Very Informative Q and A with Severlin

[GoldyGopher]

I would like to thank Severlin and Cordovan for today's Question and Answer session, celebrating the 15th Anniversary of DDO during the Weekly Live Stream.

Today's session was extremely informative and provide insight into a large number of problems, concerns and issues that many of us have with DDO. Much more so than previous Q/A and ask the devs.

At this juncture it would appear that previous ownership was far more secretive or selective in what information could be provided to the public.

An example of this was the discussion on Cosmetics and the lack of a Cosmetic Wardrobe. The problem is with Mirror of Glammering doesn't make a "cosmetic" item, rather it is a "link" to the existing items. I am not sure I am wording that correctly, but that's the gest. This gives us, the player base, an understanding as to why something that looks so simple to us isn't fixed or changed.

Thank You

[rabidfox]

The addition of new engineers being hired to help deal with stuff like lag was probably the highlight of good news out of the stream.

[Lupito]

good q&a tho what I disliked is that many of the questions are answered with no eta , they just sound nice to please the crowd

[myliftkk_v2]

We going to get a transcript? Some of us don't have time to listen to Q&As when we can consume a transcript in a fraction of the time.

[droid327]

We going to get a transcript? Some of us don't have time to listen to Q&As when we can consume a transcript in a fraction of the time.

This is one of my recent big pet peeves. Written word exists for a reason, its often the most efficient and effective way to communicate ideas.

I know people want to drive clicks and subscriptions and ad revenue, but we just want to be informed.

[Silverleafeon]

From my memory:


Hired several tech to deal with lag issues.
Are hiring more people right now.
Lag issue solutions are currently divided between: making effects more efficiently applied, and too many attacks at level cap, and ____
There will be a mega server, but initial tests on the mega server indicate that lag issues must be solved first.

Cosmetic Bag is very, very difficult because mirror of glamming links to the real item.

Horse Bag is going to replaced with Horse Stable like the backpack tab for companions (creatures that follow you around).
This is difficult but much less problematic than Cosmetics.
Sample of what this looked like was shown.

Talking about fitting a new iconic into this year if the extra time works out, otherwise next year.

Psionics will have to wait not only due to work on spell system but the additional work of balancing such, but is a favorite to do someday.
Alchemist took much, much more time than anticipated and Psionics would be greater.

Would like to add a new stateroom to the guild airship and its about 9th on the to do list, but keeps getting pushed back.

Class balancing is an ongoing process.

Bows required a complete rework of the Bow animation and when it is done the Bow will be in much better shape.
New Bow tree will be later, and while it will add to the Bow options it is not consider a Bow fix in itself.

Bows will not fire faster at level cap due to too many attacks increasing Lag issues, but they are working over the Bows (implied level cap Bow will be improved).
On the same note, the Haste Action Boost might need to be replace with something just as attractive like massive crit bonus due to Lag issues.

Epic Destinies explained somewhat in detail.
Seems to be going towards their versions of some of the ideas I and others presented:
Epic Destiny will be more like Heroic Trees in function.
There will be a pool of points to spend when you reach level 20.
There will be points earned per each level gained to spend.
You will be able to spend points on multiple Epic Destiny Trees.
They have pinpointed which Epic Destiny Trees are very popular and which are not.
The unpopular trees will be improved.
One of the goals is that thru the pool of points and improving the overall effectiveness of the Trees, entry into Epic will be enjoyable (or some other words therein).

They know people want Monks improved, but its Bow time atm.
They have lists of things to do on Monks including making Finishing Moves more dramatic.

No answers on individual items, because this is not the format for that.

Server opened up for new update.

Goal of doing these Q&A talks more often.
We should see more ask Sev anything format with Cordovan.

The questions about Mini Expansion were:
Salt____Marsh is too big for a pack.
Might be 8 or 9 (rough guess not commitment) dungeons.
They realize that ViP should either get:
1) a discount on the Base Pack
2) or bonus items.
The tech to make that happen (I guess seeing you are VIP when purchasing) is being put in place and will be available to use by the time Mini Expansion arrives.
So, they realize that Vip needs to feel Mini Expansion still worthwhile to be Vip.
Also, realize that the LotR Mini Expansion was not as attractive as usual and future could be improved upon.

Savage Island (whatever the Dino pack is) will not be this year, but enthusiasm is too great to withhold in the future.

There is unlikely to be a Greyhawk World due to the scope required for creating a new world and the demand for people to return to Forgotten Realms (which they will do sometime in the future) and continue with Eberron.
Sev did not want to discuss Copywrite issues, saying simply if they bring in a new world they want it to be BIG.
Planescape will have to wait for the same reasons (although he is inclined to do that world), due to the fact that it would be so intense there might not be any new content for a year in order to create the new world (which is not a good business model at this time).

No comments or complaints about the new owners.
Was a comment on having applied for _____ (I forget) and therefore he could not discuss yet.
Also, artists are getting new texture and particle tools and ____ (which is the equivalent of a graphic update of sorts).

Half Elf is being redone as we speak.

Other races have been used so often that it might be a mistake to rework.
Therefore instead of improving the Elf race, they brought out the Wood Elf as an model upgrade.
New races with better looks instead of redoing all the old, to prevent shocking players.
(Here is where the mention of iconics came in).

No mention of a new class in the works.
Currently focused on Epic Destinies.

There will be a level increase with the next Big Expansion, however the Epic Destinies MUST be done first.
(And there will be the Mini Expanion before the Big Expansion.)
No mention of how high the level cap will go, but mention that they read player feedback about the level cap increase in detail and decided they must do the epic destinies (implication of other thoughts of reading feedback not said).

Comment by Cordovan that the new Epic Destinies will be more enjoyable/better than the old?

Other questions answered....

Half Elf will have new skin/model.


Oh and yes, Reaper points will be increased, but only after the new reaper system is created which should reduce lag, creating a Reaper Ranks along with Leadership for Party Leader sharing part of their Reaper Rank power to help newer players survive in reaper better.


Also, Epic Destinies will become more approachable by new players.



Another Lag issue is that the internet as a whole is far more unstable after the Virus hit than before.


Mention of until December for redeeming code (but please check and make sure that is right)?

[myliftkk_v2]

we just want to be informed.

^^ I don't need to hear from self-styled reporters not reporting 100 what was said, but what they think about what was said 90 and was said 10. I get enough of that across every vertical I'm in and the inaccuracies are legion.

Let's read what was actually said first, then we can robustly debate its meaning, while having an accurate textual record to reference.

[Silverleafeon]

I would love to read an actual transcript as well, please don't let my memories prohibit someone taking the time to do so.

[myliftkk_v2]

Hired several tech to deal with lag issues.
Are hiring more people right now.
Lag issue solutions are currently divided between: making effects more efficiently applied, and too many attacks at level cap, and ____
There will be a mega server, but initial tests on the mega server indicate that lag issues must be solved first.


Thank you for this.

Permanent fixes for Lag + Megaserver are most likely things to get me to start back up regularly pugging again. I will be interested to see how this goes.

[Annex]

From my memory: <snip>

Thank you for taking the time to write a synopsis of the Question and Answer.

[Inanout]

TNX for list.

[Ganak]

Some specific notes on LAG:

"Have been experimenting with new infrastructure changes, starting with Argo...to mixed results...some say a little better, some say not better.

Looking at effects system and changes there.

Main goals: Continue to look at infrastructure, but really the effects system is lagging us in terms of how many effects can apply to creatures. We need to revamp our proc system (so it makes more sense and to be more unified as now there are procs all over the place), part of this is at the high end players attack so fast. Need to make action boost feel good (like crits rather than haste). Effects system needs to be streamlined and work better. There are ways its being used currently that are not ideal.

Infrastructure stuff should help some backend things part of it.

Referenced weird year and pandemic impact on internet and saw some strange cases on the public internet, and many cases are related to this (good pings; dropped packets)."

More people; more engineering resources. They are hiring.



That proves it; Cetus is the cause of our lag.

[Rastallin]

I would like to thank Severlin and Cordovan for today's Question and Answer session, celebrating the 15th Anniversary of DDO during the Weekly Live Stream.

Today's session was extremely informative and provide insight into a large number of problems, concerns and issues that many of us have with DDO. Much more so than previous Q/A and ask the devs.

At this juncture it would appear that previous ownership was far more secretive or selective in what information could be provided to the public.

An example of this was the discussion on Cosmetics and the lack of a Cosmetic Wardrobe. The problem is with Mirror of Glammering doesn't make a "cosmetic" item, rather it is a "link" to the existing items. I am not sure I am wording that correctly, but that's the gest. This gives us, the player base, an understanding as to why something that looks so simple to us isn't fixed or changed.

Thank You

As simple as this explanation is, it goes along way to improving custom relations. We now understand and can move on. Transparency is important devs. We like to know why things can't be done. Also excellent news on the reaper point increase. I know a heap of people will be happy about that.

[Silverleafeon]

A point that I forgot:

Player Council Application deadline is closed.

The people working on that project are sorting thru applications.

If you did apply, Mid March is the earliest you might they might be done with choosing applications, maybe later than that.

[Mofus]

Yes, was a nice interview, very informative, thanks guys.

[Cernunan]

They are planning 2 Hard Core seasons this year, the first happening in April

[Inanout]

I was impressed with Severlin.
I will be renewing sub because of this.

[LightBear]

I would love to read an actual transcript as well, please don't let my memories prohibit someone taking the time to do so.

Go Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnN2DN0PfZo

Press the [...] icon below the video window, or to the left of the video title.
You get a selection of which one is "Open Transcript".

To the right of the video the auto generated transcript appears.
About 1500 lines of text, not going to paste that here.

[infael]

Silver, thanks for the info!

[infael]

Thank you!!! The captions actually look good so far ( haven't finished watching yet)


Go Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnN2DN0PfZo

Press the [...] icon below the video window, or to the left of the video title.
You get a selection of which one is "Open Transcript".

To the right of the video the auto generated transcript appears.
About 1500 lines of text, not going to paste that here.

[CeltEireson]

Hmm if they can do a stable for the mounts could they not also do something similar for permanent hirelings?

[Aelonwy]

Hmm if they can do a stable for the mounts could they not also do something similar for permanent hirelings?

They have something for hirelings, its called a hireling folder, its like a bag for hirelings that takes up one inventory slot but will hold multiple unique hirelings and even stacks of the generic ones. Its purchased from the store.

Problem is we have so many unique, permanent hires from expansions and what-not that the hireling folder doesn't suffice and we will likely have more permanent hires in the future.

A tab for the permanent hires would be nice or better yet turn them into permanent feats like tome feats, except they act like toggles. Toggle one on to summon.

[NemesisAlien]

01:03
hello everyone
01:04
and uh welcome to a chat with severlin
01:06
our executive producer for dungeons and
01:08
dragons online right here on twitch.tv
01:11
ddostream
01:12
happy 15th anniversary everyone we're
01:15
kicking off our 15th anniversary
01:16
celebrations today
01:18
with the release of our anniversary
01:20
event we've got some free gifts that
01:22
we're giving out
01:23
you can find all of that stuff on
01:25
ddo.com additionally this morning we
01:27
published our
01:28
latest producers letter producer being
01:31
that guy nope
01:32
that that get whichever that direction
01:36
him over there on the other side of the
01:38
boulder uh that being
01:40
severlin how are you doing i'm doing
01:42
great
01:43
i thought you were pointing the beholder
01:45
it's so it all flips around on webcam
01:47
and apparently it's extremely difficult
01:49
oh i need to point the wrong direction
01:51
is what i need to do
01:52
that's how i have to do this so how's it
01:55
going everybody welcome
01:56
this is going to be a hangout a chat for
01:59
the next hour we're going to do some q a
02:01
basically opening up
02:02
it all up to your questions whatever
02:03
you'd like to talk about in the meantime
02:05
we certainly have some things to talk
02:07
about as well like the producers letter
02:09
and
02:09
any other big topics that that we know
02:12
you are interested in so uh let's get
02:15
right to it uh actually i should
02:17
probably take care of these first two
02:19
questions
02:20
uh that is servers live when question
02:22
mark
02:23
should be within the next hour here i'm
02:25
actually keeping an eye on
02:27
email but uh we should be live with
02:30
update
02:31
48 patch four that being the anniversary
02:34
patch
02:34
and the new raid patch in about the next
02:37
hour
02:38
so stay tuned for that and i can answer
02:41
that and then also the question about
02:43
will there be any anniversary related
02:44
bonuses and sales
02:46
yep there will those are also kicking
02:48
off this afternoon we're going to have
02:49
more information about that
02:51
over on ddo.com all right so
02:55
sev salt marsh mini expansion
02:58
question or comma low level raid
03:00
question mark
03:02
uh let's talk about that in two points
03:05
first off hey we announced salt marsh
03:07
yes we did i'm so excited uh so
03:11
we're going to be doing that um salt
03:14
marsh was big enough and had enough
03:16
stuff in it that we didn't want to limit
03:18
it to a normal adventure pack so we
03:20
tried to make it bigger but we just
03:22
couldn't
03:23
we just can't turn around a expansion
03:25
that big but we wanted to give it
03:27
justice because
03:28
like not only is the classic module
03:31
iconic but it's been recently touched
03:33
upon as well
03:34
so we wanted we wanted it to be bigger
03:37
and uh
03:38
it is our plans are are
03:41
are big so we're excited about that i
03:44
don't know that we want to give numbers
03:46
on dungeons at this point as it's still
03:48
somewhat in its planning stages i
03:50
believe
03:52
i think i mean it's certainly big like
03:55
what 8 dungeons 89
03:59
if we can get them in that as we're
04:01
going through
04:02
is is what we're looking at you know
04:04
landscape would be cool
04:06
uh and yeah i realized the irony of just
04:09
throwing out some numbers after you just
04:11
were like i don't know if you want to
04:12
throw out some numbers yeah i don't
04:14
i don't know because i don't as clearly
04:15
as you were hearing now on this
04:17
chat they're not 100 so you're not at
04:20
this point
04:20
right so like but it'll be bigger than a
04:23
regular adventure pack for sure yeah
04:25
like like substantially so yeah we're
04:28
going to be
04:29
going there so um red piety was
04:33
saying say my name so there you go
04:35
you're
04:36
in in in this small community
04:40
uh let's so what about uh hipporan as
04:42
the next question is isle of dread not
04:44
being thought about anymore
04:45
what what's up with poor isle of dread
04:47
after we announced salt marsh
04:49
uh oh isla dread we're the
04:52
the artists all want to do dinosaurs so
04:54
you'll you
04:56
you there do not allow me to uh
05:00
reduce the excitement the studio has for
05:02
doing that it's just too big for this
05:04
year
05:05
yeah it's just too big yep
05:10
okay
05:11
[Music]
05:13
um we're constantly looking at vip value
05:16
and we want to look at that
05:17
in fact one of the lessons that we've
05:19
learned as we've moved for
05:21
uh uh the way of doing bigger
05:25
updates and mini expansion is that we
05:27
want the vips to feel they're getting
05:29
good value during that time
05:30
so we definitely are looking at that uh
05:33
we're looking at tech to allow that
05:35
um so hopefully the vip people will be
05:38
pretty happy that like they're getting
05:40
good value from that
05:41
uh and that it builds into the vip
05:44
that's one of the things that we that
05:46
that's one of the lessons that we've
05:47
learned but
05:48
unfortunately early on when we were
05:50
doing this kind of
05:51
update we didn't really have to tech to
05:53
do stuff like that
05:55
so now that we're looking at that that
05:56
that those are the as we're looking at
05:58
the tech and what we can get
05:59
accomplished
06:00
um those are the questions that we're
06:02
definitely want to answer
06:03
what about a level cap increase so we
06:05
had referenced the possibility of one
06:07
and i believe last year's producers
06:09
letter i i
06:09
that hasn't happened yet uh what what's
06:11
our plans for the level cap
06:13
uh the level cap was basically
06:16
our plan will be our next big expansion
06:19
will include a level cap is our current
06:21
plan
06:22
we we went through and looked at
06:26
um the how people were
06:29
responding to our plans for the last one
06:32
and realized that
06:33
we just it wasn't the right time uh we
06:36
needed to
06:37
work on uh some some other
06:40
infrastructure stuff
06:41
when i say infrastructure what i mean is
06:43
epic destinies like what we want to do
06:45
is the level cap
06:46
um will will come after the epic destiny
06:48
revamp and that's what we're working on
06:50
now
06:51
is doing some cool stuff with epic
06:52
destinies we didn't want to do a level
06:54
cap before doing that because we felt
06:56
that
06:56
um it would be important for the players
06:58
to be able to
06:59
uh you know have cool things to do with
07:02
it
07:03
one of the things about epic destinies
07:04
is they're currently so
07:06
different that people getting to level
07:08
20 kind of
07:09
put their toes in the water but but
07:11
don't really get it
07:13
um so we want to open up epic destinies
07:15
give players more options to
07:17
sort of level up in extra epic destinies
07:20
once we finish that
07:21
then yeah we'll we'll the players will
07:24
have cool stuff to get
07:25
for the level cap and and and then we'll
07:28
be working on that
07:30
all right i want to i was going back
07:31
through twitch chat and by the way also
07:33
welcome everyone on youtube and facebook
07:35
we're primarily answering or
07:37
focusing our questions on twitch chat at
07:39
the moment but i
07:40
am keeping an eye on your questions as
07:42
well we'll make sure we get those
07:43
questions
07:44
asked as well if we can by the end of
07:46
the show here
07:48
uh i wanted to bring up a question kind
07:50
of a tough one because that's part of
07:52
what we're here for today is to talk
07:54
handle a couple of these tough questions
07:56
that we expect you to sling at us
07:58
so we mentioned in the producers letter
08:00
about some lessons learned
08:01
related to our previous attempt at a
08:04
mini expansion
08:06
not in this game but in our other game
08:09
and we mentioned the producers later
08:10
that we learned a few lessons so the
08:12
question is what lessons did we learn
08:14
and how will they apply
08:15
to the mini expact mentioned in the
08:17
letter
08:18
sure there's a lot of uh smaller things
08:20
that we could improve on the mini x-pac
08:22
but
08:22
two big pieces of feedback is the vips
08:25
felt that
08:26
the mini x-pac did not um reduce the
08:29
value of vip so we
08:31
realized that once we have the tech in
08:33
place um
08:34
we really need to make the vi we really
08:37
need to give them more
08:38
value so for a mini x pack meaning that
08:41
either they get more stuff or they they
08:44
pay less for the base edition
08:45
i don't know which way we're going
08:46
because it all depends on how the tech
08:48
goes out
08:49
but we definitely want the vips to to
08:52
when they approach a mini x pack that
08:54
they're their value
08:55
second is our last mini expat we really
08:57
value but not
08:58
at the excellent value that our players
09:01
have come to expect
09:02
in terms of from lautroa um i i think
09:05
that
09:06
uh the the discounts when you add up
09:08
everything we're good but
09:10
i agree with them that like we usually
09:12
do a much better job
09:14
in terms of like excellent value and
09:16
that's one of the things that we want to
09:17
address we want the players to be like
09:19
super psyched now the players have been
09:21
very good about supporting us but in
09:23
both games over the years and i
09:25
thank them for it and i'm i'm glad that
09:27
they continue to do so
09:29
but i want to reward them by really
09:31
having the value of any
09:33
extra stuff that they buy feel really
09:35
good
09:36
and i think that that's something that
09:37
we could have done and we will do better
09:39
in the future
09:40
uh when we're talking about this kind of
09:42
content
09:46
all right sounds great thank you um
09:49
we've already asked or answered that
09:51
question
09:52
[Music]
09:55
we'll scroll them through chat uh
09:58
we have a lot of suggestions and those
10:00
are always the toughest to answer
10:01
because they usually are along the lines
10:03
of that would be sweet
10:04
don't know but in along those lines have
10:07
we ever considered something like night
10:09
below or
10:09
under mountain uh i mean sure
10:13
we constantly do that one of the things
10:15
about doing
10:17
dark expansions is they get oppressive
10:19
quick
10:20
uh we learned that with the underdark
10:22
stuff uh the web
10:23
was was a little better because you're
10:25
kind of floating a little bit but
10:27
the underdark stuff can get kind of
10:30
old quick so we want to be careful that
10:32
if we do something like that
10:33
it has a number of different
10:35
environments that aren't
10:36
all like completely darkly dark grimdark
10:40
uh for that uh but right now
10:43
i think that we're going to be
10:44
concentrating on you know salt marsh
10:47
uh more classic packs and uh probably
10:51
the next big thing you'll see
10:52
sometime in the future not this year
10:54
will be like uh isle of dread
10:56
so that's like completely different from
10:59
that
11:00
dinosaurs would be very cool
11:05
uh speaking of things that can be
11:06
occasionally grim and dark
11:08
let's talk about lag a little bit uh
11:10
what are our plans for that
11:12
so we've uh moved on moving
11:16
so we're experimenting with new uh
11:21
infrastructure changes on arganescent
11:23
we've had mixed reviews
11:24
some of the people say that it was a
11:26
little better some of the argo people
11:28
say that it wasn't so we're examining
11:30
that um
11:32
and then what we're going to be doing is
11:33
we're going to be looking at the effects
11:34
system and changes in order to do that
11:37
uh did i did i went blank
11:43
no problem so basically on lag our our
11:46
main goals right now or continue to look
11:48
at the infrastructure
11:49
but really the effects system is lagging
11:51
us in terms of like
11:53
uh some some hardcore
11:57
how many effects get applied to
11:58
creatures part of it is that we need to
12:00
revamp our
12:01
proc system so that it makes more sense
12:03
and it's more unified
12:05
um because right now there's just procs
12:07
all over the place and that leads to it
12:09
part of it is at the high end players
12:11
attack so
12:12
fast um one of the things we might want
12:15
to do is
12:16
look into ways to make uh action boosts
12:18
feel good
12:19
without doing necessarily haste like
12:22
crit instead
12:23
but it would have to feel really good in
12:25
order to move that
12:26
um and and the other thing is we just
12:29
need to make the
12:30
effect system uh
12:34
more streamlined and and perform better
12:36
because there are ways it's being used
12:38
currently that i think
12:40
aren't ideal all of those changes will
12:42
lead
12:43
to the game performing better and
12:47
the infrastructure stuff should help
12:49
shore up some of the
12:51
uh back end things that might be leading
12:53
to it also it's just been a weird year
12:55
the internet during covet has been
12:57
bizarre and that has let a led to a lot
13:00
of it like there are
13:01
sometimes we've looked into lag and
13:03
they're just weird internet things like
13:05
certain places are having a hard time
13:07
and even though ping looks well
13:09
you see like drop packets on our end so
13:12
that's one of the things that kind of
13:14
complicates it related to that is
13:16
chat work we had a couple of questions
13:18
about um not just live
13:20
but the chat issues that have been going
13:22
one of them saying uh the chat issue
13:25
has not yet been resolved why is this
13:27
happening uh why has it been happening
13:29
since july is the way this person
13:30
described it
13:32
uh well i mean basically
13:36
behind the syst behind the scenes there
13:37
are
13:39
uh halo from some of the infrastructure
13:41
changes that we've made
13:43
that we're still tracking down uh they
13:46
so the we changed the back end of how
13:49
storage is done
13:50
and this halo we're looking at into it
13:53
and doing that
13:54
and uh right now we're trying to bring
13:56
more engineering resources online to do
13:58
that
13:59
uh we're currently in the process of
14:01
bringing more people on
14:03
so that's good uh and you should see
14:06
like hopefully we'll be able to see with
14:08
more engineering resources more people
14:10
looking at that
14:14
like we're aware of this and so we're
14:16
hiring currently
14:18
yep all right i am
14:22
looking through facebook chat and that
14:24
as well do you have a question that
14:26
you've maybe
14:26
been thinking about queuing up here uh
14:30
there are plans to upgrading the player
14:31
models we would love to do a revamp like
14:33
that
14:34
uh right now we do it race by race so
14:36
some of the newer player models look
14:38
good some of the older ones look classic
14:41
you want to be careful because when you
14:42
change a character that someone's been
14:44
playing for 15 years
14:46
sometimes it can be jarring uh they they
14:48
like it
14:49
so our experience our experience i'm
14:52
sorry
14:52
[Music]
14:54
one of our strategies for doing that
14:56
like one of the things we try to do is
14:58
instead of
14:58
changing the race out from under people
15:00
we bring in a new race
15:02
so like if you like the old elves you
15:05
can play those if you like the wood
15:06
elves you can play those
15:07
um the only thing i think that
15:09
universally needs to be changed which
15:10
we're working on now is the half elf
15:12
there's some texture stuff and face
15:14
options on the half alph that i think
15:17
nobody's going to argue that they want
15:18
to keep looking at so that you
15:20
revamped i need to ask a softball
15:23
question because i've seen it now
15:24
asked three different times what is that
15:26
map behind you on the video
15:28
uh it's a world map but it's but it's an
15:31
old-time
15:31
expansion map um so it's like the world
15:36
uh as it was mapped out with early
15:38
explorers
15:40
the so an actual map map of a real place
15:44
yeah the sad thing is that because where
15:46
i'm sitting you can't see all my
15:48
all my geek loot which is right behind
15:49
my chair
15:51
so you're actually only seeing the map i
15:53
think all my geek glue is just
15:55
out of range of the of the various uh
15:59
the various uh view that that we present
16:03
on camera
16:04
okay well just like i said i had three
16:06
people asking
16:07
what's that map behind them you need to
16:09
ask so so there we are
16:10
right all right uh let me see
16:17
uh we definitely want to do new
16:18
hairstyles and colors
16:20
um that's one of the things we're
16:21
actively working on now hopefully we'll
16:23
have some stuff in
16:25
by end of year um in terms of like more
16:28
character options for players uh
16:32
sometime mid-year maybe we can look at
16:34
that but i'm not sure uh
16:37
the find out what a
16:40
real place earth any plans for graphic
16:42
game engine remaster
16:44
uh question quite a bit what about the
16:46
idea of some kind of game engine upgrade
16:48
or
16:48
game uh graphics update
16:52
probably um in terms of like we want to
16:55
add
16:55
certain graphic functions that are in
16:58
more modern engines to our engines
17:00
there are plans in the work to do that
17:02
uh and to introduce them
17:04
to the games uh in the long term not in
17:06
the short term
17:07
that would be something for uh 2022
17:12
um but yeah the artists definitely want
17:15
better tools better particle effects um
17:18
for instance uh we will probably be
17:21
bringing in some lighting improvements
17:23
but that needs a lot of work we could
17:25
use some shader work too
17:27
okay your video might cut out real quick
17:29
again here while i
17:31
uh take care of an issue
17:37
i briefly i have to for some reason one
17:39
of my channels is not muting
17:41
as it must
17:44
can you hear me you just can't see me no
17:46
yeah they can hear you and everything i
17:48
just i don't want any of my
17:50
notifications going through there we go
17:55
um so we definitely want to revisit
17:58
um how we do that is
18:02
a question one of the issues with reaper
18:04
mode is the difficulty of
18:06
our our because we haven't done level
18:09
increase
18:10
so long the difficulty of the content
18:12
has has grown
18:14
um but yeah we we want to provide more
18:17
reaper
18:18
options there uh long-term uh cosmetic
18:21
wardrobe there's
18:22
the way mirrors of glamouring works
18:24
makes that very difficult
18:25
uh so maybe but that's a long-term thing
18:29
that isn't in our short-term radar
18:31
where our short-term radar actually will
18:33
probably be the
18:35
mount wardrobe we know that the players
18:37
like getting mounts but right now it
18:38
just takes up too much storage so
18:40
we'll probably be doing like we'll
18:42
probably be doing
18:44
mountain re uh amount thing so we were
18:46
talking about that
18:47
and we'd like to do is for the
18:49
anniversary maybe make the mount
18:50
um the mount interface just free to
18:53
everyone
18:54
uh as sort of like hey anniversary
18:56
here's a cool new feature
18:58
um and just have it so that mounts
19:00
become tokens and once you put them in
19:02
your mount
19:03
inventory they just exist there so you
19:05
don't have to have like
19:07
472 uh yeah
19:10
wow that was fast yeah well i feel like
19:13
did you did you really anticipate me
19:15
talking about it i took the liberty of
19:17
of just kind of quick throwing it up on
19:19
the screen here so
19:20
uh i i hope that's okay i think it
19:22
probably is right so
19:24
yeah you talked about it yeah yeah i
19:27
wasn't
19:29
it's funny because like i was like well
19:31
you know we probably won't be able to
19:33
show it off so i i maybe i'll talk about
19:35
it but
19:36
uh yeah there's uh there's some kind of
19:39
cool mount stuff coming
19:41
um in in that will make it uh better and
19:44
easier to collect your mounts
19:45
that way you don't have to like right
19:47
now people are like oh i would love to
19:49
get
19:49
a whole bunch of different colors but
19:51
they don't have the bag space
19:52
yeah so yeah uh i don't pay too much
19:56
attention to the particular avatars on
19:58
that mount they were just kind of all
19:59
placeholders and stuff
20:00
yeah sure yeah in other words don't
20:03
don't suspect that i'm spoiling things
20:04
yeah
20:05
yeah uh
20:11
let's talk a little bit about hardcore i
20:12
see a couple of questions so far in chat
20:15
about asking about the hardcore
20:16
plans for 2021 uh hardcore season
20:20
will be coming up uh
20:23
i don't remember the exact calendar was
20:25
it april
20:26
yes so we have another we have another
20:29
hardcore season coming up we want to
20:30
make sure that we
20:31
you know look at the balance of things
20:33
for that
20:34
um and give the players some options to
20:38
maybe use some of the uh
20:41
a combination of new and beloved past
20:44
things for hardcore season so we can
20:46
we can talk about that um so that would
20:48
be super cool
20:49
um and uh people do like doing that and
20:52
competing for that so yeah uh hardcore
20:55
hardcore season is coming with
20:57
with and as you would expect probably
20:59
some balance changes around that
21:01
and we're planning two hardcore seasons
21:03
this year
21:05
right i believe yes i mean one coming up
21:08
sooner than one later in the year
21:10
rather than say uh last year's schedule
21:12
which tended to be about
21:14
90 days on 30 days off yeah uh
21:18
based on player feedback we we reduce
21:20
the amount of
21:21
of hardcore seasons so the one they feel
21:24
more special and two that the players
21:26
can kind of catch up between them
21:28
uh players were saying they were there
21:30
were some players that loved it
21:32
and some players that said that um it
21:34
was coming too fast
21:36
so we experimented with with like
21:38
slowing them down
21:39
to see you know so the players can come
21:41
in and concentrate on them but then go
21:43
back and play normal stuff
21:45
all right uh what about hirelings and
21:47
improving their ai
21:49
what would you like to see done with
21:50
them and is that something we we could
21:52
realistically see
21:53
in the future here sure i think that
21:56
hirelings and one of the issues is the
21:58
hirelings in monster ai
22:00
they exist in different systems actually
22:02
um so fixing hireling ai
22:04
is actually kind of a pain we would love
22:07
to do hireling stuff in fact i would
22:08
love to do a revamp on hireling so the
22:10
players could get better use out of them
22:12
because i think that for a lot of the
22:14
solo players hirelings are very much
22:15
part of their gameplay in a way that
22:17
our high-end kind of reaper solo crowd
22:20
like
22:21
and i love that too but they don't they
22:23
don't necessarily get as much use out of
22:25
them so we definitely want to
22:27
do something in terms of improving
22:30
hirelings or even giving the players
22:32
like more to collect or ability to
22:35
to do stuff with them
22:41
mike needs something there we go okay
22:42
now my mic is unmuted on xsplit
22:44
two questions from youtube please uh 4k
22:47
scaling question mark
22:49
yep long term we want 4k scaling all of
22:52
us
22:52
are sick of not having 4k scaling on
22:54
both games
22:55
uh the issue it's a weird issue because
22:59
the it's
22:59
the ui scaling is a hard problem to
23:02
solve and even if we solved it
23:03
mathematically we would need to redo all
23:06
of the
23:07
kind of graphics and icons in the game
23:09
to be able to scale up without
23:10
pixelizing
23:11
and it turns out that that is a massive
23:14
amount of artwork
23:15
that uh you know when we scoped it out
23:18
was
23:19
much bigger than than we had thought
23:23
and that's one of the things that holds
23:24
back kind of the 4k
23:26
scaling i suspect a similar answer may
23:28
also come to our second youtube question
23:30
which comes from cosmic what about any
23:32
movement on cosmetic
23:34
storage for ddo like i said the
23:37
cosmetics
23:38
uh are the way the mirror of glamouring
23:41
works is it doesn't make
23:43
a cosmetic token in the same way as a
23:45
mount could be made it actually
23:47
has a changed version of the item which
23:50
means that you can't
23:51
easily store it in the same way as you
23:53
could say crafting items or even
23:56
the mount interface that makes creating
23:58
a cosmetic storage like
24:00
actually really really hard
24:04
um like the mount stuff was was hard and
24:07
took us a while but
24:08
uh the cosmetic stuff would would
24:10
require us to be able to
24:11
uh um do a lot of data infrastructure
24:15
work
24:16
because all of those items come from
24:17
everywhere
24:19
okay let me head over real quick to
24:21
facebook here
24:23
uh what about scaling uh like stat
24:25
squishing like guild wars 2
24:27
actually saying like guild wars 2 any
24:29
plans for level down
24:30
scaling like guilts wars to another game
24:33
so sort of this kind of stat squishes
24:35
that seem to
24:36
to be a thing and a couple of other mmos
24:38
in the industry here
24:40
sure um i'm not saying that it won't
24:43
happen i don't have anything to uh
24:46
to talk about on there because it's so
24:48
open-ended
24:49
is it something we've talked about yeah
24:51
but i mean the games that are
24:52
the games that are doing sat squishes
24:54
are doing like you know
24:56
20 million dps and we're doing what
25:00
10 000 dps at the top end maybe a little
25:02
more
25:03
if you're you're really into it so we
25:05
have a little bit of
25:06
of room there but eventually when we do
25:09
do
25:10
sort of system revamps we want to look
25:12
into a way
25:14
of kind of scaling everything down you
25:16
just want to be careful because
25:17
it has so much halo like one of the
25:20
things that those games
25:21
guild wars 2 is good because you can
25:23
basically play all the content but one
25:24
of the things
25:25
some other games have done that where
25:27
they basically concentrate on men game
25:29
and it's okay if they're leveling
25:31
dungeons or a little off for a couple
25:33
months while they catch up
25:34
that's not the case we couldn't do that
25:35
for ddo if it messes up say
25:38
heroic dungeons like that affects so
25:40
many players that we have to be really
25:42
careful so the halo for that is is much
25:44
bigger
25:45
also the back end systems are based on
25:47
three five so
25:48
uh as much as we love that it was not
25:51
built
25:52
with uh scaling that way in mind like
25:54
some of the other games
25:56
might be
25:59
all right
26:04
uh changing default servers yes we
26:06
should change them more often
26:08
it's something that uh we should
26:11
look into i'll i'll ask about it um i
26:14
think that
26:15
one of the things is in our sort of
26:17
cadence of stuff
26:18
a lot of times it's not a direct
26:21
decision to leave them on
26:22
it's more of an oversight so it's
26:23
something that we should do uh
26:25
2020 in particular uh when we first
26:28
transitioned to working from
26:30
home tended to fall around the time that
26:32
we normally had done that work
26:34
and so in 2020 in particular we were
26:36
maybe a little bit off in our cadence
26:38
there so yeah yeah
26:41
uh i can ask a question about the
26:42
players council question from twitch
26:44
chat from tensormo uh the players
26:46
council applications are closed
26:48
the people who are running the players
26:50
council are going through those
26:51
applications in the coming weeks
26:52
and we expect to probably get going on
26:56
sort of the next session of the players
26:58
council sometime in march i can't tell
27:00
you whether it's going to be early mid
27:02
or
27:02
maybe even a little later than that at
27:04
this point but but something like that
27:06
so expect to hear some more news in the
27:07
next couple of weeks related to that
27:09
right uh one of the hard questions came
27:12
through
27:12
through is mega servers we had talked
27:14
about that until we get lag under
27:16
control
27:16
until we go through and do the fixes we
27:18
need to to the effects system into the
27:20
master servers
27:22
we're not going mega server because the
27:24
master servers wouldn't be able to
27:25
handle the increased player load
27:27
we need to fix some some things uh low
27:30
level stuff
27:31
uh about that before we go on that that
27:33
was the hold up
27:34
like when we actually tested it we we
27:36
hit some even
27:38
performance issues on the master server
27:40
which we weren't expecting
27:42
we know about the instant server lag
27:44
that we're working on now
27:46
so once we get that in place and and uh
27:50
then we can talk about mega servers all
27:52
right let me ask
27:53
a question from youtube that i see a
27:55
couple people lobbying for
27:57
what about our tr caches can we ever get
27:59
sorting with them can we
28:00
what are you going to do about tr caches
28:03
oh my god
28:04
um i so let me say something unpopular
28:07
the tr cache is not meant to be a
28:09
storage area
28:11
um it is meant to kind of hold stuff
28:13
over and then you pull it out after
28:15
reincarnate
28:16
and players have used it for a long-term
28:18
storage area
28:19
the way it's implemented is not ideal
28:22
for doing any kind of
28:24
organization stuff what we'd rather do
28:26
is give you
28:27
better storage options um to
28:30
uh to so that you feel comfortable
28:33
pulling the stuff out
28:34
rather than uh doing uh tr cash
28:37
the tr cash is a whole separate system
28:40
from our banking system
28:41
so it is unlikely that we will be trying
28:45
to
28:46
create interface with the tr cache
28:48
system in order to
28:49
allow you to use it as is extra storage
28:52
uh it's not that i'm trying to squeeze
28:53
you on the storage it's just that the
28:55
technology isn't that good for it
28:57
and we don't want to encourage players
28:58
to use it yeah so what about more
29:00
storage better storage
29:02
more storage more moar exclamation
29:05
points
29:05
we definitely need a character bank that
29:08
you can put
29:09
your character items in uh that that's
29:12
more robust
29:13
like we have new technology for it we
29:15
can't add current
29:17
character slots right now because
29:19
they're implemented in the same way as
29:20
bank slots that behind the scene your
29:22
character carries them from server to
29:24
server
29:24
so if we add more the weight of
29:26
transferring servers increase
29:28
we have the technology for doing it but
29:30
um
29:31
and that's one of the things we'd like
29:32
to get out this year is
29:34
is a bank for putting character-bound
29:36
items in
29:37
um you know that will that will not
29:40
cause you even more lag as you move from
29:42
dungeon to dungeon
29:45
all right um what about character
29:49
housing
29:51
uh right now we have guild housing i'd
29:53
love to do character housing
29:54
um i love i would love to have you be
29:57
able to create kind of a
29:59
a secret base and you know have your



To be continued.

[NemesisAlien]

30:01
hirelings there and stuff
30:03
but not this year um if we we won't do
30:06
it that's something that as we increase
30:08
the resources for the game
30:09
and the engineering resources and the
30:11
system resources we can look into things
30:13
like that
30:15
okay uh
30:18
please reaper wings i've seen a lot of
30:21
comments especially in twitch chat about
30:23
doing more kind of
30:24
reaper wings what do you want to do with
30:26
reaper wings any thoughts about that
30:28
sure i'd like to have so right now one
30:30
of the
30:31
weaknesses of reaper is the trees offer
30:34
enough power
30:35
that new players coming in can't
30:37
participate
30:38
so as i said before what we want to do
30:41
not this year but
30:43
at some point is change the reaper trees
30:45
into more of a
30:46
progression system so that and then have
30:48
a leadership system where
30:50
people who are leading groups can give
30:52
some of their reaper power to the people
30:53
in the groups
30:54
that way if you take someone along
30:56
they're not just instantly killed
30:58
once we revamp the system we can talk
31:00
about uh
31:01
pushing the reaper points up but having
31:04
them in trees and the organization of
31:06
trees and the weight of trees
31:07
isn't ideal and we don't want to add to
31:09
that right now until we have a chance to
31:11
revamp that system
31:12
hopefully we'll be able to put that
31:14
closer rather than later once we get
31:16
more engineering resources
31:18
which we're as i said currently looking
31:21
for
31:21
and trying to bring on
31:25
uh on the wish list side of things we
31:28
have someone from facebook asking what
31:30
about
31:30
ever getting greyhawk to ddo
31:35
um i don't think that
31:39
will happen there are i don't want to go
31:43
into i never want to talk about
31:45
licensing issues here
31:46
um but we don't
31:49
uh we to to really do a whole nother
31:52
world justice
31:54
we would have to um
31:58
let's just say this many of the classic
32:00
packs are vague in terms of where they
32:02
take care of
32:03
and we intentionally leave them vague so
32:06
that you can imagine whatever world
32:07
you're in
32:08
but i would not i would not create a
32:10
whole another
32:11
sort of uh world for greyhawk at the
32:14
time
32:14
uh right now um because we're already
32:17
supporting
32:18
uh both aberrant and forgotten realms
32:19
and there are players already
32:21
uh whining more for both of those if
32:24
that makes sense
32:25
so what about more forgotten realms
32:27
stuff in the future
32:29
yeah i mean we definitely would love to
32:31
do more for background stuff
32:33
since we're doing wishlist planescape
32:35
question mark
32:36
uh it's another a whole nother world to
32:39
do so
32:40
we're but not we're not moving that
32:42
direction in the
32:43
in the short term uh because in order to
32:46
do it justice would be
32:48
um doing landscape would be much bigger
32:52
than an expansion in my opinion to do it
32:54
justice
32:55
uh and so it would take so so much
32:58
time of the team that i think we would
33:00
not be well served to not have content
33:03
come out for a year while working on
33:04
landscape
33:06
all right one more wishlist question
33:08
then before i get to maybe maybe some
33:10
that we we can answer a little more
33:12
thoroughly
33:12
what about ever doing psionics i know
33:14
that that is a passion of yours to some
33:16
extent that you've just
33:17
talked a little bit about in the past i
33:19
would love to do psionics um
33:21
the doing the alchemist was fun and
33:24
great but
33:25
doing a full uh spell tree let's just
33:27
say that took us
33:29
a lot longer than we thought it would uh
33:32
and so when doing psionics we would
33:35
basically have to redo that work so we
33:37
have to be very careful about scoping
33:39
that
33:40
um usually basically the alchemist took
33:43
almost three times longer than other
33:45
previous classes we did because
33:47
we couldn't reuse any of the spells and
33:50
it was a tremendous amount
33:52
of work um it turns out uh
33:55
that doing the initial work to get the
33:57
spells in actually wasn't the problem it
33:59
was all of the
34:00
the fine-tuning balance and detail work
34:03
was
34:04
way way more so doing psionics and
34:06
creating a whole another spell system
34:08
uh would would be something that we
34:10
could do but not
34:11
short term um because now that we kind
34:14
of understand the scope of doing another
34:16
a whole nother spell system
34:18
we would we would have to be very
34:19
careful about going into that
34:21
i mean i would love to do an astral
34:23
plane
34:24
gift yankee psionics expansion
34:28
like i love that and and we we
34:31
always are looking at that but the
34:33
scoping of doing that is so
34:35
big like you just have to be careful
34:37
that we just don't get sucked into that
34:39
hole
34:40
right yeah yeah yeah
34:43
all right what about ever oh any change
34:46
this one's from strim tom
34:47
any changes to the scroll seal shard
34:50
system coming in the future i mean
34:53
there's always a chance for
34:55
doing that um in terms of uh old-time
34:58
content
34:58
we have touched upon it before um
35:02
but we're not introducing that system
35:05
uh to we probably won't be adding that
35:08
system to
35:09
like salt marsh or anything in the short
35:11
term but as we go through and touch
35:13
packs
35:14
uh yeah there's a chance that we could
35:16
we could um look into that
35:19
i see some monk players asking us about
35:22
monk work in the future
35:24
maybe we could both talk about that and
35:26
any possibility of what you see
35:28
class balance work looking like here in
35:30
2021
35:31
class balance is ongoing basically what
35:33
ends up happening is we touch upon class
35:35
balance
35:36
when we do a new hardcore season so the
35:38
players can usually
35:40
know that like hey this hardcore season
35:42
like what are we touching now
35:44
right now our focus on systems is fixing
35:46
bows
35:47
um that's why you haven't seen other
35:49
things uh and
35:50
that has gotten pretty deep because uh
35:53
the
35:53
the bull problem was deeper than just uh
35:56
doing some numbers
35:57
um it once we dug into it there was a
36:00
there was some serious issues with uh
36:03
animation
36:04
and uh animation speed um and how that
36:08
affected
36:08
how they worked with uh haste
36:12
like the spell haste and attack speed
36:14
and so
36:15
the bow thing not only will there be new
36:18
tree coming later in the year
36:19
but the bow changes are
36:23
really about re doing the bow animations
36:27
and that's uh something that we're deep
36:29
into
36:30
and the bow animation changes or
36:32
something that's looking great
36:33
i really like how they look so far
36:35
they're still being fine-tuned
36:37
so once we do the bow changes then we'll
36:40
be in a position where we can
36:42
kind of uh move on to other classes uh
36:45
bose have been behind crossbows for a
36:47
long time
36:48
part of it is because the animations
36:49
were so slow and the way they were
36:51
implemented we just couldn't speed them
36:53
up anymore
36:54
so that has been a tremendous thing that
36:56
the team has kind of taken on
36:58
uh in the short term and you should be
36:59
seeing some stuff with
37:01
bow changes soon even if the uh the
37:04
horizon walker tree isn't
37:06
like isn't going to happen like
37:08
immediately but rather later in the year
37:10
so our that's where our class balance is
37:12
right now in terms of that
37:15
like at this point i can't remember if
37:17
we brought up this topic yet or not but
37:19
we have some
37:20
folks including matthew over on facebook
37:22
asking about our epic destiny work what
37:24
are our plans for epic destinies to the
37:27
extent we can talk about them here for
37:28
2021
37:30
sure one of the things that we want to
37:32
do is we want to make the epic destinies
37:33
work more like the heroic trees
37:35
because when the players come from the
37:37
heroic trees which they love
37:38
and they go into epic destinies it's so
37:41
different
37:42
and it requires so much to kind of like
37:44
open them that they feel like it's not
37:46
accessible
37:47
so i would imagine um that players
37:50
who with that opinion will be pleased
37:52
that the epic destinies will open up
37:54
more like
37:55
uh heroic trees and you'll be able to
37:57
spend points in multiple epic destiny
37:59
trees in a manner that you can kind of
38:00
cross
38:01
spend their treats as well that means
38:04
that like
38:05
uh it also opens up a lot of build
38:07
possibilities because instead of being
38:08
i'm shadow dancer and i probably put
38:10
these points into these things
38:12
um it will be ah i'm gonna go shadow
38:16
dancer for some of the points
38:18
and dreadnought for some of the points
38:20
and see how that works
38:22
so that creates a whole bunch of new
38:24
build opportunities for the players
38:27
um in addition obviously with the epic
38:29
destiny revamp there are
38:31
a handful of epic destinies that
38:33
everyone uses and a whole bunch that
38:35
people just kind of don't
38:36
um so we want to make those more
38:38
exciting and rebalanced as well
38:41
so hopefully
38:44
the end goal will be that right now what
38:47
epic destiny
38:48
you use is kind of predetermined a
38:51
little bit by like what you're trying to
38:53
do
38:53
uh but we're trying to open that up so
38:55
that you have a lot of different
38:57
options and flavors for that
39:02
i would like to announce to everyone
39:04
watching this live that as of about
39:05
three minutes ago we are
39:07
now live on the game worlds everything's
39:09
green
39:10
green is go you're welcome to log in if
39:12
you'd like
39:14
and use the coupon code happy
39:18
bail on this and just run over to the
39:20
live servers
39:21
well i want to talk i want to do the
39:22
raid i need to do the new raid tonight
39:24
but yeah
39:25
yeah but also the coupon code half happy
39:28
15 ddo
39:30
happy 15 ddo will get you those free
39:32
gifts and you've got
39:33
through the end of december plenty of
39:35
time to redeem it but yeah redeem it now
39:37
why not
39:38
and you're gonna get uh a raid item from
39:41
a select list
39:42
similar to what we did in the 10th
39:44
anniversary
39:45
but a different list and then also a
39:47
15th anniversary cloak
39:49
and you can find out more at ddo.com
39:52
15th anniversary so so where were you 15
39:56
years ago
39:59
where was i 15 years ago yeah what were
40:01
you doing when ddl got released
40:03
uh what was i doing was i i think i was
40:06
programming interfaces to scientific
40:08
instruments like electron microscopes
40:10
okay uh maybe was that about where i was
40:15
i might have been working on uh other
40:18
kinds of software
40:19
that my ddo might actually even predate
40:22
that
40:22
that that time so um
40:26
let's see so some hard stuff monks yeah
40:29
we
40:29
we we know that um the players kind of
40:32
want to do monks
40:34
bows were in a sadder state and affect
40:36
more classes
40:37
so let us get through that uh somebody's
40:40
asking about
40:41
uh twitching and chopping in order to
40:43
get
40:44
extra uh raid stuff um in order to get
40:48
extra dps and raids rather and that's
40:50
something that's on our
40:51
that's on our radar and we're looking at
40:53
it turns out that that's a really hard
40:55
problem to solve without
40:56
uh causing halo so we're looking at that
40:59
um let's see what other hard questions
41:02
so you don't think i'm ducking you
41:04
um let's see
41:09
you're supposed to be made today um
41:12
augments yeah we probably have augment
41:16
halo still that's thank you for bringing
41:17
that up
41:18
shifter uh allowing them to use hand
41:21
wraps
41:22
uh let's work on shifter first um
41:26
and then let's see what else
41:32
um uh halo by the way for someone saying
41:35
halo means
41:36
quote problems up the tree uh can we
41:38
explain a little bit what we mean by
41:40
halo when we say a halo book
41:42
yeah so what ends up happening is uh the
41:45
the code in any in any long-term code
41:48
base
41:48
you have code built on code code and
41:52
so it halo is when you change something
41:54
here and you don't expect it
41:56
to affect other systems but it does
41:59
for instance if we made a change to the
42:01
epic destinies and there was some shared
42:03
code we may not realize that we also
42:05
did something to break uh heroic
42:09
trees that would be an example or we
42:11
made a change to this race and we didn't
42:13
realize that
42:14
another race also used the same
42:16
animation script
42:17
and so we make a change to this race to
42:19
fix something but this other race now is
42:22
is much slower so halo is is
42:25
kind of that intended effect usually
42:28
hopefully with good engineers from new
42:30
code
42:30
it's less of a problem because
42:32
everything is kind of you know
42:34
well organized and then as people layer
42:36
on and people have different design
42:38
philosophies and you have
42:39
uh generations like for detail literally
42:42
generations of programmers coming in
42:45
uh the chance for halo grows a lot of
42:47
times with these longer projects
42:51
i see in chat yes after you enter
42:53
happy15ddo
42:55
to redeem your coupon code and the ddo
42:58
store you need to log out
42:59
and log back in for that very first time
43:02
uh
43:02
to do it because that's that's how it
43:04
does it applies a little thing to your
43:05
account
43:06
and then when you log back in it gets
43:08
you all this stuff
43:09
so yes yes to twitch chat you do you do
43:11
need to log out
43:13
uh real quick after redeeming that code
43:14
in order to get your stuff
43:16
yeah if you see stuff uh as a result of
43:19
today's patch
43:20
tweet this twitch chat is not your best
43:23
place to post it
43:24
yeah a year from now it's going to be
43:26
somewhat less relevant huh
43:28
i would go i would go to the forums yeah
43:31
i i i care deeply but i'm not going to
43:34
be able to
43:35
cut and paste out of twitch chat start
43:37
looking for things
43:40
um
43:43
yeah i'm trying to find some good
43:45
questions we've got a little time yet
43:47
here i'm looking at the clock
43:48
we have about 15 minutes left on the
43:50
clock here so it's a good time to
43:52
if you've been in chat and looking to
43:54
ask some questions uh maybe been a
43:55
little
43:56
uh afraid to ask questions feel free to
43:58
ask them i'm gonna be scrolling back
44:00
through the list to see what kind of
44:01
stuff
44:02
we can find but it's a great opportunity
44:04
to ask your question if you'd like to
44:11
so our goal is that epic the epic
44:14
reincarnation loop will not change
44:16
right when you when you uh do an epic
44:20
reincarnation
44:21
it will bring you from 20 to 30 and not
44:24
you won't be required to go to 3132
44:26
that's one of the design goals is that
44:28
epic destiny reincarnation stays the
44:30
same because i know that one of the
44:32
concerns people had with
44:34
level increases in the past is it
44:36
intended to increase the
44:38
uh the reincarnation loop but we don't
44:40
want that
44:41
uh so yes that reincarnation loop will
44:43
stay to 30
44:44
uh in terms of past lives for it if we
44:47
does that make sense yep uh question
44:50
that's come up in
44:51
chat here along with on the forums i
44:53
know in recent days uh
44:54
what about a new heroic raid do we
44:57
ever have plans to do another heroic
45:00
raid
45:01
well i mean most of our raids have
45:04
uh a number of our raids also have a
45:06
heroic version
45:07
uh but uh there are some that we keep to
45:10
to top end because that's where we want
45:12
to balance it
45:13
um yeah i mean we'd love to one of the
45:15
things we don't see though is we don't
45:17
see a lot of
45:18
um we don't see a lot of heroic people
45:21
in that loop
45:22
kind of going and raiding during that
45:24
time because they're more interested in
45:25
doing
45:26
small group experiences that are moving
45:29
them
45:29
sort of up the chain and so raid is hard
45:32
to do because you
45:33
you will get past the loot so quick also
45:36
a lot of our
45:37
uh longer term players already have kind
45:40
of their
45:41
what their loot at each uh
45:44
level band is so we want to be careful
45:47
if we can do a
45:48
heroic raid to give the heroic people
45:51
more stuff to do
45:52
that's great but if it takes too much
45:54
time the amount of people that jump into
45:56
her
45:56
grades are not our are
46:00
not as high as you would expect because
46:03
of
46:03
because of how the play patterns work so
46:05
we don't we wouldn't want to
46:07
spend a lot of our precious development
46:10
budget
46:10
doing stuff that a lot of the players
46:13
will kind of skip because they're kind
46:14
of
46:14
moving past that that so fast
46:18
uh related to the leveling process uh
46:21
zakaria
46:23
mentions in twitch chat how do we feel
46:25
about levels 22
46:26
23 and 25 this person is
46:30
offering their opinion on it which is
46:31
that there are no feats and it feels
46:34
like dead levels is that intentional or
46:36
an unfortunate
46:37
accident how do we feel about the low 20
46:40
leveling experience and my understanding
46:42
is that's at least part of our thinking
46:43
on this upcoming epic destiny work right
46:46
sure like one of the things that will
46:48
happen is unlike epic destinies now
46:51
you should as you level through those be
46:53
able to invest in your epic destinies
46:55
and so
46:56
uh yeah maybe you won't get an extra
46:58
feet right now we're not i don't know
46:59
that we're
47:00
revamping those but like being able to
47:02
spend you know your four points in epic
47:04
destinies as you go up like heroic will
47:06
feel good
47:07
um and that's one of the things that
47:09
that is happening now
47:12
um so hopefully that will help
47:15
uh if that's what they if that's what
47:17
they mean in terms of like
47:18
you know hey i leveled and nothing
47:20
happened that that should help
47:28
i would love to do more loot work in
47:30
terms of sets for low-level
47:32
epics and what your best thing to do is
47:35
suggest
47:36
suggest packs we occasionally revamp
47:38
packs like we did doleras and stuff and
47:40
usually we touch the loop when we revamp
47:42
the packs that's our strategy
47:44
so if there are packs that you would
47:45
love to see uh revamped
47:48
like that's a great thing to bring up on
47:49
the forums or you know
47:51
and and be like hey this pack i would
47:54
love to revamp it has cool loot but the
47:56
loot has fallen behind
47:58
and we're always looking for uh packs to
48:00
revamp especially packs you know
48:02
that uh the players are like oh the
48:05
content's good but i don't play it
48:06
anymore because
48:07
uh you know it isn't rewarding enough
48:10
that those are good things to look at
48:13
all right yeah
48:16
it sounds good sorry i've got something
48:18
happening in my kitchen
48:21
uh there are a lot of players who are
48:24
asking about reaper wing colors
48:26
which is something that is certainly
48:27
reasonable request
48:29
that i think that we could we could
48:31
definitely uh look into
48:33
um what else
48:36
let's see there's a whole bunch of
48:39
people now making suggestions about
48:41
specific packs but this isn't the place
48:43
because there's no
48:44
there's not a good way for us to
48:46
correlate you
48:47
correlate the chat and and and move that
48:50
the form is probably good um
48:54
well this we need to we'll get the word
48:56
out and i'll put it into the
48:57
anniversary guide that yes you once
48:59
you've redeemed the code log
49:00
out and then log back in to claim your
49:03
gift
49:04
yes so yep
49:06
[Music]
49:12
let's see
49:16
the 64-bit client texturing is something
49:18
that we
49:20
uh if you could give me if
49:23
there if we could find an example of
49:24
specifically what you're seeing
49:26
texturing where so we can reproduce it
49:28
that would be useful
49:32
um how many people
49:35
let's see
49:41
we can ask this is a fairly challenging
49:44
question
49:44
related to our epic destiny discussion
49:48
there was a rumor that came out last
49:49
summer that we were
49:51
going to level gate epic destiny tiers
49:54
is that still part of the design plan
49:57
that that is
49:58
so what will happen is we kind of want
50:00
to try to do our cake you need it too
50:01
there will be a pool of epic destiny
50:03
points that activate when you hit
50:05
um when you kind of hit the first levels
50:09
so that you do get the boost up front
50:11
but then after that
50:12
the ones that you get per level will be
50:15
reduced
50:16
so you won't get everything up front you
50:18
will have to as you go up
50:20
uh you know have a chance to spend your
50:22
points
50:23
um and and do that so yes i
50:27
i know that there are some people that
50:28
would rather have everything up front
50:30
and um i know it's a hard answer to hear
50:33
that
50:33
no there are there will be points that
50:36
you will earn as you level
50:37
but also it won't be everything well we
50:40
plan on having a
50:41
a pool at the bottom end that as soon as
50:44
you hit you'll be able to spend
50:46
a pool of epic destiny points and then
50:49
go up from there
50:50
so yes and no like
50:53
probably just enough so that it will
50:55
feel good to go up and then
50:57
you'll still have uh things to buy as
50:59
you go up
51:00
that's our that's our current goal i
51:02
think maybe to some extent the hope is
51:04
that
51:04
the system itself will be revamped
51:06
enough that that won't
51:08
be a driving concern right like right
51:10
now i think that a lot of players are
51:12
like oh my god
51:13
going doing the lower levels without a
51:15
full tree will will
51:16
really be terrible but i don't think
51:18
that that will be the case
51:20
like i think that you'll get enough
51:21
stuff up front and uh epic destinies
51:23
will offer enough things that it'll be
51:25
cool
51:27
what about guild air ships what are we
51:29
going to be able to carve out time for
51:30
guilds huh
51:32
um guild guild revamp is
51:35
uh never-ending we always we always want
51:39
to
51:39
we always we don't touch it we don't
51:41
touch it enough right so
51:43
right now i'm discussing i've been
51:44
discussing with uh
51:46
uh one of the things that we have
51:48
specifically put in is for
51:50
extra resources to do guild revamps for
51:52
both games
51:53
um and that's an ongoing uh design thing
51:55
that we're discussing
51:56
so i can't really talk about it right
51:58
now because i don't want to get people's
51:59
hopes up and then
52:01
uh and then have us not be able to go
52:03
into that as full as we'd like
52:05
but yes it is on our radar to do um
52:08
there's
52:09
there is some class and tree specific
52:11
stuff that's way beyond the scope of a
52:13
talk like this
52:14
so i probably won't go into specific
52:16
class balance questions
52:18
um other than like hey is monk going to
52:20
be revamped and we had some ideas on
52:22
that
52:23
like i know a lot of people were talking
52:24
about monk uh and we'd like to look into
52:26
that
52:27
i just i think one of the things about
52:29
mine because i like the finishing moves
52:30
to feel better
52:32
um and i think the team agrees and we
52:34
have
52:35
kind of looked into the monk thing i
52:37
think what happened is the last time we
52:38
looked into the monk
52:40
um we had some awesome ideas but like
52:42
the revamp got so big that we actually
52:44
sculpted it was like oh my god
52:46
like that that is huge um let us get
52:49
through bows
52:50
and the tree uh and then we can kind of
52:53
look into it
52:54
yeah uh the bo someone had asked and
52:56
unfortunately i can't
52:57
remember the exact question or where it
53:00
was posted but they were asking about
53:01
whether the bow changes would be
53:03
more focused on a universal tree
53:07
or an enhancement tree or whether these
53:09
kind of changes are more
53:10
game-wide in the scope the first set
53:13
would be gain
53:14
wide like i said we had to do a lot of
53:15
animation work to help fix that
53:18
um i think that we may even
53:21
do some uh that way
53:24
lower level characters will shoot faster
53:26
out of the gate so you don't have to
53:28
wait
53:28
high level to make it feel good we don't
53:30
want to increase the overall
53:31
rate at which both uh fire at the top
53:34
end because
53:35
obviously we're all working on lag and
53:37
increasing attack rate is something that
53:39
we have to be very careful about
53:40
uh the animations just look and feel
53:42
better too um
53:44
so and then uh obviously we're working
53:46
on numbers to bring bows back
53:48
more in line with crossbows across the
53:50
game and then we'll
53:51
additionally have a tree that will offer
53:54
people uh
53:56
extra opportunities to do bow stuff
54:01
yes we'd love to do another thing for
54:02
the last stateroom
54:04
that has been one of the things that
54:06
gets bumped down
54:08
for what a number of years now it's like
54:10
it's always
54:12
kind of in the ninth spot of things we
54:14
want to do
54:16
so that's it's hard like it hurts me to
54:19
see people saying oh i want to do
54:21
something in the last stateroom because
54:22
yes we do do
54:24
and it's hard to bump to sometimes it's
54:26
so hard to prioritize this stuff like
54:28
you have darlings that you would love to
54:29
see in and it's like oh god i would love
54:31
to do this but we just
54:32
can't hurts me i could do a head desk on
54:36
the keyboard thing of just banging i
54:38
want the test kobold i want the test
54:40
cobalt yeah
54:41
i know yeah everybody does and just like
54:44
okay
54:44
is it time for the test and then
54:46
something else comes in goes the last
54:48
minute
54:49
bumps it down you're like oh my god yeah
54:51
yeah give us something
54:53
uh when is the next crystal cove someone
54:55
asked in twitch chat that'll be
54:57
happening in
54:58
june i believe is our current target
55:00
date for crystal cove
55:14
uh let's see what else
55:17
i think we're actually maybe i think
55:19
we've covered a lot of questions here
55:21
um someone wants to get more dragon gems
55:25
yeah um so that's something that we
55:28
should do like people should not be
55:30
cut out from the only problem is that if
55:33
we said that the dragon gem most of the
55:35
time we try not to do
55:36
absolutely exclusive stuff so people can
55:39
get it
55:39
what we do is like hey it's exclusive
55:42
for a time but eventually we'll bring it
55:44
back
55:44
so i have to look at where the dragon
55:46
came that was from the anniversary we
55:48
gave that out i believe
55:49
either what last year or two years ago
55:52
two years ago
55:52
something like that um similar to the
55:55
house cloaks that are debuting in the
55:57
anniversary event
55:58
this year after being given away a
55:59
couple years ago as the anniversary gift
56:02
so you know if you've got party favors
56:03
you can fill any gaps you have or maybe
56:05
you weren't playing then or you weren't
56:06
playing on jurassic then or whatever
56:08
right yeah yeah
56:09
and jurassic then or whatever you
56:11
whatever you can get that stuff now and
56:14
i i
56:14
that seems like a likely future place
56:16
for something like the sentient dragon
56:18
gem as well
56:19
but uh we didn't do that work for this
56:21
year i mean i guess the question is
56:23
someone's asking about a speedrun server
56:25
but kind of isn't that
56:26
what hardcore is i mean i guess well it
56:29
depends
56:30
depends the hardcore is you don't move
56:32
that fast
56:35
but like yeah uh most of the speed runs
56:37
i've seen for other games usually are
56:39
like when you're dead you're dead like
56:41
also
56:41
honestly if you're doing a speed run i
56:43
mean it doesn't matter whether it's
56:45
hardcore or not if you die at level 10
56:47
on your way up you're probably going to
56:48
lose anyway
56:50
and we open up enough enough hardcores
56:52
that the players can run speed run runs
56:54
on the new hardcore season
56:56
fairly easy um and then just track who
56:59
hits 21st
57:00
um but yeah one of the things is that
57:04
um i don't know that we would want to do
57:07
it on
57:08
on live servers uh
57:11
we'd probably because it'd be very hard
57:13
to start everyone else
57:15
everyone in the same place uh that's so
57:17
much easier to do by just opening up a
57:19
new hardcore season
57:21
the closest thing we had for a speedrun
57:23
event is there was a
57:24
challenge-ified version of
57:27
the fight with the spinner of shadows
57:30
that was used for our conventions and
57:32
that was like a three-minute challenge
57:34
that kind of thing would be probably
57:36
what we would do were we to offer some
57:38
sort of speed run challenge
57:40
i think that might be a good kind of way
57:42
to do it because it
57:43
it puts people at the same place every
57:45
time and then you've got three minutes
57:47
to achieve a goal so it's
57:48
it's kind of a high score based thing i
57:51
i would love to deep dive into specific
57:54
options but we'll never be able to do
57:56
them on these questions
57:57
ama it's just out of scope so some of
58:00
the people that are talking about like
58:01
hey let's talk about like specific loot
58:04
or specific class balance trees
58:06
it just we just can't this is not a good
58:08
format for it so i apologize i'm not
58:10
trying to duck your
58:11
your stuff it's just i won't be able to
58:12
do that for our amas
58:14
[Music]
58:20
yep
58:24
i think
58:27
i think i'm still not seeing a lot of
58:29
like super big questions some wishlist
58:31
stuff that i appreciate everyone asking
58:33
in that
58:34
um but i'm not seeing a lot of stuff
58:35
that i think we could probably wrap
58:38
things up being as we are at one o'clock
58:39
here today so
58:41
why don't we just thank everyone again
58:42
and remind people that you can go to
58:44
ddo.com 15th anniversary
58:47
ddo.com slash 15th anniversary to find
58:51
out
58:51
all this stuff get your free gifts and
58:54
what have you
58:55
as we celebrate 15 years uh any kind of
58:58
last
58:59
things you want to bring up here uh sev
59:01
i'm sure there are i'm sure that there's
59:03
like eight things i forgot about
59:04
cool stuff well we'd like to do one of
59:08
the things is we
59:09
would like to try to get in a new iconic
59:12
this year
59:13
i don't know if we can do it honestly as
59:15
we're looking in
59:16
with the extreme with the chances of
59:18
with the different
59:20
ways of doing remote but i saw some
59:22
other people asking about race iconic
59:24
and and we're kind of looking at
59:26
hey can we do this and intentively
59:28
trying to shoehorn it in
59:30
i can't make a promise there but it is
59:32
something that you might see
59:33
yeah awesome all right well thank you
59:36
very much for
59:36
watching everybody thank you for being
59:38
here we're going to have to do this
59:39
again
59:40
in the relatively near future these have
59:41
gone pretty well in recent months and i
59:43
i think we're going to keep doing the
59:44
sort of thing here in the future so
59:47
one of the players have said is that
59:49
they're like we would like more
59:50
communication and
59:51
the the amas and doing them like
59:55
more frequently i think the last one was
59:57
what a month
59:58
six years is one of our ways of
60:02
addressing like
60:03
it isn't i know that it isn't the
60:06
giant amount of communication that i
60:08
would love to do but hopefully it will
60:10
kind of ask you know answer questions
60:13
rather about futures
60:14
so all right thanks everyone for
60:16
watching talk to you again soon
60:18
bye-bye thank you everyone



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnN2DN0PfZo

[NemesisAlien]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnN2DN0PfZo

[myliftkk_v2]

Both caption sets converted to a more readable format and marked up by topic. If they'd just release a bullet point summary, this would take literally like 10 minutes to read. Checked some of the captioning on the stickier subjects for fidelity and seemed pretty accurate (minus some auto-misspellings).

Should be obvious my thoughts are to the right of the dash after each bullet I care about.


INTRO




Hello everyone and uh welcome to a chat with severlin our executive producer for dungeons and dragons online right here on twitch.Tv ddostream.
happy 15th anniversary everyone we're kicking off our 15th anniversary celebrations today with the release of our anniversary event.
we've got some free gifts that we're giving out you can find all of that stuff on ddo.Com
additionally this morning we published our latest producers letter producer
being that guy nope that that get whichever that direction him over there on the other side of the boulder uh that being
severlin how are you doing
i'm doing great
i thought you were pointing the beholder it's so it all flips around on webcam and apparently it's extremely difficult
oh i need to point the wrong direction is what i need to do that's how i have to do this
so how's it going everybody
welcome this is going to be a hangout a chat for the next hour we're going to do some q a basically opening up it all up to your questions whatever you'd like to talk about
in the meantime we certainly have some things to talk about as well like the producers letter and any other big topics that that we know you are interested in
so uh let's get right to it uh
actually i should probably take care of these first two questions
uh that is servers live when question mark
should be within the next hour here
i'm actually keeping an eye on email but uh we should be live with update 48 patch four that being the anniversary patch and the new raid patch in about the next hour so stay tuned for that
and i can answer that and then also the question about will there be any anniversary related bonuses and sales
yep
there will those are also kicking off this afternoon we're going to have more information about that over on ddo.Com
all right so sev salt marsh mini expansion question or comma low level raid question mark
uh let's talk about that in two points



SALTMARSH



first off hey we announced salt marsh
yes we did i'm so excited uh so we're going to be doing that um
salt marsh was big enough and had enough stuff in it that we didn't want to limit it to a normal adventure pack so we tried to make it bigger but we just couldn't
we just can't turn around a expansion that big but we wanted to give it justice because like not only is the classic module iconic but it's been recently touched upon as well
so we wanted we wanted it to be bigger and uh it is our plans are are are big so we're excited about that
i don't know that we want to give numbers on dungeons at this point as it's still somewhat in its planning stages
i believe i think i mean it's certainly big like what 8 dungeons 89 if we can get them in that as we're going through is is what we're looking at you know landscape would be cool uh
and yeah i realized the irony of just throwing out some numbers after you just were like i don't know if you want to throw out some numbers
yeah i don't i don't know because i don't as clearly as you were hearing now on this chat they're not 100 so you're not at this point
right so like but it'll be bigger than a regular adventure pack for sure
yeah like like substantially



ISLE OF DREAD



so yeah we're going to be going there so um red piety was saying say my name so there you go you're in in in this small community
uh let's so what about uh hipporan as the next question is isle of dread not being thought about anymore what what's up with poor isle of dread after we announced salt marsh
uh oh isla dread we're the the artists all want to do dinosaurs so you'll you you there do not allow me to uh reduce the excitement the studio has for doing that it's just too big for this year
yeah it's just too big yep okay [music]



VIP GETTING BETTER VALUE?



um we're constantly looking at vip value and we want to look at that
in fact one of the lessons that we've learned as we've moved for uh uh the way of doing bigger updates and mini expansion is that we want the vips to feel they're getting good value during that time
so we definitely are looking at that uh we're looking at tech to allow that
um so hopefully the vip people will be pretty happy that like they're getting good value from that
uh and that it builds into the vip that's one of the things that we that
that's one of the lessons that we've learned but unfortunately early on when we were doing this kind of update we didn't really have to tech to do stuff like that
so now that we're looking at that that that those are the as we're looking at the tech and what we can get accomplished um those are the questions that we're definitely want to answer



LEVEL CAP INCREASE - In next expansion, not dead whatsoever



what about a level cap increase
so we had referenced the possibility of one and i believe last year's producers letter i
i that hasn't happened yet
uh what what's our plans for the level cap
uh the level cap was basically our plan will be our next big expansion will include a level cap is
our current plan we we went through and looked at um the how people were responding to our plans for the last one and realized that we just it wasn't the right time
uh we needed to work on uh some some other infrastructure stuff when i say infrastructure what i mean is epic destinies
like what we want to do is the level cap um will will come after the epic destiny revamp and that's what we're working on now
is doing some cool stuff with epic destinies
we didn't want to do a level cap before doing that because we felt that um it would be important for the players to be able to uh you know have cool things to do with it
one of the things about epic destinies is they're currently so different that people getting to level 20 kind of put their toes in the water but but don't really get it
um so we want to open up epic destinies give players more options to sort of level up in extra epic destinies once we finish that
then yeah we'll
we'll the players will have cool stuff to get for the level cap and and and then we'll be working on that



VIP GETTING BETTER VALUE?, AGAIN



all right i want to i was going back through twitch chat and by the way also welcome everyone on youtube and facebook
we're primarily answering or focusing our questions on twitch chat at the moment but i am keeping an eye on your questions as well we'll make sure we get those questions asked as well if we can by the end of the show here
uh i wanted to bring up a question kind of a tough one because that's part of what we're here for today is to talk handle a couple of these tough questions that we expect you to sling at us so we mentioned in the producers letter about some lessons learned related to our previous attempt at a mini expansion not in this game but in our other game and we mentioned the producers later that we learned a few lessons so the question is what lessons did we learn and how will they apply to the mini expact mentioned in the letter
sure there's a lot of uh smaller things that we could improve on the mini x-pac but two big pieces of feedback is the vips felt that the mini x-pac did not um reduce the value of vip so we realized that once we have the tech in place um we really need to make the vi we really need to give them more value so for a mini x pack meaning that either they get more stuff or they they pay less for the base edition
i don't know which way we're going because it all depends on how the tech goes out but we definitely want the vips to to when they approach a mini x pack that they're their value
second is our last mini expat we really value but not at the excellent value that our players have come to expect in terms of from lautroa
um i i think that uh the the discounts when you add up everything we're good but i agree with them that like we usually do a much better job in terms of like excellent value and that's one of the things that we want to address
we want the players to be like super psyched
now the players have been very good about supporting us but in both games over the years and i thank them for it and i'm i'm glad that they continue to do so but i want to reward them by really having the value of any extra stuff that they buy feel really good and i think that that's something that we could have done and we will do better in the future
uh when we're talking about this kind of content
all right sounds great thank you



WHY NO UNDERMOUNTAIN/NIGHT BELOW



um we've already asked or answered that question [music] we'll scroll them through chat uh we have a lot of suggestions and those are always the toughest to answer because they usually are along the lines of that would be sweet don't know but in along those lines have we ever considered something like night below or under mountain
uh i mean sure we constantly do that one of the things about doing dark expansions is they get oppressive quick uh we learned that with the underdark stuff
uh the web was was a little better because you're kind of floating a little bit but the underdark stuff can get kind of old quick so we want to be careful that if we do something like that it has a number of different environments that aren't all like completely darkly dark grimdark
uh for that uh but right now i think that we're going to be concentrating on you know salt marsh uh more classic packs and uh probably the next big thing you'll see sometime in the future not this year will be like uh isle of dread so that's like completely different from that
dinosaurs would be very cool



LAG



uh speaking of things that can be occasionally grim and dark let's talk about lag a little bit
uh what are our plans for that
so we've uh moved on moving so we're experimenting with new uh infrastructure changes on arganescent
we've had mixed reviews some of the people say that it was a little better some of the argo people say that it wasn't so we're examining that
um and then what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at the effects system and changes in order to do that
uh did i did i went blank no problem so basically on lag our our main goals right now or continue to look at the infrastructure but really the effects system is lagging us in terms of like uh some some hardcore how many effects get applied to creatures
part of it is that we need to revamp our proc system so that it makes more sense and it's more unified um because right now there's just procs all over the place and that leads to it
part of it is at the high end players attack so fast um one of the things we might want to do is look into ways to make uh action boosts feel good without doing necessarily haste
like crit instead but it would have to feel really good in order to move that
um and and the other thing is we just need to make the effect system uh more streamlined and and perform better because there are ways it's being used currently that i think aren't ideal
all of those changes will lead to the game performing better and the infrastructure stuff should help shore up some of the uh back end things that might be leading to it
also it's just been a weird year
the internet during covet has been bizarre and that has let a led to a lot of it
like there are sometimes we've looked into lag and they're just weird internet things like certain places are having a hard time and even though ping looks well you see like drop packets on our end so that's one of the things that kind of complicates it
related to that is chat work
we had a couple of questions about um not just live but the chat issues that have been going one of them saying uh the chat issue has not yet been resolved why is this happening
uh why has it been happening since july is the way this person described it
uh well i mean basically behind the syst behind the scenes there are uh halo from some of the infrastructure changes that we've made that we're still tracking down
uh they so the we changed the back end of how storage is done and this halo we're looking at into it and doing that and



ADDING MORE HUMAN RESOUCES - In process, no confirmation (aka accepting applications)



uh right now we're trying to bring more engineering resources online to do that uh we're currently in the process of bringing more people on so that's good uh and you should see
like hopefully we'll be able to see with more engineering resources more people looking at that like we're aware of this and so we're hiring currently
yep all right



PLAYER MODELS



i am looking through facebook chat and that as well do you have a question that you've maybe been thinking about queuing up here uh there are plans to upgrading the player models
we would love to do a revamp like that uh right now we do it race by race so some of the newer player models look good some of the older ones look classic you want to be careful because when you change a character that someone's been playing for 15 years sometimes it can be jarring
uh they they like it so our experience our experience i'm sorry [music] one of our strategies for doing that like one of the things we try to do is instead of changing the race out from under people we bring in a new race
so like if you like the old elves you can play those if you like the wood elves you can play those
um the only thing i think that universally needs to be changed which we're working on now is the half elf there's some texture stuff and face options on the half alph that i think nobody's going to argue that they want to keep
looking at so that you revamped


THROWAWAY



i need to ask a softball question because i've seen it now asked three different times what is that map behind you on the video
uh it's a world map but it's but it's an old-time expansion map
um so it's like the world
uh as it was mapped out with early explorers the so an actual map map of a real place
yeah the sad thing is that because where i'm sitting you can't see all my all my geek loot which is right behind my chair so you're actually only seeing the map i think all my geek glue is just out of range of the of the various uh the various uh view that that we present on camera
okay well just like i said i had three people asking what's that map behind them you
need to ask so so there we are right all right



PLAYER MODELS CONT



uh let me see uh we definitely want to do new hairstyles and colors
um that's one of the things we're actively working on now
hopefully we'll have some stuff in by end of year um in terms of like more character options for players
uh sometime mid-year maybe we can look at that but i'm not sure



GRAPHICS IMPROVEMENTS? - Some wants, some plans, no promises except for not '21.



uh the find out what a real place earth any plans for graphic game engine remaster
uh question quite a bit what about the idea of some kind of game engine upgrade or game uh graphics update probably
um in terms of like we want to add certain graphic functions that are in more modern engines to our engines
there are plans in the work to do that uh and to introduce them to the games
uh in the long term not in the short term that would be something for uh 2022
um but yeah the artists definitely want better tools better particle effects um for instance
uh we will probably be bringing in some lighting improvements but that needs a lot of work
we could use some shader work too


THROWAWAY 2



okay your video might cut out real quick again here while i uh take care of an issue
i briefly i have to for some reason one of my channels is not muting as it must
can you hear me you just can't see me no yeah they can hear you and everything i just i don't want any of my notifications going through there



REAPER OPTIONS?



we go um so we definitely want to revisit um how we do that is a question one of the issues with reaper mode is the difficulty of our our because we haven't done level increase so long the difficulty of the content has has grown
um but yeah we we want to provide more reaper options there



MOUNT INTERFACE



uh long-term uh cosmetic wardrobe there's the way mirrors of glamouring works makes that very difficult uh so maybe but that's a long-term thing that isn't in our short-term radar where our short-term radar actually will probably be the mount wardrobe we know that the players like getting mounts but right now it just takes up too much storage so we'll probably be doing like we'll probably be doing mountain re
uh amount thing so we were talking about that and we'd like to do is for the anniversary maybe make the mount um the mount interface just free to everyone uh as sort of like hey anniversary here's a cool new feature
um and just have it so that mounts become tokens and once you put them in your mount inventory they just exist there so you don't have to have like 472
uh yeah wow that was fast yeah
well i feel like did you did you really anticipate me talking about it
i took the liberty of of just kind of quick throwing it up on the screen here so uh
i i hope that's okay
i think it probably is right so yeah you talked about it yeah yeah i wasn't it's funny because like i was like well you know we probably won't be able to show it off so i i maybe i'll talk about it but
uh yeah there's uh there's some kind of cool mount stuff coming um in in that will make it uh better and easier to collect your mounts that way you don't have to
like right now people are like oh i would love to get a whole bunch of different colors but they don't have the bag space
yeah so yeah uh i don't pay too much attention to the particular avatars on that mount they were just kind of all placeholders and stuff
yeah sure yeah in other words don't don't suspect that i'm spoiling things



HARDCORE



yeah yeah uh let's talk a little bit about hardcore
i see a couple of questions so far in chat about asking about the hardcore plans for 2021
uh hardcore season will be coming up
uh i don't remember the exact calendar was it april yes so we have another we have another hardcore season coming up we want to make sure that we you know look at the balance of things for that um and give the players some options to maybe use some of the uh a combination of new and beloved past things for hardcore season so we can we can talk about that
um so that would be super cool
um and uh people do like doing that and competing for that so yeah uh hardcore hardcore season is coming with with and as you would expect probably some balance changes around that and we're planning two hardcore seasons this year right
i believe yes i mean one coming up sooner than one later in the year rather than say uh last year's schedule which tended to be about 90 days on 30 days off
yeah uh based on player feedback we we reduce the amount of of hardcore seasons so the one they feel more special and two that the players can kind of catch up between them
uh players were saying they were there were some players that loved it and some players that said that um it was coming too fast so we experimented with with like slowing them down to see you know so the players can come in and concentrate on them but then go back and play normal stuff all right



HIRELINGS - Want to improve, no plans.



uh what about hirelings and improving their ai what would you like to see done with them and is that something we we could realistically see in the future here
sure i think that hirelings and one of the issues is the hirelings in monster ai they exist in different systems actually um so fixing hireling ai is actually kind of a pain
we would love to do hireling stuff in fact i would love to do a revamp on hireling so the players could get better use out of them because i think that for a lot of the solo players hirelings are very much part of their gameplay in a way that our high-end kind of reaper solo crowd like
and i love that too but they don't they don't necessarily get as much use out of them so we definitely want to do something in terms of improving hirelings or even giving the players like more to collect or ability to to do stuff with them



4K SCALING - Big lift, seems like lots of visual assests are not in svg form.



mike needs something there we go okay now my mic is unmuted on xsplit two questions from youtube please uh 4k scaling question mark
yep long term we want 4k scaling all of us are sick of not having 4k scaling on both games
uh the issue it's a weird issue because the it's the ui scaling is a hard problem to solve and even if we solved it mathematically we would need to redo all of the kind of graphics and icons in the game to be able to scale up without pixelizing and it turns out that that is a massive amount of artwork that
uh you know when we scoped it out was much bigger than than we had thought and that's one of the things that holds back kind of the 4k scaling



COSMETIC STORAGE - Big lift, mirrors are pointers not items. Why can't they have a wardrobe full of pointers is next obvious question.



i suspect a similar answer may also come to our second youtube question which comes from cosmic what about any movement on cosmetic storage for ddo
like i said the cosmetics uh are the way the mirror of glamouring works is it doesn't make a cosmetic token in the same way as a mount could be made
it actually has a changed version of the item which means that you can't easily store it in the same way as you could say crafting items or even the mount interface
that makes creating a cosmetic storage like actually really really hard
um like the mount stuff was was hard and took us a while but uh the cosmetic stuff would would require us to be able to uh um do a lot of data infrastructure work because all of those items come from everywhere



STAT SQUISHING



okay let me head over real quick to facebook here uh what about scaling
uh like stat squishing like guild wars 2
actually saying like guild wars 2 any plans for level down scaling like guilts wars to another game so sort of this kind of stat squishes that seem to to be a thing and a couple of other mmos in the industry here
sure um i'm not saying that it won't happen i don't have anything to uh to talk about on there because it's so open-ended is it something we've talked about
yeah but i mean the games that are the games that are doing sat squishes are doing like you know 20 million dps and we're doing what 10 000 dps at the top end maybe a little more if you're you're really into it so we have a little bit of of room there but eventually when we do do sort of system revamps we want to look into a way of kind of scaling everything down
you just want to be careful because it has so much halo like one of the things that those games guild wars 2 is good because you can basically play all the content
but one of the things some other games have done that where they basically concentrate on men game and it's okay if they're leveling dungeons or a little off for a couple months while they catch up
that's not the case we couldn't do that for ddo if it messes up say heroic dungeons like that affects so many players that we have to be really careful so the halo for that is is much bigger
also the back end systems are based on three five so uh as much as we love that it was not built with uh scaling that way in mind like some of the other games might be all right
uh changing default servers yes we should change them more often it's something that uh we should look into
i'll i'll ask about it um i think that one of the things is in our sort of cadence of stuff a lot of times it's not a direct decision to leave them on it's more of an oversight
so it's something that we should do



PLAYER COUNCIL



uh 2020 in particular uh when we first transitioned to working from home tended to fall around the time that we normally had done that work and so in 2020 in particular we were maybe a little bit off in our cadence there
so yeah yeah uh i can ask a question about the players council question from twitch chat from tensormo
uh the players council applications are closed the people who are running the players council are going through those applications in the coming weeks and we expect to probably get going on sort of the next session of the players council sometime in march
i can't tell you whether it's going to be early mid or maybe even a little later than that at this point but but something like that so expect to hear some more news in the next couple of weeks related to that



MEGASERVER - Tested it, blew up their servers in unexpected places which. Existing performance problems also need to be fixed first as well. Basically, keep hammering them on lag and performance if we want them in a position to make a Mega-Server.



right uh one of the hard questions came through through is mega servers
we had talked about that until we get lag under control until we go through and do the fixes we need to to the effects system into the master servers we're not going mega server because the master servers wouldn't be able to handle the increased player load
we need to fix some some things
uh low level stuff uh about that before we go on
that that was the hold up like when we actually tested it we we hit some even performance issues on the master server which we weren't expecting
we know about the instant server lag that we're working on now so once we get that in place and and uh then we can talk about mega servers



TR CACHE - Never getting improved (see BTC BANK below).



all right let me ask a question from youtube that i see a couple people lobbying for
what about our tr caches can we ever get sorting with them can we what are you going to do about tr caches
oh my god um i so let me say something unpopular
the tr cache is not meant to be a storage area um it is meant to kind of hold stuff over and then you pull it out after reincarnate and players have used it for a long-term storage area
the way it's implemented is not ideal for doing any kind of organization stuff
what we'd rather do is give you better storage options
um to uh to so that you feel comfortable pulling the stuff out rather than uh doing uh tr cash
the tr cash is a whole separate system from our banking system so it is unlikely that we will be trying to create interface with the tr cache system in order to allow you to use it as is extra storage
uh it's not that i'm trying to squeeze you on the storage it's just that the technology isn't that good for it and we don't want to encourage players to use it



BTC BANK - Want to release in '21 . Challenges with character slots.



yeah so what about more storage better storage more storage more moar exclamation points
we definitely need a character bank that you can put your character items in uh that that's more robust
like we have new technology for it we can't add current character slots right now because they're implemented in the same way as bank slots that behind the scene your character carries them from server to server so if we add more the weight of transferring servers increase
we have the technology for doing it but um and that's one of the things we'd like to get out this year is is a bank for putting character-bound items in um you know that will that will not cause you even more lag as you move from dungeon to dungeon



CHARACTER HOUSING



all right um what about character housing
uh right now we have guild housing
i'd love to do character housing um i love i would love to have you be able to create kind of a a secret base and you know have your

2nd half of captions


HIRELINGS - Not '21



hirelings there and stuff but not this year
um if we we won't do it that's something that as we increase the resources for the game and the engineering resources and the system resources we can look into things like that


REAPER CHANGES/REAPER PARTY BUFFS - Not '21, but coming.




okay uh please reaper wings i've seen a lot of comments especially in twitch chat about doing more kind of reaper wings
what do you want to do with reaper wings any thoughts about that
sure i'd like to have
so right now one of the weaknesses of reaper is the trees offer enough power that new players coming in can't participate
so as i said before what we want to do not this year but at some point is change the reaper trees into more of a progression system so that and then have a leadership system where people who are leading groups can give some of their reaper power to the people in the groups that way if you take someone along they're not just instantly killed once we revamp the system
we can talk about uh pushing the reaper points up but having them in trees and the organization of trees and the weight of trees isn't ideal and we don't want to add to that right now until we have a chance to revamp that system
hopefully we'll be able to put that closer rather than later once we get more engineering resources which we're as i said currently looking for and trying to bring on uh on the wish list side of things


GREYHAWK - I don't have an opinion on world, but did Sev really say players were "whining" ? Sev, tell us how you really feel... ;)

On checking the tape, I think it is clearly an accent to caption translation issue. But see, this is exactly why SSG should issue an official printed record.



we have someone from facebook asking what about ever getting greyhawk to ddo
um i don't think that will happen there are
i don't want to go into
i never want to talk about licensing issues here
um but we don't uh we to to really do a whole nother world justice we would have to
um let's just say this many of the classic packs are vague in terms of where they take care of and we intentionally leave them vague so that you can imagine whatever world you're in but i would not i would not create a whole another sort of uh world for greyhawk at the time uh right now
um because we're already supporting uh both aberrant and forgotten realms and there are players already uh whining more for both of those if that makes sense



PLANESCAPE



so what about more forgotten realms stuff in the future
yeah i mean we definitely would love to do more for background stuff since we're doing wishlist planescape question mark
uh it's another a whole nother world to do so we're but not we're not moving that direction in the in the short term
uh because in order to do it justice would be
um doing landscape would be much bigger than an expansion in my opinion to do it justice uh and so it would take so so much time of the team that i think we would not be well served to not have content come out for a year while working on landscape


PSIONICS



all right one more wishlist question then before i get to maybe maybe some that we we can answer a little more thoroughly what about ever doing psionics
i know that that is a passion of yours to some extent that you've just talked a little bit about in the past
i would love to do psionics
um the doing the alchemist was fun and great but doing a full uh spell tree let's just say that took us a lot longer than we thought it would
uh and so when doing psionics we would basically have to redo that work so we have to be very careful about scoping that
um usually basically the alchemist took almost three times longer than other previous classes we did because we couldn't reuse any of the spells and it was a tremendous amount of work
um it turns out uh that doing the initial work to get the spells in actually wasn't the problem it was all of the the fine-tuning balance and detail work was way way more
so doing psionics and creating a whole another spell system uh would would be something that we could do but not short term
um because now that we kind of understand the scope of doing another a whole nother spell system we would we would have to be very careful about going into that
i mean i would love to do an astral plane gift yankee psionics expansion
like i love that and and we we always are looking at that but the scoping of doing that is so big like you just have to be careful that we just don't get sucked into that hole right


S/S/S



yeah yeah yeah all right what about ever oh any change this one's from strim tom any changes to the scroll seal shard system coming in the future
i mean there's always a chance for doing that um in terms of uh old-time content we have touched upon it before um but we're not introducing that system
uh to we probably won't be adding that system to like salt marsh or anything in the short term but as we go through and touch packs uh yeah there's a chance that we could we could um look into that


CLASS PASS



i see some monk players asking us about monk work in the future
maybe we could both talk about that and any possibility of what you see class balance work looking like here in 2021
class balance is ongoing basically what ends up happening is we touch upon class balance when we do a new hardcore season
so the players can usually know that like hey this hardcore season like what are we touching now


BOW PASS



right now our focus on systems is fixing bows
um that's why you haven't seen other things uh and that has gotten pretty deep because uh the the bull problem was deeper than just uh doing some numbers
um it once we dug into it there was a there was some serious issues with uh animation and uh animation speed um and how that affected how they worked with uh haste
like the spell haste and attack speed and so the bow thing not only will there be new tree coming later in the year but the bow changes are really about re doing the bow animations and that's uh something that we're deep into and the bow animation changes or something that's looking great
i really like how they look so far
they're still being fine-tuned so once we do the bow changes then we'll be in a position where we can kind of uh move on to other classes
uh bose have been behind crossbows for a long time part of it is because the animations were so slow and the way they were implemented we just couldn't speed them up anymore
so that has been a tremendous thing that the team has kind of taken on uh in the short term and you should be seeing some stuff with bow changes soon
even if the uh the horizon walker tree isn't like isn't going to happen like immediately but rather later in the year
so our that's where our class balance is right now in terms of that like at this point


EPIC DESTINIES - Big, big changes coming.



i can't remember if we brought up this topic yet or not but we have some folks including matthew over on facebook asking about our epic destiny work
what are our plans for epic destinies to the extent we can talk about them here for 2021
sure one of the things that we want to do is we want to make the epic destinies work more like the heroic trees because when the players come from the heroic trees which they love and they go into epic destinies it's so different and it requires so much to kind of like open them that they feel like it's not accessible
so i would imagine um that players who with that opinion will be pleased that the epic destinies will open up more like uh heroic trees and you'll be able to spend points in multiple epic destiny trees in a manner that you can kind of cross spend their treats as well that means that like
uh it also opens up a lot of build possibilities because instead of being i'm shadow dancer and i probably put these points into these things um it will be ah i'm gonna go shadow dancer for some of the points and dreadnought for some of the points and see how that works
so that creates a whole bunch of new build opportunities for the players
um in addition obviously with the epic destiny revamp there are a handful of epic destinies that everyone uses and a whole bunch that people just kind of don't
um so we want to make those more exciting and rebalanced as well so hopefully the end goal will be that right now what epic destiny you use is kind of predetermined a little bit by like what you're trying to do
uh but we're trying to open that up so that you have a lot of different options and flavors for that



THROWAWAY



i would like to announce to everyone watching this live that as of about three minutes ago we are now live on the game worlds everything's green green is go you're welcome to log in if you'd like and use the coupon code happy bail on this and just run over to the live servers well
i want to talk
i want to do the raid
i need to do the new raid tonight
but yeah yeah but also the coupon code half happy 15 ddo happy 15 ddo will get you those free gifts and you've got through the end of december plenty of time to redeem it but yeah redeem it now
why not and you're gonna get uh a raid item from a select list similar to what we did in the 10th anniversary but a different list and then also a 15th anniversary cloak and you can find out more at ddo.com 15th anniversary
so so where were you 15 years ago
where was i 15 years ago yeah what were you doing when ddl got released
uh what was i doing was i i think i was programming interfaces to scientific instruments like electron microscopes
okay uh maybe was that about where i was
i might have been working on uh other kinds of software that my ddo might actually even predate that that that time so


MONK PASS



um let's see so some hard stuff monks yeah we we we know that um the players kind of want to do monks
bows were in a sadder state and affect more classes so let us get through that


TWITCHING



uh somebody's asking about uh twitching and chopping in order to get extra uh raid stuff
um in order to get extra dps and raids rather and that's something that's on our that's on our radar and we're looking at it turns out that that's a really hard problem to solve without uh causing halo so we're looking at that



GOBBLETYGOOK



um let's see what other hard questions so you don't think i'm ducking you
um let's see you're supposed to be made today
um augments yeah we probably have augment halo still that's
thank you for bringing that up shifter uh allowing them to use hand wraps
uh let's work on shifter first
um and then let's see what else



TECHNICAL DEBT - Basically poor standards and poor continuous integration got DDO to point where code changes break things they don't realize are even connected. First order mistake in applied software theory here is relying on "good engineers" instead of "good standards". Hopefully new engineers being hired will show them how better shops do it.



um uh halo by the way for someone saying halo means quote problems up the tree
uh can we explain a little bit what we mean by halo
when we say a halo book yeah so what ends up happening is uh the the code in any in any long-term code base you have code built on code
code and so it halo is when you change something here and you don't expect it to affect other systems but it does
for instance if we made a change to the epic destinies and there was some shared code we may not realize that we also did something to break uh heroic trees
that would be an example
or we made a change to this race and we didn't realize that another race also used the same animation script and so we make a change to this race to fix something but this other race now is is much slower
so halo is is kind of that intended effect usually hopefully with good engineers from new code it's less of a problem because everything is kind of you know well organized
and then as people layer on and people have different design philosophies and you have uh generations like for detail literally generations of programmers coming in uh the chance for halo grows a lot of times with these longer projects


THROWAWAY



i see in chat yes after you enter happy15ddo to redeem your coupon code and the ddo store you need to log out and log back in for that very first time uh to do it because that's that's how it does it applies a little thing to your account and then when you log back in it gets you all this stuff so yes yes to twitch chat you do you do need to log out uh real quick after redeeming that code in order to get your stuff yeah if you see stuff uh as a result of today's patch tweet this twitch chat is not your best place to post it yeah a year from now it's going to be somewhat less relevant huh i would go i would go to the forums yeah i i i care deeply but i'm not going to be able to cut and paste out of twitch chat start looking for things um yeah i'm trying to find some good questions we've got a little time yet here i'm looking at the clock we have about 15 minutes left on the clock here so it's a good time to if you've been in chat and looking to ask some questions uh maybe been a little uh afraid to ask questions feel free to ask them i'm gonna be scrolling back through the list to see what kind of stuff we can find but it's a great opportunity to ask your question if you'd like to so


EPIC REINCARNATION



our goal is that epic the epic reincarnation loop will not change right when you when you uh do an epic reincarnation
it will bring you from 20 to 30 and not you won't be required to go to 3132 that's one of the design goals is that epic destiny reincarnation stays the same because i know that one of the concerns people had with level increases in the past is it intended to increase the uh the reincarnation loop but we don't want that
uh so yes that reincarnation loop will stay to 30 uh in terms of past lives for it if we
does that make sense


NEW HEROIC RAID



yep uh question that's come up in chat here along with on the forums i know in recent days
uh what about a new heroic raid do we ever have plans to do another heroic raid
well i mean most of our raids have uh a number of our raids also have a heroic version uh but uh there are some that we keep to to top end because that's where we want to balance it
um yeah i mean we'd love to one of the things we don't see though is we don't see a lot of
um we don't see a lot of heroic people in that loop kind of going and raiding during that time because they're more interested in doing small group experiences that are moving them sort of up the chain and so raid is hard to do because you you will get past the loot so quick
also a lot of our uh longer term players already have kind of their what their loot at each uh level band is
so we want to be careful if we can do a heroic raid to give the heroic people more stuff to do that's great but if it takes too much time the amount of people that jump into her grades are not our are not as high as you would expect because of because of how the play patterns work so we don't we wouldn't want to spend a lot of our precious development budget doing stuff that a lot of the players will kind of skip because they're kind of moving past that that so fast


LOW EPIC LEVELS - See ED chagnes + Pack revamps



uh related to the leveling process uh zakaria mentions in twitch chat how do we feel about levels 22 23 and 25
this person is offering their opinion on it which is that there are no feats and it feels like dead levels
is that intentional or an unfortunate accident how do we feel about the low 20 leveling experience and my understanding is that's at least part of our thinking on this upcoming epic destiny work right
sure like one of the things that will happen is unlike epic destinies now you should as you level through those be able to invest in your epic destinies
and so uh yeah maybe you won't get an extra feet right now
we're not i don't know that we're revamping those but like being able to spend you know your four points in epic destinies as you go up like heroic will feel good um and that's one of the things that that is happening now
um so hopefully that will help uh if that's what they if that's what they mean in terms of like you know hey i leveled and nothing happened that that should help
i would love to do more loot work in terms of sets for low-level epics and what your best thing to do is suggest suggest packs we occasionally revamp packs like we did doleras and stuff and usually we touch the loop when we revamp the packs
that's our strategy so if there are packs that you would love to see uh revamped like that's a great thing to bring up on the forums or you know and and be like hey this pack i would love to revamp it has cool loot but the loot has fallen behind
and we're always looking for uh packs to revamp especially packs you know that uh the players are like oh the content's good but i don't play it anymore because uh you know it isn't rewarding enough
that those are good things to look at all right yeah it sounds good



REAPER WINGS



sorry i've got something happening in my kitchen uh there are a lot of players who are asking about reaper wing colors which is something that is certainly reasonable request that i think that we could we could definitely uh look into



THROWAWAY




um what else let's see there's a whole bunch of people now making suggestions about specific packs but this isn't the place because there's no there's not a good way for us to correlate you correlate the chat and and and move that the form is probably good um well this we need to we'll get the word out and i'll put it into the anniversary guide that yes you once you've redeemed the code log out and then log back in to claim your gift yes so yep [Music]
let's see the 64-bit client texturing is something that we uh if you could give me if there if we could find an example of specifically what you're seeing texturing where so we can reproduce it that would be useful um how many people let's see we can ask



EPIC DESTINIES - Big, big changes afoot here - progression oriented will be large change, as will mix-n-match. Sounds like twists/shears are going obsolete.



this is a fairly challenging question related to our epic destiny discussion there was a rumor that came out last summer that we were going to level gate epic destiny tiers is that still part of the design plan
that that is so what will happen is we kind of want to try to do our cake you need it too there will be a pool of epic destiny points that activate when you hit
um when you kind of hit the first levels so that you do get the boost up front but then after that the ones that you get per level will be reduced so you won't get everything up front you will have to as you go
up uh you know have a chance to spend your points
um and and do that so yes i i know that there are some people that would rather have everything up front and
um i know it's a hard answer to hear that no there are there will be points that you will earn as you level but also it won't be everything
well we plan on having a a pool at the bottom end that as soon as you hit you'll be able to spend a pool of epic destiny points and then go up from there
so yes and no like probably just enough so that it will feel good to go up and then you'll still have uh things to buy as you go up that's our that's our current goal
i think maybe to some extent the hope is that the system itself will be revamped enough that that won't be a driving concern right like right now
i think that a lot of players are like oh my god going doing the lower levels without a full tree will will really be terrible but i don't think that that will be the case
like i think that you'll get enough stuff up front and uh epic destinies will offer enough things that it'll be cool


GUILD PASS



what about guild air ships what are we going to be able to carve out time for guilds huh
um guild guild revamp is uh never-ending we always we always want to we always we don't touch it
we don't touch it enough right so right now i'm discussing i've been discussing with uh uh one of the things that we have specifically put in is for extra resources to do guild revamps for both games
um and that's an ongoing uh design thing that we're discussing so i can't really talk about it right now because i don't want to get people's hopes up and then uh and then have us not be able to go into that as full as we'd like



MONK PASS



but yes it is on our radar to do um there's there is some class and tree specific stuff that's way beyond the scope of a talk like this so i probably won't go into specific class balance questions um other than like hey is monk going to be revamped and we had some ideas on that
like i know a lot of people were talking about monk uh and we'd like to look into that i just i think one of the things about mine because i like the finishing moves to feel better
um and i think the team agrees and we have kind of looked into the monk thing i think what happened is the last time we looked into the monk um we had some awesome ideas
but like the revamp got so big that we actually sculpted it was like oh my god like that that is huge um let us get through bows and the tree uh and then we can kind of look into it yeah



BOW CHANGES



uh the bo someone had asked and unfortunately i can't remember the exact question or where it was posted but they were asking about whether the bow changes would be more focused on a universal tree or an enhancement tree or whether these kind of changes are more game-wide in the scope
the first set would be gain wide like i said we had to do a lot of animation work to help fix that um i think that we may even do some uh that way lower level characters will shoot faster out of the gate so you don't have to wait high level to make it feel good we don't want to increase the overall rate at which both uh fire at the top end because obviously we're all working on lag and increasing attack rate is something that we have to be very careful about
uh the animations just look and feel better too um so and then uh obviously we're working on numbers to bring bows back more in line with crossbows across the game and then we'll additionally have a tree that will offer people uh extra opportunities to do bow stuff



STATEroom/TEST KOBOLD



yes we'd love to do another thing for the last stateroom that has been one of the things that gets bumped down for what a number of years now it's like it's always kind of in the ninth spot of things we want to do
so that's it's hard like it hurts me to see people saying oh i want to do something in the last stateroom because yes we do do and it's hard to bump to sometimes it's so hard to prioritize this stuff
like you have darlings that you would love to see in and it's like oh god i would love to do this but we just can't hurts me i could do a head desk on the keyboard thing of just banging
i want the test kobold i want the test cobalt yeah i know yeah everybody does and just like okay is it time for the test and then something else comes in goes the last minute bumps it down you're like oh my god yeah yeah give us something


CRYSTAL COVE



uh when is the next crystal cove someone asked in twitch chat that'll be happening in june i believe is our current target date for crystal cove



THROWAWAY



uh let's see what else i think we're actually maybe i think we've covered a lot of questions here um



DRAGON GEMS



someone wants to get more dragon gems yeah um so that's something that we should do like people should not be cut out from the only problem is that if we said that the dragon gem most of the time we try not to do absolutely exclusive stuff so people can get it what we do is like hey it's exclusive for a time but eventually we'll bring it back so i have to look at where the dragon came that was from the anniversary we gave that out
i believe either what last year or two years ago two years ago something like that
um similar to the house cloaks that are debuting in the anniversary event this year after being given away a couple years ago as the anniversary gift so you know if you've got party favors you can fill any gaps you have or maybe you weren't playing then or you weren't playing on jurassic then or whatever right yeah yeah and jurassic then or whatever you whatever you can get that stuff now and i i that seems like a likely future place for something like the sentient dragon gem as well but
uh we didn't do that work for this year i mean i guess the question is


SPEEDRUN



someone's asking about a speedrun server but kind of isn't that what hardcore is
i mean i guess well it depends
depends the hardcore is you don't move that fast but like yeah uh most of the speed runs i've seen for other games usually are like when you're dead you're dead
like also honestly if you're doing a speed run i mean it doesn't matter whether it's hardcore or not if you die at level 10 on your way up you're probably going to lose anyway and we open up enough enough hardcores that the players can run speed run runs on the new hardcore season fairly easy
um and then just track who hits 21st um but yeah one of the things is that
um i don't know that we would want to do it on on live servers uh we'd probably because it'd be very hard to start everyone else everyone in the same place
uh that's so much easier to do by just opening up a new hardcore season the closest thing we had for a speedrun event is there was a challenge-ified version of the fight with the spinner of shadows that was used for our conventions and that was like a three-minute challenge that kind of thing would be probably what we would do were we to offer some sort of speed run challenge i think that might be a good kind of way to do it because it it puts people at the same place every time and then you've got three minutes to achieve a goal so it's it's kind of a high score based thing i



THROWAWAY



i would love to deep dive into specific options but we'll never be able to do them on these questions ama it's just out of scope so some of the people that are talking about like hey let's talk about like specific loot or specific class balance trees it just we just can't this is not a good format for it so i apologize i'm not trying to duck your your stuff it's just i won't be able to do that for our amas [Music] yep i think i think i'm still not seeing a lot of like super big questions some wishlist stuff that i appreciate everyone asking in that um but i'm not seeing a lot of stuff that i think we could probably wrap things up being as we are at one o'clock here today so why don't we just thank everyone again and remind people that you can go to ddo.com 15th anniversary ddo.com slash 15th anniversary to find out all this stuff get your free gifts and what have you as we celebrate 15 years uh any kind of last things you want to bring up here uh sev i'm sure there are i'm sure that there's like eight things i forgot about cool stuff


NEW ICONIC - Want, no promises. I put at 50/50



well we'd like to do one of the things is we would like to try to get in a new iconic this year i don't know if we can do it honestly as we're looking in with the extreme with the chances of with the different ways of doing remote
but i saw some other people asking about race iconic and and we're kind of looking at hey can we do this and intentively trying to shoehorn it in i can't make a promise there but it is something that you might see


OUTRO



yeah awesome all right well thank you very much for watching everybody thank you for being here we're going to have to do this again in the relatively near future these have gone pretty well in recent months and i i think we're going to keep doing the sort of thing here in the future so one of the players have said is that they're like we would like more communication and the the amas and doing them like more frequently i think the last one was what a month six years is one of our ways of addressing like it isn't i know that it isn't the giant amount of communication that i would love to do but hopefully it will kind of ask you know answer questions rather about futures so all right thanks everyone for watching talk to you again soon bye-bye thank you everyone

[count_spicoli]

Tks for the write ups very helpful.

Getting rid of haste action iboost s a big problem for me. I have used it since day one on alot of my builds and would not like to see it removed. They take away cool things like the little archon light and say that eill help and it has only gotten worse. PLS DO NOT REMOVE THE HASTE ACTION BOOST!!

[infael]

Hmm if they can do a stable for the mounts could they not also do something similar for permanent hirelings?

I had that same thought, too!!

[Saekee]

Hmm if they can do a stable for the mounts could they not also do something similar for permanent hirelings?
well at least let people put halfling hirelings in the stable

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

From my memory:


Hired several tech to deal with lag issues.
Are hiring more people right now.
Lag issue solutions are currently divided between: making effects more efficiently applied, and too many attacks at level cap, and ____
There will be a mega server, but initial tests on the mega server indicate that lag issues must be solved first.

Cosmetic Bag is very, very difficult because mirror of glamming links to the real item.

Horse Bag is going to replaced with Horse Stable like the backpack tab for companions (creatures that follow you around).
This is difficult but much less problematic than Cosmetics.
Sample of what this looked like was shown.

Talking about fitting a new iconic into this year if the extra time works out, otherwise next year.

Psionics will have to wait not only due to work on spell system but the additional work of balancing such, but is a favorite to do someday.
Alchemist took much, much more time than anticipated and Psionics would be greater.

Would like to add a new stateroom to the guild airship and its about 9th on the to do list, but keeps getting pushed back.

Class balancing is an ongoing process.

Bows required a complete rework of the Bow animation and when it is done the Bow will be in much better shape.
New Bow tree will be later, and while it will add to the Bow options it is not consider a Bow fix in itself.

Bows will not fire faster at level cap due to too many attacks increasing Lag issues, but they are working over the Bows (implied level cap Bow will be improved).
On the same note, the Haste Action Boost might need to be replace with something just as attractive like massive crit bonus due to Lag issues.

Epic Destinies explained somewhat in detail.
Seems to be going towards their versions of some of the ideas I and others presented:
Epic Destiny will be more like Heroic Trees in function.
There will be a pool of points to spend when you reach level 20.
There will be points earned per each level gained to spend.
You will be able to spend points on multiple Epic Destiny Trees.
They have pinpointed which Epic Destiny Trees are very popular and which are not.
The unpopular trees will be improved.
One of the goals is that thru the pool of points and improving the overall effectiveness of the Trees, entry into Epic will be enjoyable (or some other words therein).

They know people want Monks improved, but its Bow time atm.
They have lists of things to do on Monks including making Finishing Moves more dramatic.

No answers on individual items, because this is not the format for that.

Server opened up for new update.

Goal of doing these Q&A talks more often.
We should see more ask Sev anything format with Cordovan.

The questions about Mini Expansion were:
Salt____Marsh is too big for a pack.
Might be 8 or 9 (rough guess not commitment) dungeons.
They realize that ViP should either get:
1) a discount on the Base Pack
2) or bonus items.
The tech to make that happen (I guess seeing you are VIP when purchasing) is being put in place and will be available to use by the time Mini Expansion arrives.
So, they realize that Vip needs to feel Mini Expansion still worthwhile to be Vip.
Also, realize that the LotR Mini Expansion was not as attractive as usual and future could be improved upon.

Savage Island (whatever the Dino pack is) will not be this year, but enthusiasm is too great to withhold in the future.

There is unlikely to be a Greyhawk World due to the scope required for creating a new world and the demand for people to return to Forgotten Realms (which they will do sometime in the future) and continue with Eberron.
Sev did not want to discuss Copywrite issues, saying simply if they bring in a new world they want it to be BIG.
Planescape will have to wait for the same reasons (although he is inclined to do that world), due to the fact that it would be so intense there might not be any new content for a year in order to create the new world (which is not a good business model at this time).

No comments or complaints about the new owners.
Was a comment on having applied for _____ (I forget) and therefore he could not discuss yet.
Also, artists are getting new texture and particle tools and ____ (which is the equivalent of a graphic update of sorts).

Half Elf is being redone as we speak.

Other races have been used so often that it might be a mistake to rework.
Therefore instead of improving the Elf race, they brought out the Wood Elf as an model upgrade.
New races with better looks instead of redoing all the old, to prevent shocking players.
(Here is where the mention of iconics came in).

No mention of a new class in the works.
Currently focused on Epic Destinies.

There will be a level increase with the next Big Expansion, however the Epic Destinies MUST be done first.
(And there will be the Mini Expanion before the Big Expansion.)
No mention of how high the level cap will go, but mention that they read player feedback about the level cap increase in detail and decided they must do the epic destinies (implication of other thoughts of reading feedback not said).

Comment by Cordovan that the new Epic Destinies will be more enjoyable/better than the old?

Other questions answered....

Half Elf will have new skin/model.


Oh and yes, Reaper points will be increased, but only after the new reaper system is created which should reduce lag, creating a Reaper Ranks along with Leadership for Party Leader sharing part of their Reaper Rank power to help newer players survive in reaper better.


Also, Epic Destinies will become more approachable by new players.



Another Lag issue is that the internet as a whole is far more unstable after the Virus hit than before.


Mention of until December for redeeming code (but please check and make sure that is right)?


Thank you ! +