A Mounlanders Thoughts

[Postumus]

*shakes his head* You really don't have a clue what goes on behind the scenes. It isn't as simple as that.

Trust me when I say many a programmer wishes it was.

He's correct in that it has a low, almost inconsequential cost compared to new artwork, new models, new mechanics, new music, new narration, and new flavor text.

[GaiaKOS]

Hi, I'm Gaia. and I'm an ex-ML. I'm on my 12 step program back to live now...

First time on ML I got permanent fly cast on me in the desert... The feeling was
awesome. The desert looks great from up there...

Joke aside, I am proud to have participated and fought for what I believed was important in
the game. Fairness, balance, playability and fun. I was always opposed to solo play, and as D&D
always has been a social game for me, that's what I wanted from DDO when I started
when the game went live in Europe. The ability to see, and been asked to give unbiased
feedback on not only new content, but also system changes over the years has been great.
The discussions was sometimes heated, but in a tone that allowed everyone to push together
towards the goal, or a compromise that sometimes had to be made - for whatever reasons,
being technical (very often), time, resources (often), money (rarely)etc. Many fights were
lost, some was won... and some lost fights later got a verdict turnaround...

But more than anything, Mournlands was a social thing. We kept in close contact, many almost
daily. There were some extremely skilled players involved in the program. They crunched
numbers and gave detailed and well thought-out responses to changes that we were shown.
The weekly gathering we had on ML was always a blast. We often ran alpha stage dungeons,
often whth the dungeon designer, and gave real-time feedback which I know they appreciated.
Often our comments were answered with that it's already scheduled for the next build...

I'm not even going to comment much on the developers, QA and community team, but they were
all great, and disclosed to us what they could, always. I hope that the openess on Lammania
continues in that spirit. Know this - noone is out to ruin anyone's game. They do have the game's
best interest in mind. The only things that are constant are the changes...

To my fellow ex-MLers : SOCIAL! May your pants be off and your drinks plentiful.
Heck, no pants and drinks for everyone!

Gaia
Member of Attrition on Ghallanda

[Jasparion]

Joke aside, I am proud to have participated and fought for what I believed was important in
the game. Fairness, balance, playability and fun. I was always opposed to solo play

Brave way to introduce yourself !

[Steiner-Davion]

I don't think Dev's ever really ignored feedback. As far as Production...well that is something I don't feel comfortable talking about as I am sure there are rose colored glasses involved on my part. ( I am a pessimist at heart ).

I feel personally that most inelegant game design we have seen has actually come from engine limitations. Not a revenue push. I was never privy to any kind of financial data or anything so I do not know for certain. Though my gut feeling is things were not done for revenue.

Yeah, I have to agree with this statement, there are a lot of engine limitations. And it limits so many things in the game it is hard to fathom.

But that is also my biggest complaint about this otherwise great game. Money is really only being spent on things that will lead to more direct Sales. The direct part is key! Bug fixes do not directly lead you, me or anyone to to by a quest pack or anything. Very little money is being spent on Engine upgrades or things that require a lot of "engineering"

Combine that with the Spaghetti code monster that is DDO, and you can see why seemingly simple things get broken, or are hard to fix or otherwise address.

But a case can be made, that you can entice people to spend more and play longer if you can make their gameplay more enjoyable. Sadly these types of fixes usually come out on the loosing end of the Cost vs. Outcome/effort equation.

So to bring this back to the OP and thread discussion, my time on ML, really highlighted a lot of the limitations that were placed upon the Dev team by the engine's limitation.

One last thing, so those of you that will say: "Well LOTRO uses the same engine..." While they technically have the same core engine, they are in effect 2 distinct engines at this point, with 2 distinct code bases. And simply coping code from one to the other is not an option.

[Steiner-Davion]

I don't blame any player for any changes to the game, but I don't credit any player with any changes to the game either. Turbine is going to do what Turbine wants to do, it's as simple as that. All of a sudden there's a bunch of threads where players are complaining about getting all the blame for this and that, I just don't see it, I've never seen it. In fact, until today, I've never seen anyone ever talk about Mourlands in general discussion, ever. So to me, all this, "We get the blame.", stuff just seems like a way of convincing yourselves that you have had more power over the process than actually existed.

well if you were not a member of ML, you probably didn't notice the little comments here and there. That doesn't mean that they were not there. IF you want to see some of them, read the threads introducing the Player's Council. There are a few in those threads.

Mourlands formerly, and currently the players council are ways Turbine can get feedback on things that have yet to be released, or even announced. They do this in order to not get the entire community up in arms over something that might never happen, for a variety of reasons, only one of which is their perception of how it might impact the community based on the impact it has had on these very small focus groups.

While this may be true in part, our experiences on ML point to this not always being the case. More often than not, if not always, the feedback we provided on ML, was a mirror image (though a lot more detailed and rationally thought out and presented) of the feedback that these Live forums provided, when our feedback was ignored or not otherwise acted upon. Some systems or changes we were barely given any notice of before they were introduced to Lam. Others we never saw. And more times than anyone should feel comfortable with, what we were shown, we were told it was too late for any real substantive changes to be made to X.

Turbine has access to a very large group of players who have a very large interest in the game, right here in the forums. Someone suggested that they had more influence by sharing their opinion in the mourlands program than we have here in the forums, but that's simply not the case as Turbine is going to do what Turbine wants to do. They are not going to discount a suggestion that interests them because its source was from a forum post anymore than they are going to implement a suggestion they are not interested in because it came from someone in a focus group.

This wont really work, because these Live forums, that are open to the entire community are like 95% noise. Trying to sort the wheat from the chaff is a monumental task.

[Steiner-Davion]

How far out was the build you tested from live? Meaning, you log in to a new build, look at some release notes, then X months pass and you see that build on live (or the features from it)?

Given how Lam is working, I would guesstimate 3 to 4 updates ahead, but it could be more like 2 to 3...

I want to say we were usually 1 or 2 updates ahead of live, with a few exceptions, and those were more of system changes (like Enhancements) being discussed, rather than the whole update.

[Steiner-Davion]

Hardly a laurel to rest on. In the 18 months I was in ML there was far more success at change coming from Lammania than ML. Mostly because Lammania was often ahead of ML in terms of content.

Certainly there were a few things we managed to change, but I suspect Turbine were simply testing just how far we would allow ourselves to be pushed before the revolt. I dont think we changed their minds on anything they werent already considering changing. My proof of this would be the huge amount of things we never got to preview before it went to Lammania or even skipping there and going straight to Live.

Maybe that changed in the last 8 or 9 months since Ive been gone, but I doubt it.

I wouldn't totally disagree. as there were definitely things that we protested, that were pushed through to Lam. Things that we protested, were pushed to Lam anyway and then changed, when the feedback they got there was exactly the same as what we said in the first place.

[Hendrik]

I wouldn't totally disagree. as there were definitely things that we protested, that were pushed through to Lam. Things that we protested, were pushed to Lam anyway and then changed, when the feedback they got there was exactly the same as what we said in the first place.

Yep.

Nearly all the time, our feedback exactly mimicked what Live said. This is my greatest hope for the PC. Take the lessons learned from ML and take action earlier based on the feedback of the PC. But then, sometimes you need a larger sample to take action and fine tune changes from that larger sample of feedback. It is a fine line to walk and one you have to be careful waling on...