I have the answer for how to keep (some) people at cap

[aumerle]

I noticed that there seem to be a lot of threads about how to keep people at cap. The answer is simple, we need a new raid that requires farming to be able to craft the gear (so folks are encouraged to run it over and over) and has high end stats. In fact, I'd argue the best way to make folks stay at the high end is to make ALL new raids have this kind of gear. The easiest way to make this happen currently would be to buff the stats of Legendary Shroud. Strahd and Baba (to the best of my understanding) do not require this, so other than people running it a few times because it's new and interesting, you get your couple of drops that you care about and you're done (and a few might keep farming for tomes) and that's it.

But if the raid required more farming than that *and* additionally allowed you to craft items for different slots like Shroud, then not only could everyone make use of it but there would be a much more long term need for the drops from the raid, people might even be encouraged to keep multiple characters at cap to get more drops faster.

Obviously the TR grind will still pull some people away from this - once that was introduced, there were always going to be less people at cap than a game like WoW that doesn't have a TR mechanic, for example. But this would create more of a reason to stay at cap than we have now.

[aGarde]

One of the issues is the best gear is L29, and most people simply TR at 30. Perhaps the best gear should be capped at say, L26, so there's more reason to farm for items and do end game stuff.

Sentient weapons were supposed to be the end game reason to farm, but I think it kinda failed. It did let people use up all their duped items (if they were lucky to have massive stacks)

You see the shroud items had great use for TR'ing. you got them at L11/12, and could use them for 8-9 levels. The shroud was the greatest thing in the game. It took them a long time to kill it. For the current end game, you need something similar.. something that has use for 8-9 levels.. not 1 stinking level.

[aumerle]

I stand by my suggestion. It's too easy right now to farm for the couple of items you need from the current high end raids and call it done. Sentient weapons don't solve the problem because you can farm for sentient xp by using named items from any level, you don't have to be at cap to do this. Even if the amount of xp you get for higher level items is higher, it's not enough of a reason to stay there. A Shroud/Slave Lords type crafting raid where you need to be at 30 and farm ingredients for awhile and have the ability to make items for any slot would benefit more people and keep them interested in staying at 30 longer.

In the end, DDO created a mechanic which actively encourages people to NOT stay at 30. So it's always going to be a problem, but they didn't counter that with much in the way of motivation to stay there. Something like this would give people a real reason to do so for an extended period of time.

[Nonesuch2008]

In order to foster this concept, true end-game content needs to have a ML30 entry requirement. Any sort of earlier entry dilutes it otherwise i.e. if you've finished all of the Level 30 quests when you're at 27, there is that much less reason to stay at 30 once it has been attained.

Combine this requirement with something else unique, such as a level 30+ saga, and then you'll have some longevity. Other incentives, such as an "uncompletable" Legendary dungeon with cosmetic rewards for reaching certain levels or waypoints could be a creative means of providing rewards without adding to loot inflation/obsolescence.

[Garthog77]

One of the issues is the best gear is L29, and most people simply TR at 30. Perhaps the best gear should be capped at say, L26, so there's more reason to farm for items and do end game stuff.

Sentient weapons were supposed to be the end game reason to farm, but I think it kinda failed. It did let people use up all their duped items (if they were lucky to have massive stacks)

You see the shroud items had great use for TR'ing. you got them at L11/12, and could use them for 8-9 levels. The shroud was the greatest thing in the game. It took them a long time to kill it. For the current end game, you need something similar.. something that has use for 8-9 levels.. not 1 stinking level.

Very much agree with this. I don't bother to take any items with ML 29 or 30. To me those items are useless, and I will pass them every time, or feed to weapon if no one wants it. I don't take 29th level until I am capped and ready to take 30 and immediately TR. I have no interest in staying at cap, and for me when I am done with all my TR's, I will likely stop playing. Any MMO I have played I just have no interest in playing at max level. Nothing wrong with people who do, its just not for me.

[zehnvhex]

No.

Here's why. Warning, salt levels maximum.

1 - There's already a decent chunk of things to do at cap. You can farm gear for your next TR. You can raid. You can farm reaper points. Etc...

2 - The more people you stick at cap where there's already an abundance of players, the fewer there are in the TR treadmill (especially pre-20) where the grouping game is kinda stagnating right now due to lack of groups due to a terrible UI and horribly restrictive game design.

3 - The 'solution' to an entirely phantom problem is to not take something that's already tedious (farming gear) and make it even more tedious (how many people speak ~fondly~ of farming LGS mats? Anybody? Bueller?).

4 - If you make it even more tedious, all it's going to do is drive more people to not do it anyways because while a handful of guilds who push the envelope will put up with the grind, most people will simply go "Meh" and stop raiding altogether. Why spend weeks/months farming for a set of lvl 30 gear you're only going to wear as long as it takes to get 42 heart seeds running dailies on normal?

5 - We already have too many crafting systems as is. SSG should be crunching them (absolutely no reason that LS, LHoX, LTS, CiTW, VoN6, etc...can't all use the same materials these days to make raid items), not making more of them. If they had a lick of sense they'd introduce something like this to encourage 'raid rampaging' to increase interest in old raids.

6 - A better idea would simply be to go the route most modern MMO's are going and just make PL bonuses account wide, make all gear BoA. That way you can park a character at level 30 to do raids/reaper farms whenever while your other characters farm PL's. Of course this will never happen because the grumpy old man club is too stuck up their own keisters about "Bruha YOU KIDS WITH YOUR HAND OUTS YOU NEED TO EARN IT bruha bruha bruha" or who knows what the heck their argument is these days. It's hard to keep up with that 1990's toxic gaming mind set.

I could go on but unless your suggestion for the game is "add more dungeons that people farm for 2 days then abandon!", "update old gear so that people farm it for 2 days then abandon!" or "manage to somehow make night revels even more tedious!" it's not going to get done.

But hey, we're getting capes so that's pretty cool I guess. I can't wait to tell all my friends who quit the game years ago because of a complete dearth of care or investment in the grouping situation that's plaguing new players and driving them away from the game that we get capes now.

[blerkington]

No. ...

The main obstacle, as far as I can tell, is play at cap doesn't generate as much revenue as the reincarnation hamster wheel. If SSG was able to think of a way to make money from us at cap there'd be more for us to do there, but until they do this part of the game isn't going to be as well supported as the levelling part.

I disagree with a lot of the opinion expressed in the quoted post. There is not that much to do at cap, since most raids no longer offer relevant gear and they are rarely run. Farming gear for heroic lives is a pointless activity if you aren't doing heroic lives nor is it really a significant time sink. Reaper xp can also be earnt in the levelling game in good amounts; it's not the sole province of endgame. There is also not nearly the amount of content for capped charaters as there is for people levelling.

If the problem with previously offered activities as cap before was some (not all) people found them boring, then the solution is to make a more diverse and enjoyable set of activities. Not write off trying to provide an engaging endgame as being somehow impossible. Most MMOs are not about recycling the levelling game; in many of them getting to cap is a short formality, and they provide activities for people with capped characters that are enjoyable and engaging.

It really staggers me that there are people who try to argue against having an active and rewarding endgame. They tip their hands on the issue when they complain that it would make it harder to run levelling content, but if it were done well we might have enough customers for both activities to flourish like we did in the past. Being able to cater to people who like endless reincarnation, those who only want to run at cap, and those who are happy to do one activity for a while then the other (maybe to prevent burn-out on either) would be the best thing for the game. And if there's a part of the game you don't like, then just don't play it.

Thanks.

[mikarddo]

Shared racial pl / rxp account wide is indeed the solution.

This lets us park a few chars at cap while running one or more in heroics with much more flexibility and ability than needing to manually earn rpl and rxp on alts as well in addition to heroic, epic and iconic past lives.

Do heroic stuff when not that many of your friends are around - do legendary stuff when they are. Much less "****, I just did a TR so I cannot join your guys, sorry".

That way its not "either heroic or cap" but "both heroic and cap" and likely no less money earned. Even those players with 100+ rxp and racial completionists will likely still want the other past lives on any alts they want to play so there is no shortage of xp to run even for them.

[caberonia]

Since we're just spit balling, I would suggest a lvl 30 grind that provides a BTA item that provides a past life that cannot be USED on the toon who earned it. Boom you got a way to farm past life on alts with your capped character, You need a shared bank to trade it so theres some sales and of course depending on the grind you could sell items to reduce it not to mention potentially selling more character slots. Devs win. .Alt players win. PL grinders win . Cap players get more ppl to party with and win. Can even make the grind harder and/or longer than actually doing the life..since it's an alternative to actually playing through it and can be done at cap.

Example. Soul of the fighter- When consumed provides Past life Fighter Feat. Cannot be consumed by character that earned it.
I'll leave the debate for whether iconic or racials should be earnable in this fashion to others. (i would prefer if racials could at least though)
This would be preferable to SHARING everything account wide IMO.

[Wipey]

If you don't do or at least don't give the hardest content - high reaper epics at try, then what's the point really ?

I don't understand how some can only do Waterworks, Shadowcrypt or Litany ad nauseum on r1 on their 257 life whateverpletionists.

There are some (very good) players at cap, at least for some time. After playing few years, how can the hamster wheel be interesting. But we make our own fun right ?

Some way to earn xp ( even with huge penalty ) at cap was mentioned few times.

[thedip]

Why not convert XP at 30 to a mysterious remnant like token that can be exchanged for a minor unique benefit (+1 melee/+1 ranged/+10hp etc.) that can only be used whilst at cap and possibly disappear with ETR or TR. The benefits could be very small, but would still show a bit of progress, they could also be hideously expensive in terms of XP.

Is it a grind - yes, but the bonuses would be very small and you would earn the XP whilst running raids and dungeons looking for the 'Sword of Ultimate Death'. It could also be possible that the store would sell some tokens to speed up the process (thus earning money for SSG).

This is just my suggestion and I'd prefer if you leave your torches and pitchforks at home when replying.

[AbyssalMage]

...<snip>...

Legendary Shroud
Slave Lords
Thunderholme

Sorry, filling up player inventories with collectables may have worked for the original Shroud but hasn't worked since. Maybe the player base has matured? Maybe there was another key ingredient, lost to time, that kept players at 20?

Grinding literally turns players away from the game and towards other marketable games. Then again, you said "Some" so you are setting "the bar pretty low" which even SSG seems to have trouble reaching occasionally. Honestly, it may be time to have an exclusive update with 12+ raids within. Once that fails, if it does fail, or succeeds we can finally change the subject back to smoothing out content and making it original.

[Kriogen]

Past Life gives you unique perk you can not get in any ather way. And it stacks with everything else.

Its a "monopoly" as evasion was not so long ago. Before MRR(part of Armor Up), the only way to get good protection vs magic damage was evasion. Because of that everyone and hes pet metalic picachu took /rog2 or /monk2.

MRR broke that "evasion monopoly". Long live Armor Up Revolution!

To fix "no end game" that is caused by "past life monopoly", you'd have to create a new Armor Up ... i mean ... End Game Revolution. There would have to be a way to get what Past Life gives and at the same time stay at cap.

[tralfaz81]

Easiest way to keep people at cap? Reaper XP.

Easiest way to make people do anything you want in this game? See above.

[Chai]

Most of the true endgamers are already gone. The hamster wheel crowd "won" the Battle of the Allocation of the People Hours with their decisive victory through their proclamation of "its about the journey not the destination." While on the losing side, Im still not convinced it was the wrong side.

The way to keep people at cap has already been demonstrated in DDO. Its all about designing new gear for the new raids which does not invalidate the old gear from the previous raids. This is different in other MMOs where they can invalidate old gear with new progression all they want as 100% of the PVE focus in those games is endgame.

[Chai]

Legendary Shroud
Slave Lords
Thunderholme

Sorry, filling up player inventories with collectables may have worked for the original Shroud but hasn't worked since. Maybe the player base has matured? Maybe there was another key ingredient, lost to time, that kept players at 20?

Grinding literally turns players away from the game and towards other marketable games. Then again, you said "Some" so you are setting "the bar pretty low" which even SSG seems to have trouble reaching occasionally. Honestly, it may be time to have an exclusive update with 12+ raids within. Once that fails, if it does fail, or succeeds we can finally change the subject back to smoothing out content and making it original.

Yep there was an endgame community of players. Most are gone now.

[zehnvhex]

Yep there was an endgame community of players. Most are gone now.

This may come as a bit of a surprise but during these 'glory days' of raiding nothing but shroud and maybe ToD on occasion, the game was losing players by the thousands. There's a reason they 'screwed it up' and that's because if they didn't the game would have shut down a few months later.

I know you guys have this fantasy in your head where they can endlessly add sidegrades and 'situational' gear and etc...but they couldn't even do it at 20 anymore. The UI/inventory system isn't built for that and it was driving players away. Modern gamers want gear sets and BIS items, not having 37 hotbars filled with "This is my diplomacy gear, and this is my swaps for when I hit KTA, and this is my 19 different items that regenerate spellpoints, and this is the 14 different potions/scrolls I keep on the rare occasion I get hit with something that casts crushing despair, and this..."

I know that's what makes DnD...DnD. I appreciate that. But 2.5, 3.5, 4.0 etc...are long dead. We are in the era of 5.0 now and 5.0 gamers don't want to deal with that. MMO players, what few of us there are left, don't want to deal with that. We want potions that refill themselves (PoE, D3). We want slick grouping UI's that take care of forming the groups for us (FFxiv, WoW). We want inventory systems that are more of an afterthought where I'm not playing sim-closet space more then I'm playing the game (pretty much every MMO other than DDO), etc...etc...

Anyways...

DDO's end game cannot be raiding. It simply can't because SSG -cannot- compete with WoW, FFxiv, ESO, etc...it just simply can't. They don't have the manpower, the engine for it, the programmers, etc...to keep up.

What DDO has is the TR treadmill and a decent/great 1-30 game. There are very few games where you can remort, and even fewer that aren't korean trash mill MMO's. That's where their focus should be. The occasional raid is great. The occasional level 30 dungeon is great. But the real focus should be on making a better play experience for people who are just starting the game.

End game raiders will burn out naturally regardless of how much content you put out. What you need is a steady influx of new players to take their place, to start the TR cycle anew. You go and read the reviews on Steam, Reddit, MMORGP.com, massively, etc...you'll get an idea for the MMO community at large and how they perceive DDO. it's seen as an -extremely- new player unfriendly game, and they are not wrong.

Stagnating the level 30 game by making it a massive grind or just shuffling stats around on gear from update to update isn't going to help new players get past level 5 where the game starts to become a chore for new people.

[droid327]

I dont see what the need is to keep people parked at 30. Why is that inherently better than TR cycling? I consider Epic as a whole to be endgame. Its not like quests are severely limited by quest band like they are in Heroic. You can access pretty much any Epic quest at any point in an ETR cycle. I kinda think people expect there to be an incentive to stop leveling up at cap just because that's what you're "supposed to do" in an MMO...or because they just want more players at their level to make groups for them :P

If anything, maybe just introduce a new mechanic that reduces ML on your gear, one level per Epic life, to a minimum of 20. Then you could gear up with "cap level" gear sooner and contribute better to Legendary parties even if you just ETRed to 20.

[Chai]

This may come as a bit of a surprise but during these 'glory days' of raiding nothing but shroud and maybe ToD on occasion, the game was losing players by the thousands. There's a reason they 'screwed it up' and that's because if they didn't the game would have shut down a few months later.

I know you guys have this fantasy in your head where they can endlessly add sidegrades and 'situational' gear and etc...but they couldn't even do it at 20 anymore. The UI/inventory system isn't built for that and it was driving players away. Modern gamers want gear sets and BIS items, not having 37 hotbars filled with "This is my diplomacy gear, and this is my swaps for when I hit KTA, and this is my 19 different items that regenerate spellpoints, and this is the 14 different potions/scrolls I keep on the rare occasion I get hit with something that casts crushing despair, and this..."

I know that's what makes DnD...DnD. I appreciate that. But 2.5, 3.5, 4.0 etc...are long dead. We are in the era of 5.0 now and 5.0 gamers don't want to deal with that. MMO players, what few of us there are left, don't want to deal with that. We want potions that refill themselves (PoE, D3). We want slick grouping UI's that take care of forming the groups for us (FFxiv, WoW). We want inventory systems that are more of an afterthought where I'm not playing sim-closet space more then I'm playing the game (pretty much every MMO other than DDO), etc...etc...

Anyways...

DDO's end game cannot be raiding. It simply can't because SSG -cannot- compete with WoW, FFxiv, ESO, etc...it just simply can't. They don't have the manpower, the engine for it, the programmers, etc...to keep up.

What DDO has is the TR treadmill and a decent/great 1-30 game. There are very few games where you can remort, and even fewer that aren't korean trash mill MMO's. That's where their focus should be. The occasional raid is great. The occasional level 30 dungeon is great. But the real focus should be on making a better play experience for people who are just starting the game.

End game raiders will burn out naturally regardless of how much content you put out. What you need is a steady influx of new players to take their place, to start the TR cycle anew. You go and read the reviews on Steam, Reddit, MMORGP.com, massively, etc...you'll get an idea for the MMO community at large and how they perceive DDO. it's seen as an -extremely- new player unfriendly game, and they are not wrong.

Stagnating the level 30 game by making it a massive grind or just shuffling stats around on gear from update to update isn't going to help new players get past level 5 where the game starts to become a chore for new people.

We've already refuted your revisionist history of DDO with facts in the past (you didnt even play in the era you are falsely claiming the incorrect reason for player attrition in), and we even named the 9 raids which were available in the era you are once again misrepresenting - as well as shown examples of older games which still have multiplicitively higher populations than DDO which use horizontal progression systems, zero of which you could address, so no need to rake those over the coals again, however I will say the following:

What you do here yet again is engage the false dichotomy fallacy where it can only be one or the other, but not both, attempting to incorrectly argue endgame and TR game against each other. Most of the players do both, or at least did both in the past when both were viable. When we got sick of the TR grind we raided. When we got sick of raiding we did the TR grind. Players do not burn out more in the raid grind than they do in the TR grind. They burn out more when there are LESS OPTIONS. Behaving like an MMO can only have one system and one system only demonstrates a severe lack of knowledge of how MMOs are developed. Heck, the games you named above have MOBA-esque PVP, embedded into a sandbox-esque raid system with its own LFM tool, embedded into yet again a huge theme park open world where players level.

If you want to talk some comparisons of DDO to D&D 5.0, show me in the source books where the rules for PRR, MRR, melee power, ranged power, spell power, dodge chance, are all located. I mean we have been running this since beta, and have yet to encounter these rules. Dont worry, I'll wait...

Or you could just admit that comparing DDO to D&D rule as written is a futile endeavor at this point, as most of the rest of us already clearly have understood for the past 4-5 years or so.

[Peter_Stauffenberg]

I think you need to make something that requires you to be legendary (i. e. at cap). The reaper xp seems to work to make people run at higher difficulties and you gain points to make you stronger.

Make legendary xp too which is only gained if you run a legendary quest while at level 30. Then you get legendary points ala reaper points which you can spend in the legendary trees. Some thresholds could grant cosmetic abilities ala reaper wings, reaperling etc.

Named loot (including raid loot) from legendary quests could get legendary bonuses ala the mythic or reaper bonuses you have now. To qualify you need to be level 30 when running. The higher the difficulty the bigger the chance.

Make new quests and loot in 3 tiers: heroic, epic, legendary

The main problem is that running at legendary will mainly be desirable for those who have finished their TR lives. So running at 30 should give some bonuses to people wanting to do TRs. Maybe XP stones, tokens and TR hearts could have a chance to drop as end rewards when at level 30 in a legendary quest. These items BTC. Now we only get seeds being at 30. Make people shorten the TR process a little by staying longer at 30.

To make this simpler you can give such rewards as legendary saga rewards or chain rewards.

People should have a reason to stay awhile at 30 even when on the TR bandwagon.