Hey! Where Did Everyone Go?

[Goalt]

They left. Sliently.

[SiliconScout]

They left. Sliently.

By the thousands, yes they did. And that is all the more worrisome really. When the population just quietly slips away it's a lot harder to see the situation for what it truly is. Boiling Frog metaphor and all that.

[lyrecono]

I've never seen DDO advertised.
I found it because I was in the mood for D&D and had no one to play tabletop.

Is there a reason DDO doesn't advertise or am I just missing the adverts?

I wouldn't know, been using add blockers since they were homebrew.
I understand people in the US are used to magazines&commics with adds every other page, giant billboards every 100 feet, radio&television commercials every few minutes and posioned your own internet with endless spam&banners but i grew up outside of the US where this was less prominent. When the internet dawned and US based websites got overloaded with adds, we started to block them (partially due to infcted adds).
So some of us across the pond would never have known about ddo (or found the origional box in the bargain bin like i did)

I was thinking along the lines of advertising on specific web-comics that run along these lines: Goblins, Giant in the playground, Girl Genius, etc.
Advertising there is cheap, relatively, and hits some of the target audience. I'm sure there are contemporary comics in other nations that would also welcome the advertising.

Who reads print anymore? Dragon Magazine lost most of it's appeal to me... thirty years ago...? Oh my God, I'm old.

I don't think that would help, plenty of potential younger/newer players are tech savy enough to use add blockers.

So that was YOU scaring all the fish!!!!



Don't need merger. Just Global chat.

It works for LOTRO, it would work here.

Ohhh heffle no!
It's a channel i would block on day 1, i already have plenty of public space spammers blocked.
You would get all the weirdo's spamming to sell kobold prayer beads (as they do now), because no one responds to them in trade channel

For some values of "work". Biggest problem is the opportunity for a single rude person to reach and out and annoy a vastly increased number of people. ("You can't make me not post spoilers in world chat. I'm just going to keep posting spoilers.", pro-/anti-vaccination spamfest, "GOAT", etc)

World Chat without active moderation is non-optimal.

Pretty much this!

Oh, yeah, an occasional <person> tries getting all annoying or offensive. Global chat means that many more people either Ignore the person and they find themselves only talking to themselves, or that many more people report a truly offensive person and they just sorta disappear.

Yeah, many channels have fallen flat like this

I also play on Thelanis, when I joined in Fall '09, there were regularly 3-5 instances of the harbor and marketplace pretty much any time I logged on. I remember the first Crystal Cove event having 20+ instances for the first three days maybe longer. The first Mabar also had over 20+ instances. Last year even with the revamp of Cove loot I don't recall seeing more than 3 instances even on the first day of the event. I rarely see more than 2 instances of either the harbor or marketplace anymore and usually its just one.

I don't know how many people are required before a new instance is opened but we don't seem to have enough for that to happen with any frequency. ...And that might be a good thing because the servers seem less stable than they were way back when... I mean I've taken part in Cordovan's anniversary Free-for-alls and it seems like each year it gets less and less reliable that people can even move properly without DC-inducing lag. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes in DDO but I remember in years past NOT having such issues with more people so... what in Shavarath is going on?

Yeah, people always forget how bad the infra structure is in ddo and can't handle that many people in 1 spot.

They left. Sliently.

By the thousands, yes they did. And that is all the more worrisome really. When the population just quietly slips away it's a lot harder to see the situation for what it truly is. Boiling Frog metaphor and all that.

Sadly they have left, sillently, one by one.
And not enough is done to stop this

[Maldorin]

I don't know how many people are required before a new instance is opened but we don't seem to have enough for that to happen with any frequency. ...And that might be a good thing because the servers seem less stable than they were way back when...

I fear sometimes the ultimate solution for past crippling lag was to let the population die down to eventually playable levels.

[Tyrande]

[...]. what in Shavarath is going on?

Between 2009 and now, DDO has moved through at least 3 different data centers; and using cloud based computing for cost savings...

and of course, the executable size, its much larger and complex. We're at what? Update 43? 43 major updates, and 4 different expansions? Of course, even at the system level its different. We have a lot more races, classes, etc.; and we have the revamped trees; Epic levels and with HR, RR, ER, IR, LR.

Also, more fighting styles: dual crossbow style, dual knife backwards style, ninja style (with shuriken), warlock Eldritch Blast, etc.

I do not recall we had TRs prior to 2009... If I had stopped playing in 2009 and came back today, it would almost feel like a new game.

[Zavina]

Here is a list of things that don't transfer:
Your Friends list
Your /Ignore list
Your Guild name, level, airship, amenities, membership ranks, or other guild-related benefits. You will appear in the new world guildless.
Items in your True Reincarnation Cache
Items bid on or posted to the Auction Houses
In-game mail
Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage items
Your Astral Shard balance
Your Creature Companion Stable

Thinking something is easy, might not actually be the case just cause you think it is. To merge servers it would cause massive losses to the players on the server that is shutting down. While also causing an influx of players on a server that probably cant handle said amount of players. Which also doesn't fix the core issue of players grouping with others.

Yeah i couldn't ever move from Orien based on that list. Having my own Kraken, and just upgraded to Crafting Storage VII (to give an idea of how crowded my storage is) today.

[TedSandyman]

G-land, EST, late afternoon to evening; mid-week through Saturday. NEVER more than five people on in my level range, 9-12, for those nights. Based off the Who List.

Just adding some numbers to the conversation.

No, a server merge is not the answer as SSG cannot handle that and we would lose the game.

What we need is better marketing and customer retention.

Maybe time to rename the default server?

To be fair, I don't play as much as I used to. Too many friends don't play at all anymore, way too much player split with Heroic/Epic and 13 difficulty levels.

I truthfully don't think any level of marketing will help at this point. That ship has sailed. If it had been handled correctly when the game was young, there would have been more players and it would have been better now, but mmo's are not where the cool kids are anymore.

Amazon may be able to pull it off but I doubt even they can. Hmmm. I just had a thought. I may start a new thread.

An easy server merge would simply be to shutdown one server and give the players on the server a free "Account Move" to a different server. They already do account moves (if you pay them), so it definitely wouldn't be the big headache that everyone points out.

They already do account moves, just do the same process en masse. Have a good backup, in case things get lost. Move guilds according to the leader. Regroup on the other side. Rename things as needed. Give free name changes too, if you don't want the _1 on your name.

It wouldn't be a nightmare. Just inconvenient to some.

[Maldorin]

An easy server merge would simply be to shutdown one server and give the players on the server a free "Account Move" to a different server. They already do account moves (if you pay them), so it definitely wouldn't be the big headache that everyone points out.

They already do account moves, just do the same process en masse. Have a good backup, in case things get lost. Move guilds according to the leader. Regroup on the other side. Rename things as needed. Give free name changes too, if you don't want the _1 on your name.

It wouldn't be a nightmare. Just inconvenient to some.

This pretty much describes what a server merge is. And includes what people complain about most. Being forced to move and having to deal with same names, guild stuff, TR cache etc...

Me, I'd be fine if they just took a poll and all those against server merging...just delete those accounts. Simplest solution really.

Just kidding...

[SiliconScout]

I truthfully don't think any level of marketing will help at this point. That ship has sailed. If it had been handled correctly when the game was young, there would have been more players and it would have been better now, but mmo's are not where the cool kids are anymore.

Amazon may be able to pull it off but I doubt even they can. Hmmm. I just had a thought. I may start a new thread.

An easy server merge would simply be to shutdown one server and give the players on the server a free "Account Move" to a different server. They already do account moves (if you pay them), so it definitely wouldn't be the big headache that everyone points out.

They already do account moves, just do the same process en masse. Have a good backup, in case things get lost. Move guilds according to the leader. Regroup on the other side. Rename things as needed. Give free name changes too, if you don't want the _1 on your name.

It wouldn't be a nightmare. Just inconvenient to some.

Spoken like a guy who doesn't manage big production data stores if I ever heard it. The _1 at the end of the name is BY FAR the easy part.

Lets say you get moved. But you had a Big guild ship, all the amenities and it was all purchased with shards that you bought in the store. The current "Server move" model not only doesn't compensate you for that, indeed it leaves any shards you still had to spend behind as well. I am gonna guess if that was you then you'd have an issue.

The "Easy" fix is to transfer over all the shards you currently have AND payback the shard cost in the guild ship. But what if you have 2 toons, 10, 30 ,.... WHEN do you move those shards over. What if (as is in my case) 3 players contributed shards to the ship, even have a bunch in the shared guild bank ... how do you give those back equitably?

They can't really use the existing tool (which until fairly recently was a 100% manual process) to complete a server merge now without ripping off many of their players and giving them legitimate grievances. They paid actual cash for those goods, in some jurisdictions SSG could get sued.

I still maintain the actual best choice would be to create a completely new server and simply move entire accounts from 2 or more servers into it. You don't get a choice ALL your toons are moved over there, and so is your guild. It's by far the cleanest way to compete the job but it's also quite likely to be the most labour intensive it's also the one with lower risk of an issue but with a higher impact if there is one.

Could they do it, I think so, I know my team could do it ASSUMING the schema on all the servers is identical, which I would strongly expect it to be. The real question is does it make economic sense for them to do this. Given that their servers are virtualized I will guess there is little to no savings in hosting / hardware costs so you are hoping to regain the expense in either greater player sales OR new subs, and really it's both. As much as I would be OK with this, I just fail to see the ROI at this stage in the game unless we are talking going HARD and only having 1 or 2 servers total.

[Livmo]

.

If going to go big, go big. One world. Everyth9ing gets xfered to it.

I would have a massive fleet of airships to hoard treasure and over 700 toons on 1 world. I got 6 Livmos, 6 Bills, 6 Teds, 6 Excellents, 6 Adventures...(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3fx6TugN7g)

Every thing gets a free re-name and some special thing worth $$. Only $$, because I would not expect a thank you for your patience, because you can't play the game while this actually happens to be more than $50 US.

And of course afterwards, I would like to have player housing, airship wars/battles, trophy cases to display fully upgraded raid loot I don't use, spell component bags, potion bags, no TR cache, and beer on Sundays.

[Maldorin]

, and beer on Sundays.

And free beer on Sundays...

Because there's always room for improvement.

[Andu_Indorin]

hey! Where did everyone go?

ffxiv?

[concavenator]

Mergmergmerg