Bill Z Bubb wrote on Mar 13
th, 2014 at 12:55pm:
Then your friend is lying to you.
Wow, assume much?
I haven't played GW since the first one, and even then it was briefly, so I can't speak to this personally. From what he describes to me, he simply never runs into these kinds of obvious flaws. Since he is not a "hard core" gamer, I find that easy to believe.
There are some differences if I am understanding his descriptions correctly. In DDO special events are usually fairly contained (Harbor, Bongwater Tavern, Delera's, etc.) so in theory they should be more easily managed. It sounds like in GW2 the special events can affect much of the world so, at least to me, it sounds pretty impressive, and I would imagine that it's much more immersive.
So you have (seemingly) much more ambitious events with (seemingly) much fewer obvious problems. Not surprising really, considering the relative amount of $ and staff involved in each game. But when a typical consumer is trying to decide where to spend their game time/$, should they have to consider the size of the company behind the curtain? I don't think they should. The game/experience is either entertaining or not. The average consumer is not going to adjust their scale of enjoyment based on the resources that went into the creation and support of the game.
I submit to you that obvious flaws, that are easily encountered by even the most casual user, definitely detract from DDO's appeal. Imagine recommending this game to a friend, and then having their first experience go like this:
1) Install game
2) Login
3) Loading screen says "The"
4) Login takes 5 or 6 minutes while progress bar shows nothing happening
--) At this point many folks will just assume a crash and shut down the process via the control panel. If not...
6) Eventually get into game
7) Oops, everything is frozen - not connected to server
8) Quit game
9) Oops, not closing cleanly, gotta use control panel
10) Try starting game again
11) Takes 'only' a couple of minutes this time
12) Actually get into a working game (finally)
I don't know about you, but if I was trying out a game for the first time, I'd probably be giving up before the second try.
So no, I'm not naļve enough to imagine that GW2 is flawless. But I'll bet the overall user experience, for the average user, is a damn sight better than DDO's. And don't give me "Then go play GW2 then." We all know why we are still with the filthy lying whore that is DDO.