You'd be right if they were drawing in tons of new players. Game's old, most people who are gonna play at this point have most of the content they want. Double points sale equals roughly an everything sale because you have more points to spend per dollar sunk in, better business proposal than just marking everything off to me. Making everything cheaper just means the points that the freebie players have stocked up they are just going to use less of those points and not purchase fake currency that is cheaper per dollar.

Meanwhile i'm happy with my 4 ottos boxes and my 1 to give away for the guildies, seems the sale worked for small whales like me >.>

I dunno, from my standpoint it's hard to market pseudo currency when you're giving it away and it all holds the same value. I feel like they are trapped into making their currency cheaper to promote sales to make money because how semi-laughably easy it is to make the currency. Microtransactions is hard.

Getting into Guild Wars 2 right now and they have a wonkier model of f2p, in game currency can be traded for pseudo currency to purchase content and consumables, i don't even know how they make money tbh they'd have to explain it out to me, especially since half their content they give away for free as long as you keep playing.

I dunno what would be best, I just see what they are doing is all, and it's not marketing wise stupid to sell more fake money because it costs nothing to produce and gets people spending in their microtransaction store. Especially since they usually and this is speculation bank on getting those ottos box sales to boost their bottom line because of their ploy of supply being in small windows and their demand being players that are beleaguered by the past life grind and how they won my sales is knowing i don't want to touch heroics for tiefling or to get back to 30 if i can help it.

and blah blah blah something about not wanting to nullify their Vip headcount by savagely reducing all their content packs. all the rest of the junk they have in the store to me is junk that you don't need until you're like "oh shit i need that junk" like cakes and bells and sp pots.

TL:DR i'm probably rambling too much and most of what i said is going to be called retarded, but I don't think their black friday sale is terrible, it has the essentials for me and that's all i care about.

Revaulting wrote on Nov 21^st, 2018 at 8:25pm:

There really isn't a better way to get someone's attention so abruptly. Walk up to someone and call them a stupid fucking idiot and see how quickly their focus on you intensifies.

Skoodge wrote on Nov 21^st, 2018 at 5:08pm:

Bladeforged still not on sale, huh?

Skoodge wrote on Nov 22^nd, 2018 at 2:30am:


Your retorts need to evolve man.
Quit living in the past.

DDO hasn't known how to market itself since....2006?

This is nothing new.  You'll get the white knights flocking to it though.  I forget the name of the particular fallacy but they assume that the marketing person at SSG "has the numbers!" so obviously they always make the 100% best decisions, right?

But then they'll go to work and complain about how much of an idiot their co-workers all are.

----

Anyways.

I honestly believe that they're under some sort of contract with WoTC where they're only allowed to do so much.  Keep in mind that NWN is WoTC's baby.  Obviously this is all tinfoil hat kinda stuff but my guess is that something along the lines of the following happens:

Turbine is about to fold.

Sev knows people at WoTC from doing DND shit for 20 years and DDO for the last several.

He cuts a deal where they stay under the radar and WoTC lets them keep running the game basically as a glorified emulator.

They get to keep their jobs, fill a niche that NWN doesn't, but they're not allowed to do anything that might seriously grow or expand the game.

It explains quite a bit.

- They don't have merchandising rights to the game.  Even if you wanted to buy an official DDO shirt, you can't.  Jerry keeps handing out merch they found in someones abandoned office at the cons they occasionally go to.

- They're not allowed to advertise outside pre-existing channels.  There was no trailer for Ravenloft.  Even LOTRO got a shitty one.  Cohh nation will do streaming events for fucking Pantheon of all things, but SSG couldn't even convince the people at Roll20 to do a short blurb about DDO?  I asked them to do a Reddit AMA on r/dnd.  I asked Cordovan if I could buy a bunch of 500 point codes to run some contests and hype events on the sub.  Fucking crickets.

- They haven't done -anything- to grow the game since SSG formed.  No revamp of grouping mechanics to help players find each other.  No revamp of the newbie experience.  Every other MMO consolidates content every few years.

I mean...

Imagine the following:

DDO implements a decent group finder.  They consolidate all the different item bonus types into like...4 so it's not such a clusterfuck for new players.  They fix the character creator so that you can use player created templates for your characters.  They make a few nice UI updates (unifying all the various character panels into one interface for example for a fucking start.) 

They have a modest Korthos revamp that includes an NPC that walks you through how to do a TR since that's like 90% of the game.

Then they sell a new "DDO Battlechest" for 10 dollars that has all non-expansion content and classes, and the "DDO Ultimate Battlechest" for 20 dollars that also has all the expansion content as well.

Then they advertise the fuck out of it as Eberron Reborn.  Post on every gaming forum they can find.  Get a bunch of mid/low tier Twitch variety streamers (Witwix, Theoddone, Cirno, etc...) and do a charity stream with them for a week.  Do a "We are the developers behind Dungeons and Dragons Online!" AMA on Reddit gaming and DND.  Sell a DDO bundle on Roll20 that has a bunch of maps and stuff for some of the more popular DDO content.  Advertise themselves as basically PoE the MMO.

They switch their income model away from selling content and instead start selling cosmetics and QoL stuff.

Sell me new spell graphics.  Imagine if you could bling up your dimension door so yours looked like a portal from D2 (kinda), some kind of hell gate, a field of broccoli.

Sell me things like a perma airship portal, perma bigby's hand, perma heal scroll that consumes some platinum every time I use it just so I don't have to keep making that run to Jorasco every TR.

They could do so much more.  If Runescape can fucking make a come back like it did, so can DDO.

But they won't and I have to tell myself it's because WoTC would smack them down in a minute if they tried.  If DDO even showed a glimmer of hope of pulling people away from NWN WoTC would be all over that.

Because the alternative is that Sev is a chicken shit with no spine and wants to keep collecting an easy, albeit shitty, paycheck over making DDO something great.

I'm not sure SSG employs anyone who understands UI

Zehnpai wrote on Nov 22^nd, 2018 at 2:28pm:

They could never capture that audience. Largely due to how the game is built for TRs. Try telling someone they have to tr 96 times, and farm 66 reaper points to play the game at a high level. POE is popular because it strictly rewards alt play. Because their loot system is the best in the business, which allows the game to grow from new players to long time players just returning to do a league. They have built the game to be an incentive for all play styles and players. DDO sells character power in the store. It is laughed at by anyone not playing it still.

Metal-Beast wrote on Nov 22^nd, 2018 at 5:28pm:


It's not.  It's still the most popular MMO on XBox1 and pretty much the only MMO on PS4.  Conservative estimates put it at around 50~100k users per day.

By contrast DDO is at about 2k users on a good day.

Well, I did get infractions on the MBs for pointing out that they have only games devs at SSG and not a single business person


They have no business people, so its no surprise they are clueless.


I wouldnt expect a plumber to be good car mechanic - but apparently in SSG world being a mediocre games developer also magically makes you also a genius business person

goldgolem wrote on Nov 23^rd, 2018 at 7:44pm:


The thing is, you don't even need a "business person" to be even moderately successful.  Any reasonably intelligent adult would be able to figure out how to sell stuff for profit.  The fact that they can't even do that speaks volumes.

I'm a stupid fucking twat