A bone for the casuals ...

[Qhualor]

Yes to more quests, no to everything else. Motu was a huge casual expansion as is.

Ha! Thats the first ive heard MOTU described as casual and sadly have to agree.

[Singular]

I do get, and share, the OP's frustration.

One of the things I liked about EQ (and DDO's Turbine stablemate LotRO) is that you did not have to group in order to make appreciable levelling progress. Sure, grouping was faster, but there was an acceptable alternative if time was short or some other circumstance prevented you from grouping.

Turbine has decided that DDO is going to be almost exclusively instanced, rather than persistent. The only real exceptions I can think of are Mabar and Crystal Cove. The only alternative to soloing quests or doing wilderness areas are the Challenges. I've done a bare handful of them and, frankly, I didn't enjoy them....but, setting aside my personal opinion on them, they are designed to be quick (15 minutes or so?) so they fit almost any timeframe you have.

I would not be a fan of any in-game karma system, however, as you're likely to be punished for any number of insufficient reasons and thus your rating would suffer unwarrantedly. We see people getting negative rep here on the Forums for no reason other than daring to disagree with someone. Why should we expect any better behavior in-game?

I have a question: is it possible to have non-instanced environments in an MMO like DDO that is instant based?

If so, a mix of both would be totally awesome. It would be great to see something like the King's Forest or Vale as a link between two "safe cities" that is non-instanced.

[Musouka]

I have a question: is it possible to have non-instanced environments in an MMO like DDO that is instant based?

If so, a mix of both would be totally awesome. It would be great to see something like the King's Forest or Vale as a link between two "safe cities" that is non-instanced.

It is possible. Is it possible with DDOs code? Some events have happened where they opened up certain areas to everyone to join as a public instance. They have done it before, and Mabar and Crystal Cove show that it can be done. Can it be done well enough and with much fewer bugs? I'm not sure. Will it strain too much on their servers? It does with Mabar.

[Qhualor]

How do you define casual? 1 hour per day? 1 hour every other day? 1 hour a week? If casuals are getting a bunch of xp, you better believe everyone else would want some of that action. If it was limited to casuals, rants would ensue. If it was open to all, it would be "abused". I already think there is enough pendulum swinging in game. Currently i feel the pendulum has swung towards casuals.

[RedHost]

This sounds like it would be abused by players who pike, going AFK or doing the bare minimum keytaps to keep from being booted, if the XP is any good. And if the XP is not good, then no one will use it at all. Trying to come up with more ways to encourage grouping is a good thing, but it sounds to me like this kind of forced PUG group will just promote abuse. And the player rating system will only further the potential for abuse.

I would think that a 'mentoring' system, where you can artificially lower your level, and your character's abilities in order to run lower level content, would do more for expanding your range of people to group with. After all, you can promote grouping all you want without any benefit if the players just aren't there.

[Ungood]

Ummm ok.

Lets say, I look at this.

Kinda cool idea.

You have what amounts to an Endless "Ring of Fire"/"Fight to the Finish" type of Challenge, but with endless "waves", and players earn exp after each "wave" is done, and anyone can come in or leave between "waves".

I would wager broken into 8 categories. 1 - 4, 5 - 7, 8 - 10, 11 - 13, 14 - 16, 17 - 19, 20 - 22, 23 - 25. So that everyone was pretty close in level and thus max EXP and skill for all involved. This would need hard lockout, so the levels were fixed (Not what happened to Mabar)

This would be pretty much any solo builds dream type of deal.

A couple of points.

There should be no party size minimum, so if one person joins then they just start, no need to wait for others. IE: if you are on an off time and your are alone , you can play alone, or if you are the 7th person to join in, you simply start your own instance.

Grading System. Not a good idea. While fun in concept, I don't see it doing any good, and only people who know each other would be prone to give a pos anyway, and neg anyone that even remotely disagreed with them.

I think a better system would be for Group to be able to enter of their own accord and stay that way, as opposed to risk breaking up upon arrival (like they could in Mabar)

Death should kick a player from the Challenge. Perhaps give 40 seconds for a party member to raise them, otherwise they are kicked from the Challenge with no exp.

All in all, it could be a fun "Something to do to pass time when you are not sure what to do next" because lets be real, objectiveless slaughter is just fun sometimes.

[ThreeEyedBob]

I would love to see a "Random Dungeon Delve" where you can generate a challenge style dungeon with several levels (1-5 for example) with a boss and difficulty increase for every level until a final big boss at the bottom. Typical oldschool hack and slash adventure with a random chest here and there.

Preferably where you can choose how many levels the dungeon has initialy so if you are time constrained you can pick just a 1 level dungeon.

[Uska]

Maybe for casuals you could add a xp bonus the first character on the account they played after being gone for a bit the longer they were gone they larger the bonus to a max of +25% the reason I say only the first character they played is other wise it would maybe start to be abused.

[Natedogge]

If you wanted to run a "come and go" adventure you would go to the quest giver and you would enter a queue. If a space was available in an existing group you get parachuted in, if not you enter a queue and wait until either a space is available or there a 4 or so people in the queue to form a new group.


Now this would be pure PUGing and you would have no idea about the skill or ability of the people you are going to adventure with and you don't know what is coming next so XP/min would have to be pretty high and you would need to be pretty self sufficient to survive. I propose when a player leaves you get to rate them (thumbs up/down/neutral) and that over time determines their reputation. High rep players get put in groups with other high rep players and vice versa. If you get your rep above a certain level you can apply to become a "sensei" and you get dumped into the worst groups and teach them how to play in exchange for a massive boost to your XP (thinking +100%).

If this system was already implemented, you'd be complaining about the queues. It's a fact of (gaming) life.

Rep is bad, +100% exp for an easy to abuse system is worse.

[Tshober]

I agree that the game could use more short quests. There are too few of them and the few we have are nearly all very low level.

But I very much disagree with everything else suggested. I particularly hate the idea of a public rating system for players. We have way too much bias against other playstyles as it is.

[LordMond63]

I have a question: is it possible to have non-instanced environments in an MMO like DDO that is instant based?

If so, a mix of both would be totally awesome. It would be great to see something like the King's Forest or Vale as a link between two "safe cities" that is non-instanced.

Yes, as Mabar and Crystal Cove are both examples of a persistent, if temporary, environment.

Musouka raises the key issue though: Turbine's servers seem to become overstressed when running Mabar and the dragon spawns. Last incarnation, I sat twice through instances where no one could move from the time the dragon showed up until we all died from mob damage and a couple more times where things were not quite as bad but still pretty awful. That doesn't give me much reason to hope that they'd be able to smooth things out enough to make it work on a regular basis.

The more I think on it, the more I'm convinced that Turbine sees the Challenges as DDO's version of this. Small group, set goals, short time frame. It fits. Some folks seem really to enjoy them, but, judging by the lack of LFMs for running them, the majority do not (though I concede that they may well be soloable, so we wouldn't see groups if they are unnecessary).