DDO Producer's Letter - September 2016

[Zistra]

I think sometimes I spend more time in TR cache and other storage than actual questing!

If you have any bank toons, that might actually be true.

[ThomasHunter]

This is exciting as always. I'm only a bit anxious about the Ravenloft setting. I only know it involved UNDEAD and I'm pretty tired of that in many ways. Plus, this makes my Rogue shudder. Heh.

Hopefully we get more than undead in Ravenloft!

Thanks! I am enjoying the new dungeons as "dungeons", but not as "incredibly awful crazy number of times I have to repeat them" dungeons for my many toons.

Enjoy!
Taleisin

[axel15810]

Forgive me if this comes off as negative, I'm just attempting to give blunt and honest feedback -

So we're only getting 1 new quest the rest of the year? That's really disappointing. I was hoping for a big holiday update with some new raids like we got last year. And assuming the two proposed updates hit in october and december, we're probably going to be see the first update in 2017 drop in februrary or march. So we're stuck with only 1 new quest in 6 months? And over an entire year without any new raids? I hope there's some content stuff not included in this letter.

A lot of that quality of life stuff is nice but I don't care much about it personally. I'd definitely give up an overhaul on quest panel and bank panels if it meant we get a new raid or two. Or more new quests and new adventure areas.

As a player what I want most is 3 new quests every 3 months and a new raid every 6 months at least. So that's my feedback.

And another new race? Come on Devs, lets balance the races we already have before you do that. How can you introduce another new race when the existing racial trees are in such bad shape balance-wise? I know you're likely doing it because it's a good money maker and you have to keep the lights on which I understand, but still. There's so many races already in DDO with almost no reason to use them. The races are so crazily unbalanced. We have 14 playable races and 2/3rds of them atleast are bascally obsolete.

[Thar]

When might we see some enhancement overall love for Clerics/Druids?

Agree with the above, more quests/raids would be nice. at least a new quest an update. event upgrade is nice but it's gone in a week or two.

[Steve_Howe]

I think sometimes I spend more time in TR cache and other storage than actual questing!

This great game within the game is called Inventory Tetris™

[Dungeoner49]

Any news on when we will see arti's update? They still have only two trees, one of which is seriously outdated.

Honestly, what ever they do to arti, it should be something to help with epic content as rune arms are their main source of dps. And yes, I know that arti is a bit OP for early to mid game, but they seem like they launching pebbles by hand in epics. In epics my pure elf ranger gets 15-35% of the kills in compared to my pure wf arti getting 5 kills that would be other's if I'm lucky.

Anyway, dragonborn also is a sarcastic term used by non-kobolds for kobolds, at least in D&D's and DDO's lore. I hope that monks get the love they need, very few monks I've seen use earth stances, and the light monks complain of the light clicky enhancements not counting toward finishers.

[Enoach]

~ Deity feats: We’ll be adding new Deities that players can follow, and new feats that can be unlocked by players who find favor with their deity of choice.


~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

All the rest sounds good, but I wanted to touch on a few things with these two that I really hope Turbine keeps in mind.

On the Deity feats, I hope this is both selectable Deities for all races as well as expanding on the Favored Weapon.

On the storage aspect I hope this is including the TR Cache. While I liked the Tabbed interface of the Kundarak Bank I also feel that a few enhancements to the interface (which will work for all tabs) would help make sorting/finding easier

1. Sort, By Name or By Minimum Level
Sorting by name should use Minimum Level as its secondary sort and sorting by Minimum Level should use the Name as a secondary sort

2. Add a way to jump to a page. Sometimes you just want to jump to page 9 of 22 (Could see this as a number entry box). Or if anything provide a Jump to First and Last Page and a 5 page Jump in either direction

But even without the above if TR Cache is part of this change it will be a great improvement as the TR Cache searching has been the biggest thorn in players side.

[Uska]

Character transfers, monks, FVS, questing hub and free quest sounds awesome the rest sounds pretty much awful

[Uska]

Yes, very nice, thank you! I love seeing D&D modules coming to life in DDO!

White Plume Mountain would be cool.

Wouldn't expect much but it is one of my faves and one they might get closer to right.

[Gondandur]

~ Deity feats: We’ll be adding new Deities that players can follow, and new feats that can be unlocked by players who find favor with their deity of choice.
~ Sev

This is a great idea, I think this part of role playing as been discarded for too much time.

~ Monks and Favored Soul updates: Continuing our class work, you can expect an overhaul of handwraps in addition to updated enhancement trees for both classes.
~ Sev

I hope you will work also on a healing focused druid tree soon or later. Healers need more love and you should make the game more balanced in order to incentivate players to group together to cover all roles.

[Zebedar]

I hope you've been enjoying Against the Slave Lords, checking out our new Cannith Crafting update, and helping us celebrate a decade of DDO! I'm writing today to talk about our plans for the rest of the year and beyond.

Our goal is to release two updates before the end of the year. One of the updates will be larger, the other smaller, and combined they'll bring several things that players have long asked for to DDO. Since we are currently working on two updates, it isn't clear yet what will be in each update. We'll release things when they are ready, so if something isn't ready in time for next month, we'll see if we can finalize it for the following update in December.

Here's the list of Things We’re Working On:

~ Updated Night Revels event: First up, we’re working on an update to The Night Revels, our Halloween-themed event which debuted last year. We’re planning to add a couple of new quests along with a handful of new items that will focus on cosmetic fun. We’re expecting the updated Night Revels to debut later in October.

~ A new Questing hub: We've long wanted to help people figure out where to go and what to do when they come back to DDO from some time away, and this hub will help both them as well as anyone who'd like to get to quest entrances more quickly. We don't have a name for this new system yet, and we'll be talking a lot more about it in the coming weeks.

~ World Character Transfers: We've heard from many of you that our process to transfer characters from one world to another needs to be more intuitive and take less time. Our new launcher-based system will send a character or characters from one world to another in seconds, and players will be able to pay for their transfers directly with Turbine Points. We think you'll like this transfer system, which is already in place in our sister game Lord of the Rings Online. Expect to see it debut by the end of the year.

~ Deity feats: We’ll be adding new Deities that players can follow, and new feats that can be unlocked by players who find favor with their deity of choice.

~ A new free dungeon: We’re expecting to release a new free dungeon in December that we think fans of A Study in Sable will enjoy. This quest sends adventurers to a popular type of pen and paper location that hasn’t had much representation in DDO. I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

~ Monks and Favored Soul updates: Continuing our class work, you can expect an overhaul of handwraps in addition to updated enhancement trees for both classes.

Looking beyond 2016, we know many of you have been hearing the rumors and teases about Ravenloft, so let's talk Strahd. We're 100% interested in bringing Ravenloft to DDO, and are working through the process to make it happen. We don't have an exact time frame in mind, although our current plan has it coming to DDO sometime towards the end of 2017. We can't wait to bring one of the most popular and classic adventures in Dungeons & Dragons history to the game.

We’re also planning for our 11^th anniversary in late February! We’re hoping to debut a new playable race for the anniversary along with some new adventuring. We’ve been asking you whether you’d like to play a kobold or dragonborn, and while the final decision hasn’t been made, it looks like many of you would enjoy the dragonborn, so we’ll see what the anniversary brings.

It remains an honor to be your Executive Producer, and I'll be back later this year to look ahead to 2017. Until next time, may the loot gods smile on you.

~ Sev

STOP. STOP NOW. Seriously, that all sounds great but you HAVE to get DDO's house in order before you open up anymore cans of worms Sev.

FIX THE BUGS, ATTEND TO THE KNOWN ISSUES LIST AND IT'S MANY YEARS OLD BUGS BEFORE ANY MORE CONTENT. YOU SAID YOU WOULD HAVE THE TEAM 'BUGSMASH', KEEP YOUR WORD AND FIX THE BUGS FIRST!

[fedula]

The game continues to be fun for me after all these years. Sev - you and your team are doing a great job!
Thanks & keep it up!

[Bozone]

All of this is great. While some of it is not too important to me personally, I know there are a fair number of players that will benefit and have waited for some of these things for a long time. Being a casual player I'm pretty easy to satisfy. This is already a great game and more than six years after starting playing I haven't fully explored everything it has.

But there is one thing I'm skeptical about:

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

Improved look? I guess, maybe. Improved functionality? I think you and I have different definitions of functionality. I agree with those above who prefer using the current character bank tabs to the shared bank. It's a pain to find things in the shared bank. I only have 60 slots in my shared bank because if I bought more it would just mean having to tab and scroll more and a harder time to find what I'm looking for. I'm always short on storage it seems, but I dislike the shared bank UI enough that I don't consider buying more an option. If there aren't improved organization/sorting/searching methods included in this change, please reconsider. Hopefully, you just didn't mention the shared bank UI improvements you plan in this brief summary.

[PacmanJones]

What I don't like is that you absolutely NEED to farm the low level missions to get the exp you need to level up. What I would like to see is a new, updated Korthos for TR's that focuses on giving more exp so your only option isn't to farm. Granted farming is great and all, but when it's your only option for getting your character leveled up, its a little silly. Like leave the current Korthos for characters that are brand new to the game and learning it, but another low-level area for TR'ing characters. But that's just me.

[sbeehre]

On the storage aspect I hope this is including the TR Cache. While I liked the Tabbed interface of the Kundarak Bank I also feel that a few enhancements to the interface (which will work for all tabs) would help make sorting/finding easier

1. Sort, By Name or By Minimum Level
Sorting by name should use Minimum Level as its secondary sort and sorting by Minimum Level should use the Name as a secondary sort

Yep sorting would be excellent! LoTRO has is so why cant we?

[Zebedar]

Fix the bugs first.

[Zebedar]

My understanding is the transfer system itself doesn't have a check on it, but you could log into the world and attempt to create a character with the name if it's a concern. Of course you'll then want to delete the character prior to transferring.

#fixthebugs1st

[Faltout]

~ A new Questing hub: We've long wanted to help people figure out where to go and what to do when they come back to DDO from some time away, and this hub will help both them as well as anyone who'd like to get to quest entrances more quickly. We don't have a name for this new system yet, and we'll be talking a lot more about it in the coming weeks.

I hope that means you'll include the location of the quest in the quest journal or the adventure compendium and will not teleport players directly to the quest entrance...

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

More space is nice, but the "improved look and functionality" is simply NOT TRUE. As other posters have mentioned, the paging system of the shared bank and crafting storage is awful. You can't sort items, you can't look fast for a familiar icon.

At least I hope that the other inventory view (the lists by type) will not vanish.

The other stuff looks good (well, except night revels, unless you're bringing the summoning chamber as a raid)

My understanding is the transfer system itself doesn't have a check on it, but you could log into the world and attempt to create a character with the name if it's a concern. Of course you'll then want to delete the character prior to transferring.

But... but... if the system doesn't have a check on it, then doesn't that screw your whole ID system? If a player manages a transfer and the name already exists then wouldn't there be 2 players with the same name in that server? How would EVERYTHING work (mails, parties, loot, tells, etc.)?
And if the transfer doesn't go through, then why can't that player know beforehand? Or why not add a name change to the price and prompt a name change in case the name exists?

[Xanthrawl]

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.
~ Sev

This is great news. When can we expect the additional character Bank storage space to be available?

My main is on his final life for triple completionist, at 30 and ready to TR again.

My next goals are to collect all raid loot in the game, as well as all seals, shards, and scrolls from the old epic loot (no room to actually make them, just want to have them in my bags.) This is currently not possible, unless I delete things like green steel, event items, etc.

Unless there are more past lives added, the only thing I really care about is BtC storage space. I'll gladly pay for the upgrades, but more space is needed pretty soon if I am to remain an active player.

[Hipparan]

~11th Anniversary..
Would of expected to see Tiefling and Aasimar long before Koboldsand or Dragonborn.. but somehow these are not options or even on the drawaing board?
Kobold/Dragonborn cosmetic skins for players and pets probably would have sufficed for the birthday event...
but I guess its something more than we have ..so ok...

I would like to know this as well.

Severlin mentioned in the last producer's letter that Aasimar and Tiefling would show up far in the future, so we will probably be getting three races next year. I know Tiefling tails and horns have been something the devs have thought about, so it could be that Dragonborn/Kobold are being released as a test to see what can be done about tails and horns showing through armor or not.