I'm torn on this new "communicate with the players" thing.  I thought I wanted to know more about what was going on behind the scenes, but the more I learn about how Turbine thinks (and what they are spending their time on), the more I miss being blissfully ignorant.


https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/419401-Secret-Doors!

Secret Doors!

Hello again! There’s another change that will be visible on this week’s Lamannia game build before we’re done with implementation: the wonderful world of secret doors. As part of our work to enhance Shadar-kai, Rogue, and other “sneaky business” in game, we have been evaluating the way secret doors behave in game content at high levels.

Hidden doors and search skill become largely irrelevant at the higher levels of the game because the magic to reveal them is available at such low levels. Above level 5 to 8, you basically never end up using your spot or search skills to find hidden doors. Our quest makers place hidden doors in high level content, but if everyone can automatically see them, then those doors are not very “hidden”, in which case, what is the point of making them hidden at all?

We’ve deliberated over this for a while and there were a couple ways we could approach it. We could try just not placing hidden doors anymore. It’s faster for us to place basic doors… but then it also means there’s just physically nothing “hidden” for you to find. That seemed bad. We could nerf the instant-find spells. That also seemed bad. So we were at kind of an impasse to meet our design goals. We’ve landed on a design that we think will reward players for character advancement, encourage designers to keep hiding those doors in newer high level content, and soften any radical changes to the quests players are used to.

Here are the details of the design, and what state the design is in for Lamannia:

•We will be updating the Detect Secret Doors spell so that it scales up as your character levels up. We are still working the full design out - such as what the casting formula is specifically and which skills will influence it - and you therefore may experience odd behavior on Lamannia with the spell since the mechanic has not yet been finalized and the spell isn’t acting as it should in this build.
•True Seeing will now detect secret doors if you would have been able to find the door with a Spot & Search check of 30. We were going for a simple round number that's right around the Heroic/Epic line. True Seeing will continue to have all of its other effects, including negating Displacement, Blur and Invisibility.
•Any existing equipment that has the Detect Secret Doors spell will be set to an adjusted caster-level appropriate for Heroic content. The durations are intended to be the same as what they currently are on live.
•The Divining Rod will be set to a higher caster level so that it’ll always succeed at detecting secret doors. We'll also keep its current duration where it is.

As always you’re welcome to provide feedback on these changes, but keep in mind that the version of the changes that you’ll be seeing on Lamannia are not ready to be taken for a test drive yet. We’re looking forward to getting the design up on a future build that you can play with, and we’ll let you know once that time comes!
- PurpleFooz

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I'm in.

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They'll totaly be able to get through the Grotto.  They'll just need to follow the link to the store that pops up when they search and fail, and buy a Divining Rod.  No sweat.

I like it too.  I like the communication.  I like that they are focusing on making the game more than hack n slash max your DPS and zerg.  There are players that enjoy sneaking.  Secret doors should be....secret.  This makes the world more real.  Trivalizing traps, secret doors, sneaking, and such just narrows the game.  if I wanted a narrow hack n slash dps fest, I'd go play Neverwinter, ffs.

bah, stupid from the begining, the easy way was to limit the spell to no more than a DC of 30 or 40, and put high DC Doors on the high level quests.... a fully developed Rogue Mechanic will have 60+ in Search.
Problem Solved.

Rogue becomes relevant again in high end content.

LafoMamone wrote on Jun 28^th, 2013 at 4:42pm:


See, what you don't understand is there are multiple people that deal with stuff. Someone working on Stealth has nothing to do with the people that work on say, server performance, enhancements, loot or whatnot. Different people, different expertise. Some people are moving on, and wanted to fix their pet peeve on the way out. So things that have been lame for a while actually got looked at.
As for server/lag and all that. I still have some suspisions on a ton of that, and some of it is sadly because the engine is 10 years old. There is a ton of improvements to that kind of technology since then, and doing open heart surgery on a game --hell any live service is a very risky proposition. There is things we can do finding and fixing some of the stupid done years ago(multiple calls to things for no reason..at least no reason we can see), but some of it sadly is inherent in the system.
And we are not fucking with you. There are changes afoot, and will be made clear soon.

GreyMouser wrote on Jun 28^th, 2013 at 7:57pm:


I can't speak for other folks but I can appreciate that there are multiple people and teams working on multiple aspects of the game. My concern is more in the area of cross team communications. If someone comes up with a fix to their pet peeve that I don't really care about (ie secret doors) what repercussion will this have on areas on areas that do affect my game play (ie lag). This leads me to be with the "if ain't broke don't 'fix' it" crowd.

The tears of the "moar dps iz de only way!" crowd are so very delicious.
(Now we just need Shade to pipe up with "I should be able to find em by swinging my axe at walls!")

LafoMamone wrote on Jun 28^th, 2013 at 8:31pm:


Really? Some people left the team and didn't fix anything, they just waited for the desk to move. I'd rather the changes.

Secret doors aren't very secret when you know exactly where they are by your 3rd run through, and you just stand infront of a brick wall waiting for a good roll on a gear check.

If this is implemented it had better be tested thoroughly.  Based on the past history, testing of code is given a score of -44 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Something like this, if it gets to live completely broken, will be almost as bad as issuing a patch that made it so people could not play the game. 

Actually, I think not being able to find secret doors at all would throw many of the marginal player base over the edge and cause them to quit.  You know, the players that want the easy button?

LafoMamone wrote on Jun 28^th, 2013 at 8:31pm:


Just because you don't give a shit doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.  Surely you learned that in your "How Not to show your Narcissism" training.

Schmoe wrote on Jun 28^th, 2013 at 9:39pm:


Determining if something has any value at all is the easy part.  Evaluating risk vs reward is harder.  Weighing the value against all of the other things that may have value (i.e. prioritizing) is much harder.