DDO Producer's Letter - September 2016

[Thar]

STOP. STOP NOW. Seriously, that all sounds great but you HAVE to get DDO's house in order before you open up anymore cans of worms Sev.

FIX THE BUGS, ATTEND TO THE KNOWN ISSUES LIST AND IT'S MANY YEARS OLD BUGS BEFORE ANY MORE CONTENT. YOU SAID YOU WOULD HAVE THE TEAM 'BUGSMASH', KEEP YOUR WORD AND FIX THE BUGS FIRST!

see the other thread where they are asking what bug annoys you the most.

[changelingamuck]

This is exciting as always. I'm only a bit anxious about the Ravenloft setting. I only know it involved UNDEAD and I'm pretty tired of that in many ways. Plus, this makes my Rogue shudder. Heh.

Hopefully we get more than undead in Ravenloft!

Ravenloft does not equal Undead. People on the forums have just beaten that idea into the ground without a sufficient understanding of the setting. The Ravenloft setting is a fantasy horror pastiche setting that draws from a vast, vast array of different horror source material from the Island of Dr. Moreau to a horror twist on Pinocchio to faeries as they were in the original horrific versions of faerie tales.

There are domains ruled by ordinary human manipulator/mastermind-types with no supernatural status whatsoever. There's wererats, Lovecraftian illithids, poisoners, blood/pyre/grave/mist dark elemental variants, uniquely cursed humans, rakshasas, serial killers, evil bloodsucking treants, dread dopplegangers etc. etc. etc. Of course, in horror as a genre, there are plenty of undead to be found, but the setting isn't anywhere near as one-dimensional as people make it sound. It sounds like they're planning on basing some portion of an expansion's content on the original Ravenloft I6 adventure module that inspired the setting as a whole. That portion of the expansion's content that takes place in Castle Ravenloft itself would need to be moderately-to-highly heavy on undead. For the rest of the content? There's an enormous amount of non-undead source material to draw from. There were dozens of adventure modules/campaign expansions made for the setting that featured fantasy-horror adversaries of all shapes and sizes.

Even the undead themselves in Ravenloft are often novel and interesting and not what we've seen before, like cerebral vampires who subsist on cerebral fluid instead of blood and have unique strengths and weaknesses.

[BoBoDaClown]

~ World Character Transfers: We've heard from many of you that our process to transfer characters from one world to another needs to be more intuitive and take less time. Our new launcher-based system will send a character or characters from one world to another in seconds, and players will be able to pay for their transfers directly with Turbine Points. We think you'll like this transfer system, which is already in place in our sister game Lord of the Rings Online. Expect to see it debut by the end of the year.

Hopefully this is free for awhile to satisfy those of us who want to play with a higher population. For those of us like that, it would accomplish much the same thing as a server merge.

[BoBoDaClown]

If the transfer technology is so streamlined that it only takes seconds... why not implement free temporary transfers?
1) make global LFM panel available from the launcher.
2) allow players to log with a character directly to any server.
3) restrict trading of visiting characters if you're worried about global economy.

NOM NOM

At £20 a Pop even if it's able to be bought with TP it will still be too expensive for many.

And honestly with the amount of alts around I think you'd get a lot more sales out of this by halving the cost or even more.

Free for a while.

[BoBoDaClown]

So we're only getting 1 new quest the rest of the year? That's really disappointing. I was hoping for a big holiday update with some new raids like we got last year. And assuming the two proposed updates hit in october and december, we're probably going to be see the first update in 2017 drop in februrary or march. So we're stuck with only 1 new quest in 6 months? And over an entire year without any new raids? I hope there's some content stuff not included in this letter.

Yes. When I read 2 updates, 1 big 1small, I expected quests and raids.

While I agree with you re: racial imbalances, I'd still like to see a new race

[Talon_Moonshadow]

Uh....Isn't Mystra dead in the DDO timeline?

Isn't that why Anna is the Thread of the Weave?

/tries to think of something creative to say about worshiping Anna...

[Tahkhesis]

This all excellent news and I'm very excited about the future of this game. Thanks for all the hard work you guys do.

[nightmaremxt]

Kobold! Please a thousand times Kobold!

[Nonesuch2008]

Two producer's letters in a row containing multiple unexpected items & buzzworthy news as well. And since you've teased Revels twice now, you have to crank it up at least a week or two in advance of Halloween this year.

I think this letter is as ambitious, if not more so, than the last one, but both of them have given us some very far-reaching plans to let us know that DDO will be around for the foreseeable future. Tough job balancing classes/races, bug fixing, adding new content plus streamlining & refining the existing content, and of course, placating a player base that wants it all right now. Mixing in some of the new, some QoL/bug fixes, and the odd surprise that we're not expecting with each update seems like a good recipe.

I'm looking forward to seeing it all & learning what some of these as yet unrevealed surprises are!

[lyrecono]

I hope you've been enjoying Against the Slave Lords, checking out our new Cannith Crafting update, and helping us celebrate a decade of DDO! I'm writing today to talk about our plans for the rest of the year and beyond.

Our goal is to release two updates before the end of the year. One of the updates will be larger, the other smaller, and combined they'll bring several things that players have long asked for to DDO. Since we are currently working on two updates, it isn't clear yet what will be in each update. We'll release things when they are ready, so if something isn't ready in time for next month, we'll see if we can finalize it for the following update in December.

Here's the list of Things We’re Working On:

~ Updated Night Revels event: First up, we’re working on an update to The Night Revels, our Halloween-themed event which debuted last year. We’re planning to add a couple of new quests along with a handful of new items that will focus on cosmetic fun. We’re expecting the updated Night Revels to debut later in October.

~ A new Questing hub: We've long wanted to help people figure out where to go and what to do when they come back to DDO from some time away, and this hub will help both them as well as anyone who'd like to get to quest entrances more quickly. We don't have a name for this new system yet, and we'll be talking a lot more about it in the coming weeks.

~ World Character Transfers: We've heard from many of you that our process to transfer characters from one world to another needs to be more intuitive and take less time. Our new launcher-based system will send a character or characters from one world to another in seconds, and players will be able to pay for their transfers directly with Turbine Points. We think you'll like this transfer system, which is already in place in our sister game Lord of the Rings Online. Expect to see it debut by the end of the year.

~ Deity feats: We’ll be adding new Deities that players can follow, and new feats that can be unlocked by players who find favor with their deity of choice.

~ A new free dungeon: We’re expecting to release a new free dungeon in December that we think fans of A Study in Sable will enjoy. This quest sends adventurers to a popular type of pen and paper location that hasn’t had much representation in DDO. I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil it.

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

~ Monks and Favored Soul updates: Continuing our class work, you can expect an overhaul of handwraps in addition to updated enhancement trees for both classes.

Looking beyond 2016, we know many of you have been hearing the rumors and teases about Ravenloft, so let's talk Strahd. We're 100% interested in bringing Ravenloft to DDO, and are working through the process to make it happen. We don't have an exact time frame in mind, although our current plan has it coming to DDO sometime towards the end of 2017. We can't wait to bring one of the most popular and classic adventures in Dungeons & Dragons history to the game.

We’re also planning for our 11^th anniversary in late February! We’re hoping to debut a new playable race for the anniversary along with some new adventuring. We’ve been asking you whether you’d like to play a kobold or dragonborn, and while the final decision hasn’t been made, it looks like many of you would enjoy the dragonborn, so we’ll see what the anniversary brings.

It remains an honor to be your Executive Producer, and I'll be back later this year to look ahead to 2017. Until next time, may the loot gods smile on you.

~ Sev

1, night revels; do we get a spectral dragon this time?

2, returning player quest hub; don't we have guilds, guild ships and mentors for those? not that i would minds but it seems redundant in a age of scarcity.

3, it's one way of offering server merges i guess.

4, Deity feats, why? sure Eberron is atheistic, sure there are plenty of religions but there are no gods that walk the mortal plain.

5, A new free dungeon, that's nice i guess.

6, character bank, are you addressing the tr bank too? i get sick and tired of loosing items during tr.

7, monk& fvs, bit late but appreciated.

8, ravenloft? why? where's khorvaire?

9, Races, why those 2, why not where touched or some other more Eberron savvy related race?

[Qezuzu]

~ Deity feats: We’ll be adding new Deities that players can follow, and new feats that can be unlocked by players who find favor with their deity of choice.

Hopefully these new deity feats simply expand build options and create new builds, and don't just simply add on to existing power, e.g. "WIS to damage with [weapon classes]" would be good, "+10 melee power" bad (and boring.)

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

I'll echo what others are saying: the reincarnation cache also needs the same UI. It's baffling that something so clunky, obtuse, and commonly used has existed for so long without any improvements whatsoever.

~ Monks and Favored Soul updates: Continuing our class work, you can expect an overhaul of handwraps in addition to updated enhancement trees for both classes.

Would it be possible to get a road map for the classes after that? Pretty much all the casters besides Warlock need work, as well. A bunch of things in the Season's Herald tree and Druid spellbook don't even function correctly.

[Marc]

Really, really good news! Thanks for staying in touch.

I'd like to ask (and I think my fellows DDO players will agree) two new resources (although I think they should not be very hard to implement):

- A search system for the TR cache. If possible, a sorting system also, the same way it happens with the normal inventory. And a "sort by level" would also be very welcome.

- An "Empty TR Cache" button or a better, faster system to empty TR cache, which actually may take more than half an hour. So hitting that button all the items would go to normal inventory and bank.

PRETTY PLEASE?

Cheers!

I hope you've been enjoying Against the Slave Lords, checking out our new Cannith Crafting update, and helping us celebrate a decade of DDO! I'm writing today to talk about our plans for the rest of the year and beyond.

Our goal is to release two updates before the end of the year. One of the updates will be larger, the other smaller, and combined they'll bring several things that players have long asked for to DDO. Since we are currently working on two updates, it isn't clear yet what will be in each update. We'll release things when they are ready, so if something isn't ready in time for next month, we'll see if we can finalize it for the following update in December.

[Sylvado]

~Character Bank Storage: We’re working to take the user interface used for your Shared Account Bank and Crafting Storage and bring it to your personal character bank. Besides an improved look and functionality, this change will allow us to offer additional character bank storage space in the future.

~ Sev

If you could provide an hook to the inventory record or a means to export a character inventory and bank contents that would be very nice.

[Cetus]

So there are no new LE raids or quest series on the docket for this year? This is very saddening.

[Jandric]

Yes, very nice, thank you! I love seeing D&D modules coming to life in DDO!

White Plume Mountain would be cool.

This! And Blackrazor would be perfect to coincide with the release of sentient weapons. Just saying

[Blastyswa]

~ Deity feats: We’ll be adding new Deities that players can follow, and new feats that can be unlocked by players who find favor with their deity of choice.

Please make the deities highly unique, and be focused towards particular niches; I know that's not really the focus of the current deity feats, but I'd love for followers of Nerull to have bonuses to necromancy and death and penalties to light and healing that really push them into that focus, as well as that same type of specialization for other deities. I just used Nerull as an example because that was my cleric's deity in my old 2nd Edition campaign, and I very very much hope that I'll finally be able to make a more accurate version of that character in DDO.

Summary: Nerull! Nerull! Nerull!

[EllisDee37]

Oh, character BANK. I was thinking inventory. Meh, I don't much care about the character bank interface. I mean, I do manually organize my character banks, but my organization usually ends up feeling less than ideal, so whatever. TR cache could use some love, for sure.

For world transfers, to be honest I've never really understood the thinking behind the service. Who in their right mind would transfer one character?! I could see maybe 2000 TP to transfer your entire account, but just one character? Makes zero sense to me. (And to clarify: Only having one character also makes zero sense to me.)

[solstinox]

I think that a kobold shaman iconic race/class would make a lot of sense.

[Kaylenn]

These quotes echo my main thoughts upon reading this letter. I like most of the new stuff, but the bank part makes me nervous. Please hear these considerations before eliminating the well used Kundarak tab system. You can NOT just copy/paste the shared bank system as it is now. If you do anything, you MUST make it more functional first.

(On a side note: Eww dragonborn. Yay Kobold!!!)

While it would be nice to have more character bank storage, I'd rather keep what we have than have it replaced with the current shared bank interface. I use the tabs to sort my stuff. Yes, I can search for items in the shared bank interface, but I can only search by name. That doesn't help me when I pull things out of my TR cache and store them in my character bank by ML so that they're easier to find when I level up. It also doesn't help if I'm working through a few epic past lives and store my level 26 gear set in one tab so that it's really easy to swap gear when I hit level 26. It also doesn't allow me to put certain "important" items in the first tab so that I always see them when I open the bank. It also doesn't allow me to put items that I'll no longer use this life on a separate tab so that I don't have to bother looking through them when I'm searching for something.

Of course, the best option would be if you improve the shared storage interface before changing the personal bank storage to use it. Here are a few things that could be improved with the shared bank interface:

- There's no easy way to move items around in the list.

- Paging through the shared crafting storage can be slow and painful. I have about 30 pages, and I sometimes use it to move items among toons. The last items added go at the end of the list, and it isn't always easy to search for them.

- Adding new sorting methods (ML, item type, reverse time order, etc.) would make it easier to use.

- Adding new search methods (ML, item type, item attributes, etc.) would make it easier to use.

- Having subdirectories in the storage that we can rename would really help with keeping things sorted and easy to find.

I hate that you are taking the interface I like (character bank) and changing it to the one I hate (shared bank).

My character bank has all the tabs nicely organized so I can quickly find the items I'm looking for. Most of the time I'm looking for all the items of a certain ML range so searching in the shared bank is nowhere near as useful as being able to pick the order things are in. Meanwhile I will have put all items of the same ML on the same tab in my character bank making it easy to find what I'm looking for.

That said the shared bank interface would be somewhat more useful if it listed the most recent items first instead of the oldest, and if I didn't have to scroll AND go to other pages. (It should be one or the other not both).

This is also my concern about such a UI change.

For the bank change, I'd echo others' concerns. I'd guess a fair number of players are a little OCD in terms of how they keep their items organized. As it stands, the shared bank doesn't allow any organization to it, short of manually pulling out and putting back in a particular order which is tedious at best. Even if you could add up/down arrows like are in the quivers, it would still be annoying to get things where you want them. Hopefully you have some new organizational scheme in mind or there could be many aggravated players...

While I liked the Tabbed interface of the Kundarak Bank I also feel that a few enhancements to the interface (which will work for all tabs) would help make sorting/finding easier

1. Sort, By Name or By Minimum Level
Sorting by name should use Minimum Level as its secondary sort and sorting by Minimum Level should use the Name as a secondary sort

2. Add a way to jump to a page. Sometimes you just want to jump to page 9 of 22 (Could see this as a number entry box). Or if anything provide a Jump to First and Last Page and a 5 page Jump in either direction.

But there is one thing I'm skeptical about:

Improved look? I guess, maybe. Improved functionality? I think you and I have different definitions of functionality. I agree with those above who prefer using the current character bank tabs to the shared bank. It's a pain to find things in the shared bank. I only have 60 slots in my shared bank because if I bought more it would just mean having to tab and scroll more and a harder time to find what I'm looking for. I'm always short on storage it seems, but I dislike the shared bank UI enough that I don't consider buying more an option. If there aren't improved organization/sorting/searching methods included in this change, please reconsider. Hopefully, you just didn't mention the shared bank UI improvements you plan in this brief summary.

[Marupal]

<list of amazing stuff>

~ Sev

Booyah!