DDOCast 365 - State of the Game 2015

[pjstechie]

We talk about the State of the Game this week with a special line up of guests Propane, Voodu, Lessah and Steiner-Davion

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News - 0:00
State of the Game: Introductions - 3:02
Character Balance - 5:19
Server Population - 11:13
Player Base Divides - 16:02
New Player Accessability - 20:18
Raiding Scene - 23:20
Reincarnation - 31:20
Community - 33:01
Bugs - 45:54
Game Performance & Game Challenges - 50:50
Looking Ahead - 1:01:10
Lightning Post - 1:14:32
Closing - 1:17:32

[pjstechie]

I will note that this episode was recorded before Christmas and before the particularly bad string of lag the last week +

[Vellrad]

We didn't had 3 raids this year.
We had 1 raid and 2 5 minute boss encounters.

[Livmo]

Great show, I can't believe you all got up so early for it!!! 6:30 is early imo.

Also, glad to see you're moving/moved Steiner. I was a little worried a while back when your bookshelf was emptied/looked empty. My first reaction was, dang he sold the farm for DDO double points, or took up crack. Whew.

Sarlona in the house!

My vid card is gimp on my new cheapie machine. If you need an idea for the 100th vid on your channel Voodu, them perhaps run on Shadow of a Doubt? I got it down to 4 minutes. It's a good quest to learn how to apply damage to shadows before moving up the food chain to Thunderholm and epics.

Thank you all for making my day today!

[lyrecono]

Server population;
population is very low, bugs, lag, age, lack of new content, etc isn't helping
people hiding behind channels helps grouping a bit, if you have acces, new players get confronted with the people kept out of channels and the occaisional tr vet, a new player's only chance is meeting a friendly non jaded vet and not get absorbed into a mass guild where information and skills are rare.

A message of the day/warning sighn when signing up telling new people to go to the forums and sign up for a mentor program could help.

as for level range, a tr vet (who is most likely to put up an lfm for a quest) will set it up like this: lv 10 quest on elite: lv range 10 to 12, usualy not lower because many newbies can't handle it at level, let allone under level.

Raids;
The raid scene of today, if you could speak of one was destroyed by raid timers, bugs and lag spikes (not that the old abot did any better), it's biggest problem is the passing of experience.
When we did raids years ago we could afforst to take four gimps into part because we had 8 vets to pull us through. Over time those vets hid behind channels, wanting to quest with people they could trust in what many already regarded as unballanced content. now i see groups fail normal shroud, reavers fate, fot etc, they simply don't have a clue and no information was passed on.
The power differnce in toons is huge too, i have been in fot's where 10 people had so little dps that i had to stop tanking the (5%hp)stormreaver and equip a bow to help kill the (85%hp)dragon they had been hitting for 30 minutes! Altough the ego boost is nice i can't help but wonder why they failed so badly, why it turned into a rez fest. After some chats i realised they don't have someone in guild or friendslist helping them by pointing out build options or gear. Most were in mass guilds where the weirdest opinions on the game were repeated without fact checking, an intulectual inbreeding of sorts.
It was realy funny to see them with thunderforged gear and armor whille they had never set foot in those raids, all ingredients bought of the (s) AH
raids during heroic lifes are nigh impossible to fill, tempest spine is easy, but count on carrying 10 gimped free to play first lifers through it, von is doable but hard to fill, demon queen lfm's are a barren desser(no pun intended), reavers fate is a nightmare, heroic abot rarely gets flagged for, shroud is often flagged for but the quality of people attempting to run it is low, hound, vod and tod are hardly worth it in terms of loot/time investment.
Basicly i do tempest spine because i can solo it if needed and von 5&6 because i can pull gimped toons through with instructions, for al the higher level content raids they fall behind in gear to much to be of an impact on a raid completion.
a side affect of people complaining about the game being to hard (years ago) resulted in content hardly being run by newbies and not enough vets around to teach/ pull them through.

With the focus on epic past life grinding these days, i't simply not feaseble to keep 20 toon geared out to the max like we used to. People had to focus on a limited amount of toons limiting the amount of raids we have to run.
Another stab in the back of the raiding scene is the content itself, its blend, tasteless, since the lv cap was raised to 25, with the biggest offender being CitW.
Shroud was a succes for many reasons, one of them you didn't mention was the far larger crafting options, this game's biggest charm is it's many custimising options.

Community;
mentioning the ddo twitch channel might not be the best advertisement ddo could have.....

Bugs;
loosing battle...
fixing the lights? realy? don't make me laugh, lights don't make 200 people spam channels about lag at the same time, the double log ins weren't caused by lights either
as for the QA, bugs and exploits, we told them on lamania when people noticed it, it stayed unfixed for many months, not a pretty sight to be fair

The future?
Shoud 2.0 (with it's many crafting options, not the watered down canith lob/ma or thunderforged crafting)
haunted halls heroic option, lv 5 (where it belongs imho) to lure in D&D vets.
Korhvaire content, i had enough of the 18th century DDo version of Sydney, i want to see more of the "old" country
more iconics finished, where are my dwarven batle ragers?
more and better raids, at lv 20 we had so many relevant raids compaired to now
more immersion (less crowns)
more eberron lore and content in general


A lv 1 ddoor Clicky XD