https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/474594-My-thoughts-of-the-10th-Anniver...

Jerry lost his shit this afternoon on this delightful thread reviewing the 'event' Take a look at this priceless piece of Hyperbole he trots out in a defensive fit:

Jerry said: Quote:


After he posted that and closed the thread he went back and cut two full pages of posts that were criticizing the event and calling out the fanboi squadrons for abusing posters who didn't like the event. The most amazing part is how he left all the COC breaking posts made by Jerry's kids after closing the thread and pulling posts.

That guy is in a glass case of emotion! 

People dared to criticise their event, and now they have hurt feelz.
Uurlock and crew spent hours spam reporting all those negative posts, so Cordovan could have his confected rage.

Moomooprincess is a crybaby. "I wanted something big and all I got was free loot and one more kobold challenge". Because game events get bigger over the years while player population is declining?

I read the thread, but after the cuts.  I still see the same old doombois (IronClan and Zebedar) and the same old Fanbois (Turdh, Chai, Halfeal, and HAL) going at it.

DoRayEgon wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 10:12am:


Nobody will win. 

You aren't going to convince a Doomboi that Turbine is anything other than a piece of shit and that the game is shutting down because of their gross ineptitude and disrespect/disdain for their customers.

You aren't going to convince a Fanboi that Turbine is anything other than the creator of their favorite game and that they should support Turbine as much as possible and try to convince others to keep playing the game to ensure that the game continues as long as possible.

Asheras wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 10:16am:


I'd like to think I'm open minded and capable of accepting and integrating information that conflicts with my current world view.

Based on what I've seen, Turbine is a piece of shit company that is ruining a game they bought because of their gross ineptitude, disrespect for past efforts, and contempt for their customers.

I also see that logins continue to decline; quality takes a back seat to everything; Jerry, the face of DDO!, is still Jerry; and Sev still thinks you cast Raise Dead on the soulstone.

What am I not seeing?

OldCoaly wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 10:59am:


I'm not saying that everyone who has complaints about Turbine is a Doomboi.  Only the ones who can never acknowledge anything good or look at things from a rational prospective and weigh pros and cons. 

The same with Fanbois.  Loving the game or liking an update or feature doesn't make you a Fanboi.  If you can acknowledge flaws and mistakes and call Turbine out objectively when they err, then that's not being a Fanboi.

I agree with you that Turbine's design direction has been flawed.  I do not agree with their loot plan (or lack thereof) since MoTU.  I do not agree with their ED methodology.  E-TR and I-TR are a trainwreck.  Quest design has been uninspired in most cases and the methodology for scalling content and difficulty has been greatly flawed, culminating with Legendary content that is either a rofl-stomp with no deaths or a rofl-stomp with 1-shotting (which doesn't actually ever risk failure.  It just causes annoyance).  The LGS design was the latest in an example of a half-assed copy/paste design that misses the mark. 

Logins continue to decline because that is what happens to all games at 10 years.  Neverwinter is declining faster.  SWtOR is declining.  LotRO is declining.  Guild Wars 2 is declining.  Even WoW is declining.  Turbine is exacerbating that because of game design mistakes.  The best case scenario for a 10 year old game is treading water.  Gaining as much as it loses.  But that isn't happening here because of the mistakes that have disenfranchised the players.

I don't agree with "contempt for their customers".  I think that is more frustration talking.  Every business has a love/hate relationship with its customers to some degree, especially the ones with difficult personalities.  (And gamer populations tend to be filled with a lot of people with poor social skills).  But  to say that they have a systemic contempt that bleeds into their personal desire to do good work in their chosen profession and are actively sabotaging the product to spite the customers?  That's a bit of a leap and one that I think people go to just because they are so upset with the decisions and can't fathom the rationale to the point that it just feels personal.

As a career IT professional, the lack of a long term road map and vision has been the biggest issue for DDO and is appalling.  The game is like a building that keeps having rooms added on one at a time.  Each in a different architecture and style.  Such that the end result is a hodgepodge from the outside and from the inside you have floors that don't line up and ceilings at different heights and corridors that go to a dead end for no reason. 

A long term XP and reincarnation plan from 20-30 should have been mapped out in 2011.  And followed.  A long term loot plan should have been created for 20-30 and followed.  Both with enough flexibility to allow for creativity over time within the structure.  But that wasn't done. 

After a consistent loot structure from levels 1-13, things fell in to the pit of Green Steel from 13-19.(Notice how everything stopped incrementing after about level 13?  Stats, etc. stuck at +6)
Then the Epic items at 20 (Mod 9) (S/S/S system and +7's appear,)
Then U5 adds guild augments, crafting. 
Then the MoTU plan from 21-24. (Randomizing, BtCoE, Comms of Heroism, new affixes and suffixes) 
Then the GH plan from 24-26 (EN/EH/EE versions of gear.  BtCoE, Comms of Heroism, new augments, affix/suffix changed again and ghostbane happens). 
Then with U20 the dropping of the EN/EH/EE concept and comms of heroism eliminated for comms of valor.  And stats suddenly jump from +8 to +12 in 4 levels.  Loot power creep is rampant. 
Then with U29, LGS comes out (with no augments anymore.  A new augment slot that is completely different and ineffective) and new random loot that overpowers all existing loot from level 11-30. 

That's a mess.  But it doesn't show contempt for players.  Or even so much individual ineptitude by developers.  It shows organizational planning failure and inability to create and follow a vision.

Asheras wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 11:40am:


I completely agree here. It's not on the individual dev's to come up with a company-wide vision. If someone gives me the job of implementing new loot I'd be half afraid of getting canned if I just changed numbers on the old loot. Would that be the right answer? Often, yes it would be. But there's a big risk there as a dev that you'd be viewed as lazy. A roadmap for how they wanted the loot to operate (or quests, or enhancements, or ETR's, etc) would allow dev's to develop content within a set of rules created ahead of time. Without it you're asking too much of any individual dev, especially when multiple people work on the same projects without a map.

Asheras wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 11:50am:


"Battered woman syndrome (BWS) is a mental disorder that develops in victims of domestic violence as a result of serious, long-term abuse."

Whenever I see anything on the vault with Mc-whatever in the title, I automatically think the thread is about Marty.   

Asheras wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 11:40am:


From here, it looks as though DDO's customers are seen by DDO's employees at best as a nuisance, but I don't think "contempt" is as far from the mark as you do.

Contempt:  the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.

I believe they do have a culture of contempt for their customers.  This doesn't manifest as "active sabotage", but passive sabotage and dismissing suggestions of IT industry best practices as "inapplicable because we're different.  tut tut, player.  You just don't understand" is still contemptuous.

Were it otherwise, things like showhelmet /on|off would not still be broken.  The preview server would be running on a copy of the live environment to reduce the number of bugs that appear because of this difference.  They would not sneak last minute changes into update releases that haven't previously been deployed to preview.  Systems would get finished.  FUCKING VERSION CONTROL WOULD BE A THING.

This culture of "the customers are beneath consideration" is further evidenced by the way Jerry releases news to gaming news websites before his own forum and the way he still hasn't learned to prepare for the quests he will run during his streaming events.  The way Jerry and Glin referred to the Wayfinder Market bridge protest in their DDOCast was also pretty revealing.

DDO has shown that they hold worthless the previous in-game efforts of their customers as well as the efforts of past employees.  Raid loot from the previous pack is casually eclipsed by the next pack's lootgen.  Class Passes blow up character builds so frequently that frequent players have become desensitized to it and infrequent players don't bother to invest effort into their characters.  Old systems are ignored when new systems are deployed, and if the old system is broken by a new system, the old one is left to languish until it's forgotten.

If you need an example of "scorn", try "Burden of Guilt", last year's Mabar, or the tenth anniversary event loot. 

These examples are not outliers.  They are Business as Usual for Turbine.

Asheras wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 11:40am:

The solutions to most of DDO's problems are well documented and evident to most people who look at the environment from the outside.  Turbine chooses to ignore them.

I'm not under the impression that DDO chooses to continue to suck because they want to irritate me personally, but it does sicken me to see them continue thumb their nose at practices that would make things much less bad.

I started my IT career in '91.  As an IT professional, what Turbine does embarrasses me because their actions are intentional and they take no ownership of outcomes that are results of their choices.  I'm nauseated by the smug dismissiveness with which they brush off the value of Quality Control, version control, community relations, and on and on.

They have made clear that the rationale behind their choices is that they are the experts, their decisions are based on information that we as customers aren't capable of understanding, and they're frequently baffled by our reaction.


You're right that for me, there's a fair amount of frustration talking.  It's remarkably similar to the frustration I feel when trying to teach a 2 year old to use the commode rather than defecate in his pants, having said 2 year old resolutely REFUSE to use the commode, load his pants, then smirk when I display exasperation.

Frustration or not, "Contempt" is probably a milder than appropriate adjective.

OldCoaly wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 3:17pm:


In looking at the above definition, I'd agree that Turbine is often inconsiderate of their customers.  Whether in the form of poor communication/lack of communication or in the form of changes that are poorly thought out. 

I think where we differ in the definition above is the attribution of that lack of consideration to them thinking customers are worthless or deserving scorn. 

I'd argue it is more due to ineptness of individuals and organizational chaos and lack of structure. 

A lot of the things you, rightly, take exception to are institutional failures that don't pass an ITIL best practices check.  Those are management and process issues.  Turbine doesn't necessarily need better programmers.  They need a better CIO/Software Development manager who understands how to implement an SDLC system to ensure quality. 

I don't have much experience with video game industry programming, but the stuff they do wouldn't fly in any of the corporate information systems operations I've been in in banking, finance, accounting, sales force automation, and CRM.  It feels like the video game industry values creativity and innovation in development over process and structure.  And I get that video game development requires more of that than other vertical markets, like say banking.  But that doesn't mean you can completely ignore IT best practices.

But again, all of that speaks to ineptness.  Not contempt.  At least to my perception.  YMMV.

OldCoaly wrote on Apr 22^nd, 2016 at 3:17pm:



Don't really read a lot of "walls of text" on the vault and agree with 99ish% of the ENTIRE fucking wall.  Thanks for taking the time/effort to express what you feel OldCoaly!

I feel very much the same way.

/signed