Meursault wrote on Apr 10^th, 2016 at 1:15pm:


I'm ok if their not D&D fans, because you would have a very small pool to recruit from if knowing D&D is a requirement.

But that said, ideally at least one member of the team should be familiar with different D&D versions to ensure the feel/theme/balance is given due weight.

The rest of the team should know the game mechanics, and should get up to speed quickly as part of their training/induction.  Being a generic code monkey is not enough to do these roles well. This would be easy to facilitate either serruptiously or openly via experienced players/guilds.  DDO crash course should be part of their training - or at least the relevant parts to their first DDO role.
I believe you can see this deficiency clearly in the loot design.  Nearly all loot in recent updates has been randomly thrown together shit.  Whomever is doing it doesn't understand how "powerful magical loot" is created in D&D, nor how DDO is played and what loot would be interesting without being overpowered.  Loot design is a key role in the sustainability of an MMO, but it appears to have been given to the part-time vacation student at Turbine.

I understand that the game design needs to look beyond the flavor.  D20 rules can't cope with where DDO has gone, and so game design needs to innovate.
But Sev has been accelerating the move DDO away from D&D's core, which is a risk to their existing long term player-base.  D&D Classes used to have roles, strengths and weaknesses.  Multi-classing used to have trade offs.  Some classes were difficult and rare.   And this was a core premise in the D&D game.
In DDO, Classes have lost their roles completely in an effort to make an MMO solo friendly, which is ironic.
We don't need another WoW or NWN clone.  DDO needs to stay in its niche.

Mr Meursault, I agree that if someone in the team had some love for the D&D game, that the mess that is Epic Destinies might not have happened and they might have stuck more to the PnP version of Epic classes.

Reading here, many believe the post lvl 20 changes have brought about the decline of DDO.  The devs have backed themselves into a corner, because by moving away from an established pathway, they lacked the foresight to understand the future implications and power creep they introduced.

Novalis wrote on Apr 9^th, 2016 at 4:39pm:



But but but...DDO's end has already happened. With U19. We are now playing a distopian d&d game. Where things you say are monitored, censored, limited choices are sold as great opportunities, more lag with every update, etc. 

PersonaNonGrata wrote on Apr 11^th, 2016 at 11:11pm:

and
PersonaNonGrata wrote on Apr 11^th, 2016 at 11:11pm:

I think these two really get to the heart of my objection. I don't care that they departed from the D&D rules because I only want to play D&D, or out of fierce brand loyalty, I object to them departing from the rules because they had a tried and true path laid out for them, one that was working pretty well, and left it because they thought they could do better on their own. The hubris of thinking of they were better game designers than the people who made D&D led them to go from a game that was pretty good but with a few problems (let's face it, the guys who wrote D&D weren't perfect either) to a disaster.

I accept that the D&D rules can't work EXACTLY for a MMO, but these dev's aren't the innovative trailblazers they imagine themselves to be, and our game suffers for it. In fact, imagining themselves to be innovative trailblazers is the extent of their imagination. D&D wasn't great, but it had balance, and decent design, and sticking to the rules while adding more content would have been much better for the game.

Meursault wrote on Apr 12^th, 2016 at 7:12am:


lol

Meursault wrote on Apr 11^th, 2016 at 11:01pm:


This is actually completely feasible and potentially not even a bad project for the vault to take on(we've actually got some pretty smart people) - it also doesn't require any source code, the guys who did it with WoW sure as shit didn't have the source.

I have some experience, in my time fucking around with shit I found on shady torrent sites, I've actually set up and had running 2-3 different private WoW servers and a private Ultima Online server(You guys remember UO? The sequel was so amazingly successful that it got canceled midway through production).

Here's the basic gist of how these private servers work: most of the game-data is client-side. The server is actually not that sophisticated. It is a server emulator, and if I recall, my WoW servers were basically just a database and some weird stuff running in windows.

I haven't got the technical skills by any stretch of the imagination to WRITE one of these server emulators, but it has been done. From there, tweaking things like drop rates and XP curves wouldn't be tough. You could probably even get the DDO store to run and just let everyone have unlimited TPs. Not really sure why you'd do this, but I'm just sayin: DDO shard servers are totally doable.

noamineo wrote on Apr 12^th, 2016 at 3:40pm:

Yeah, the code for "the weird stuff running in windows" is what you need the source code for. You can get by with a pre-compiled client, but you need code (or a compiled executable) for the server, and you need the database.

I guess somebody might be able to reverse engineer the server code, but I can't even imagine how much work that would take. It's not like you can just record the packets going in and coming out and map inputs to outputs - it's a stateful system with a huge input domain. I guess I shouldn't say it can't be done, but I'd be damn impressed if somebody managed to do it.

I'm pretty sure the WOW server code was leaked after a breach.

Meursault wrote on Apr 12^th, 2016 at 2:28pm:


Not really. Wizard, Druid, and cleric and fairly balanced, the rest of the classes are pretty much inferior. There are different roles, but they are almost always better off performed by a caster. Here's a good write up of the whys if you don't believe me:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?266559-Tier-System-for-Classes-(Re...)

Meursault wrote on Apr 12^th, 2016 at 2:28pm:


It's kind of apple vs orange to me. I'd be more comfortable comparing 3.5 to say Final Fantasy Tactics. While the rules basis is there, being an MMO required adaptation.

noamineo wrote on Apr 15^th, 2016 at 5:18pm:

I believe the reason the pirated WoW emulation was so popular was because people really enjoyed classic WoW content. There's nothing really about DDO's current state that is sustainable. People are still playing to accomplish their current goals, but without new content, an emulation would get stale real quick.

For it to work, the game would have to not only be emulated, a lot of the stupid shit Turbine has done would have to be undone, and a lot of the broken shit would need to be fixed. Not going to happen.

Knight Solaire wrote on Apr 15^th, 2016 at 5:43pm:


Not so. The reason the WoW emulation was so popular was because a lot of people wanted to be able to play WoW without paying for it.

Amongst the private servers I toured before taking up DDO, I saw multiple "instant 80" PvP servers(when the cap was still 80) and many more with increased XP/loot drop rates. All of them running content that was, at best, one or two minor patches behind the current latest and greatest.

Then of course were mod servers, which ran custom content(they'd even found ways to add their own models - keep in mind this was all being done without access to the source code) these servers were much harder to find, since any great deal of exposure would have led to shutdowns.

I remember back when I was dicking around with private WoW servers, every time a new expansion came out, the community would rush to get it on their private servers Yeah, there were plenty of "classic" servers, but they were far less common than the instant-80/near cutting edge systems.

Oh, there is also the privately-ran EverQuest server that has it's own motherfucking subscription plan.

I'm just sayin: it possible.

noamineo wrote on Apr 15^th, 2016 at 6:09pm:


Agree, it would be possible, but it sounds like they had a good head start with the pirated code.

I also take into account the "demand" side with WoW having 12M + plays at one point and DDO having maybe 100k at its peak?
(Feel free to correct the stats if you know better - I can't be fucked Googling the stats as that isn't point).
Amongst those WoW players are obviously some pretty dedicate and passionate players who happen to have the skill sets necessary to undertake this.

We have Fran! Uurlock and that stupid Kwai chick.
Can you imagine Fran! being in charge of the alternate DDO?

I'm sure there are some capable and enthusiastic DDO players (look at the various fan sites and tools) - but I doubt any of them would be involved in a pirate project. 

No we'd have to rely on the Vault which would likely mean:
1. Every other NPC would yell "Nigga" or "Faggot" as you run past.
2. The rest of the NPC's would likely just yell "Gay & Retarded"
3. You would go to loot chests or sell loot and while you think you were getting richer, but instead of getting money, you'd be secretly getting siphoned and put into Eberron offshore account for Epoch.

What chacacteristics do you think a DDO Vault based pirate version of DDO would have?

PersonaNonGrata wrote on Apr 15^th, 2016 at 6:52pm:



A welcome box with one of each ingredient, large bags, and step by step instructions on duping

PersonaNonGrata wrote on Apr 15^th, 2016 at 6:52pm:

There's worse than Fran.  That Marshalle guy who bitches all the time about past lives and calls people mini-thors.

His DDO server would have a level cap of 5 levels below his characters, just so no one could mini-thor him.  And no reincarnations of any kind allowed.