of bugs

There are reliably lots of bugs that never make the known issues list that are discussed in detail on the forums. There's no way for us to know whether there's a flaw in the bug reporting or reproduction process that prevents them from even landing on a dev's plate, or just a communication breakdown in populating the known issues, but seeing as there are sometime major-seeming bugs that go unacknowledged for a while, the former seems much more likely.

How do we bug report the bug reporting tool, again?

#1: It's all about expectations. I've never had much problem with in-game support, but I also never ping them on something I know they can't do anything about. I've only ever opened tickets when a quest is bugged, which isn't *that* often for me, historically.

[Cyr]

1) Turbine does have really poor customer support. Dying in an instance due to lag...not the issue though. Inconsistent behavior and the bewildering responses to the truly serious lost item bugs in game are the big ones here. Another important issue is that some GMs frankly do not know the basics of the game and can't do much to help you because they are so clueless. My favorite GM response to this day was in response to a ticket about the shroud a few months after it came out when there was literally more shroud LFM's up then for any other quest 24/7...."I am a little unclear on one thing. What is the shroud?"...my response the quest my character is standing right in front of..."Oh it's a quest." Needless to say the ticket as most things I write was fairly detailed...

2) Bugs and how they get into the game despite reports and are ignored. Yeah this is an incredibly important one. Probably number 2 on my top priority list also. The whole 'we can't stop the train' stuff from the recent crafting debacle on lamaland was case in point to what is wrong with Turbine processes and priorities. Basically in that case, by the developers own statements, they put in major changes to a system without anyone else reviewing it and expected it to go live without any changes despite no review being done on it. I truly think the system team is the main culprits here. Their systems often are sprung on lama and there is a strong push not to change things based upon customer feedback. This is not a solitary occurance as it happens time and time again. It is very apparent that the systems team bypasses proper QA procedures and may also bypass playtesting, ML, and Lamannia at times (crafting thing bypassed all but the last and expected to ignore the last).

Clearly QA needs the authority to simply shut down the entire assembly line when the system teams (or other developers) put stuff into the game without proper QA, playtesting, and preliminary review by customers

[HellHoundU]

Regarding your top 5 issues...

Hi, my name is Joseph. Before I go into this, I was a former InGame Customer Service (Game Master) for Activision-Blizzard for their game World of Warcraft. I worked in their Austin, TX location from Dec., 2007 to March, 2010. Before I left, I was promoted to a Specialist Game Master whos main job by the end was recovering hacked accounts. During this time, I got to experience alot from a companies point of view regarding these issues. Now, Blizzard's policys since then may have changed, but let me begin...



1) Customer Support Processes

There is systematic problems with the customer support processes. First, in-game GMs need to be empowered to compensate players for items lost due to bugs and also to partys who wipe on a raid/quest due to lag. The GMs should be able to make a judgment call with a case by case situation. Turbine charges non-VIP members for in-game support when the majority of tickets players submit are related to issues that GMs have no power to assist with.

Let's say hypothetically a whole party wipes due to confirmed server lag on party 5 of the shroud. A GM should be able to either re-create the part 5 instance and place the players back there, spawn the chests in a private area, give a 2x damage boost for parts 1-4 for the next run, or something of the like.

Another example would be if a player reports losing an item due to a bug. Instead of telling a player to fill out a bug report which will likely not be dealt with within a year time period if ever (e.g. abbot destroying an item), the item should be able to be restored. If it's shown in player log that they owned an equipped bound to character item and suddenly not there anymore then Turbine should assume that there was an issue on their end and not the other way around.

Second, players should be able to request a party wide chat session with a GM so that other players can confirm what the primary ticket creator is telling the GM and ensure everyone is on the same page.

I fully understand why non-paying customers would be given less priority but VIP customers deserve better support and treatment. Veteran players especially should be given benefit of the doubt and not assumed that they are idiots who are trying to cheat the system. Most players in the game are actually honest and hard working.


First of all, though I do not know Turbine's policies regarding compensation, but in WoW, GMs were not to reimburse or compensate players at all, even in cases of verifiable latency issues that could be traced on our end. If I came across a ticket from a player, or multiple players, who lost a raid fight due to lag, it was almost always a NO. At most, we would get a Senior GM to possibly reset the instance, but most GMs from other games as well as WoW will not compensate for lag, latency, disconnects, etc. This is in part due to the nature of how the internet and latency issues work. Most problems 99% of the time are not Turbine's end, nor on your end, but the very nature of the connection, the hops, the hand-offs, etc. your connection takes from your computer to Turbine's server.

As for lost items due to a bug, even a verified bug, again, GMs in WoW were not able to compensate. Now, if I could find in the logs that at one point you had the item, and an verify on top of that that you lost the item, I may go to my Senior and ask for an exception. 9/10ths of the time, I would be denied regardless. Likely this is how Turbine as well has their policies. In any case, if there was any reimbursement, we would have to have verification that you had the item. As well, there is an absolute blanket policy that GMs in WoW DO NOT compensate for the issues above, as well as other things.

Last note: If you asked a WoW GM to open a party chat, that would also be denied. Every ticket was between me (the GM) and the player only. Most times than not, the GM WANTS to help you, but by policy cant. Telling a player No is the hardest thing as a GM. As well, players dont need to confirm with a GM, he already has access to game logs anyway, and will use those to verify anything. You may not be lying, but other players do, and we would never go on a player's word regarding any issues. Blizzard's other main policy is that the logs, not the player's word, determine if any assistance could be considered. Turbine again likely uses some form of this policy as well.



2) Bugs/Design flaws and Community Feedback mostly ignored

The in-game bug report form hasn't worked for some time, this is extreme irony and the epitome of everything that is wrong with the game.

To give an example of both poor communication and a core game issue, when I first starting playing the game about a year and a half ago raids such as shroud and adq would have fairly constant party wide lag. I recently came back to see what core game problems such as raid lag have been resolved. Not only has this problem not been resolved but when I contacted Turbine support about multiple raid parties in a row experiencing constant PARTY-WIDE lag they asked for my directx log and claimed they've received no reports of raid lag.... when the forum has a large amount of such unanswered posts and many players have submitted such reports.

I have yet to see any posts in the last few months from a Developer/Turbine Manager besides a basic announcement. DDO has the most knowledgeable and mature player base of any MMORPG out there and Turbine doesn't utilize that to their advantage and instead essentially ignores them.


After I left Blizzard, I worked at NCsoft as a Tier II Technical Support. Prior to both these position, I worked at CenturyTel for 5 years first as Network Server Technician, moving up to their IT department of their corporate HQ. Most of my work experience has been in IT / Network Administration regardless. As well, I am currently working on my BS in Computer Science / Software Design (Im 31, dropped out at 22 to join the army for 4 years, so now finishing up).

Now, I am no expert, but again, 99% of the time, if you are experiencing latency issues, it is not specifically Turbine. Now, if for example, a backbone ISP in northern Colorado goes down, and all other ISPs have to route around it, you can expect that most everyone in Californa, Nevada, etc. would experience the lag, which could affect 10% of the players, but this is not something You or Turbine can resolve other than call up Mr. Backbone ISP and yell at them till THEIR techs get it up and working.

Again, this is the nature of the Internet.

And surprising to most poeple, but your hardware affects your connection as well. If a player has a crappy low end computer, this can affect the connection. Your CPU handles your Network card's functions (mostly the API calls that other devices or software ties into), and if it sluggish, this will affect the incoming / outgoing traffic. This is an example, and there are thousands of all small things that has nothing to do with your ISP that will affect latency. Its common knowledge for all techs to get a DirectX report, along with a TraceRT or other network reporting tool. DirectX gives valuable information about your network's card device information, driver information, etc. that can assist us in finding the cause of your lag. This is assuming network lag and not graphics lag, which is something entirely different.

All that aside, GMs again will not reimburse or compensate for lag issues (see above reply). As well, any bug report has to be sent to the QA department so that they can verify the bug, which can take months sometimes. At Blizzard, we GMs had access to the Bug tracker that the devs and QA guys used, and I would say maybe 1 out of 4 bugs could be verified, most of the time, they could not be recreated or verified and were dropped. (..and ugh, dont get me started on explaining how your computer's hardware can cause these bugs for your game client only, that cant be verified... thats a whole other page...)

Once a bug is verified by QA, a report written, its then sent to the Devs, who then have to update the game code to fix it... and thats on top of any projects or other things that their bosses might have them do. Also: the severity of the bug determined the time it would be fixed. If there was a verified glitch that would cause the servers to crash, it would likely be pushed to the very top of the "fix this" list. That minor glitch that may cause you to clip through a wall and fall to your death? Bottom priority.

But rest assured, if you reported the bug, they know about it, and probably found it sooner than you.



3) No direct correlation between party skill/time put in and drop rates

There are three sub-problems here:

First, a player can consistently play with one of the most skilled and efficient partys in the game and it would still likely take over 200 hours to fully equip a single character with top items. Most MMORPGs have the equivalent to a difficult epic raid in which very valuable trad-able items are guaranteed to be dropped on the hardest quests/zones in the game. Even on a 20th raid run in the game, a player is still not guaranteed to be able to select the item you want which drops from that raid. Also, some epic raids/quests are much more difficult than others but the drop rates are equally as bad.

Second, It is understandable that some items are not trade-able so encourage players to acquire them through quests/raids but Turbine takes the item trading limitation to an unnecessary extreme. Personally, I have multiple storage characters full of non-trade-able items that would be very beneficial to lower level players in the game yet I can't give away/trade them.

Randomness is part of any MMORPG but it simply doesn't make sense how it is implemented here.


As someone said earlier in this thread, I would prefer the items to be MORE rare.

In any case, you can send this as a Suggestion. Be aware, as they did this at Blizzard, the Devs will be unable to reply back regarding your suggestion, but they will get it. At Blizzard, we would get a monthly Dev report from Devs to us GMs about their thoughts on player's suggestions. Some suggestions the devs liked, others they didnt... but it was a nice way to let us GM employees know. Now they were not required to give us this information, but they did. So yes... the Devs are likely looking at your suggestions, but its a long process between when a suggestion is made or being implemented, as well as several hurdles that have to be crossed before your suggestion could be implemented.



4) Lack of live events

There should be regular events such as guild competitions on completing raids, pvp tournaments, and general events. I don't see why a game which is so party/guild focused doesn't have competitions such as a weekly TOD/shroud raid whose instances starts at the same time and give guild rewards to the guild who completes it first and have a large prominent record board in-game. Could also run variations of this and do it over the course of a month or so.

As far as general events Mabar was actually good in concept but with the bugs, lag, and kill stealing it became a complete disaster. With better planning this kind of event would be a lot of fun.

With more live events there would be much more of a sense of community and would help keep veteran plans from losing interest in the game.


Now I know early in WoW history the GMs would make live events, but by the time I started working there, Blizzard had a policy that we were to not interact with players in the game on our GM characters, or effect the game world in any way possible. Like the Prime Directive in Star Trek, the policy was to affect the game world as minimally as possible so as to not interupt players enjoying the game. Any violation easily got you fired. Now I do know some Senior Game Masters could every once in awhile show up, interact with the players, goof off with them. But only Seniors could do it, and ONLY if their work load allowed it.

As well, if you have seen from WoW's several game events (the scourge invasion before Wrath of the Lich King came out here comes to mind...) where Blizzard did try to implement Live events, the players as a whole actually complained harshly about it, and hated it. I remember it as the work week of hell, due to the many, MANY tickets from players who hated it, anywhere from a nice "please get rid of it" to the occasional "F*** Y** BLIZ, I HATE YOU, GO DIE IN A FIRE". In fact, due to the mass amount of tickets hating the event to the few players who liked it, it pretty much changed the policy of the Devs to no longer do any more events like this anymore.

So while you may like the live events, etc. there are probably 6-7 of your fellow players who would hate it. Again though, DDO is a different game with a different playerbase

And lastly: I agree with you in that I LOVE live events (I loved the ones in WoW too)



5) Information In-Game

DDO is the most complex MMORPG in existence and this is definitely not a bad thing and part of what makes DDO unique and such. However, there is very little information in-game regarding core gameplay mechanics related to stats/skills/feats/crafting/etc which has a very detrimental impact on the experience of new players. Some examples:

- There isn't an indicator in the quest compendium or a map of what quests F2P players can enter.
- It's not made clear that quality items cannot be bought in the store in which new players spend most of their savings on thinking they are the best items in the game.
- Third party tools that player community has created like shroud loot planner should be implemented within the game itself and creates unnecessary confusion to have to go outside of game to a third party site.
- Certain class paths such as offensive casting healers in epic raids/quests are pretty useless (I found this out myself the hard way)
- There's no mentor system like many MMORPGs have.
- There is no player reputation system or even a way to see all the other characters a player has. There's many ways of implementing a player reputation system but with a little thought this could provide an easy quantitative way to get a general idea if an unknown player is going to be a good fit. This would be especially useful for veteran players.

Most new players have to spend a large amount of hours playing the game before they find out that their character build is almost useless at higher levels and that most high level quests/raids require the map pack or VIP.


And here we get to the point on which I generally agree with you 100%. Be aware that WoW has no Mentor system as well (or they might, I dont know, I quit playing after I left the job). But I do agree in that there should be some way of assisting new players better than the current tutorial, as well as assisting players better in building their characters. But any changes to the actual system would take it away from the Dungeons and Dragons core system. But I agree, new players need to be made more aware that certain stats and skills are more beneficial to their race / class.



Conclusion

I've never heard of a still supported MMORPG where GMs have no power to compensate players for time lost due to lag/bugs, there's virtually no live events/competitions, little information in-game to help new players learn the most complex MMORPG in existence, core game flaws/bugs reported by many are not resolved after a period of years, and virtually no communication with its customers. Veteran players will continue to leave in large numbers to the lack of effort by Turbine in maintaining the game and new players will continue to leave out of frustration. Turbine could significantly increase their profits by being dynamic, communicating with the player base, and treating their customers like they are valued.


In your conclusion, you mention that you have never heard of any MMORPG where GMs will not compensate for loss due to lag/bugs. Working at Blizzard (WoW), and then at NCsoft (Guild Ward, City of Heroes, Lineage II, Aion), none of those reimburse or compensate for lag / bugs either. As well, several of my friends who I met during my employment at Blizzard, some now working for Trion (makers of Rift) also told me they dont reimburse / compensate for lag / bugs there either.

Pretty much everything you were complaining about is general standard procedures and policies that all companies use. Yes, it will take a long time for bugs to be verified / fixed (most of them cant be), and the GMs will be unable to compensate for those issues you mentioned. This is nothing new, but its also nothing that makes the company or the game bad or lacking. Now if you can create a company and find a way to address all these issues in your game, I would cheer you on! I just doubt that by the time you experience that, you will understand the demands and requirements that a Massive Multiplayer game can require.

As well, I pretty much subscribe with the notion if you let your players direct your game, it will be a failed game. Just look at EverQuest 2...

[cptcruch]

Top 5 Issues

I've compiled the following issues to take a general perspective of the core issues the game has. The player community has to do our part to continue to stand up for simply what is right. There are definitely players that know me than me but I've played many other MMORPGs and have a good idea on what Turbine needs to improve on. I have a lot of specific examples I could provide that have happened to me personally for each one but I try to limit the examples and take a high level perspective on the issues.






4) Lack of live events

There should be regular events such as guild competitions on completing raids, pvp tournaments, and general events. I don't see why a game which is so party/guild focused doesn't have competitions such as a weekly TOD/shroud raid whose instances starts at the same time and give guild rewards to the guild who completes it first and have a large prominent record board in-game. Could also run variations of this and do it over the course of a month or so.

As far as general events Mabar was actually good in concept but with the bugs, lag, and kill stealing it became a complete disaster. With better planning this kind of event would be a lot of fun.

With more live events there would be much more of a sense of community and would help keep veteran plans from losing interest in the game.




This one I agree with..........Turbine has in the past ran live events on their other game Asheron's Call which ran for months. This was fun and only the person who got the kill was able to loot anything first.......great concept!

The lack of live events or the creation random invasions would create more interest in my opinion....I mean how any times has a Dragon even invaded the MP or one of the Houses? How many times have Kobolds or Orcs even ransacked anything? Other than in raids or quest we don't see anything live other than the MP invasion?

[Bloodstealer]

The last few things aren't really major problems in the game, but they are annoying. Heck, to be honest, I decided to go for 20 VoD completions a while back in the hopes of getting a +3 tome, and guess what? I got jack sheet. No +3 tomes whatsoever, just a bunch of crappy items that I could only sell or destroy. It would be nice if there was more flexibility to the items you could get on your 20th reward. If Turbine can't fit all of the raid and tome items available in the reward list, they could just use a NPC vendor or a barter UI nearby the raid entrance to allow you to exchange a 20th for a item or tome choice. In fact, the barter UI is probably much better to use because it provides more detail and you dont need to go through a bunch of chat options..


Ooooh that reminds me... Dear Santa (eermm DDO Dev), for christmas can I have a big fat goose that lays golden eggs for me when i want them, and, and, and, pleeeasssse can I have one of them Djinnin's in a bottle things..... you know the ones' that give you anything you want, not random like... but exactly what I want!!!

/SARCASM :D ....

[BrightAsh]

Ooooh that reminds me... Dear Santa (eermm DDO Dev), for christmas can I have a big fat goose that lays golden eggs for me when i want them, and, and, and, pleeeasssse can I have one of them Djinnin's in a bottle things..... you know the ones' that give you anything you want, not random like... but exactly what I want!!!

/SARCASM :D ....

_0_

Indeed, people don't seem to realize that if it all were that easy as to run a raid 20 times and get what every you want... those items would lose their value.

I also want all the best gear. But if it was there for the pick up... it wouldn't be and thus don't feel special. Which would really downgrade the item tremendously (how the *peep* do you write tremendously?)

Run Vela 20 times and get an epic red dragon scale helmet for free!..... riiight

[caione]

Great Post

great post

[Cleric999]

A lot of interesting points have been made in response and some good point of views with several people having customer service roles with other gaming companies. I'll just make some general comments mostly regarding support and their policies.

I have confirmed with a senior GM that the official policy is not to compensate players for bugs. This is an example where it comes down to a communication problem. Where is it communicated/noted that this is the policy? Not only does it frustrate players when they submit a ticket with this request but it increases the replies necessary by GMs. GMs generally respond pretty quickly but they are almost always pre-written replies to fill out the bug report form which is mostly ignored. A poster made a good point about the importance of being able to verify bugs and such, but Turbine should be aggressive and actually respond to bug reports to get the necessary information which they do not. Also, when the in-game bug report form hasn't worked for months (which automatically) sends in-game data it makes it more difficult for Turbine to verify bugs and further implies bug reports are ignored. As far as lag, the examples I was referring to wasn't internet connectivity/hardware but entire party wide lag where at least 8/12 party members complained about the constant lag in the party chat.

Not all aspects should use WoW as a good baseline to use for policies such as bug/lag compensation. WoW may not do much live events or compensate players but it also has millions of players and there's more non-PVE things can do that players organize. I used to play Lineage 2 by NCSoft and can tell you that they were constantly making tweaks to balance both PVE/PVP, fresh high level content, and had weekly very fun (automatically run) castle sieges where guild alliances competed. I also used to play 9Dragons and by a case by case basis they would compensate players (and sometimes the whole server) who were adversely affected by lag, bug, or just lost a lot of time due to a miscommunication by the company. Rarely were players unjustly enriched by such policies. If a player loses a greensteel item in abbot that spent 30 hours of work gathering materials to craft, why shouldn't a GM have the capability able to look at the logs, confirm they are VIP, and then re-create the item?

Turbine is not a billion dollar company like Blizzard, there's no reason that there should be no engagement with the player community especially with how mature/knowledgeable most of the players are and the major core gameplay issues that currently exist.