The Weekly Development Activities

[Vhlad]

DDO II !
DDO expansion!
DDO sexy mod with boob and hip slider at character creation!
DDO epic level super pack! levels 20-30 woot woot ><
DDO 4th ed.

Heh. I may be playing AoC now but d&d will always have a place in my heart, along with DDO. And eventually I'll be back, so get going! Hop to it! Moosh! etc etc, gogogogo.

[Impaqt]

Ya know, this would of been a whole lot easier to swallow if it was released in tandem with SOMETHING showing us you were sincere about keeping us and the general MMO public Informed.

We rearely see anything come out of Toleros weekly Q/A Thread and quite frankly, the questions lately havent been all that interesting to many folks anyway.

Codogs thread is so Full right now THat tons of questions get missed or unanswered.

Bug Hunter thread is also so huge that many things get missed and never confirmed/Clarified.

[jkm]

the bug hunter lodge has been closed for the spring. the last turbine response to it was 3-21...

[smatt]

Well, let's be honest here.... I understand the idea that perhpas holding back news of upcoming game changes might be a good idea to some extent. But all this really means is the player base as a whole won't here about many of the new changes and therefore won't be able to prepare for them the same as the "special" players who get all the inside from turbine employees and reps... Such as PRIVATE forwarded reported post PM's sent to "Customer Service Reps" on this board ect. That strangely enough end up cut and pasted and forwarded to said reported posters.

Now, you can't convince me that these same players also receive inside information about game play issues and then take advantage prior to their release or becoming common knowledge within the player base. This is too be expected, welcome to the world, no biggee...... But at least the WDA gave the player base as a whole a chance to see some of the planned changes and adjust accordingly. I completely agree that Turbine needs to work to get better press for DDO, but I'm not all that sure, that this is the way to go about it.

[bigal4458]

If this turns out to be just like the whole "We're no longer doing monthly updates, but rather bigger, better quarterly updates" fiasco...I feel that a lot of community will be disappointed.

Just some tips to the Turbine clan....Don't alienate the community....allow us an opportunity to give feedback on decisions and updates....and please update us on bug progress, etc.

[Elsiah]

typically i try to be a positive poster, but this is cause for a bit of complaining. I mean, i understand that some things need to be under wraps for you PR, that i get. But not posting the state of fixes, state of bug repairs, etc. is silly. sure, keep the big shiny new things secret. give us the mundane items that mean nothing to anyone outside the game. I thrive on the WDA, i like knowing what is and isn't going into the next mod, even if it's just minutae. Please come up with some new weekly or bi-weekly post letting us know the state of the non-secret stuff.

[Ron]

We understand that this won’t be a popular decision with many of you

Hmm. You can count me in as a subset of this population. I HATE this decision.

Keeping the character planner up to date just got a lot harder. I used the WDA to keep on top of the upcoming changes. Too bad for me, I know. Everyone can pretty much expect there will now be a much longer delay between when a Mod comes out and when the planner update gets released. Ce la vie.

[thatguy]

I don't like this at all, not one bit. I also don't like the explanation that was given as to why it was taken away. I appreciate the fact that DDO is getting more exposure these days but people like to see what is around the corner for DDO. I am not looking forward to spotty information here and there about what might or might not be coming up in future mods. I like the weekly dev activities, lots of people do. You really should reconsider. At least, put it too a poll of community. Let them tell you what they think!

[MTG]

I understand it but man I'm going to miss reading it first thing at work. All I ask is this please stay away from 4th edition i got the core books last nite and I aready wish I hadn't.

[bobbryan2]

To be honest... it's felt like that 'wall of silence' has been crashing down for 3 months now. The end of the WDA kinda cements it. It's already incredibly difficult to get any actual dev feedback with certain things in the game. And things that are well-known by the players are all too often seemingly unknown to the dev base.

Take, for example, the recent potion change. When lesser restore pots were first changed, they were broken with regards to rage. It took 3 months for them to be fixed to work with barb rage, but were still broken with madstone rage. When the new potions were announced, there were multiple threads about how they were going to work, whether they would work with madstone rage, concerns, comments, etc. Nothing was ever talked about.

Then the new potions come out, broken like the lesser restore pots were broken 7 months ago, and still no dev has ever come out of the woodwork to even say if they're intended to no longer work with madstone rage!

Things like this are going to have to improve in the future, especially in light of the WDA. Communication with anyone in development has plummeted. Slithe and Codog's threads that you mentioned have been pretty sparse for any communication for weeks (which is to be known because they're individual projects)... and this is the answer for an even further lack of communication.

You guys need to do better than what you were doing 2 weeks ago... and you took a step even further back.

[Milolyen]

I also enjoyed reading the WDA's and such but it suprises me how many people are upset by this. It seems to me that the vast majority of the people complain about the lack of advertising. It has been discussed many times how Atari is the one responsible for advertising and not turbine and that Atari has no interest in doing said advertising. So for Turbine to cut out the WDA's and move to giveing exclusives to be released in articles is a good move. They are getting the advertising that the forum goers and player base has been asking for. SOOO

RIP WDA's - You died for a good cause.

Milolyen

[Ghoste]

First of all, good to hear that some marketing is beginning to happen.

Secondly, glad to hear you're secretly working full tilt on druids!

[Riddikulus]

DDO expansion!
DDO 4th ed.

I'm fairly sure one of these two reasons will ultimately be what is going on "under wraps"... some of the recent changes/nerfs we have seem to be aligning with 4th ed.

[binnsr]

one less reason to visit these forums

[Mellkor]

In my opinion, this is a huge mistake. Please reconsider this asinine decision. The WDA was always one of the things that I looked forward to. It gives us a chance, as players, to put some input into game development. It seems to me that many great ideas came from player input stemming from the WDA. Please let me know who decided this, I would like to write a formal letter to the person who did.

-JR

[sigtrent]

I don't like it at all.

See... one of the real problems wiht this game's Dev-Fan communication and in most MMOs is there is no central point for good, solid, reliable, straight from the source information where you can go and difinitively find the answer.

Instead you get rumors and third hand information passed down some windy chain that you can't personaly verify.

WDA was one of the only good sources of information on what was happening in the game and what to look out for. At least you realize that it was going to be unpopular, but that hardly explains why you would do it other than you are short handed. Is it really so difficult to compile a list of bug fixes planned or new features added? If you must have mystery features just list a teaser. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[jkm]

does everything have to have such nice marketing spin on it? can't you just come out and say that 2 things happened in mod 7 that you just didn't like?

1. WDA's set a baseline for delivery that doesn't mesh with your new exit criteria for production? lets take assassinate for example - would way of the assassin 2 even be announced if it had such a feature breaking bug associated with it? this is one of the frustrating things for those of us who use bug reports - we never get to see the triaged priority of different bugs. how hard would it be to implement bugzilla and hide bugs that you would consider exploits?

2. publishing the particulars of new abilities during the scrum cycle allowed the (paladin in particular) playerbase to run the numbers and prove that they needed an upgrade. this of course was totally infeasible because you were already in development (and what dev loves crs?).

the WDAs were inherently reactive and in software, being reactive generates more aggro than being proactive. my question is whether you think going into a shell is going to help this aggro or would it be better to move into a proactive mindset?

[Mirta]

In your quest to obtain new players, please don't forget us older players. The masses are hungry for information and starved animals need to be fed. At least give us something like a Weekly Bug Report. Confirm new and old bugs, tell us which ones you're working on, and give us ETAs on the patch to fix them. It wouldn't really be spoilers as we know it's coming anyways, and it at least gives us some interaction to let us know you're still there.

[alans240]

This is a very bad decision for Turbine.

You already are having a hard time keeping your player base interested in the game and now this dumb change. One of the best things you had going for you was the WDA. It kept players looking forward. You constantly saw posts in the WDA thread of people excited about the new changes coming. Now these people have nothing to get excited about. I guess now all we can do is complain about the lack of content again. At least before we could see new stuff on the horizon. Now we will have no clue what's coming. Good move Turbine!

You told us we would be getting "More Communication" in the past, but clearly this mindset has left the building.

[WeaselKing]

Silthe and the rest of us are still prowling around. The hubs of bugdome will be the Bug Hunter Lodge and the Known Issues lists (Don't worry, we're moving all the Mod 7 knowns over to the current sticky, and will continue to update the list as usual). Silthe is still actively reading/investigating things brought to the Bug Hunger Lodge.

But not Q, eh? Well we will miss you Quarion, I hope you have moved on to bigger and better things, though what could be bigger and better than DDO, I don't know. ;D

Oh yeah, and Monday mornings at work just got more depressing. :'(