Letter from Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini - January 2018

[ChicagoChris]

Hello, ty for the game and ty for Ravenloft, a fantastic expansion.

I would like to put one issue onto your radar regarding Crystal Cove: Mithral Heavy Armor. Being made of Mithral is supposed to be an advantage but the PRR system gives it the PRR of medium armor. If possible could you please patch the PRR system to recognize Mithhral Cavalry Plate and any other armors made of mithral in the game for their base armor type?

Thank you

THIS!!!

Would it be possible to have a permanent Sheltering added to mithral and adamantine? It would have to be coded as a "Base" effect, not enhancement so it would stack. The other option would be to add Insightful PPR to mithral and Insightful MRR to adamantine from a lore standpoint to reflect each metal's effect on physical and magical harm.

[QueenOfTheHook]

Artificer improvements are nice for a VERY small segment but what are you doing to fix the lag the and make the quests more playable. New Quest Sunrise runs around 4-7 FPS on a my Win7 64 bit I7 with 16G Ram , 4G Video ram on my ISP's fastest line, there's nothing else I can do. Are you looking at switching hosting again or be honest is it simply too cost prohibitive.
You cannot contact any GM as they refer you to customer service and you are given the age old standby , "Must be on your end , We never heard of issues"
Personally I love the new content and pre-purchased the ultimate Ravenloft, But I would like to see some new content put on hold while we fix some issues playing.

Thanks for time.

Michael

Is it Sunrise giving you trouble or Wrath of Earth (druid one with all the electricity)? It's not an ideal fix, but if it is indeed Wrath of Earth, try restarting your client right before going into the quest. Do not just log out and back in, close the whole program and reopen. I went from 4-10 FPS on a brand new computer to a functional 40-60 fps with just a few dips into the 20s using this technique. If it is indeed Sunrise you are thinking of, try the same thing and see if it helps.

[Niminae]

Speaking of events, we have plans for Night Revels to update the public space to work similar to the Challenge system its dungeons use, and add a new dungeon for our favorite Halloween event.

Ahhh, it all becomes clear. I listened to the "ask the devs" DDOCast, and when they said something about making Night Revels act more like Challenges I was confused, because all of the dungeons in there already act exactly like Challenges. So this is a change to the public space, gotcha. Hopefully those changes will allow the raft of spells and abilities that cannot be cast or used in public spaces to be cast there during the festival.

One of the things we have long heard from you about is the desire to have a third Artificer Enhancement tree, and we're pleased to be able to say that the Renegade Mastermaker will be coming in the near future. This tree will focus on improving your Repair spells, Curative Admixtures, personal Defense, and building things to buff both yourself and your allies. We also intend to add a third Favored Soul tree, update the Cleric Warpriest, and do extensive work on the Druid class. For Druid, we will be working on the core of the class, its animal forms, and both of its existing enhancement trees in addition to a brand new enhancement tree.

This is all good news. I just hope that this time the intent can be made a reality. The third FvS enhancement tree was promised in the May, 2016 Producers letter. That didn't happen that year, and it's running right up on being two years without being fulfilled.

I hope that you'll keep the two good things from the Warpriest tree: Ameliorating Strike and Magic Backlash, and either jettison entirely or give a major overhaul to the rest of the tree. We all know the argument against a decent melee Cleric: A full casting rank class shouldn't have the same melee capabilities as a Paladin or Fighter or whatever. And yet Druids exist as a full casting class with a strong melee capability (and please don't screw that up during the Druid pass). Perhaps look into the same sort of mechanics that you've attached to Druid animal forms: Slower casting/cooldowns as the drawback to effective melee capabilities. This would model the Cleric Prestige classes in PnP which have 1/2 or 3/4 spell progression. Maybe tie it to the second or third core or tiers, so players could dip into Warpriest a bit without suffering any casting penalties, but if a character is more "all in" to the tree then their casting suffers due to the focus on the martial skills.

Next, we are pleased to announce our next classic adventure! An eccentric wizard has hidden three famous Sentient weapons inside of a volcano, and challenged all comers to try to retrieve them. Can you make it through fiendish obstacles and deadly traps? Have you guessed the pack yet? It's White Plume Mountain, a classic 1979 dungeon that was also recently brought to 5th Edition in the Tales from the Yawning Portal book.

This is awesome! I was at the Gencon or wherever this was launched back in the day and participated in the tournament. My group didn't win, but it was a pug so what do you expect. :-P This module has always had a lot of nostalgia for me due to that. It certainly isn't a typical dungeon, but it has some quirky bits that make it funny and fun. I will look forward to running this module in DDO with anticipation.

[OfElectricMen]

Hi!

For Druid, we will be working on the core of the class, its animal forms

You do realize that the core of the Druid class is not the animal forms, right? The core of the Druid class is, wait for it . . . Spellcasting!

We are happy with the feedback we received about Sentient Weapons

Happy about it, I believe. Responsive to it? Nothing you've said here indicates that is the case.

Thanks!

[Vooduspyce]

Congrats to SSG on a successful first year! What started out slow and a little bumpy just kept getting better. 2017 was better than at least the previous 2 years for me and this letter has me looking forward to 2018!

What is conspicuously missing is any mention of new player races. I thought kobold and tiefling were a shoe in for 2018 but no mention. Can you please speak to new races for 2018?

[Graedyn_Jaxx]

[QUOTE=What is conspicuously missing is any mention of new player races. I thought kobold and tiefling were a shoe in for 2018 but no mention. Can you please speak to new races for 2018?[/QUOTE]

About as likely as the Flumph as a pc race or Blackguard as an Iconic Class. Just not going to happen.

As for quests Castle Amber or Bloodstone pass have some good arc potential.

[QueenOfTheHook]

Congrats to SSG on a successful first year! What started out slow and a little bumpy just kept getting better. 2017 was better than at least the previous 2 years for me and this letter has me looking forward to 2018!

What is conspicuously missing is any mention of new player races. I thought kobold and tiefling were a shoe in for 2018 but no mention. Can you please speak to new races for 2018?

Maybe they are going to let the racial completionist have a break from that grind? Every new race means another 4 lives to grind, 3 to get racial completionist back, and 1 to get their actual build back.

[Chacka_DDO]

just some quotes:

Must be on your end though. I'm running and AMD FX8350, 16GB RAM and a 1070. I get well over 60fps on ultra. There are some lag issues, sure, but no fps issues.

It is about consistency, if a single (type of) area drops FPS by 75-90%, that is a bug - stronger configurations probably make it feel less impactful.

Into the Mist,
Yester Hill,
Berez quests (inc Baba Raid outside areas)

All the above quests do the super FPS drop on my IGP only PC. Other areas play perfectly fine 30-45 FPS, consistently.

He maybe means Wrath of Earth, running a dual hex cored Xeon e5 rig with 32 gig ram and AMD 56 8 gig HBM2 card off ssd and I see low frames of 8-20 in Wrath and I'm only running at 1440p so I can see the icons else would be 1600p/4k on a 44 inch screen, 220 meg down 20 up internet pings of 100ms with no loss, even the explorer before entering gets 50-60 fps so that tesla tower is sapping the life out of everything to run it's volts.

I run a system with a v3 3.5Ghz Xeon CPU and 32GB ECC memory my Graphic is an R9 Fury Nano.
As I bought my system my goal was a stable running system to get as least as possible problems.
That's why ECC RAM because it completely eliminated the sudden DDO client shut downs for me (caused by the low-quality RAM I had before, but the ECC completely eliminate all one-bit errors now) and I use an AMD card, because the Nvidia drivers have always caused bugs for me no matter what Nvidia card I tried with DDO.

But now to the subject. my experience is that with my NON-high end system I am used to see above 100 fps in most quests. in Some old areas even above 200 fps.
In the quest Wrath of Earth the fps drops for me to like 40 fps, maybe I'm just spoiled but this is already noticeable and too low because if you got an average of 40 fps this includes some spikes to like 80 fps but too bad also some spikes down to very low fps and very noticeable graphical lag.
My tip for this quest is to restart your DDO client if you do this quest (or another one you may experience an unusual fps drop) for me a fresh DDO client greatly improves the performance and I have almost no really annoying graphical lag then. And this might be also the reason why the developer who creates this is/was not aware of this issue, if he always tested his newest creation on a freshly started DDO client (just a thought of course).

So what does this tell me and why fits this to this thread?
Based on my own experiences on my Computer system and from reports I read here in the Forum it is obvious that the System requirements are very different in different quests.
And this cause some major problems formost for users with not the best hardware.
But the question is what is wrong and what can be done?
I don't think the solution is only to tell the players have to buy the newest graphical cards and CPUs etc. just to make ONE quest running as it should be.
Sure the quest works also "WAI" but this reminds me on the Spectre & Meltdown problem almost all CPU have now, the CPUs also work as intended but this makes exploits possible so it is not really helpful for the users that they work as intended .
My expectation for the future would be that developers and game designers actually test what they do on a recommended system for DDO.
And the currently recommended system would have major issues in the quest wrath of earth!
So the player knows if he got this system (or a better one) he can expect all quests are actually working for him.
And this is another example for me that the developers do insufficient tests.
DDO doesn't have to run only on a high-end system with 20ms latency smoothly, it has to run on a currently recommended system also in Australia with 200ms latency (or so).
But of course, this is just an opinion based on an assumption.
Not everyone has to share it even if I believe that's a quite reasonable demand.

[adrian69]

I'll chime in with my two cents about the lag. It's making the game nigh unplayable some nights. A run which normally takes me 12 minutes through Lords of Death just took me 38 minutes with all the lag. Swing, swing, lag...swing, lag...you get the drift. Forget about getting spells off...

Please, point me to where I can find and defeat the lag monster of Ghallanda...

I've not* noticed any lag since the maintenance fix last week. We have a couple of people that have atrocious lag who found out in the last week Windows and related apps were constantly updating in the background. I know one of them set their updater to a weekly time and lag has stopped for the most part, not sure about the other guy, but it may be something to look into.

edit*

[swadesblynx]

I love this game & ty bunches for keeping it a challenge; however, will help tickets get answered now that Ravenloft is up & running????

[Maquist]

You do realize that the core of the Druid class is not the animal forms, right? The core of the Druid class is, wait for it . . . Spellcasting!

When I read that section of the letter, I didn't read it as implying that the animal forms are the core of the class. I read it as a list of the components that will be reworked. In essence, they will be reworking 1-the core of the class, 2-the animal forms, and 3-the enhancement trees.

Now I wonder which one is the intended message?

[Chacka_DDO]

What do I wish for DDO? (because this seems to be a "wünsch dir was" thread)
More content is of course always nice (more races, classes, quests etc.) but please quality over quantity so make the new content as good as we are used to it from you.

My currently biggest Issues with DDO "gameplay" are space problems and the need to deal with the TR cache.
So I would wish you completely remove the TR cache from the game because this is NOT need. A TR can work like an ER/LR!
Just leave us the bank and inventory space we got from favor and you dont have any need for such a TR cache!
And at the end, this might be also less work for you because you also had to deal with some big issues with this stupid and unneeded TR cache in the past.

Besides that, more space is always better!

In my opinion, you should also consider to completely drop the BTC property on items and make items either BTA or not bankable. I think it basically never needs to make an item BTC or nonbankable because you can completely avoid the need for such a property.
Basically the need for anything that inhibits free trading of items in a game is quite artificial and not really need if you do things "smart" enough.
But I think that at least BTA is maybe really need for DDO, but I wonder if I only think this because I'm used to it.
If we would not have a BTC, there is basically no need for a character bank and you can drop this old and also basically outdated system.
Then we could have only ONE BIG account bank!

And the next thing that also concerns the space and item handling problem.
one of my biggest wishes for DDO are items that scale with your level, this means you can equip such an item from level one to level 30 and it provides its power based on your current charater level (e.g. 2 strength at level one and 20 strength at level 30).
In my opinion, also an example of something we all are used to have in an MMO are the minimum level property of items.
But we are used to having something that is basically not needed and quite stupid if you think about it, but it is very hard to drop old habits.

And another thing is that I expect that you stop this stupid power creep, also this is something we are just used to have, even if it is stupid and even harmful for the game at the end!
Make item different and not stronger!

Therefore if you update the item rewards e.g. for Crystal Cove, you might consider to introduce items that scale with your level because they do this anyway, you just need like 5 inventory spaces for an item that should only use one space, with all the negative consequences for the player!
And don't make the new items too strong. Make them as strong as Ravenloft items not more and not less.
And if you keep this line you don't have to fear that you have to change this item again and again because of they were outdated by your own senseless power creeping item policy.
The reason why you are going to change this item now is foremost the power creep in the past but you should finally start to learn from the past.

And if you do class passes the same, be careful to not overdo it because this cause the need of class passes in the future only to solve balance problems caused by power creep too.

[Kwansai]

I've had a ticket in for over 3 months on not being able to enter Kings Forrest in the Underdark package. You don't even sell the package right now but you haven't done anything for those that are effected by this. Not even a reply to the ticket. Any feedback would be expected by a paying customer.

[Gapp]

Sounds awesome!

Who's going to narrate White Plume Mountain?

I would like Christopher Walken to narrate a dungeon would be great.

[Spadedragon]

I'm glad to see my idea of a kobold sentient jewel will be implemented for the anniversary event.

On another note can they add new types of festival augments to Night Revels this year. It would be nice to see charisma and constitution festival augments added.

[Tamryn]

I smell..... TOMB OF HORRORS!!!!!

LOL! That is exactly what came first to my mind as well!

[PSU_Lion]

Please let the expansion be Isle of Dread!!!!!!!!

[Stev69]

All good stuff. However banking, inventory and the ui in general all need to be brought up to date. A server wide search tool would be awesome, nothing worse than looking through a whole bunch of toons for an item you think you might have. On that server wide note server wide trading would also be welcome rather than on a per character basis. I know I personally spend to much time sorting through stuff.

[HungarianRhapsody]

An eccentric wizard has hidden three famous Sentient weapons inside of a volcano, and challenged all comers to try to retrieve them.

What does that mean? Most named weapons that are ML 20 or above can be Sentient. Are these weapons already Sentient? Or are they three new jewels? I'm interested, but confused.

[Arkat]

Does this mean we are getting trident as a weapon?

I'll bet it's a quarterstaff that just looks like a trident.