Eladiun wrote on Dec 20
th, 2012 at 2:54pm:
That's totally true...and pre-MOTU there was a lot more for the Hardcore player than post. Little things had more impact the 10 hp from a Barb past life or the +1 from a Fighter past life had more impact. Gear from the Vale raids actually was useful as a stepping stone to epic pieces. Now you can grind out comms in Forgotten Realms in a few hours and piece together good enough gear. Turbine consciously targeted the game at casual players with the expansion and essentially alienated all the hardcore players. 70% of the people I ran with have pretty much left the game. Hell, look at the forums...people complaining and hour long quest is too long. I've ground 5 hours on one boss in progression raids in other games and spent a month of three nights a week just to finally clear a raid . This game had great balance between the two. It no longer does and that's without taking into account the store.
I was super excited for the level cap bump and destines. Only to be let down that 20-25 was worthless and destines nothing but a giant XP slog. Couple that with the drop in quality of the game..bugs, lag, etc... The top end is just gone. Now, the most difficult achievements in the game are sold for points.
If you are still having fun more power to you. I'm not trying to convince you to leave. I'll not change my opinion that any game that sells XP is in the fast lane to game hell though.
This is so true, and bares repeating. Before the expansion even though Turbine was targeting the casual gamers since f2p it wasn't until after the expansion that they tried to make casual players hardcore players. They should have created forgotten realms in the lower levels as well as the higher levels, instead they focused on making everyone level 20. Unfortunately the stones were one of the tools they used to encourage everyone to get to level 20. They probably didn't originally intend to sell them in the DDO store, but once they were programmed in and once they became so popular it was inevitable that we would see them there.
However, I feel like Turbine didn't really have anything to lose once they saw all the posts declaring that endgame was dead and that the game was bleeding endgame players. Rather than trying to rework their game to encourage more growth and participation of veteran players they decided to go the easy route instead. Casual gamers are still here, and they have always been the majority so why not say fuck the powergamer and add +4 tomes and stones to the store? Make it easier for the people who want easy.
All of this is speculation though. However, what I'm still not clear about is why Turbine would go out of their way to remove the grind from the game. The casual player will keep playing even if there is grind in the game. They don't play that much, and they don't really mind either way; this is the true definition of a casual player. However, as every business knows it is easier to retain customers than to attract new ones. This new business model of selling XP in the ddostore, and this started with tomes of learning not the stones, defeats the purpose. Regardless of what you say the grind has always encouraged people to keep coming back and leveling their characters. It was the entire reason the TR grind was instituted to begin with. Not because of character advances, but because Turbine couldn't keep up with the demands of the endgame. They couldn't possibly develop endgame content quickly enough to satiate the endgame players, so why not reuse the content they already have?
Unfortunately I don't just see this as pay to win, but working against their own interests as well. I don't think that Turbine made as much money as they spent on the expansion. They made the mistake of making Forgotten Realms accessible only at the highest levels, rather than giving someone the option to play in forgotten realms without being involved with the game before. They fucking blew their chance to have a rabid fan base frothing at the mouth introduced into the game because they made some arbitrary decision to make it endgame only. So after the expansion we saw all kinds of these neat little pay2win things in the store. Tomes of learning, state tomes, etc are a symptom of the problem of bad direction going on in this game. There were literally years years after f2p was opened that this wasn't happening. Unfortunately regardless of what you say nobody is going to join the game because "wow man I can just pay for the levels instead of playing all the way through the game. The after all this hard work, I'll be able to play in Forgotten Realms". This will actually only alienate players who had been playing the game for years. People like Eladiun for example. However, while riding upon this sinking ship turbine is going to do their best to be bailing out the treasure stored in the stockage (tp store) as quickly as possible. These sort of bad decisions and missed opportunities are definitely spelling out the future for DDO.
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