2015 DDO Players Council Update

[Cordovan]

Click here for an overview of what the 2015 DDO Players Council has been up to! We're hoping to publish these overviews more frequently, time permitting, provided the community is interested in reading this kind of thing.

[UurlockYgmeov]

thank you! and thank you to both last years and this years council!

[Artagon]

As a caveat, most of the quoted comments here were from before the general forums got a glimpse of the base Warlock info. Permabanned was pretty dead on, as there are members of the P.C. from very different perspectives.

As I've watched the Warlock thread, I can tell you that almost every suggestion/request there made it into our discussions and we had some really good back and forth about it both with the development team and the other Council members. Some of them since the thread went live. I am pretty sure most of us have been hovering over that thread pulling out the juicy ideas to talk about. Keep up the good work to all of you as well!

[Oxarhamar]

As with last years council exactly how much of their feedback was listened to/followed?

I wonder how many council members gave the thumbs up to the vendor trash that is Mythic Heavy Pick from ToEE?

I know someone had to point out that Was trash. common man make Mythics Mythic not vendor trash.

[Cordovan]

As with last years council exactly how much of their feedback was listened to/followed?

I wonder how many council members gave the thumbs up to the vendor trash that is Mythic Heavy Pick from ToEE?

I know someone had to point out that Was trash. common man make Mythics Mythic not vendor trash.

In regard to how much was listened to, we pay attention to everyone's posts, so I suppose that could be answered with, "pretty close to 100%." As far as how often Players Council feedback has led to changes, I think the Council members themselves can speak to that, but yes - some significant changes were made in response to feedback, including loot, enhancements, quests, and more. Since there were 170+ threads posted by Council members, and quite a few official feedback threads that went into 100+ posts, it simply isn't possible for us to make every change suggested. That said, the Council's input is vitally important to us, and their suggestions have led to easily dozens of changes (maybe more), some big, some small, and some that were used to inform the early pre-coding design process.

Sorry you don't like the pick.

[Qhualor]

I'm not pointing fingers at devs. PC or both because that's just unfair. I will reserve my opinion at this point in the year with still many months to go. So far, I will say, disagreeing with TOEE loot overall and shaping rogues in general to how DDO continuously changes into the game it is today. If you have read and cared at all about my posts on those subjects in various forum threads, than no need to go into detail here as you than know how I feel.

[Ayseifn]

That said, the Council's input is vitally important to us, and their suggestions have led to easily dozens of changes (maybe more), some big, some small, and some that were used to inform the early pre-coding design process.

That's great to hear, previously it felt like Mournlands/the PC were shown things that were fairly far into development already so that any changes would waste development time.

Sorry you don't like the pick.

Does anyone like the pick? It's pretty bad.

[Oxarhamar]

That's great to hear, previously it felt like Mournlands/the PC were shown things that were fairly far into development already so that any changes would waste development time.



Does anyone like the pick? It's pretty bad.

Yes I've yet to see a player post that they are excited for the Pick

I'd be fine if this was just standard named trash loot that happens but, this is Mythic Item which should be Mythic not trash which is why I selected the Pick it's the worst item in the update.

[Ovrad]

So the ridiculous numbers of Horned Devils and Abishai kills in the MM4 made it past the player council?

[Krelar]

So the ridiculous numbers of Horned Devils and Abishai kills in the MM4 made it past the player council?

We pointed out a lot of things with the MM, some was changed some wasn't. (Pretty much how it goes with all our feedback)

I can only assume/hope they plan on having lots of these in the next 2 updates.

[IronClan]

In regard to how much was listened to, we pay attention to everyone's posts, so I suppose that could be answered with, "pretty close to 100%." As far as how often Players Council feedback has led to changes, I think the Council members themselves can speak to that, but yes - some significant changes were made in response to feedback, including loot, enhancements, quests, and more. Since there were 170+ threads posted by Council members, and quite a few official feedback threads that went into 100+ posts, it simply isn't possible for us to make every change suggested. That said, the Council's input is vitally important to us, and their suggestions have led to easily dozens of changes (maybe more), some big, some small, and some that were used to inform the early pre-coding design process.

Sorry you don't like the pick.

No one likes the pick, it's a random gen pick with +5[W] instead of 2, all the other mythics have a crit range improvment... except the scimitar and the pick both are widely regarded as vendor loot while the other weapons at least have SOMEONE that likes them.

[vengfarga]

Not sure about the picture to accompany the (rather excellent) update. It appears to show one party member ignoring the rest, another angry and sulking (and drinking a lot!) and the rest? Lyres!
A veiled insight into the workings of the council perhaps? Or perhaps it's based on a dev meeting? Or perhaps it represents the forums in general? Or perhaps ... something more sinister??? ;D

[gwonbush]

No one likes the pick, it's a random gen pick with +5[W] instead of 2, all the other mythics have a crit range improvment... except the scimitar and the pick both are widely regarded as vendor loot while the other weapons at least have SOMEONE that likes them.

At least the scimitar breaks devil DR and has Greater Evil Outsider Bane. It's almost useful considering our next 2 updates are Shavarath and Epic Vale. Still pretty lackluster, but at least it's not the Talon.

[Hafeal]

Well, a hearty thank you to the PC, and particularly those who are invested in participating. Having been there, I understand the comments Cordovan was kind enough to quote in the update. Seems to me, overall, that the PC is having an influence within the constraints of the the Producer's vision and the dev team's resources and abilities.

And to Cordovan - thank you very much for the update. I appreciate it. I was definitely wondering what was happening with the PC and looking for some news.

--

A couple of questions:

Is there any thought to a paid expansion in the future for any of the upcoming content?

Is there any thought to re-visiting ToEE to give it polish?

Besides loot, what did the PC think of other aspects of ToEE? Mob spawns, exploring, dividing it into smaller chunks? Slayer kill counts? and the like.




Again thanks to all on the PC giving their time and feedback.

[Loromir]

In this article https://www.ddo.com/en/news/2015-ddo...council-update manglord made the comment: "There are a lot of factors that I'd never even thought about that come in to play with every new quest and new pieces of loot."

I think this would be a good time for us to hear what this obscure factors are...what are the challenges the dev team faces that we as the general player population do know about that might prevent us from having exactly what we want when we want it.

This might go a long way in mitigating the frustration that is so prevalent with in the general DDO community.

[Thar]

That's great to hear, previously it felt like Mournlands/the PC were shown things that were fairly far into development already so that any changes would waste development time.



Does anyone like the pick? It's pretty bad.

Does anyone like any of the named loot? The hat is cool to see but how often are you hit with 4 elemental damages at the same time unprepared? It needed a slot at minimum. The rest... maybe the shield is ok but not spending 2 hrs per run x 200 runs to get a shield that is light as i'm better off with the mrr changes than evasion.

Yes Sev, after all the complaining i did for evasion tanks, i changed as it wasn't worth it after the armor pass. The evasion tank died after 8 yrs of ddo life.

[S3R3N1T7]

do your job
Gallanda was down AGAIN
stop implement stupid thing (champion who crashserver and kill fun on heroic at low lvl) and investing on descent server, thank you !!

are you professional you take money ! no ????

[Cordovan]

In this article https://www.ddo.com/en/news/2015-ddo...council-update manglord made the comment: "There are a lot of factors that I'd never even thought about that come in to play with every new quest and new pieces of loot."

I think this would be a good time for us to hear what this obscure factors are...what are the challenges the dev team faces that we as the general player population do know about that might prevent us from having exactly what we want when we want it.

This might go a long way in mitigating the frustration that is so prevalent with in the general DDO community.

I think in general the answer to your query is defining "we". There is rarely a "we", rather; there are large numbers of "we"'s whose play style, motivations, interests, behaviors, desires, and opinions need to be weighed with the realities of the development process.

[diequietly]

Why doesn't the council take a moment and get turbine to actually fix G-land.
Who cares about a new class or these stupid bonus weekend ordeals if G-land will spend
60% of that time offline. This is getting ridiculous and someone needs to get turbine to
actually do something about it. Either merg the server or something. And last but not least
just come out and give us a formal apology. This is what the council should be focusing on
G-land has the largest population or at least it did. So we should not have to have our voices go
unheard.

[Natashaelle]

In this article https://www.ddo.com/en/news/2015-ddo...council-update manglord made the comment: "There are a lot of factors that I'd never even thought about that come in to play with every new quest and new pieces of loot."

I think this would be a good time for us to hear what this obscure factors are...what are the challenges the dev team faces that we as the general player population do know about that might prevent us from having exactly what we want when we want it.

This might go a long way in mitigating the frustration that is so prevalent with in the general DDO community.

Cripes !!!

Talk about the the proverbial CAN of WORMS !!!!!!1111iii111llllll111!!!!1!1!111III111 ... !!!!

---

I've been a game designer myself (for RuneQuest, HeroQuest, and tangentially and uncredited-ly D&D 2E & 3E) ; the most elusive quality to reach in any design is balance, and the more complex the game, the harder that will be.

2/3rds of the challenges that I've seen the Devs struggle with, whether on the Mournlands programme or the Players Council, have involved balance -- and this has many many different facets.

Hard numbers need to be balanced on the one hand, not just between races and classes and EDs, but against any bewildering mix that the multiclassers can throw at the content ; and at every class & dungeon level in the game now and in future ; but also a more tenuous balance of interest and therefore intrinsic difference needs to be created between each and every class race level and any other such variable in the game.

Also, a balance needs to be preserved between hardware capabilities, software, dev resources, budget, income/expenditure, and how many man-hours of work towards the multiple game creation, development, support, management, and pure business tasks relative to each other, plus the politics and frankly I could go on for hours ...

What was being discussed here, from a more focused point of view, was likely an appreciation of the fine technical detail of magic item, character class, enhancement tree creation and so on ... There is a pleasing degree of to-and-fro in all these domains between the Dev Team and the PC members according to the interests of each.