Producer's Letter

[FestusHood]

I dont think it a good strategic move to cancel the FR because of the new 5ed of pen & paper- there the FR are the official DuD Game world. So if new players are coming to DDO then from something they know from the 5ed books.
By the way- the new modules Tyranny of dragons from FR are a fine paperback module- look and have fun. I hope and think, that there will be new FR contend but only revealed after it is a sure thing for the devs.

Best regards
Tarinia

I doubt they have officially cancelled anything. When all of the content they were doing was being put in the realms people thought they had essentially cancelled Eberron, at least in terms of new content.

They can only do so much stuff. People have been asking for new Eberron content, so that's what they are doing.

[Braegan]

So...it doesn't assauge your feelings that the Realms also houses Manshoon, the wizard who (without being a Chosen, or a 2 millenia old Netherse pervert who learned Elven High Magic) repeatedly shredded Elminster so badly that his Evasion spell (Elminster's Evasion - a special contingency that yanks him, at the instant he takes enough damage to kill him into a pocket demiplane, and basically pauses' things long enough for him to burn off his memorized spells into healing spellfire and not die) and the Spellfire he has from being a Chosen of Mystra are the only reason he lived? One of those times, he was even out of commision in the lore for nearly a year because Manshoon freaking blew off his arms, legs, and a good portion of his torso.

Manshoon, Zhentarim Archmage, is an epic level personification of hating Elminster, and all his power, he got himself. To make matters nastier, he's a powerful free vampire now too, with no loss of wizardly abilities, and still has Manshoon's Battle Gorget (a custom magic item he made himself, that's just a *tiny bit* shy of being an artifact. It's one of the very, very, very few items in all of tabletop that gives heavy fort. In fact, he's the ONLY named NPC in all of the tabletop books I know of who's got Heavy Fort...oh, and one of the special traits of that collar is that said heavy fort also applies to things like Vorpal. His head stays attached, thankyouverymuch.)

Manshoon also rejected Shar and her Shadow Weave, and Mystra and her shift to into Neutral Good crusading, paying what religious devotion he does (which isn't a lot) to Azuth, who really only cares that you cast arcane magic, and are /not/ a wild mage (who he doesn't really like...they don't follow the rules of magic.)

Manshoon was a very cool character. I liked Fzoul more myself and it always irked my that Cyric got that shot on him during the Avatar Trilogy.

But very nice sum up between your couple posts here that FR does have some nice rich history and involved story/plot lines.

[The_Human_Cypher]

I doubt they have officially cancelled anything. When all of the content they were doing was being put in the realms people thought they had essentially cancelled Eberron, at least in terms of new content.

They can only do so much stuff. People have been asking for new Eberron content, so that's what they are doing.

Good point. Only 3 Updates worth of content is discussed in this Producer's Letter, so Update 28 at the end of 2015 could be entirely new Forgotten Realms quests.

[MeliCat]

Sev you haven't said anything about lag in the letter. This is a very serious issue driving people away from the game.

I've just got out of a MoD that lag wiped and everyone is logging off in disgust. It's the same thing that was happening over a week ago. This is Khyber btw. But similar was happening on Thelanis.

Please talk about it. Please reassure us that something is being fixed. This is a showstopper and an elephant.

[Uska]

Sev you haven't said anything about lag in the letter. This is a very serious issue driving people away from the game.

I've just got out of a MoD that lag wiped and everyone is logging off in disgust. It's the same thing that was happening over a week ago. This is Khyber btw. But similar was happening on Thelanis.

Please talk about it. Please reassure us that something is being fixed. This is a showstopper and an elephant.

Agreed,I,left Khyber for a couple,of,years due to,lag issues and came back and it seems to be getting really bad and I have a better computer than ever and a vastly faster internet connection then I had in the past, other servers I don't the same problems

[Oxarhamar]

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

What about Anauroch?

[Uska]

So...it doesn't assauge your feelings that the Realms also houses Manshoon, the wizard who (without being a Chosen, or a 2 millenia old Netherse pervert who learned Elven High Magic) repeatedly shredded Elminster so badly that his Evasion spell (Elminster's Evasion - a special contingency that yanks him, at the instant he takes enough damage to kill him into a pocket demiplane, and basically pauses' things long enough for him to burn off his memorized spells into healing spellfire and not die) and the Spellfire he has from being a Chosen of Mystra are the only reason he lived? One of those times, he was even out of commision in the lore for nearly a year because Manshoon freaking blew off his arms, legs, and a good portion of his torso.

Manshoon, Zhentarim Archmage, is an epic level personification of hating Elminster, and all his power, he got himself. To make matters nastier, he's a powerful free vampire now too, with no loss of wizardly abilities, and still has Manshoon's Battle Gorget (a custom magic item he made himself, that's just a *tiny bit* shy of being an artifact. It's one of the very, very, very few items in all of tabletop that gives heavy fort. In fact, he's the ONLY named NPC in all of the tabletop books I know of who's got Heavy Fort...oh, and one of the special traits of that collar is that said heavy fort also applies to things like Vorpal. His head stays attached, thankyouverymuch.)

Manshoon also rejected Shar and her Shadow Weave, and Mystra and her shift to into Neutral Good crusading, paying what religious devotion he does (which isn't a lot) to Azuth, who really only cares that you cast arcane magic, and are /not/ a wild mage (who he doesn't really like...they don't follow the rules of magic.)

Nothing about FR makes me feel better Mashoon wasn't any more an original idea than anything else out of the realms

[Oxarhamar]

Sev you haven't said anything about lag in the letter. This is a very serious issue driving people away from the game.

I've just got out of a MoD that lag wiped and everyone is logging off in disgust. It's the same thing that was happening over a week ago. This is Khyber btw. But similar was happening on Thelanis.

Please talk about it. Please reassure us that something is being fixed. This is a showstopper and an elephant.

Lag was discussed in Sevs responses check the Dev's tracker.

[wizdarrick]

I have been noticing that the Mele Weapon Power rocks so good now that a lot of those who use a Bow and arrow, or a throwing weapon get in the fight and get like 3 shots in by the time the whole room is cleared out already, and they are not getting many kills at all now days. Even against the magic the ranged weapons are hardly scratching anything i bet the monsters think the arrows are just a mosquito bite LOL

[MeliCat]

Lag was discussed in Sevs responses check the Dev's tracker.

Ah thank you yes missed that:

“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.

can't happen soon enough...

[MangLord]

I have been noticing that the Mele Weapon Power rocks so good now that a lot of those who use a Bow and arrow, or a throwing weapon get in the fight and get like 3 shots in by the time the whole room is cleared out already, and they are not getting many kills at all now days. Even against the magic the ranged weapons are hardly scratching anything i bet the monsters think the arrows are just a mosquito bite LOL

I have to agree. I used to love playing my pure ranger, but it seems like such a boring kitefest compared to my swashbuckler now, or even my fighter/cleric greataxe user. It's hard to utilize much of the Harper tree for ranged power as an elf AA because of the investment in AA tree and elf tree to get dex for damage on longbows.

[MonadRebelion]

Here are some things that sound really cool.

The stuff you said about monster champions sounds great.
The stuff you said about Shavarath sounds fantastic.
The temple of elemental evil sounds amazing.

Here is some stuff that I don't like.

I'm not a fan of Warlocks. Adding them to the game will make me like the game less. I'd rather have gnome illusionists, elven blade singers, dwarven defenders, or more deities and deity focused cleric stuff. I'd rather you just add new spells to existing classes or looking at trap the soul or other spells that could stand to be updated. If the choice was between warlocks and nothing, I'd take nothing. As I said I think warlocks would harm the game.

I'm not a fan of the Vale. I really don't see any reason to revisit that story/area. Lots of people want that, but I think it's just because their imaginations are being carried away by the idea of epic greensteel. I don't think it has much to do with the actual merit of the vale.

[westerndragon207]

so let me get this straight.....we still have broken low level stuff...quests with almost forever locked doors, glitched recipies, bad scripting for dialog in some quests and outright breakages in some areas yet AGAIN instead of fixing and streamlining existing material your plowing ahead into new garbage to break more stuff....didnt you learn your lesson breaking the baudry chain with an update....listen Delera's graveyard is a disgusting mash of poor scripting from doors that stay shut for minutes all the way to stuck mobs and poor flagging for quest advancement....this is a quest chain that was narrated by the great Gygax himself i would hope you'd want it to run smoothly too this is just one example of the many pee-poor programming mistakes your team is constantly making and not fixing.....as a game developer myself i see things most players ignore. like i can tell when a programmer is taking shortcuts when i see certain behaviors in the mobs or game....you have soooooo many quests with line of sight issues for ranged people menechtaurun is a good example....and for you mouth breathers who say "report it on the forums" 99% of this has not only been reported before but is years long known issues try.

heres an example try shooting from one dock to another in three barrel cove's defend the ship quest.....i dont know how you do quests when the air stops your arrows and spells....it makes elite unnecessarily hard at proper level and its sloppy programming. do yourselves a favor and make your early game FLAWLESS its not like you guys are attracting masses of new players or anything it would be a shame to see 10-15% of those new ones leave because they cant figure out where their chain goes next......

[Antus]

How about adding gnome, changeling, and shifter races to the game some time? Shifter druid is a natural combination.

[NyteByrd1017]

Greetings,

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.

Robert “Severlin” Ciccolini

First off, congratulations on your new position. Fresh eyes and a fresh perspective can revive a game that's showing its age.

Second: In regards to the above quote, can it be assumed Mabar will return?

Frankly, cancelling the Mabar festival was what caused me to cancel my subscription. A return would make me take a second look.

Again, congrats.

[Oxarhamar]

First off, congratulations on your new position. Fresh eyes and a fresh perspective can revive a game that's showing its age.

Second: In regards to the above quote, can it be assumed Mabar will return?

Frankly, cancelling the Mabar festival was what caused me to cancel my subscription. A return would make me take a second look.

Again, congrats.

Mabar is not coming back. There will be a replacement that offers the Mabar items from what's been said overtime

We will be replacing the Mabar Festival of Endless Night with a new event, currently scheduled to debut sometime after the release of Update 24 (not this next update; the one after it.) The new event is likely to make its debut after the new year. We're not yet ready to provide details about the event, other than the hint provided in the Producer's Letter from July, but we can say that the event's items will be the items from Mabar. At this time we have not been able to recover the Mabar festival in a way that addresses the issues with it and allow for its return.

Regarding Crystal Cove, we're planning to run the event this year with the new tier of loot around the time that Mabar would normally arrive. The plan for the future is to have the new event run around the time that we used to run Mabar.

[AnubisPrime]

Awesome update! +1 and again +1!!!

Only downside, I'll have to reincarnate and run up warlock to maintain my heroic completionist. (It's actually an upside )

[Uska]

Awesome update! +1 and again +1!!!

Only downside, I'll have to reincarnate and run up warlock to maintain my heroic completionist. (It's actually an upside )

No it's an extreme downside some peope hate doing for any class but for a class you actively opposed adding it's much worse

[The_Human_Cypher]

First off, congratulations on your new position. Fresh eyes and a fresh perspective can revive a game that's showing its age.

Second: In regards to the above quote, can it be assumed Mabar will return?

Frankly, cancelling the Mabar festival was what caused me to cancel my subscription. A return would make me take a second look.

Again, congrats.

Mabar itself is not coming back but there will be a new Halloween event. Several posters on the forums, including myself, suggested a Haunted House themed event to replace Mabar. The Haunted House could be completely dark except for one source of illumination carried by the players (e.g., a pumpkin lantern) similar to the Rainbow in the Dark quest.

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...o-Mabar-Event?

[Sehenry03]

No it's an extreme downside some peope hate doing for any class but for a class you actively opposed adding it's much worse

And its even worse if you end up LIKING the class =) Course no one would admit it here but its gonna happen.