Producer's Letter

[FranOhmsford]

So which raids in the game are real raids (for a frame of reference)?

Tempest Spine
Chronoscope
The Shroud
Caught in the Web
VoN 5
Twilight Forge

The above are what Vellrad wants more of I'd say.

As opposed to:

ADQ2
Reaver's Fate
Vision of Destruction
Fall of Truth
Mark of Death

Which are all basically one room Boss Fights!


Now one room Boss Fights can work fine if given a little extra:

Abbot
Hound of Xoriat
Lord of Blades
Master Artificer

But I'm with Vellrad on this one - Let's have some more REAL Raids like Tempest Spine and Caught in the Web please!


P.S. Caught in the Web is a REAL Raid done badly - Try to get them right please!

[Tarinia]

Thanks Severlin for your letter and exiting news,

but I feel somehow sad, because not one Forgotten Realms module is anounced- since I thought FR is a DDO prime world I am really astounished. Only one adventure a year is a little too less for me to think as DDO a FR game.

Best regards
Tarinia

Greetings,

My name is Robert Ciccolini, although many of you might know me as “Severlin” on the forums or from podcasts. I am the Executive Producer for Dungeons and Dragons Online. I wanted to take this opportunity to look back on our previous year and look forward to the year ahead.

The last year has been eventful, and looking back we have seen many additions to the game.

In the last year we added lots of new content including three new raids. Our characters were able to explore the Haunted Halls as we had the opportunity to present that classic adventure to our players.

Player were able to band together to form more powerful guilds and update their guild airships and amenities.
High level adventurers were able to experience more powerful versions of some of some well known heroic content. We revisited both Three Barrel Cove and the most powerful area of the Orchard of the Macabre.

This past year has seen changes that have allowed for powerful new builds. Heavy armor is no longer relegated to niche builds and has instead taken its place on the front line of the fight. The year saw large improvements for Bard, Paladin and Barbarian, as well as a few improvements for Ranger and Rogue. We added a new Bard tree with Swashbuckler, and the new Vanguard tree is now available to Fighter and Paladin. We also added the Harper Agent enhancement tree. This year also saw changes to help some heroic abilities scale into Epic levels, and a rebalance of the melee oriented Epic Enhancement trees.

The Mirror of Glamering was created to give players the freedom and flexibility to capture the look of their favorite weapons and armors from the game’s treasure. We have already seen players scouring the game for their favorite items to update their style.
Players in hard and elite content faced a new challenge in the form of Monster Champions.

As excited as we are about the additions to the game, the true joy of working on our game has been the involvement of the community. The feedback on features and additions has been extremely helpful. Our players are a passionate bunch who clearly love the game as much as we do, and we love reading feedback, hearing what you love about the game, watching your videos, answering questions during live casts, and hearing stories about your in game adventures.

In the last year we have had some great people provide terrific feedback on the player’s council. I wanted to give those players a shout out for all of their time and enthusiasm. We are working hard on creating our player council for the coming year and we are both excited to hear some new voices and sad to see the current players pass the proverbial baton to the new guard.
Looking forward to the new year we have lots of exciting plans to share.

Temple of Elemental Evil
Our next big update will include the Temple of Elemental Evil. We are all excited to present this classic dungeon to the players. The Temple grounds are quite large! Although players will be presented with a quest to accomplish when they enter the temple, there will be many dangers and treasures to find if the players take the time to properly explore the vast network of temple halls and chambers.

Monster Champions and Mysterious Fragments
Characters facing the game’s toughest challenges have encountered a wide variety of Monster Champions - creatures that have increased skill and power. What is causing this increase in power? As characters investigate the source of this newfound strength they will begin to discover that many of these creatures carry Mysterious Fragments that seem to resonate with strange magical power. Could these fragments be causing these champions and their rise in power? What use could these fragments have for those looking for power?

Monster champions will have a chance to drop Mysterious Fragments. Players can gather these fragments and various agents and interested parties might trade them for a variety of rewards. Rumors of groups offering scrolls, potions, cosmetic items, and even prestigious and rare pets have begun to surface. Organizations do not have unlimited resources. As factions vie for power some agents and rewards might change as the year progresses.

Warlock
We are looking into adding a new class during the year, and we are considering the Warlock class. The Warlock creates powerful eldritch blasts to destroy enemies in addition to a variety of spells to aid them in their adventures.

New Storylines
The game will introduce a new story arc that will take the players to Shavarath for a new adventure pack. Characters on these adventures will work to prevent a catastrophe. That story will continue as the year progresses to bring the players once again to the Vale of Twilight. New threats have entered the Vale and more powerful challenges await in this chapter of the Vale of Twilight’s history. Defeating this new threat will require you to enter the more dangerous and powerful Vale of Twilight as you increase your level to 30 and obtain new treasures. More powerful items also await from the corrupted Greensteel found in the Vale after recent events have increased the magical power of the area.

Level 30
Characters will be able to gain experience to increase their level to 30. Characters who reach this milestone will gain additional feats and power, and they will be able to wield and even construct new weapons and treasures to face the foes that challenge them.

New Festivals
The coming year will bring new festivals; a mimic event where players have to hunt down mimics that have infested all the corners of the land. The autumn will also bring a new seasonal festival that will haunt your favorite places and provide characters with more treats than tricks.


These are just some of the ideas and plans we are looking into for the next year. We don’t want to spoil too much about our new monsters, new treasures and other goodies we have planned. Our goal is to present players with a taste of the ideas we are working on, and we also want to remain vigilant to the requests and feedback from the players. Your ideas are important to us, and your feedback will help guide us over the course of the year.


Robert “Severlin” Ciccolini

[Dragavon]

I just wanted to jump in an answer some questions:


“Epic vale quests again...”


Our current plan is to redo the Vale quests, and keep the raid mechanics mostly intact with a new encounter at the end. Some of the Vale quests really need to be revamped.

Sev~

Are you serious? Yet again take old dungeons and put in mobs with more HP and think you done great? Scrap this idea please.

We want new dungeons and new quests, not just the same old **** with more HP on mobs.

I am really really dissapointed with you guys now.

[Flavilandile]

First, gratz on the promotion Sev !

It was starting to be obvious that you had the power of somebody in charge of things behind your posts lately. ( at least for me )

Still - Guild Management System...

The old broken system was looked at during the guildship revamp... And it's not fixable... a new one would have to be created from scratch.
There wasn't enough time at that time.

since I thought FR is a DDO prime world I am really astounished.

The prime setting is Eberron, FR is a secondary setting... and Greyhawk ( what there will be of it in The Temple ) is a third one.

[Edwinge]

Thanks for the updates. It's nice to get a peak at your plans for the year.

One thing not mentioned that I really hope we can see this year is a new volume of the monster manual. There are so many more monsters without entries yet!

[Oxarhamar]

Thanks for the updates. It's nice to get a peak at your plans for the year.

One thing not mentioned that I really hope we can see this year is a new volume of the monster manual. There are so many more monsters without entries yet!

to this point I agree.

now it has been metioned in the past by Devs that part of the reason MM has not been added was the Art was expensive ( I am assuming because, they used Art from original dnd handbooks they needed licensing ) my suggestion is to have the artists at turbine do up the art save some $$$

[fmalfeas]

Epic Greensteel has to be called Blue Steel .


Warlock could be a hybrid melee/caster...and optionally ranged (as in thrower or bower). I would personally add Stealth so, there is reason to think future quest design with stealth in mind.

Warlock should have a personal pet, much like the druids, buffs appropriate to this pet to be useful even at later stages up to EH.

Warlock could also focus on applying cheap/fast effective debuffs..ones people actually care to apply, and are still useful in EEs.

Please fix overpowered builds before you do a ranged pass (or any other pass really), we already have shuriken and bow builds doing 60-80k burst damage, and thats without minmaxing. Thrower builds are running the end game now with the ranger wolfs.

He said 'corrupted Greensteel', which has me curious. How do you get more corrupt than a metal that is only found in deposits in Baatezu-tainted outer planes (namely, Devil-held parts of Shavarath, and The Nine Hells of Ba'ator)? Is it mixed with Abyssal Bloodiron? Gehennen Iron? Some Eladrin metal (and if so, the work you'd have to do to alloy metallic Lawful Evil with metallic Chaotic Good should be a doozy without it just exploding.)

[Eth]

New shavarath quests? Can't deny I'm excited to hear that.

[Wizza]

“Epic vale quests again...”


Our current plan is to redo the Vale quests, and keep the raid mechanics mostly intact with a new encounter at the end. Some of the Vale quests really need to be revamped.

Really? Please do tell me how those quests that have been there for 4 years need to be revamped again. They work just fine, and they are pretty good as they are.

[imTonE]

I wonder if Mysterious Fragments will be implemented in a way which doesn't allow them to be duped into trivialisation.

[Chi_Ryu]

Just, please, add some kind of mechanic to prevent people to bring epic level characters into infinite low-level respawn zones (like Kobold Assault) where they could farm those fragments from champions that are weaker than level-appropriate mobs.

A mechanism much as used for Guild Renown in chests would work well - if you are over level you get a reduced rate of drops (and eventually none at all).

Will we get an Epic XP rebalance? It is already kinda harsh to gater 6.6 mil XP to Epic TR, and the natural progression will scale it to over 10 mil.

IMO, better would be to leave XP alone but retain the threshold for Epic Reincarnation as level 28 as it is now - assuming sufficient new quests will be added to make the extra XP between 28-30 viable without eye-bleeding farming of Spies-VON3-WizKing...

Really? Please do tell me how those quests that have been there for 4 years need to be revamped again. They work just fine, and they are pretty good as they are.

Well, let's look at that:
"Running with the Devils" and "Rainbow in the Dark" are pretty awesome (though it would be good if light sources like Archon lanterns were reintroduced).

"Coalescence Chamber" and "Let Sleeping Dust Lie" are particularly unpopular with many people and contain some tedious mechanics in each (the multiple switching of shafts and up-and-down running in the first, the "let's hunt for an orange name that will randomly spawn anywhere, but only after we've read a journal which equally spawns in multiple locations" - I don't mind exploring a whole map (in fact, I like it) but detest having to re-explore it on more than one occasion...

"Ritual Sacrifice" has a tedious "protect the NPC" mechanic right at the end, which can be quite frustrating with a hard mix of champions - since other "protect" quests have been altered to make the NPC more robust - or in fact invulnerable - this would stick out.

[legendkilleroll]

I'd like to see something new for vale, not like necro IV, exact same quests with different enemies, Just boring when you know what to expect

I dont know the shaverath quests like the back of my hand so for me personally anything here will feel fresh, just make sure to have a raid aswell!

The frags from Champs and Epic GS mats, Please! make sure they not exploitable, i dont want to see completed items on the first day and the shard exchange flooded with them.

Would rather the lv30 increase come asap as if it comes end of year, whatever comes before that will most likely just become overshadowed/leveling gear

[arkonas]

I just wanted to jump in an answer some questions:




“Are any bug fixes in the works?”


We plan to do regular bug passes with each update. Right now our engineering is devoted to fixing lag issues.




“Is this the Sentinent weapon that was talked about?”


Here is the honest reason I didn’t mention Sentient Weapons. Our plan is to include them in the new Greensteel, because we don’t want to release a system and have Greensteel overshadow it, and we also don’t want to release Greensteel and have Sentient Weapons make those obsolete. So far we have been unhappy with our designs to include Sentient Weapons with Greensteel because, as most players know Greensteel was an awesome system. Because that design is still very much in the air I didn’t want to include Sentient Weapons in the producer’s letter.


“Epic vale quests again...”


Our current plan is to redo the Vale quests, and keep the raid mechanics mostly intact with a new encounter at the end. Some of the Vale quests really need to be revamped.


“ugh... mimic acid damage galore...”


The mimics that are part of the hunt are not the fully mature hard hitting mimics you are probably thinking of.




“What about adding better networking hardware? Better servers to handel the players?”


We are currently discussing options to move the datacenter and update the hardware, but I have no firm plans to announce at this time.




“Can someone please be assigned to adding new relevant recipes to Cannith Crafting?”


We’d love to revamp Cannith crafting and have it extend into some of the higher levels, and have discussed doing so. Our schedule is fairly aggressive and if something needs to be cut the revamp is a likely candidate. For that reason I didn’t add it to the producer’s letter. It is on our list of things to do however.


“Lag grew to an unacceptable level in 2014 and has majorly affected the ability of players to enjoy the game.”


Last year we took steps to combat lag. We changed the shared bank to a paged system for example.


We are currently looking at a specific case of lag caused by stacking server instances. We are working on a fix. I have no date to announce but we want to deploy a fix soon.


There is also another type of lag players are seeing – the lag spike. The lag spike isn’t lag as you imagine it. It is often a server process encountering a content bug and trying to restart out from under players. The server tries to save the instance by moving the instance and all the players to another server process. When this happens all the players see a longish lag spike as their characters are shuffled from process to process. Some characters fail to move and get DC’d. We are actively pursuing the most frequent cause of these process issues and hope to close off at least some of those in the next patch. This work will continue until we have nailed down any frequent crashes.


After that lag will be an ongoing development process. As an example, we plan to look at possible lag caused be crafting formulas in the patches that follow this one.


"Exploits have completely destroyed the in game shard economy, anniversary event and crippled the end game raiding scene.”


We have already added server side protections in the last patch to close exploit holes. We will continue to do so throughout the year.


“When do we start talking about the other stuff in U25”


We have other balance plans as we progress through the year. We still need a ranged pass. We are looking to see if barbarians need further tweaks. We know there are classes that need a third tree. We have other plans for some trees that underperform. Those ongoing design notes are out of scope for a producer’s letter.


“Epic Shavarath”


To clarify, we expect the Shavarath adventure pack to be all new content.


“Warlock Class? Wait isn't that basically Pale Master?”


We envision the Warlock class concentrating mostly on its Eldritch Blast ability and ways to manipulate that arcane blast in various ways. While the Warlock does have spell abilities they are closer to a ranged character than a traditional caster.


“This might also be the time to introduce the Tiefling race as well (hint, hint).”


Modifying all the helmets in the game for horns *and* modifying all the animations to add a tail turns out to be really, really costly in time and art.


“I am however concerned by yet another added collectable/ or ingredient.”


They stack really high so you should only need one slot. We wanted to do some kind of currency panel or wallet, but we don’t have the implementation time at the moment.


“Is the mimic event still going to contain the Mabar items, or will they be moved to the autumn event?”


The mimic hunt is actually one of the fun things we have planned for our anniversary. I believe the Mabar items are still planned as rewards for the mimic hunt. We want to have an entirely new festival around the Halloween time, and that would also include appropriately themed items.




Sev~

i just wanted to say i really liked you as a dev and i really hope you continue to talk like you have. i know the others rarely talked. i guess its nice to see them communicate every once in a while. so my only question is one of the fixes going to deal with the loading screen crashes people deal with? i'm not the only one who has suffered from it.

[arkonas]

I'd like to see something new for vale, not like necro IV, exact same quests with different enemies, Just boring when you know what to expect

I dont know the shaverath quests like the back of my hand so for me personally anything here will feel fresh, just make sure to have a raid aswell!

The frags from Champs and Epic GS mats, Please! make sure they not exploitable, i dont want to see completed items on the first day and the shard exchange flooded with them.

Would rather the lv30 increase come asap as if it comes end of year, whatever comes before that will most likely just become overshadowed/leveling gear

i would love to see them turn into currency like plat and astral shards. no duping available. heck any new currency should be like that but that is just me. crafting mats should stay the way they are.

[nibel]

So which raids in the game are real raids (for a frame of reference)?

In my personal order of "this is an well-planned raid" to "this is a raid, but need improvements"

Tempest Spine (long, explorable, full of minibosses and mid-raid chests with named loot, very challenging at the time of release)
Twilight Forge (long, explorable, requires a party to split up, good puzzles (missing a reset lever on green), very challenging even today)
Shroud (Divided by stages, each stage have their own reward allowing people of varied skill levels to be rewarded on partial completion)
Vault of Night (long, explorable, requires a party to split up, good puzzles. Not on pair with Titan because of no named reward mid-raid, and no end chest)
Chronoscope (explorable, good boss fights, great story, mid-raid chests with named loot)
Temple of the Deathwyrm (long, good puzzles, great story)
Caught in the Web (long, explorable, decent optionals. On the other hand, escort quest and the most BORING raid boss ever: Fight the dire navel!)

I prefer any raid that is more akin to those seven than the one-room boss fights we got recently.

Epic Greensteel has to be called Blue Steel .

Or, since it is further corrupted... Red Steel

[Tarinia]

First, gratz on the promotion Sev !

It was starting to be obvious that you had the power of somebody in charge of things behind your posts lately. ( at least for me )



The old broken system was looked at during the guildship revamp... And it's not fixable... a new one would have to be created from scratch.
There wasn't enough time at that time.



The prime setting is Eberron, FR is a secondary setting... and Greyhawk ( what there will be of it in The Temple ) is a third one.

I mean with prime setting: Pay to get a very new, high quality and excited stuff in the FR in form of expansions- I would like to pay for a FR expansion, if nothing else is planed for free in FR in 2015.

Best regards
Tarinia

[Tarinia]

Hi Severlin,

you was not speaking about new features in the AI or Misc functions for 2015- for me I would nearly pay any price for a "search all" function for all inventories and all banks for all of my Chars on the same server.
I loose lots of time seeking for items stored on others chars/banks/invetory and would love to save that search marathons.
Any chance that we will se it in the future?

Best regards
Tarinia

[RedOrm]

Here is the honest reason I didn’t mention Sentient Weapons. Our plan is to include them in the new Greensteel, because we don’t want to release a system and have Greensteel overshadow it, and we also don’t want to release Greensteel and have Sentient Weapons make those obsolete. So far we have been unhappy with our designs to include Sentient Weapons with Greensteel because, as most players know Greensteel was an awesome system. Because that design is still very much in the air I didn’t want to include Sentient Weapons in the producer’s letter.

Perhaps it would help (for getting feedback) to make a thread on lama describing what you actually have in mind (including bits saying "we're not happy with the next bit but here it is anyway, please discuss") for sentient weapons? I've had sentient weapons in my homecampaign that ranged from largely cosmetic to effectively an etra party-member -neither of which seems to be a great thing to include in DDO. So what ARE you thinking of?

We are currently discussing options to move the datacenter and update the hardware, but I have no firm plans to announce at this time.

Hey, it's a start!

We’d love to revamp Cannith crafting and have it extend into some of the higher levels, and have discussed doing so. Our schedule is fairly aggressive and if something needs to be cut the revamp is a likely candidate. For that reason I didn’t add it to the producer’s letter. It is on our list of things to do however.

I really hope it gets in! Provided, that is, it's an *expansion* on what we currently have. NO removing stuff already in there, NO changing of existing recipies. Just more of what there is (statboosters to +10, skill boosters to +20, addition of new enhancements). Heck just adding the stat- and skill boosters would be a great improvement!
And the more finger-friendly essence cruncher of course.

Last year we took steps to combat lag. We changed the shared bank to a paged system for example.

I hope that created a SIGNIFICANT decrease in lag (haven't seen any yet), as that is a serious pain in the posterior. I really hate it.

To clarify, we expect the Shavarath adventure pack to be all new content.

WOOT!

Modifying all the helmets in the game for horns *and* modifying all the animations to add a tail turns out to be really, really costly in time and art.

AS mentioned, drop the tails. Quite a few helmets cover horns so would not need a modification, but I suppose that may not be enough. However, while we're on the topic of headwear, can you please have someone look into the hair issues some hats and helmets have (notably the cosmetic wizard had eating your hair!), and do the same for elven ears? When I wear my spider mask, I suddenly no longer have ears! It's certainly a minor issue, but annoying all the same. Also, *please* allow shadar-kai to use hair cosmetics? I can understand them having hideous hair during creation from a background perspective, but WHY can't they go to the shop and get a make-over afterwards??

Hm. I'm not sure how badly people want these special races, but... Would a kickstarter be an option? If you run a kickstarter for thieflings (or kobolds), and add a few easier-to-create races as stretch goals (half-elven make-over?), it might be you could raise the money for creating them.

They stack really high so you should only need one slot. We wanted to do some kind of currency panel or wallet, but we don’t have the implementation time at the moment.

I really wish they'd go into a bag, but I guess this is to prevent duping. How about instead giving everyone 5 extra spaces in the collectables shared bank, and let these thingies (and a crunched super version similar to heart seeds if needed) go in there? I don't mind getting a new ingredient item if I also get a new place to store it.
Btw there's some old collectables (planar shards come to mind) that have this same issue and might be given the same treatment.

Looking forward to the coming year!

(oh and a provisional congrats on your new postion; provisional on you *staying* there!)

Greetz,
Red Orm

[Wizza]

Well, let's look at that:
"Running with the Devils" and "Rainbow in the Dark" are pretty awesome (though it would be good if light sources like Archon lanterns were reintroduced).

"Coalescence Chamber" and "Let Sleeping Dust Lie" are particularly unpopular with many people and contain some tedious mechanics in each (the multiple switching of shafts and up-and-down running in the first, the "let's hunt for an orange name that will randomly spawn anywhere, but only after we've read a journal which equally spawns in multiple locations" - I don't mind exploring a whole map (in fact, I like it) but detest having to re-explore it on more than one occasion...

"Ritual Sacrifice" has a tedious "protect the NPC" mechanic right at the end, which can be quite frustrating with a hard mix of champions - since other "protect" quests have been altered to make the NPC more robust - or in fact invulnerable - this would stick out.

So, let me get this straight:

Two quests are fine, one CAN be tedious because of the newly introduced Champion mechanic (which leads us to think that the problem is not the quest itself but the new mechanic), and the other two because of their mechanics.

Coalescence chamber is pretty straightforward, requires some jumping yeah but I can't see the problem there honestly. The first run through it can be long but the next runs can be done in under 10 minutes.

Let Sleeping Dust Lie is probably the most annoying one (I actually like it) but you could just make few changes to make it enjoyable: make the orange named spawn only in one area. Other than that, it's a maze-like quest. You HAVE TO get lost and repeat some segments of the quest in order to learn the path and complete it.


Said this, I still clearly don't see how the whole Vale of Twilight pack needs to be revamped. In fact, it DOESN'T.

[Michele]

Seems a very exciting year!

I can't wait to play the new warlock class: I love playing all kind of casters.