Let's Talk: What the Heck are the Dev's Working On?

[GermanicusMaximus]

What the Heck are the Dev's Working On?

Their resumes?

Changes to game mechanics and an ocean of bugs caused a large number of long term players to leave, and a substantial influx of new players never materialized. Now, the expansion is old news and GW2 has captured the buzz.

Turbine likely has more employees now than its revenue base is capable of supporting.

[toaf]

"QA team" they dont have that team im sure

[Missing_Minds]

"QA team" they dont have that team im sure

They do and they have been over ruled when concerning releases.

QA does not equal bug fixers. The two are separate such that a release may/will have bugs, but if QA has done a great job, all the bugs are already known. Which is separate from the "shut up already we know about it" thread.

[Ape_Man]

I agree.

I might have considered buying points with the recent triple (just) bonus points offer. However, I'm not really inclined to give them any money right now with the state of the game and the most recent lack of communication.

FWIW, I have gone out and purchased Turbine Points on days and weeks with good communication. I don't always buy points. But when I do, you can count on it being at a moment aligned with some good community engagement from Turbine.

Triple bonus points . . . I bought none.

[Ape_Man]

Their resumes?

Changes to game mechanics and an ocean of bugs caused a large number of long term players to leave, and a substantial influx of new players never materialized. Now, the expansion is old news and GW2 has captured the buzz.

Turbine likely has more employees now than its revenue base is capable of supporting.

Kinda/sorta/maybe. GW2 is generating a LOT of buzz on this site's off-topic forum as well as some other forums. I haven't played it (yet, might buy it this weekend) and it definitely has some feature Turbine should steal.

It looks breath-taking. My jaw dropped on some of the YouTube clips. it's a huge part are the immersion, being awed by what you see.

The lack of grind looks attractive compared to the ABSOLUTELY INSANE XP grind that is end-game of DDO. Gear is relatively painless to get. Will this retain players who knows, it doesn't matter for their pay model.

PvP meh, I guess if your into that but I've always though PvP in MMOs was stupid because you cannot kill that which has no life. The World Versus World stuff looks cool as well if you are into that sort of thing.

GW2 has VIABLE RANGED COMBAT and it didn't cause the universe to implode. Turbine should pay attention to that.

But . . . who knows if it'll have the staying power. might just be a diversion for now with people coming back. it's the nice thing about the F2P model is if you buy content you can take a break and come back at any time.

I'm worried about Neverwinter, the clips I've seen look amazing. The graphic again are a huge part of the experience of a game and compared to the lag-filled old-busted dreck that is DDO this looks AMAZING. Neverwinter also had a roll-your-own module creator built in and looks so easy a monkey could make their own quests. A huge part of D&D was DMing, making your own content for your players. This could be huge if it wasn't 4th edition.

DDO should blantanly steal the good features from the new games.

We also need like 5 more GOOD raids since almost all the loot from the old ones is now terribly out-dated.

[GermanicusMaximus]

GW2 is generating a LOT of buzz on this site's off-topic forum as well as some other forums. I haven't played it (yet, might buy it this weekend) and it definitely has some feature Turbine should steal.

Yeah, I haven't actually played GW2, and I'm not convinced I ever will. But the buzz is everywhere, and most of it seems pretty positive.

The biggest problem seems to be that they substantially underestimated how many people would want to give it a try, and don't have enough hardware right now. That's a relatively easy problem to fix. Some other deficiencies have been noted as well, but all those players are throwing a lot of money at the game, and money usually is pretty good at fixing a wide range of problems.

might just be a diversion for now with people coming back

That seems to have been the DDO battle cry for a long time. Its a bit dicey as a strategy, kind of like letting your wife play the field because she always comes back to you in the end

[Ew_vastano]

They do and they have been over ruled when concerning releases.

QA does not equal bug fixers. The two are separate such that a release may/will have bugs, but if QA has done a great job, all the bugs are already known. Which is separate from the "shut up already we know about it" thread.

wouldnt expect nothing less from you missing IF the qa team was acualy doing there job U14 and U15 might have acualy worked instead of releasing them all the bigs that got reported in both closed and open beta, also quests that acualy worked

thats without all the lr problems and ed problems that shouldnt have got passed any sort of a QA team

[Ape_Man]

That seems to have been the DDO battle cry for a long time. Its a bit dicey as a strategy, kind of like letting your wife play the field because she always comes back to you in the end

Watch some of the YouTube videos of the PvP, it actually looks really fun like a good shooter. It gives you something to do at cap besides run House of Rusted Blades for ED XP.

I'm NOT saying DDO should focus on making PvP compelling, it's just too problematic with a D&D model, I'm saying DDO needs MOAR endgame. There needs to be more to do.

[Ew_vastano]

But . . . who knows if it'll have the staying power. might just be a diversion for now with people coming back. it's the nice thing about the F2P model is if you buy content you can take a break and come back at any time.

unfortunatly one day there will be a game good enough that the people who leave dont come back
as you said neverwinter maybe
GW2 once you bought it is f2p
also elder scrolls online coming maybe that will be the one who knows

all i do know is ddo is a bug ridden wreck of a game only reasons i play is A, i got a lot of friends here and B, i own whole game

and no i didnt buy any points while on triple bonus wouldnt buy any points if they was on 10X bonus once the devs start showing some interest in the game then maybe

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

I found the screenshots of GW2 looking very sweet and nice, very colourful (I like that !) - but on the other way I clearly stay away from it as long as there are loads of hackers trying to steal accounts, some with keyloggers even (assumed by me from a post elsewhere).




I really do hope that the devs won't forget the low-level content. But, as it looks right now, hey are fully concentrating on high-level content instead.
The result I fear from that is basically like ... trying to give you a picture ... having to wade through ruins, rubble and ancient temples to get through to a modern, high-tech town of today.
If the low-level content won't get upgraded, too, then it might create an image of horribly dated and ugly graphics (for example, the quest scructures can remain as they are), which won't attract new players.

And no new players = demise of Turbine & DDO.

Feeding only he whales leads to a solid income for Turbine - but neglecting "fresh meat" won't help it.

And that's why I'm so concerned with it.

unfortunatly one day there will be a game good enough that the people who leave dont come back

This depends.

Only the younger generations of gamers have become hese "graphics *****s" - because "the industry" trained them so !
"Better graphics !" was the warcry of both the graphics card manufacturers AND game developers - mainly those of shooters. And shooters - as everyone knows - very much dominate the PC market right now.
Which means that all other game genres are currently pwned by shooter games - and their players. Who want the best possible graphics - and are seemingly even willing to sacrifice EVERYTHING ELSE for that.


The other side are those who clearly prefer STORIES over graphics. But I doubt that these would be enought to keep DDO alive.

DDO is the game with the most complex character creation I know apart from the offline Drakensang games. But I must admit that I haven't been playing many RPGs in the recent times.
But still : DDO is in my eyes rather a "number-cruncher" game (in terms of character creation) than anything else. If enough people are attracted to this, it might well, stay alive - and perhaps even lourish !
Which imples that not everyone is a "graphics *****". Some people are just "number *****s", so to say.


Now if DDO could manage to get some more social interaction back ...

I still believe that "The SIMs Medieval" is the future. Because iot combines social interaction with the RPG genre.
It's a start. It's an first experimen. The VERY First one, because NO-ONE has ever tried this fusion !
But I believe that it is the future. The perfect fusion of so many play styles.

I'm wondering how DDO's future might look like ...

[kingfisher]

I'm worried about Neverwinter, the clips I've seen look amazing. The graphic again are a huge part of the experience of a game and compared to the lag-filled old-busted dreck that is DDO this looks AMAZING. Neverwinter also had a roll-your-own module creator built in and looks so easy a monkey could make their own quests. A huge part of D&D was DMing, making your own content for your players. This could be huge if it wasn't 4th edition.

NW is going to be a fun game. destroying a DM's content and immediately posting about it will be great fun. and vice versa too, getting your ass handed to you by some 45-year-old-in-moms-basement-type DM's uberhard content with random mob placement, random traps, virtually unlimited depth and distance, thats fun. we will see if they can figure out how to scale the loot/xp tables to jive with the content. if they can then the user generated content will always be worth running and the game will have basically endless fresh content. the voting system for approve/disapprove of the user gen'd content is also cool. each developer will have a page/blogspace as well.

i am unclear on what classes/races will be released initially, but if they can rival ddo in its current character development then lots of us will go to NW. and if DDO nerfs multiclasing through the enh overhaul it wont matter if NW has limited character gen options to start with.

havent heard any bad things about the combat yet, but still that question remains. DDO's combat is great, so NW has a tall order to compare well in this regard.

MW is DND and it NOT 4E anymore. its good to look at. the content is a plus. if the char gen and combat as similar to ddo, the question is who WONT leave to try it out?


EDIT: before the forthcoming comments about cryptic et al and how they love to screw up games and NW is just the next one to get screwed up by them - Yeah i know, but is turbine really knocking it out of the park these days?

[azmodeus1]

at this point, does it even matter?

[Rip-V-Winkle]

TUrbine has 600 employees or something like that. You think every DDO dev is working on Mabar? I think it's probably 2-3

Yes and 400 or more working on LOTRO.
DDO is second place with them has been for some time.
LOTRO is the money maker that is why we see little if any progress with bugs.

[Missing_Minds]

MW is DND and it NOT 4E anymore. its good to look at. the content is a plus. if the char gen and combat as similar to ddo, the question is who WONT leave to try it out?

I delt with cryptic for 2+ years with CO. And delt with their ineptitude for only a month with CoH under them. Add in PW and their policies and its a no brainer. I ain't touching it. Now mind you, I was able to track huge portions of their issues with CO back to management + Atari. Do I hope NW is a success and fun? Heck yeah. Games should be fun.

And even larger reason, I have no intention of leaving only to re establish myself again after 6 years of playing in a DnD setting.
No... I'm waiting for a different MMO. One that I lost a few hundred hours to on the previous console version.

[ZeebaNeighba]

Why do you even have to ask? Assume they're working on nerfs and you'll never be let down

[MrWizard]

most likely working on making this work with a buggy and horrid windows 8 setup..
me? I am going linux, forget windows...enough is enough.

[Raptormesh]

I delt with cryptic for 2+ years with CO. And delt with their ineptitude for only a month with CoH under them. Add in PW and their policies and its a no brainer. I ain't touching it. Now mind you, I was able to track huge portions of their issues with CO back to management + Atari. Do I hope NW is a success and fun? Heck yeah. Games should be fun.

I was burned really badly by Cryptic in STO(Zero content and broken promises a year long in a SUBBED game), and will never be their customer.

Played GW2, no grind? Perhaps you were misled, I had water 10 plants and kill 10 worms as part of completing a "heart". It looks real shiny but has zero immersion, what with constant pop ups and alert sounds. Not my type of game. Also filled with hundreds of trolls on chat and whatnot. I've played WOW for 7 years and was turned off by the amount of grind in GW2. To each their own. Note that I loved the first GW very very much.

DDO is probably the buggiest MMO i've played(sigh hitching ladders, getting stuck in shroud) and can be punishing(I just screwed up a LR and the cost is very dear indeed) but it's the only game with such a deep character building system, the rest are just themeparks. Also, the community is also a step better than most, this game and LOTRO. I keep coming back. Growing older, I find myself valuing decent social interactions more than the next shiny effect.

Back on topic, it would be nice if the devs speak to us more often really, about what we can expect at the end of year and next as a whole in a more detailed and noncommittal way. :P

Also the bugs, they hurt.

[Ertay]

I found the screenshots of GW2 looking very sweet and nice, very colourful (I like that !) - but on the other way I clearly stay away from it as long as there are loads of hackers trying to steal accounts, some with keyloggers even (assumed by me from a post elsewhere).

Just chiming in because the gw2 servers are actually down now, so this caught my attention:

The hacked accounts are more myth then reality. There are no known keyloggers and certainly no targeted attacks on your personal account or anything concerning gw2. What really happened is that some chinese guys hacked a gw1 fansite and got accounts and passwords from there. They then proceeded and mindlessly tried these exact combinations on the gw2 login screen and managed to hijack a ton of accounts, due to users setting the same login email and passwords. Thats it. Now we can probably all agree that this was entirely user error or at least that nothing on the devs part could be done to prevent this. In fact, they do have ip authentication, but since the users whose login data were stolen obviously don't care for security much, it is of little help.

That being said, gw2 is an awesome game, and I'm having a blast with it. Not right now, but in a general sense, I pretty much do =)

[MrkGrismer]

I'm NOT saying DDO should focus on making PvP compelling, it's just too problematic with a D&D model, I'm saying DDO needs MOAR endgame. There needs to be more to do.

I think a random 'undermountain' type of dungeon (ala Telengaurd) would go a long ways towards that. I think they have enough tilesets now that they could make such a thing interesting.

[Grosbeak07]

always slow in summer months..and september.
expect october to pick up.

they need to make an epic tempest spine..and more spine like raids

Why?

Am I the only one who isn't all that impressed with Tempest Spine?

Want a challenge at level... go clear the entire map and not just walk in the back door.