Join us on Wednesday on Twitch for a Q&A with Severlin!

[voxson5]

I have questions to please be passed on,

As a cafe owner I take customer criticism and negative feedback very seriously, in fact I see it as far more important for my team that anything else. We do everything we can to address this openly on social media and to make sure the communication stays open, honest, and to show we're here for the customers.

This has come in part from my business studies, as I've been taught that customers who provide complaints or criticism are typically ones who are invested in the business - they want it to succeed and be better, which is why they take the time to provide it.

Anyway, here are my questions:

1 - Why does SSG remove criticism?
2 - If the constant is continued negative criticism, why is it often ignored?
3 - If the lack of communication / transparency is due to lack of time resource, will further a further FTE be implemented?

There is an extraordinary amount of quite strong criticism from such a small player population towards SSG, the community manager, the 'proposed' changes, the lack of communication, the lack of transparency, the game engines (both LoTRO & DDO), the in- games support. This is easily found in this forum, various discord channels, the vault, lotrocommunity, various blog sites, game news sites, business review sites, and so on.

Non-DDOvault critique examples regarding SSG and staff:
https://biobreak.wordpress.com/2020/...-communicator/
https://occasionalhero.com/2020/10/2...ini-expansion/
http://www.containsmoderateperil.com/blog/2020/10/19/lotro-even-more-community-management-problems
https://www.bbb.org/us/ma/needham-hgts/profile/video-game-dealers/standing-stone-games-llc-0021-188406/complaints

DDO & LoTRO players appear very invested in the games, and when something happens which they do not agree with, they are willing to let the company know. Many times comments, or even whole threads of discussion will be closed, or removed from existence without response, or acknowledgement.

From a customers perspective it appears that the status quo is to hide the 'bad stuff' from investors / devs / producers, in a "this is fine" attitude. As if you don't want to hear any critique or opinion different to your own.

To be fair, not all critique is removed, but it really feels that if it speaks ill of the company it gets disintegrated with no trace. If a customer is unhappy, provides critique, and gets banned / posted removed / essentially dismissed without any reasonable acknowledgement or validation of the issues, no favours are being done to company reputation or a likely paying customer's satisfaction nor to whomever that customer might influence for future purchasing opportunities.

I expect this post will be moderated.

*edited to include more examples.

[Madja]

Will we ever see heroic level raids again? It's such a shame to have all the cool raid items and dungeons be made only for the people who like to stay at cap.


Are you concerned with the amount of power creep that has been introduced in the game over the years? If so do you have any plans for addressing it?


Do you feel that reapers and champions have been a healthy addition to the game?

[Cardo]

Can we get a permanent hireling barrack similar to the mount stable?

[Eme]

These are fine questions, but they sound like better questions for the systems team rather than our executive producer, other than the +20 heart question, which the answer is no, we are not distributing free +20 Hearts of Wood with the release of Update 49. That level of granular ability question makes more sense for someone who works on it.

brave

[Hawkwier]

If your changes don't result in significant lag reduction, will you roll them back?

[Aelonwy]

Well I got to actually watch most of it live this time. Very informative and articulate today, and rather more encouraging than I expected considering my feelings of late, so good job Cordovan, good job Sev.

But get on that Monster Manual teaser, please. I need some hints.

[FengXian]

So Severlin mentioned that those items might be getting reworks/updates/whatever with Saltmarsh.

Since cat seems to be out of the bag can anyone elaborate, even a little bit?

If you're gonna help the S/S/S nerfed bows as soon as Saltmarsh could have mentioned that you have "plans" for those items, would have been clarifying and just nice tbh, could have spared everyone some complaints probably

[mikarddo]

So Severlin mentioned that those items might be getting reworks/updates/whatever with Saltmarsh.

Since cat seems to be out of the bag can anyone elaborate, even a little bit?

If you're gonna help the S/S/S nerfed bows as soon as Saltmarsh could have mentioned that you have "plans" for those items, would have been clarifying and just nice tbh, could have spared everyone some complaints probably

EStorm and ESoS nerfs Inc

[Artos_Fabril]

EStorm and ESoS nerfs Inc

"ESoS has been retuned in line with current Cannith crafting ilevel system, it is now a +6 Adamantine Greatsword with 3[2d6] 17-20 x2 damage (including Keen III)"

[DYWYPI]

Thanks, to whomever (as I didn't watch the Twitch version recording so didn't see the exact question posed) asked Severlin some form of question about his resemblance to John Malkovich around [31:40] on my behalf as per my previous post [Post #4]. :-)

[DYWYPI]

Possibly the first time I saw Jack Black (Cordovan's choice of actor, to portray him in a movie) appearing on video, was of him acting in the "Vision Warrior Men's Circle" section, and throughout the video. He was hardly known outside of the USA at the time, so I didn't even realise until a few years later.

[Silverleafeon]

Watching April Ask Sev on twitch:
(please pardon any errors or omissions on my part, recommend watching if you have time)
Hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed listening.
Took most of the day with breaks.
(as i save to clipboard knowing this will likely not post first attempt

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/995549362?t=0h3m38s


At a little before 6 and half minutes:

Banks - some good news there:

My comments:
I previously thought that the earlier work on banks was wasted and worried that they should have brought out what they had.

However, listening to this, they build upon that work, adding UI and a new system for BTC items.
When finished, this will offer more bank space (yah!) and be less resource taxing on the system (take less room on the backside).
This will allow easier transfers (remember Sev is eyeing a new mega server someday with most everyone transferring to it),
as well as less resource drain.

My comments:
Overall, very pleased with this news.
Bigger Banks are still "Soon TM." (expecting some time this year)


My comments:
Also, we have some awesome new engineers.
We have expanded the engineering team; they are still coming up to speed.



At 7:40 ish:
Q: What are future plans about the current changes on debuffs?

Regarding changes to double strike and double shot.
These were important changes to make, but let's not kid ourselves this is not going to totally solve performance issues.
The more we look at performance, this is like the problem of a thousand cuts.
This will help some players significantly, but it's not going to be like "there will be no lag tonight."

Now what we are doing is trying to go thru and make changes so the procures remain relatively the same where we can.

After this is all over, there are going be some builds such as arcane archer paralyzing arrow improved precise shot that are still going to lock down monsters, and we will need to look at that to decide if that is what we want to happen.

However, changing procures might affect some unintentional things like spells and we will have to go thru and make sure the changes to procures does not affect things that are not double strike and double shot.


My comments:
Having been at the point three years ago wherein certain raids with certain groups, my toon had to wait 15 minutes after the raid had ended for the end chest to appear so that I could loot it, I will usually always be on the anti-lag side of the fence.
Also, reaper 10 is not designed to be doable, so anytime we get a lot of players doing reaper 10, I would expect an adjustment in the reaper dungeons themselves or in the top-performing builds.



At 10 minutes:

We have also found some lag issues centering around monk's centering and barbarians raging.

We have found some back-end solutions for this.
However, the player will not notice anything different.
This is being worked on right now.


At 10:20

We are in the middle of the Epic Destiny Revamp.
The Player's Council has begun to sink their teeth into it.
We will be seeing more information on the Epic Destiny Revamp soon.

My comments:
Having been on the PC, I can say that Official Public Thread often follows soon after in most cases, unless there is a huge back to the drawing board situation. So, we might see partial information in the next few months? Maybe sooner?

It (epic destinies) is pretty cool.
It will work more like the heroic trees.
It will be exciting and open up a lot of new builds.
And quite frankly will be more balanced so a lot more of the trees are useful.

My comments:
The big thing needed is for the player base to look at the new Epic Destinies and say "This is more enjoyable than the old Epic Destinies."
We have seen some pull back on outlying builds lately, so I feel there is some room for goodies and this is the place to put this.


At 11 minutes:
Q: What are we doing to improve customer service?

One of the problems with customer service this that everything is being put into two separate Qs.
There is an in-game Q and an out-of-game Q.
The customer service team has to go thru both of these, and find out if the account is online, then they have to go look up what to do.
They did not have tools for _____ and they needed to go get permission to do stuff.

Solutions: We need one Q, so that is one of the things we are working on.
They also have new tools so they can address things offline and see more information about what account this is and if the player is online right now.
They can look at each character individually.
They can fix things and look at inventory while the character is offline.
This is going to be a tremendous boon.
This should speed up things a lot.

We are likely to have the in-game ticket change to opening up a browser and dealing with the ticket that way.
[EI: All tickets in one Q that is out-of-game.]

There are a lot of duplicate tickets and it takes them a lot of time to go thru and figure out which tickets are duplicates.
With the new tools and only one Q, this will be faster.
One of my concerns is the players will have to get used to the new system and we don't want the player to feel we are trying to redirect them.
It will just be a unified system.

The new tools that we have put into the QA service (which are not live yet) are really slick.
(said with pride).


At 14 minutes:

With the new ED system, a lot of the ED problems just go away.
(Speaking still about Customer Service, so I'm assuming this is a reference to lost epic destiny XP?).

Cordovan asks about lost Epic Destinies.
It seems to be a performance hitch, so the amount of time it happens is very low.
However, with the number of people reincarnating, it can happen and when it does it can be very devasting.

The new epic destiny does not use that system at all.
At least behind that scenes how reincarnation will work that whole system will be much more stable.


At 15 minutes

Q: Is there a technical reason that we have not received more challenges?

Yes, it's a balance issue.
How can I put this?
We have had many designers over the years and there have been many ways of balancing creatures.
Some of this has been haphazard.
The reality of this is how we balance monsters now compared to 3, 5, 10 years ago are very different.
Well, the challenges were made with a problematic system for leveling with that we are not entirely happy with.
So making new challenges, there would be certain levels that there would a tremendous amount of work balancing all that.
The current system uses a tier of creatures instead of a ____ (progression?) system like reaper mode, so we would basically have to redo that in order to get the balance right.

The other issue is that challenges grant monsters based on character level.
(summary of next part: challenges don't offer the N/H/E/R1-10 difficulty options that players like to have = EI: one person has hard day at work want easy mode, while someone else wants to die 71 times and barely win)


At 17:37

Q: Don't expect any more Eveningstar Challenges ever?

A: I don't want to say never, but there are significant challenges to ...
Turns into Pun: There are challenges in doing challenges because the challenge level is not good...(laughed)

There are things we would have to rework to make challenges be what players expect.


At 18:

Infrastructure problem with inventory over the weekend causing lag issues.
We had fixed most of it, but there were some (EI: additional) issues yesterday that we have mostly fixed so that should be cleared up.


At 19:

Q: what about new hardcore champions coming to live servers?

If we did that, we would do it as a festival-type event.
The issue is that we do not have the tech to change world-type champions, but we could build that if there was a demand for it.
One of the things on hardcore is "how do we figure out the new champions" as a fun extra.
I want to be careful because people have their way of playing the game and when you throw them curveballs sometimes it can be more frustrating than fun.
When you go to a brand new hardcore server, you are expecting that kind of a thing, but when you TR and suddenly the champions are different, we just want to make sure the players are all on board and that is a fun opportunity before we do something like that.


At 20:20

Q: Can we have more ways to protect our account; can we have two-factor authentication?

That is something that we would love to do.
It would require engineering resources.
Now that we have great new engineers and we are going thru cleaning up stuff, that is something happen maybe next year.
Depends on how much we can get thru tech debt.
Also want Salt Marsh which will take time.


At 21:30

Q: Has WotC ever rejected any of your proposals.

Cordovan: its more of a collaborative effort.
Sev: this is not a forum that I would discuss. It's out of scope for here.
...It is cool to work with WotC...

Cordovan: I have been working here for 10 years and I cannot think of anything major.


At 22:28
Sev: I like pirate champs, I think that would be a cool idea.
(looking at question list I think)


At 22:38
Q: new monster manuels? what is up and when
A: yeah, they are Qued up. I know there was some work done on
I have to look up when more will be released, but that is definitely


at 22:25
Comment on question list:
New skins for Cursors I wonder if we could allow people to insert their own background objects for Cursors?
That would be interesting.


at 23:50
Would like to get a new drow at some point, that is definitely on the radar.
Would love to get "Joe" to narrate if you are listening, "Joe", send me an email.


at 24 minutes

UI scaling
Creating every icon in the game at a 2x scale would be a GIANT undertaking.
....remarkably expensive to do without problems...
We definitely want to do that, particularly 4k support is important.


at 25 minutes
New hairstyles and colors in store?
Yes, likely next year, we have good ideas for this.


At 25:27
Q Are we still getting the Isle of Dread?
A: All of our artists are super excited about the Isle of Dread.

I don't want to spoil anything, but there are certain giant-sized creatures that artists are working on even now.

We are always looking for classic modules....names one, oh that is a blast from the past, there are a number of modules that I would love to see.

We will continue high-priority on classic modules.
Mentions Salt Marshes and wonders that it has a wilderness (thinks likely).


at 27:16
Q: will there ever be non-horse mounts?
A: oh yes, one of my favorites flying carpets and giant gelatenous cube
Wierd mounts is a cool DDO thing.


at 28 minutes
Q: what new things will VIPs get?
A: we are constantly evaluating the value of what VIPs get and what cool things we can give them
We don't want to give them power boosts over normal players.
We would like some of our content to cost less for VIPs like mini expansion, but we are still working on tech for that.
Don't want to promise before its finished.


at 29 minutes
Q: storage for cosmetics?
A: Mounts you click on, and are different from cosmetics, so was easier to do.
Cosmetics carry the stats of actual items and come from many sources therefor are more complex.
Cosmetic storage if done would look more like bank storage.
(Wonders about expansions...does not want increase special cases)


at 31:48
comments from list of questions
We have to be careful about hardcore.
We want the cosmetics there to be good for hardcore, but not so impressive that the nonhardcore players feel obligated to do it.
Fine line there.


at 32:40
would be honored if "John ___" would do a DDO movie.
John if you are out there, contact me.


at 32:50
Q: what can you tell me about Horizon Walker?

Horizon Walker will add a lot for Bow.
It will be bow-focused.
There will be other stuff to move up the tree for non bow builds.
It will be cool.
We want people to feel they don't have to be a ranger to use a bow.


at 33:51
Q: When will Feywild be in the ddo store?
Cordovan no announcement
Also no announcement for gifting to others.


at 34:30
from question list:
Reincarnation is something we like players to do, but you never need to reincarnate to access the content that we offer.
You can experience everything in the game (due to various difficulty levels) without ever reincarnating.

Goes on to talk about the previously mentioned leader feature:
if you group up with someone with lots of past lives and/or reaper experience,
way if group leader has thus and players in the group don't (have pl & rxp) you share some of that power
boosted by their leadership
to be easier to make groups
working on a complex system
looking at doing that but not making it easy to abuse
its something that we will look at even more after we are done with the epic destiny revamp



at 36 minutes
Q: when can shurikens generate Ki like bows?
Cordovan: surprised they don't already
Will look at the state of that going forward.
Shurikens were at the top of the tier list for so long, that we might have been reluctant to look at them,
but (if/since) they have fallen from the top (of tier list) we want them to be playable and fun.

We need to be careful since shurikens do a lot of multi-procures.


at 37 minutes
looking from the question list:
We can still do Forgotten Realms content.
Our classic packs tend to end up in "classic wherever" the gatekeepers find them.
But can go back to do more Forgottens Realms, balancing out where things come from.


at 38 minutes
A deep dive itemization is probably out of the scope of this chat.
If we go into deep dive itemization I could talk for 3 hours about sentient weapons, set bonuses, etc...



Forum questions


at 38:30
Consider adding (permanent?) gold seal creatures (hirelings?) from the store?
(implied)

I don't have an answer for that, because I would like to work on a system where you could build your own (implied hire).
It is so early on in the stage that I don't want to commit to anything.
....Would like _____ ..... is that vague enough?


at 39:43
I would love to do a pass on both pets and summons.
(Summons) Playstyles are not useful.
If we did a "build a hire" project, we would have to do a pass on pets and summons because we would not want one to eclipse the other.
...look at the end game and as part of the class...


at 40 minutes

I would love to do some sort of summoning based class, and by doing that summoning is expensive (computer resource wise) because of pathing, but we could create sort of mindless creatures that just sort of run towards the enemy but not be smart enough to chase around corners and go down halls. They would be (short term) do their damage and then the character would have to resummon them (to save computer resources).

But that is a long-term goal and I don't know how the design team agrees on how cool that would be.


My comments:
Sounds cool to me.
(if any Devs are reading - Reference the Healer from the 3rd Ed D&D miniature handbook.)



at 40:55
Q: when is crystal Cove coming back?
A: Cordovan: within a few months - between now and mid sumer


at 41
more comments on hirelings
Hireling healers could be smarter and hireling micromanagement is a skill.
Tank hireling is harder to do.
We don't want players to feel safe (because they have hireling out). We have to be careful we don't go too far.
But we have a ways to go before we get there (overpowered) laughs.
This is something we can work on when we do the hireling pass (build your own hire, revised pets & summons, and potential Summoner).

Hireling use is a skill of its own.
Sometimes hirelings are more susceptible to CC than you are.
Players ask why did the hire not heal me, but they were paralyzed.
Their saving throws are lower than yours.

Cordovan bragging about level 5 rogue hireling on hardcore afterward.



at 42:40
Q: some enhancement trees still need some work, cleric _____ can these be done next year?
A: heroic trees are a constant rebalance and ongoing
A: we don't want to overboost trees that some players are using very effectively
A: Wizard Archmage would like to see done with spell pass


at 44 minutes
Wish lists stuff

Adding reapers to monster manuals?

Stackable iron ore?

no answer, as Cordovan moves to

at 45 minutes

Q: what about more low-level raids.
A: we find low-level raids to be underutilized because at that level, the goal of the player is not to be get together and group to do challenging content.

We have two types of players at that level:

One type plays DDO like they play dungeons and dragons - they go along with their small little group (searching dungeon together and no banding together with larger groups) so they are not going to be interested in raiding (at a low level).

The second type plays solo thru content and therefore will not be raiding at that level (revisiting content after reincarnating). They are working on building their character.

We could make a low-level version of higher-level raids, but that is a lot amount of work for something that will not be engaged by a large amount of the player base.

We want to be careful not to spend precious Dev time on ____, not that we don't want to support alternative playstyles, we don't want to introduce something that just does not get played.


at 47 minutes
Q Titan Raid

A when confronted the Devs about redoing the Titan Raid there was a certain amount of horror on the faces of the Devs, and I think that was at large degree why we have not gone to that.
The complexity of this raid is ___ and there were alternative ways of doing things.
(coding is so different than how we do things).

I do like the idea of using the assets from it and doing something like that.

Revising loot from the titan raid might be more possible.

I like going over beloved content and giving new life to it.

My comments
(This is actually what happened in Mark of Death which was rewritten as a new raid by Steelstar).


at 49 minutes
Q: old Scroll, Seal, and Shard items?

A: Sev: Am I spoiling by saying the revising that is part of Salt Marsh?
Cordovan: I know there was kicking around...I did not know that got slated into Salt Marsh. That is cool!
Cordovan starts talking.
Sev starts talking.
Cordovan stops after talking over Sev.
Sev: I know that is one of the things we were talking about. Maybe the Devs will be mad that I said that.
Laughter from both.
Cordovan: hands-on head.
Cordovan: it's fine
Sev: They want to do that.
more laughter


at 50:30
Sev, reading from the question list:
We don't want to go into that, too much power____your deity roll is____


If we go into all the cool content that could probably use updating gear, we would just blow away our hour (this question time on stream).



at 51 minute
People like new sentient gems.


at 51:20
The problems with server merges are immense with many problems to be solved.
Remember when I talked about Mega Servers?
We ran into a problem, there are limitations applied to the master server that keeps track of all the server's executables.
There is a problem/limitation of all of the server executables in a specific shard (lots of hand waving around here).
That is what we ran into here, and it is not an easy problem to fix.
Significant work for the mega server.
Functional limitations to how many shards could be attached to a master server.


at 52:33
Probably not going into specific enhancement fixes in the "Ask Sev a question" stream.

Interface quality of life - long-term goals, done some recently in character creation.

Cordovan's CooCoo Clock - is it fixed yet?
No and might be beyond my talents to fix.


at 53:23
Can we do character naming differently someday?

Sev, I think we could because characters are based on ID, not their name.
Nothing to announce.


at 53
Q: Gifting?
(maybe this is where nothing to announce is at)
A: the problem with gifting is it tempts people to try to steal your accounts, so we have to be careful.
A: behind scenes encourages other behavior _____.


Ask now, last round of questions?



Q:Where are we on hardcore:
Cordovan: have not died, level 6 and 4.
Hardcore going great.


Recap on earlier Customer Server - repeats a few things


Offhand double strike capping at 50.
We don't want two-weapon fighting increasing hits.


Q: Alice in Wonderland -
comments I love the Xoriat Quests where things are crazy and zany, but that is not something you do over and over again.
You do it once, it's super cool.
Also, you have people say, "That adventure was cool, I'm never doing it again."
They do add variety, but you don't want too many --- sometimes you just need some XP.


Cordovan mentions the latest XP boost (which will have expired by the time you read this).


Q: Changing gender on lesser reincarnation?
Appreciate this and would like to do it in theory, but I think there is a technical limitation that we ran into technical when we tried to do that.


Q: Univeral Racial Undead Tree?
Have you been talking to our Devs?
This has come up in the past that they want to do.
Would be cool, higher up in the universal tree, more effects added, the character looks more and more undead.
There were problems with changing your character to look more and more undead.
We want to do this for Ravenloft, but it did not work out.



About to reopen the worlds....


Final


Q: Nighmare Mount?
Likely

Q: Bonus Days anytime soon?
Likely

Q: Is there a reason why warlocks don't get a way to bypass elemental defense?
They are so good already! I am not sure you want them to do everything.

Q: any sneak peeks for the future?
We have kind of already.
Hinted at a dinosaur-themed _____ (intentionally mumbled next two words)

Q: we love Titan Raid
Not expecting all the Titan Love, it must be Titan Week!
Cordovan the potential of facing off against a Warforged Juggernaught with Laser is pretty awesome - laughs
Sev: ____facing Demonweb ____


Finishing off, maybe back in 4-6 weeks with another "Ask Sev" Stream.

Sev thanks all, hope you enjoy the new content.