DDOCast 574 - Free to Play 10th Anniversary

[pjstechie]

Cordovan joins us this week for a conversation about the 10th anniversary of free to play in DDO and how it changed DDO and MMOs

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Game News - 3:28
Community News - 30:37
Lightning Post - 42:17
10th Anniversary Free to Play - 45:28

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DDO Chronicle 352
Strimtom: Guide To The Universal Enhancement Trees

[FuzzyDuck81]

I'd been playing DDO on Devourer, on the European servers, for about a year when DDO went f2p & pretty much immediately moved over, choosing Thelanis since that was where some guildies & a few others I played with regularly had already decided on. It was a bit of a wrench having to start from scratch again just as I'd just capped a character for the first time (cap was 16 at the time & incidentally that was also the 1st character I got to 20 when I was able to transfer her over after the EU servers shut down permanently. I still have her.) but those regrets soon vanished when I arrived on Korthos and... *gasp* THERE WERE PEOPLE HERE!

I've almost always had a positive experience with DDO's community in general, though there were a few funny moments in groups where I'd say it was time for me to finish up for bed & get a "wait, are you a kid?" response then have to reply that no, it's 10:30pm here & I have to leave the house at 7am for a full time job - clearly, some people hadn't quite worked it out that there were people from all around the world playing now & they were in different timezones. Also, a few US players I ran with mentioned that they could understand some of the EU players (particularly the Swedes, Danes & Dutch) over voice better than some of their own countrymen, which was always amusing.

Another unexpected upside to being a non-US player was that because of the low EU server population we'd gotten very good at being self sufficient - US players hadn't yet developed those skills quite as universally as far as I can remember - and that combined with our existing knowledge of the game would often surprise the players who were already well established on the server & had evidently been expecting complete newcomers from the initial f2p surge.