Lesson Learned?

[tinyelvis]

Our spaceship have launched successfully, reached the outer space and did some researches. Who cares if it crashed afterwards, astronauts died, equipment burned and research data is lost ? Overall it was positive !

:-\

Actually what you write is very similar to the truth. When "We" sent a spaceship to the moon, it's computer glitched, bugged out, and crashed. But did the lunar module auger in and crater the moon? No, it did not. There were sentient humans aboard who took over and calmly found a place to land with less than 30 seconds of fuel left. Sentient humans can also easily negotiate the very small issues with this update... especially the Pale master, who currently nets a huge positive. Oh, btw, dont forget the 70 addition to negative energy power and spell pen and bats... the later not much use in reaper but works like a charm otherwise. As for sentient humans playing this game being able to negotiate past the bugs, well, aside from a few exceptions, it appears that too is true.

[erethizon]

And MAC Players CAN'T log since yesterday patch...
So... how many people do you think are not playing the game due this marvelous Patch?

Hopefully all Mac users will be able to play after today's patch. It sounds like the problem is with users that have an old Mac client (and they can download the new client to play immediately), but after the patch in 5 hours they should be able to play either way.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

Since I only do Crystal Cove this week[end], I don't care about those bugs, because when I defeat pirates, those bugs don't matter much to me. And I play almost exclusively lower-level chars anyway. I'm so much away from Destinies, that I'm sure they'll be fixed when I arrive there in a year or two.

[LucidLTS]

All of the things that went wrong with this launch: the lack of testing, lack of listening to feedback, the sheer amount of broken and bugged items we saw have been happening since they were with Atari/Warner/Turbine years and years ago. If anything, it may have gotten worse. Have they learned? I'm going to have to go with a firm NO. They keep doing the same thing expecting it to go better but it never does. At some point a rational person would have to step back and reevaluate their approach.

But the same voices always tell them they are doing great and attempt to smother any criticism by reporting any critical post as a personal attack or derailing threads and unfortunately those are the voices that SSG chooses to listen to.

And here we are. *shrug*

^This

DDO got a huge amount of goodwill by being named after (and originally based on) D&D, but they're squandering it at an alarming rate with poor quality, indifference to and poor communication with customers, double standards, and relentlessly driving the power gap. I keep hoping they'll see the light, but hope is dying.

It's easy to listen to somebody who tells you you're doing great no matter what, and it looks like they fell into that trap hard.

[clashjunky]

I've been playing since the patch went live and enjoying myself.
Yeah, there are bugs, but none are "showstoppers"... some minor inconveniences.

People these days just look for ways to be victims of even the smallest of inconveniences.

I play on a Mac. They made the same mistake they did last week and broke the Mac client login. These bugs are Stopping my show.

[LurkingVeteran]

I agree that they should have more thorough Lam betas, esp. for such a large change as this, but getting useful feedback out of the forums does not seem easy either as people exaggerate problems.

There is a bitter culture of... let's call it melodrama, on the forums, where people pile on to complain over even minor tweaks they find in patch notes without considering the changes in their full context. The important stuff just gets lost in all the noise. Going by the Lam threads, DC casters were doomed, DC casters were getting buffed too much, melee were doomed, xp rate was doomed, PM not strong enough, PM was OP, arcane nuking was pointless, arcane nuking was too strong, reaper was now too easy...

Just today post-patch I read that epic DC casters were too strong, and low-skull reapers may be too hard, which might be closer to the truth because they have at least tried it. We'll know in a few weeks when things settle.

The best way to get devs to pay more attention to player feedback & open betas is to raise the bar on feedback quality, and help them actually test stuff on Lam. FUD does not help anybody.

[bracelet]

There is only one game breaking issue and that is for Mac users. Though I am not sure that testing on lam would have fixed that.

Actually, I did test it, saw that it was broken again, and mentioned it here in the announcement thread: https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...=1#post6235059

I guess I should have filed a proper bug. But it’s really not something that should ever have happened. The client is literally broken everywhere. It will not launch on any macOS on any machine. This falls into the QA failure mode known as “did not even try it”.

[MrChipinator]

Sure the experience changes are a net negative for people who relied on dailies being an easy way to level if they had limited time to play, and sure people who never touch anything above R1 are saying what's the big deal with the meta balancing but at least my arbitrary standards for myself have been met and now I can go forth and post really dumb analogies about how good this update is.

Yeah I'll admit I don't have the capacity to see things from another persons perspective but who cares? I'm enjoy playing R1 Red Fens and getting 500 more XP for my hour long investment and anyone who doesn't understand how that's an amazing change that was really hard to do is just a salty forum troll who is a melodramatic baby.

[LurkingVeteran]

I didn't say all of those concerns were invalid, it's just that there is often drama when something is changed, and angry outbursts don't really help communicate the problem. Once properly framed, that is a perfectly valid concern. The problem with the original system was that there was no correlation between quest exp numbers and player fun = player retention though. You just happened to have some quests that were best xp, and then everybody got to play those disproportionately often. That is also a valid concern.

Wouldn't a better solution to the problem of casuals falling too far behind be a "rested" xp bonus more similar to WoW? Then they could play whatever quest they found interesting and still get a temporary bonus. If you stay factual, it's not that hard to find ways to make everybody happy.

[Potatofasf]

Wouldn't a better solution to the problem of casuals falling too far behind be a "rested" xp bonus more similar to WoW? Then they could play whatever quest they found interesting and still get a temporary bonus. If you stay factual, it's not that hard to find ways to make everybody happy.

It isn't hard... but looks like there is no interest by SSG to make the game new/casual/returning player friendly!

[Chai]

We're all the way down to declaring "minor inconveniences" as victories, over simply listening to specific players point out specific scenarios where their play experience is worse than before. Even if its slightly worse, thats still not a victory.

[LurkingVeteran]

It isn't hard... but looks like there is no interest by SSG to make the game new/casual/returning player friendly!

Sweeping claim without facts to back it up. This is the kind of unconstructive melodrama I was talking about.

I can think of several things SSG has done to make it more new/returning friendly. Like buffing pure builds by fixing the most underperforming trees (e.g. EK, Warpriest, Warchanter, EDs etc), items to make it easier to unlock a desired ED, making decent loot easily accessible through RL etc. They have significantly improved evoker scaling, and are even talking about a THF buff. DDO does retain a large powergap between TR/RP junkies and the rest, but half the player base is violently opposed to narrowing that gap.

If you have a legit peeve, be specific and factual. One day you may find they have at least tried to fix it.