End of the week with Major Malphunktion - Kobold Union Edition

[sephiroth1084]

I realise it has Halloween links but I do wonder why when there seems to be reuse of other events more liberally. Feel sorry for anyone rolling a new monk or PM between now and Oct 2012 is all.

Yeah...I'd be down with Mabar coming up again for 1 week somewhere around April, with at least a 1 month buffer in either direction between events (ie, no moving from Crystal Cove or Risia right into Mabar or vice versa).

CC comes up more often, I think, because it isn't holiday themed and offers attractive gear to a much wider audience. That said, access to the Epic Robe of Shadow and Wraps of Endless Light is something I feel should be a little more regular than once a year for new Pale Masters, and monks, respectively. That the Shroud of the Abbot has gotten a nice upgrade, and is lower ML, and that we're finally starting to get some new, interesting and powerful handwraps makes this slightly less important, but not irrelevant.

[ericrd]

any news on when more of the recipes that are in the cannith crafting guide are going to be in game ?

[Terminus-Est]

Coming into the Mabar event this year, having never participated before, I was conditioned to expect a couple of things.

1. Server-crushing, raid-killing lag.

2. Little to no ability to control who I raided with.

3. Scarcity of specific components (Lich Dust).

At the end of the event though, on the back of 5 for 5 successful completions and plenty of non-Mabar related quest running, my opinion of the event was raised noticeably.

1. I didn't get hit with lag, in or out of the event.
It's easy to say that I am just an exception; but the fact that there is an exception is superior to a server-wide blanket of lag death, isn't it? I found the CC to be a laggier event then Mabar, on the whole.

2. Creating a group prior to the raid opening and coordinating entering allowed me to get my party in the same instance as long as we were in the same level range. Yeah, having only half-feedback from the minimap is a down-grade from every other raid, but it is better than it was in the past, neh? By aggressively coordinating on the general chat and dispersing my party-members to the various locations, I was able to ensure a minimum of coverage that got me the win every time and in a quick manner to boot.

3. Running as a 17-18 (I leveled up during the event, doing other things), I had a fairly hard time generating Lich Dust. In large groups with 20s, they would spawn, but I wasn't guaranteed a dust from a kill. On my own I had a hard time soloing them and they were very rare. In the end, I pulled one dust throughout the event and bought two others for reasonable prices. Just how much platinum is an epic item worth? Exactly. Scarce though it may have been, I was able to buy it with platinum earned off of a non-capped toon, not needing to dip into my main characters stash of PP.

Yeah, Mabar could have been better. I'm guessing that next year, it will be, as we have been promised. And I suspect that it was a lot better then it was last year. Isn't that how things should be? Better every time? Hell yeah.

[BOgre]

I had decent time in Mabar as well. Made 2 pairs of wraps for my monk, one for now, one for down the road, and an epic cloak for my ranger. Of the runs I was in, only one was a slideshow, which we somehow won, another was so-so laggy, which we lost, and 2 more were smooth and quick. Farming worked best when in a full raid party.
My complaints with it are the same as my complaints for most of the content I've run past lvl 14: caster-centric. A melee character has become less and less useful in the late game, and in these events the caster/melee gap is even more accentuated.

[Cleanincubus]

Spoken like someone who was not here during the dark ages after Mod 8, leading up to the Free to Play Announcement and the legal issues with Atari!

You're right, I wasn't around at that time. During that time, I didn't even know DDO was a game, I thought it was some sort of online resource for D&D. My join date, is in fact close to my game join date (adding another month or 2 to it). But as I've said, that doesn't mean I have no clue about the situation, or at the very least, similar situations.

Here's an example for you. Early '06 I started playing a game called SOCOM 3, for the playstation 2, religiously (8-18 hours a day, every single day). Soon after SOCOM: Combined Assault was released, which was more of an added campaign, rather than a entirely new game (both played on the same server and S3 maps were included with the S:CA game). To make a long story short, it took a year and 2 months for the developer to release an update (the final one), while the community manager would post on the official forum once every month or 2 to something alone the lines of "We're working on it, but I can't say anything more than that." Among the major fixes of that patch was fixing the vehicles that would become invisible during the game. For a 3rd person shooter, getting spawn camped for over a year, with invisible 1-shot-kill tanks and vehicle turrets, was obviously beyond annoying. The hardcores stayed (or went back to playing the older games in the series), but most left, going from up to 60K players at peak hours to 6K within a month or 2.

So yes, just because I haven't been playing this game for as long as many of you, I do in fact understand what a year without new content would mean. I'd prefer to have a game with less "lag"/latency issues, no more wiped ingredients bags transferred from shared bank spaces, no more quest items or enemies not spawning that cause a quest fail, buggy & grindy events, hirelings that get worse with every "adjustment", etc, etc, than more new quests or classes or races that no one even asked for. I realize not everyone agrees with me, and that's cool. But don't pretend like DDO is the only game out there to ever have content or developer communication issues.