Yes exactly, that is exactly what we want We want you, specifically, to be bored

Asheras wrote on Aug 20^th, 2018 at 12:12pm:


Some bright bulb at ssg looked at the average revenues for an update with a store cost of ~500-1500 points and free for VIPs and compared that to the revenues for an expansion that the VIPs and everyone else have to buy.  Guess which brought in more money?  (And yeah, I am guessing.  But is your guess any different?)  So of course they are planning another expansion.  From here on you can expect it to be expansions all the way down.

noamineo wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 11:16am:


Yeah, it was called World of Warcraft.  Meanwhile in DDO every night another 200~1000+ people had logged off for the last time because they were sick to death of running nothing but Shroud for the millionth time and the low level game was even more of a ghost town than it is now.

DDO was hemorrhaging players something fierce.

Remorting saved the game from joining the likes of Matrix, Vanguard, etc... and being turned off.  Now, you can say till you're blue in the face that it would have been better to just die, but that's on you.

Don't get me wrong, SSG is absolutely fucking up left and right with this game.  It's almost embarrassing.  But whoever made the call to 'fix' the TR system, such as it was, and make that the major focal point of the game should be credited with saving the game from being another footnote on some wiki page about dead MMO's.

Huh. I'd say the real golden age was well before the period you guys speak of, though I'll agree that it was a silver age of sorts. I think everyone is forgetting the year plus with no new content at all. It was a good time for people to catch up, but the boredom set in hard.

Dungeon Scaling was one of the things that ticked me off the most. I enjoyed figuring out how to solo raids. That's not anywhere near the same thing as running a raid on a solo setting. At minimum, it should have been something we could select - not automatic.

Dungeon Alert was (and presumably remains) a piece of shit. And being told that we had to take it because we were causing all the server lag was absolute bullshit. Funny how that lag was still around, or even worse, after DA was implemented...

Epics were pretty cool, but the loot system was shit. Way, way, way too much farming required, unless you were unusually lucky.

While I've not tried it, I'm definitely not a fan of where I've heard things have progressed in the eight years since I left. I thought past lives were a horrible idea - but they've doubled down on that several times over. A bajillion difficulty settings - and something tells me that despite that, Dungeon Scaling is still in place. I'm sure the move away from the D20 system is so complete now that I wouldn't even recognize it. And their never-ending crafting systems and compounding inventory tetris... jesus fucking christ.

Rzyman wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 8:21pm:

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the progression towards EZ-button gaming. I thought silver flame pots were pushing it, but now I hear talks of cocoons and the like. Poo. Back in my day, we ran and hid in the corner while desperately drinking CSW pots, and we liked it.

TornadoJoe wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 5:04pm:


I should have said "people I added to my friends list in ddo" but "friends" seemed obvious. I apologize.

noamineo wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 1:23pm:


When the servers shut down for DDO, im curious if people will try to emulate it. If so, what version.

Zehnpai wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 4:36pm:


What version of the game are you talking about? Sounds a lot like before it went f2p.

Zehnpai wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 4:36pm:


You're talking about when it went f2p right?

Zehnpai wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 4:36pm:


It was the obvious choice. They cant create an endgame at 25 if their hopes were to go to level 30. It showed too. They only made one raid for motu. Then 8 months later finally added one more raid. To make matters worse, they added raid timer bypasses like a month and a half after motu. I know this because I was the first to get a 40th CitW exactly 2 months after motu launched (zerged 34 completions in 9 days). It was actually the Epic Destiny's that was the endgame. Why create more content when you can just recycle old content?

Strake wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 7:47pm:


Thats what an endgame is though. You grind and grind to improve your character. Just like tring. I see no difference between endgame and tring. Except with the endgame you can kick your feet up for 1-3 days when you're timed out. You also have to keep the lifespan of the content long. I believe they implemented a system that did just that.

Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 9:25pm:


AC had an active playerbase of around 3,000 when it went dark, and they came up with a working emulator in less than 6 months. Granted, some of the still active players were pretty impressive tech-gurus, and efforts to build an emulator had been running off and on for 10 years.

Odds are the first server emu for DDO(if it ever happens) will be on whatever version the game is running when it gets shut down. BUT, try to keep in mind, locking out specific features is trivial compared to building an emulator on an older version(partially because you'd need the old CLIENT to go along with that old server), so modding out a classic server would be easy.

Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 9:25pm:


This is exactly what attracted me to DDO in the first place. WoW's endgame was "grind the same few raids until the next raid content comes out". DDO's endgame was "Grind the entire game" - that was a lot more fun for me the first 100 times I played the early-level content, but still. It was a neat idea. And honestly the current game would still be a lot of fun if the playerbase was large enough.

When Asheron's Call shut down, the playerbase numbering only in the thousands was fractured across 7 different servers. And this was a game where soloing was encouraged. Imaging trying to play DDO in it's current state with only around 100 other players online at any given time, spread across the entire level range. It'd basically be a single-player game at that point.

Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 11:04pm:


That is hands down my favorite thing about DDO. Back when I was playing WoW I could never get started on an alt because the thought of re-farming gear was too painful. Even on DDO my alts are few and far between, I just have my one completionist with bulging pockets

You could just content lock the sale of later packs. They'd be in the game but no one would have access.

Flav wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 11:46pm:


Very impressive what that small community did.


Flav wrote on Aug 21^st, 2018 at 11:46pm:


Gotcha, thanks for the info.

WonderfulFoppyBint wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 6:27am:


Yeah blocking levels, content, races, classes etc. would be the start. Luckily the old loot system is still in place. However one issue may be how they changed some item bonuses.

For example:
Epic redscale armor after MotU: +84 spellpower to fire (so +85% damage), +16% fire crit chance
Epic redscale armor before MotU: 8th level and lower fire spells +50% damage. +9% crit and +0.50 crit multiplier

So luckily you can just revert it down to 50 spellpower, the crit down to 9%. Not to sure about the crit mult tho.

Same goes for a lot of other things. For example Dodge replaced a lot of AC bonuses on items. They also released PR although I dont think old items got PR. Reverting all the old items back is doable for sure. Just tedious.

The biggest issue are the enhancements and feats. Now it is possible to find the old enhancements online. Luckily nothing really changed from updates 13-18. Update 19 gave us the enhancements revamp. One could theoretically create new enhancement trees that just gave us the Update 18 numbers. This would require a decent amount of effort but 100% doable.

The only other issue is bringing back the old Epic. Im not too sure what difficulty one would use. Maybe epic hard?

Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 9:39am:


So the question I have is how "thorough" do you really need it to be? Does it actually need to be a faithful re-creation of pre-MOTU, or would merely capturing the same "feel" do the trick?

What I gather from yourself and others is that the real important part is getting everyone back into the same cycle(E.G. heroic TRs), not "having every named item item have the exact same spellpower as it did pre-MOTU".

So, for example, a really easy solution would be to build the server emulator based on current game-client as is, then cap everyone at heroic XP and down-balance all the existing epic content to something akin to the old-style epics. All game content remains available; but now instead of having heroic an epic, levels, you just have heroic and epic(ML20) content just like pre-MOTU. Leave all items/enhancements/etc as-is.

The only major problem I see is with the iconic races. These could either be locked out entirely or provided with some other gimic to allow them to TR at 20. Even funnier would be to leave them in but force them to start at lvl 1(I always thought it would be interesting to play an iconic at-level through early heroics).

But that's just how I'd approach the project.

Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 9:39am:


All the items are still in the DAT files, As far as I know there hasn't been many retroactive changes to items beyond stuff like ML that were incorrect or not there.
So all version of the same item are present, you just need to point towards the correct STRING_TABLE_DID to get the version you want.
It's probably not that hard to code once you know all the STRING_TABLE_DID for all the versions of the items.

Same probably goes for the Enhancements, there's good chances they have been kept in the files.

As for Items the way the appear to be defined in the files is :

( example based on Wild Assed Guesses made from my reading into the DAT files, check relevant archived thread in the various (i)relevant Vault Sections. )

- Item
  String table towards description of item
   Fluff stuff ( durability, made of, ... )
   Power 1 -> String Table towards power 1
   Power 2 -> String Table towards power 2
   ...


- Power 1
   String Table towards Server Side stuff to make it work if server side calculated

- Power 2
   String Table towards Description of power to make it work in gamelogic.dat as this power is client side.



noamineo wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 11:29am:


Yes, they organized that out of reddit ( and also Discord I reckon ) when the shutdown was announced, somebody provided the google drive to dump all the wireshark traces, another provided the framework of what was needed ( what kind of interraction in game was to be traced ), and they all went and spent time tracing
the hell out of the game.

Now I gather that they had some starting point through various utilities that were created for AC. ( like the one that allowed them to extract the game map, and the one that allows to scan the DAT files ( they have almost the same format as DDO apparently, the difficulty is the almost ).

Since DDO ( and LoTRO ) is using almost the same tech as AC we already have a huge starting point. the rest is to find good coders to reproduce servers and stuff.

Nova wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 9:52am:


Same boat as you. DDO was my first mmo. Pre-motu the max was +7, Exceptional +1 and +2 (they both stacked).


Nova wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 9:52am:


WoW number crunches every other expansion. I dont think ddo needs to do it just yet but it has gotten pretty silly.

Nova wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 9:52am:


Agreed. Also theory crafting the best item builds. The sad thing is ddo is the old breed of mmos. We will never see something like this ever again. WoW got so popular because it simplified everything. All the casuals could rush in and enjoy the game.

noamineo wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 11:23am:


I would love an exact re-creation. Theres many reasons. The main reason besides the pre-motu community aspect was the endgame.

noamineo wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 11:23am:


Would be an interesting take. Unfortunately I dont think it would take off. Generally people want private servers that were official releases. I know there's a couple WoW private servers that change everything up however the official expansions are much more popular. Assuming ddo servers shutdown in 2023. Pre-motu would be 11 years ago. The majority of those who even played pre-motu would be gone. Those who want a classic server would be a massive minority. The only realistic emulation would be the most current patch before it shut down.

noamineo wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 1:40pm:


Obviously I would be rooting for the pre-motu server. However I would have no say in the project. It would be up to those who dedicated themselves to bringing ddo back from the dead. By the time the servers shut down and a proper emulation is started hardly anyone would even consider a classic server. The only viable option is the most recent patch.

Edit: The aspect that brought so many people together pre-motu (healer/tank/dps). Will be the achilles heel of a classic server. If you dont have a decent sized community. It would be a failure at endgame. If you think waiting for healers was bad in 2010. It would be abysmal if a classic server only has a hundred people or so.

Flav wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2018 at 12:49pm:


How does someone get the DAT files?