U51 - SSG please take notice.

[gringofoot]

(This post represents my thoughts, experiences and observations. I have been a VIP member since 2010. I have bought all the expansions. I play a lot. My primary toon is on Orien, named Kinchloe. I have at least one toon on every server. I have played Hardcore in each season. That's who I am.)

The response to U51 seem overwhelmingly negative.

• I see more negative and more pronounced than responses to any update in a long while.
• The dislike of the U51 that you showed us is not rooted in minor adjustments. The few changes that have been taken into consideration do not address the core grievances with U51:
  
  • Much more is being taken away from player / customers than is being given back.
  • Loss of the ability to change trees for free. We often need to change our ED tree as a group forms. Sometimes we change ED's 2 or 3 times while a raid party forms, based on changing party make up. Someone either ignored this and decided to jack us up for a growing scale of plat and punish us for trying to run a quest in the game that we came here to play, or worse - has no understanding of why and how we play. Vague suggestions of some temporary discount are at best, an attempt to mollify criticism now and then do whatever you wanted to anyway. How will this build player / customer loyalty or grow server population?
  • 3 trees only, instead of 6 with heroic and vastly reduced options from current ED system. Filler enhancements that add minimal benefit from T1-T4 and T5 at L30. In heroic, T5 is at L12. This is draconian and horrid. How will this build player / customer loyalty or grow server population?
  • Level gating to L30 for the most useful tree options is beyond understanding. Moving it down to L29 will not be some great compromise. L25 at most is the only useful solution.
  
  
• It really seems that the changes in U51 have been in progress for 18-24 months already. It is disingenuous to label it as an advanced beta that is in any appreciable way open to suggestion. This is an announcement, not a discussion.

A solution in search of a problem

• The responses to critiques of U51 from SSG staff, devs and some others have not clarified any compelling reason for this. Telling us that people are not running epic quests, is grossly insufficient. It is a single data point, and by itself does not identify the actual root cause of that data, nor does it demonstrate how these changes are the answer.
• How do you know that the current ED's are the reason why?
• Is it perhaps because there is no real F2P path to L30?
• How many paid players (present and past) / long time players with races unlocked by favor are not running epic quests?
• How many F2P players reach L20 and TR?
• Who asked for this ED hork? Specifically, who? It was not a majority of player / customers. DDO has no suggestion box and no such requests are on the forum. Because I cannot see any trace of compelling need for this drastic change, I am left to speculate what the reasons may be. Others have suggested that this is part of preparation for level cap raising to L35...L40...L50. Whatever reason, it is not clear.

Low server population is this game's biggest problem.

• Player / Customers abandoned dedicated healer builds for good reasons. For one: there are not enough LFMs for anyone to level. Without LFMs to join, dedicated healers (NOT offensive casters) are left to solo quests with shockingly horrible DPS. And someone pointed out as well, there stopped being a need for dedicated healers. Still, my point is that leveling as a pure healer is dreadful.
• It can take 45 min to fill a raid on a Friday night and sometimes there aren't any posted at all.
• You need to bring more people to the game. The game will not grow nor last, on money from the same people. I don't know what percentages of total players are VIP / paid in some form, but I'm willing to bet that they are fairly consistent. So, to get more money - get more people. To get more people, you need to put out a platform that they will play for free and also pay for. Other D&D type MMO's are out there, growing their player / customer populations.
• Dungeons & Dragons has been around since 1974. It is the best known, best selling RPG on the planet. A global base of potential customers, only a fraction of which are playing DDO. Many or most are off playing something else online. It is ludicrous that World of Warcraft (the AOL of Dungeons & Dragons gaming) owns this market.

Speed leveling is not bad.

• If someone wants to slowly level, good for them. Do not tell people that want to level quickly, that this is not how the game is played. We have jobs, families, health, homes and a million other things to manage in our days. Some of us want to get the most we can out of playing DDO in constantly changing schedules and game playing availability. So, yes that means many of us want to get the most we can get from our playing time.
• Don't slow down game play because devs declare that there is a "right way" to play the game.
• Read the data and the customer base and let people play the way they want to play.
• Here is some data, in the form of reasons why I do not hang around L20-L25 one instant more than I need to. I run whatever I can to get xp and level up:
• Worthwhile loot. As in: none.
  
  • Nothing worth having or farming or occupying limited storage space in: ToD, Sentinels, Demon Sands, Phiarlan Carnival, VoN (other than SoS), MoTU chains (maybe a ring from ES2 chain, and saga rewards to hold until after epic TR), Druid's Deep, High Road, GH, Shadowfell, Heart of Madness...basically, nothing below L29 useful for anything more than a single level (at best). Borderlands has good gear for L21 and I am farming that now in preparation for this hork. Thank you for that.
  • Epic loot from any of the above are not going to help much in Reaper from L20-L27.
  • I just ride Sharn gear to L27 and start swapping it out. I am by no means alone here.
  • You may suggest that this new ED will strip players of all the current ED over-powering and force us to use something other than Sharn L15 gear. If I can get a +8 stat with 4 attributes from Sharn at L15, I will not trade it for a +6 ring from ToD with little else.

The userbase is an asset, not an annoyance

• We are player / customers. We give our time and money to this game. We ask for entertainment (something fun to do / pretty to look at and rewarding), and you ask for enough income to pay operating expenses, staff and investors. The relationship between player / customers and SSG works poorly if you don't find out what makes people pay money.
• Engaging your player / customers is not a show of weakness or some capitulation to whiny know-nothings. The ability to know what motivates your player / customers to buy your product *IS PURE GOLD*. Harvest it. It enables this game to pay salaries, reward investors, innovate and improve. No one is suggesting that you involve us in everything. But...there are simple ways of engaging with current and most importantly past customers is a treasure trove of data that will inform SSG / DDO on what will produce greater player populations and revenue.
  
  • People vote with their feet when they leave DDO and choose another game. Contact ex players and ask them why they left and what games they play instead.
  • Contact F2P and past paid accounts and ask them why they don't pay / stopped paying.
  • I can see no way it benefits any organization with ongoing widespread access to buying criteria from their current and past customers, to ignore the data and make no use of it.
  • Players Council does not count. Getting feedback from a tiny group of hand-picked player / customers who lack access to the data just listed and any ability to act on it is, well, not much.

In closing, I feel and observe that U51 changes you showed us last week may be a well intended solution to a problem, but that it will not fix the problem you identified. Moreover, the reason for people not running epic quests lies elsewhere. I also believe that you are missing out constantly on opportunities to grow the userbase of player / customers by not engaging with them proactively and pointedly with the express aim of finding out what will make them invest time and money in DDO.

SSG, I sincerely hope you read this and take it to heart. But, don't take my word for it - ask everyone. Really ask, and then act on that data.

Thank you.

[Twilight23]

I disagree with a fair amount of what you are saying.

First, the response to U51 does *NOT* seem overwhelmingly negative. I've mostly been reading Discord and Reddit (so maybe the forums are) but most comments that are open to any sort of ED change have been tentatively supportive. Most negative comments are about implementation specifics (charges decay too fast, t5s not available until 30, etc).
* Resetting EDs already costs plat (but changing twists or switching which tree you have active does not) - it would be nice if they could do something like you can reallocate X points for free.
* I don't know of anyone that uses more than 4 trees (guessing there are a few) and few people use more than 3 trees (not counting racial). I'm assuming the number of allowed trees will expand along with destiny points from cap raise.

They've given rationale for the ED overhaul multiple times. Many players agree there needs to be an overhaul (even ones that hate everything else about U51).

Low server population is definitely a big issue. Until other sources of lag have been addressed, I doubt significantly more players per server can be handled.
* What dedicated healers? There are (almost) none not due to server populations or anything like that - it's because they are not needed for the vast majority of content.
* The playerbase for DDO is small but lucrative (per the releases done during the acquisition). I agree it would be ideal to add new players at a faster rate but that's a tall order for any 10+ year old MMO.
* Other D&D MMOs are losing players way faster than DDO. Other fantasy MMOs are definitely adding players faster (though even WoW seems to be on a downward trend).

How do you know SSG doesn't have at least some of the data you claim they don't? How would you suggest they acquire the data? Surveys (or asking people) has a notoriously low response rate (so is likely biased). Most players are likely not on the forums, Reddit, or Discord so getting data there is highly likely to be skewed (and thus likely not to represent most of the players).

[gringofoot]

How do you know SSG doesn't have at least some of the data you claim they don't? How would you suggest they acquire the data? Surveys (or asking people) has a notoriously low response rate (so is likely biased). Most players are likely not on the forums, Reddit, or Discord so getting data there is highly likely to be skewed (and thus likely not to represent most of the players).

Good question. We don't know that SSG reaches out to present and past customers. We don't know.

As for suggestions, the only way to try is to genuinely try. Send emails to the addresses people use when they create accounts. So what if the response is low? The objective is to gather information. Ask pointed questions and leave space for unstructured comments. Ask. Find out. Ask again.

Why guess, when you can know?

[Coffey]

A survey would have to be implemented in game when the players logon to the game.

[Coffey]

Del

[Smokewolf]

Good question. We don't know that SSG reaches out to present and past customers. We don't know.

“If” Dev’s ever reached out to its customer base someone would of posted about it on DDO-forums, Reddit or any number of social-media sites. However, being a player / customer since 2006, I can’t recall ever seeing anything like this. Which makes me believe that the driving force behind the games development isn’t what the player(s) wants or even needs but rather a monetary one.

About the only time the Dev’s noticeably interact with anyone is during Lamannia play-testing and even then, most of what transpires amounts to lip service. Honestly I can only think of a handful of times that someones post directly resulted in actual constructive change. Hell for that matter, there are a hundreds of bugs that have been around longer than most of the users of this forum. It’s not that the Dev’s don’t realize there’re problems but rather they’ve another agenda and we mostly just get in the way.

-Smoke

[rabidfox]

“If” Dev’s ever reached out to its customer base someone would of posted about it on DDO-forums, Reddit or any number of social-media sites. However, being a player / customer since 2006, I can’t recall ever seeing anything like this. Which makes me believe that the driving force behind the games development isn’t what the player(s) wants or even needs but rather a monetary one.

About the only time the Dev’s noticeably interact with anyone is during Lamannia play-testing and even then, most of what transpires amounts to lip service. Honestly I can only think of a handful of times that someones post directly resulted in actual constructive change. Hell for that matter, there are a hundreds of bugs that have been around longer than most of the users of this forum. It’s not that the Dev’s don’t realize there’re problems but rather they’ve another agenda and we mostly just get in the way.

-Smoke

They had open sign-ups to join the Player's Council just a few month ago. There was forum thread directly linking people to the form to apply; that's the devs reaching right out to the player base to get feedback well before anything hits Lamannia.

[Smokewolf]

They had open sign-ups to join the Player's Council just a few month ago. There was forum thread directly linking people to the form to apply; that's the devs reaching right out to the player base to get feedback well before anything hits Lamannia.

Really as if the Council matters… Can’t say that I believe that considering the direction the game has taken over the years.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to believe feeling all fluffy with anticipation for the next update. However, past experience is a strong indication of future outcomes.

[gringofoot]

They had open sign-ups to join the Player's Council just a few month ago. There was forum thread directly linking people to the form to apply; that's the devs reaching right out to the player base to get feedback well before anything hits Lamannia.

The PC application notice that you mentioned does not find out what player / customers want nor does it find out why they buy / don't buy / stay / leave.

For starters, it was a notice posted, not emailed. I was not sent to past members, paid, F2P members. It was posted on the forum.

Next, the questions on the PC application had zero about buying criteria. Here are the questions. Curiously, they did ask what we think about healers.

The Players Council is still a small hand-picked group of active player / customers. They are unable to provide the data from asking thousands of people why they have left the game or are not willing to pay money to SSG.

In short, announcing a PC application is nowhere near the level of engagement that I was talking about.

[Hashrabal]

[*]Contact F2P and past paid accounts and ask them why they don't pay / stopped paying.

World of Warcraft - the burning crusade classic is what I play now.

Why?

Even Blizzard, of all people, seems to understand better then the current devs what is the nature of a game.

A game should be, above anything else, fun. If you got a game that the devs like, but the players (at least start to) despise, you don't have a game. You have a chore. This is what DDO has become.

The devs might like to slow us down, remove power, endlessly nerf already aquired (and "worked" for...) power, force us to group up even for leveling content... but the players don't.

At some point you gotta decide what is more important - the dev's ego or having players. If you choose the dev's ego, you will end up with a small subset of players that share the same vision. Small subset of people won't even cover the license cost, thus no game.

You've lost me, for good, already because the devs are so extremely detached from the playerbase. You might be able to salvage what few players remain if you turn around now. I doubt you will - ego is a hell of a drug.

[MistaMagic]

World of Warcraft - the burning crusade classic is what I play now.

Why?

Even Blizzard, of all people, seems to understand better then the current devs what is the nature of a game.

A game should be, above anything else, fun. If you got a game that the devs like, but the players (at least start to) despise, you don't have a game. You have a chore. This is what DDO has become.

The devs might like to slow us down, remove power, endlessly nerf already aquired (and "worked" for...) power, force us to group up even for leveling content... but the players don't.

At some point you gotta decide what is more important - the dev's ego or having players. If you choose the dev's ego, you will end up with a small subset of players that share the same vision. Small subset of people won't even cover the license cost, thus no game.

You've lost me, for good, already because the devs are so extremely detached from the playerbase. You might be able to salvage what few players remain if you turn around now. I doubt you will - ego is a hell of a drug.

I can never understand WHY people that are gone for good would even be reading these forums. If you have left DDO then you do not have a right to comment on it. Let those that actively play do the commenting

[Iriale]

I can never understand WHY people that are gone for good would even be reading these forums. If you have left DDO then you do not have a right to comment on it. Let those that actively play do the commenting

Because those people loved the game before, and they left because it has changed in a way that they dislike, but they still hope it will change again in a way that allows them to come back.

[Hashrabal]

Because those people loved the game before, and they left because it has changed in a way that they dislike, but they still hope it will change again in a way that allows them to come back.

You got the nail on the head. Might be silly hoping they will change their course - but what else then hope remains...

[Osama1991]

If you have left DDO then you do not have a right to comment on it.

he can comment however much he wants

you aint no one to decide who can comment and who cant

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

(This post represents my thoughts, experiences and observations. I have been a VIP member since 2010. I have bought all the expansions. I play a lot. My primary toon is on Orien, named Kinchloe. I have at least one toon on every server. I have played Hardcore in each season. That's who I am.)

You just cannot compare to a first-lifer player. Curse of Knowledge.

The response to U51 seem overwhelmingly negative.

Wrong.

You need to write this :

The response to U51 seem overwhelmingly negative in this forum.

I am NOT part of "the player base" you assume. Just do not include me against my own will.

The userbase is an asset, not an annoyance

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...eringToTheBase

People vote with their feet when they leave DDO and choose another game.

I voted with my feet and came back to DDO.

Contact ex players and ask them why they left and what games they play instead.

You really really really really do not want to hear my response when I was asked why I quit playing DDO years ago :

It was too much of an power/action RPG to me.

And this is something you definitively do not want to hear : That there is still far too few story and far too much fighting within this game from my point of view.

Do you see now how much I do not fit into your presumed "player base" ?

Don't do as if you were the shepherd.

[cdbd3rd]

I have never liked the 20-30 'level' process since it came on board, so I have no dog in this debate.

I am, however, gonna throw +props at the OP for taking the time to format and organize the OP. Excellent presentation.

[Shadowperson]

Many will always resist change, regardless of how positive it is.

[Faltout]

Reading about the designs I found them positive. When I look at the negative comments in the forums all I see is "this is terrible"/"Whatever this is, my expectations are +1 and thus this fails to meet them". I also think that the few legitimate negative comments that come from people that are testing this (I am not one of them) are getting buried in the threads.

The only point I agree with you is about the player base being too small and them wanting to raise the level cap is dividing the base further. The rest? Let's see some examples:
- "Much more is being taken away from player / customers than is being given back." - And this is not bad even if it is true. Devs giveth, devs taketh away. As long as it remains playable and fun.
- "Loss of the ability to change trees for free." - They are changing that, perhaps you should read the threads more carefully if you're going to say things about "the response..."
- "3 trees only, instead of 6 with heroic" - How is that comparable? I don't see why the number 6 is magical.
- "Level gating to L30 for the most useful tree options is beyond understanding." - That's where I agree about the level cap raise.

Let me add a few more "responses" into the mix:
- "The builder/spender system is **** and outdated" - Says who? Especially when that system has been in countless places in-game (DoTs, weapon bond, Master's Blitz, barb rage, assassin's marks, poisons, debufs, vulnerabilities, shadowdancer, etc., etc., etc.)
- "My triple completionist is not being rewarded enough" - Even though triple completionist currently gets nothing (1 twist slot) compared to what is being proposed (unlimited twist slots from 2 other destinies)

[Dilbon]

Speaking of 20-30, don't people usually level 20-28 in a "wrong" destiny anyway because of karma? Very rarely I've had an optimal destiny fit the epic past life I'm going for.

[rabidfox]

Let me add a few more "responses" into the mix:
- "The builder/spender system is **** and outdated" - Says who? Especially when that system has been in countless places in-game (DoTs, weapon bond, Master's Blitz, barb rage, assassin's marks, poisons, debufs, vulnerabilities, shadowdancer, etc., etc., etc.)

Except anyone can make a viable build for most content without having to do any active stuff for those effects on their character at current time; all those examples are optional ways one can make a character if one likes doing that stuff. The u51 stuff is forcing one to engage in that type play vs it being a choice. With 15 classes, I can skip classes I don't like the playstyle of and play the ones I enjoy. The existing trees have multiple playstyle setups based off what one picks, the new ones have a core mechanic that's the same across them all, so a choice has been removed (if one wants to perform fully). I'm 100% behind wanting a new ED system(the current system is fairly limited, it works but it's not great), and u51 stuff has a lot of potential from what was shown so far; I just hope the tweaks and adjustments before the next preview free us from being locked in to a single mechanic.