Apr 10
Trying to Repress Being A Jerk
but it’s really really hard when WarCry makes it so easy.
“April 5th, DDO finally patched in a big, bad red dragon. Less than 48 hours later it was dead. Now, it is basically getting farmed. Strategy guides for taking down the toughest encounter in the game are appearing less than a week after the content was patched in.”
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Ditto. I had to grip the edge of desk and restrain myself until the urge passed. Of course, I was laughing like a fool the whole time too… But I made it through. Hang in there man. :)
It’s not even that I want to be, it’s just … man, for a company that’s had so much experience running massive games HOW CAN THEY NOT HAVE FORSEEN THIS?
And yet, does it matter?
They’re committed to what they have. It’s not feasible to go on some magical content-generation binge that will solve them problem. They can just crank the difficulty of everything up, but that’s just a delaying tactic that rewards catassers and penalizes the semi-casual gamer.
Assumption: DDO is explicitly not targetting catassers. Why bother? You’d be hard pressed to beat existing games that have grinding sown up.
Assumption: DDO is explicitly not targetting super casual players. D&D doesn’t really lend itself to “pop in for an hour, solo some stuff, and leave.”
From those two big assumptions, they’re left with the semi-casual gamers. Perhaps people who played tabletop D&D at one point, but got busy with being adults. These would be players who log on once every week or two for four or so hours (a typical tabletop D&D session). At that rate of content consumption what’s in the game will last “a while”.
I think that market exists and is currently underserved. I’ve got a co-worker who is enthused by the idea of DDO because it matches his time and interest. He really wants to play tabletop D&D, but his work and other activities make a regular game infeasible. But he can afford at relatively random times to play for several hours at a stretch, perhaps two or three times a month.
That said, while I believe the market exists, I also believe the market to be very small. Puzzle Pirates small. Which would be okay if this was run on a PP level budget, but this got a WoW level budget.
DDO’s mistake wasn’t failing to cater to hard core players. DDO’s mistake was targetting a very small audience.
I agree with most of Alan’s points, and being a semi-casual gamer myself I have been enjoying DDO since the headstart event and not even come close to exhausting the content. I play with a close group of friends whom I know in RL and we often swap in and out of alts to get a good match of class types for whatever quest we’re on. We take great joy in exploring each new quest and looking for all the hidden content without resorting to online guides.
Most of us quickly drop out of groups consisting of level grinders who rush their way through a quest they’ve done before and even when repeating quests (to level up a differrent alt or just for fun) we try different strategies and approaches to the level, test out new spells or weapon combos.
I applaud the attempt to try different things in an MMO, the inclusion of integrated voice chat, more interactive combat, etc. Its the first MMO I’ve played (and I’ve played most of the common ones WoW, EQ, EQII, Eve Online, UO, AO, SoR, PS, CoV) that I truely felt used the 3rd dimension effectively (CoV came the next closest) in its quests. And its also the first where I felt the rogue character came into its own rather than just being a DPS beast.
I also agree that the game does not cater to the hardcore, but from my point of view that’s a good thing as the current perception of how a hardcore game should work is a very old model that hasn’t changed much from its MUD roots and leaves little room for innovation and I think can be a barrier to entry for anyone new to the genre. Of course opinions differ on this point, but I’m glad someone did something a little different from the norm.
In all honesty I don’t think there is any quest based MMO out there that doesn’t have its content exhausted quickly by the hardcore (I’ve seen complaints of people maxing out in WoW in the space of weeks) and it would be impossible to develop content faster than players can use it up (unless your developer group was insanely large… which would have its own set of problems). So where’s the problem? From my point of view as long as the inclusion of content keeps pace with my game play I’ll keep playing. When it doesn’t I’ll cancel my subscription and move on. Until then its a great place to catch up and play D&D with my friends in an immersive environment.
As far as I know most of my friends and collegues fit into the semi-casual category, and while I like the idea of belonging to a small segment, I doubt its as small as people think. But then I’ve never understood the gamer mindset that beleives the developers of a game have commited some kind of heresy if their complaints are not agreed with and fixed immediately. Its a game, if you enjoy it… play it… if you don’t then go play something else. If the type of players who play the game make up only a small population then the game will eventually die or just fade away…
I don’t have to restrain my anger… because I’ve already done my bitching well before this patch came out :) Now I can just point and laugh. DDO is turning into the MMORPG bloggers greatest “I told you so.”
I think PuppaSmirk hits the nail on the head with his comments. Having played WoW before DDO I saw pretty much the same thing occurring with every additional content added. So how is DDO any worse than any of the other mmorpgs out there when it comes to new free content?
A question for Micheal & Prognosticator - Why do you play mmorpgs? (as in what do you get out of them). Is it to be the first to beat the game? To get the best ‘lewt’?
How whould you do it better?
The reason I’m being so snippy, fantomas, is that I’m critiqing the addition with a side-lines old man hat on. Turbine is a vernerable company in this marketplace, and they’re making decisions that I’m not sure I agree with. They’re making these decisions with a license that should be an excuse to print money, and should have allowed them to get it ‘right’ on launch.
To answer your question: I play games to have fun. I didn’t have fun playing DDO. Even playing with other people, I just didn’t enjoy myself all that much. I’m the complete opposite of a catasser, and even I think that the amount of content they have in the game is tissue-paper weak.
If someone can grind through the entirity of your game during the weeklong ‘pre-launch event’, there isn’t enough content in there.
I dont know about Turbine being venerable per se, as I think they used up a lot of that type of standing with AC2 and have only made it worse with DDO.In defense of AC2, I will say that it was a much better game at it’s demise than at its beginning. I predict that by years end it will be only the original AC that makes any income at all for Turbine and that if they shoot for the same small niche-market for Lotr-o that they claim they wanted for DDO then we will be reading about them heading to bankruptcy,imho.