Greetings!
As you may have heard, we are shutting down Mournlands. What is Mournlands some of you may ask-well, it's our Fight Club. It was a server that had a group of players that the development team used for focus testing, opinions and reality checking the changes to the game. They have been extremely helpful over the years and I think I speak for all of QA and Development in saying thank you. The help from them even recently in the enhancement pass and the TR pass were invaluable. Again thank you Mournlanders, you know who you are.

So from the ashes are new beginnings. Instead of hiding behind a veil of secrecy, the developers, QA and the game will be out in the open on a public test shard. We will be pushing out early builds to Lammania—just as ugly and wart filled as what would have been seen on Mournlands. Devs will communicate directly in the Lamannia part of the forums.

So in essence you, the public, the players, are the new Mournlands. Everyone now has a voice.

The thought is we want to hear more opinions, and as early as possible. There will be some growing pains—Developers –and QA can be a superstitious lot—but over the past 6 months we have become more comfortable talking about things publicly and earlier than ever before. It has been kind of awesome.

Lamma will be run a bit different. It will not be up all the time, and be on a focused schedule. Why? We want developers and employees to have more interaction on the server than we have seen in the past. I admit I have wanted this for a long time.

So here is the first shot. Lamannia will be updated later this week with an Alpha build. This is super early, and you get to see all the half dones, and warts.
The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar and Thunderholme landscape will be open for VIPs. Haunted Halls should take about 1.5 hours to complete if you do no optionals. It will take up to 5 hours if you complete everything. Yes, it is an old school early D&D style module. It's huge. This will be opened up in later Lamannia deployments to everyone, but with VIP's come the perks of first peek.
There are some things that you will notice:
Loot is not finished. Not even close. Matter of fact, most of it is placeholder stuff.
Deco is not finished. Yes some rooms are bare.
Monsters are not balanced yet. Good luck.
VO (Voice overs) work is about half done.

You may come across weird systems and placeholders--half built skills and whatnot. Most should be turned off and hidden, but you never know.
This is a build straight out of development, so there is no optimization yet on the new areas. Some slowdown on landscape is completely possible.
Text is not finished, expect random TBDs and half-finished things.
Gameplay should be fairly complete...enough to get a good idea of what the developers were thinking. We are very interested in bugs-of course- and how things 'feel'. Too hard, easy, long short exc.
Lamannia will only be open though Monday morning. We will reopen it with other stuff in the near future..
Squeak and Kookie will still be around to make life easier.
Usual forum rules apply. Don’t be mean, this does not exclude negative comments, but keep it to the game, not the individual. This will not be tolerated in my little kingdom of the forums.
Please still report bugs. It is super helpful, and yes we do scurry over them on days after a Lamannia push like kobolds and shiny objects.
Hope to see you on there! Help us make DDO the best experience for you and your friends!

So does this mean we can now openly talk about the people who were in ML ?

And how far too many Devs treated it with contempt?

"There are some things that you will notice:
Loot is not finished. Not even close. Matter of fact, most of it is placeholder stuff.
Deco is not finished. Yes some rooms are bare.
Monsters are not balanced yet. Good luck.
VO (Voice overs) work is about half done.

You may come across weird systems and placeholders--half built skills and whatnot. Most should be turned off and hidden, but you never know."

Yes.

Does this mean I can share nasty stories I've heard from friends about 404error?

Does this mean I can share nasty stories I've heard from friends about 404error?

How exactly did the vault ban work?  Unless the MLander used the same username or something DDO wouldn't know.

Hah, as I read Maj's post I thought exactly the same thing!
Don't forget the TBD's and assorted file reference errors too. New content wouldn't be the same without them. 


They're trying to make VIP's feel special, whilst actually getting them to do their jobs for them.

As Memnir says, it is interesting - why start public Alpha testing now?  Why the shift in thinking?  I think it more likely a mgmt decision than imminent demise.  Imminent demise would not have me want to Alpha testing, and Maj's comments are that internally Turbine thought they had a fabulous year in 2013 - so hardly negativity.

I would hope the Player's Council helps them to avoid wasting their development time on breaking things that weren't broken (secret doors) and focuses on fixing key items and developing content/systems that people want.  That would be the best use of it.

You mean like the icon for my bladeforged character's slashing reduction?  The one that says "DO NOT USE" in big yellow letters?