Meursault wrote on Apr 10
th, 2016 at 1:15pm:
Yeah, this. These people aren't devs because they love D&D, they can barely even spell it.
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.