Carpone wrote on Aug 10
th, 2019 at 9:29am:
I'll take Sev any day over
http://www.ddovault.com/Images/Fernando4.png and Glin. I disagree with a number of his decisions, and players always want more features delivered faster. But for a game that is the epitome of Kevin Kelly's "one thousand true fans", DDO is trending in the right direction.
LOL, I definitely agree with how bad F & G were. I'm not sure they're doing so hot on the 1000 true fans, though. I guess selling the 1000 seasons passes suggests they're putting their eggs in that basket and it's holding together today, but the 1000 true fans assumes you can replace the ones you lose by attrition, DDO has proven increasingly bad at that. It also assumes you can continue to deliver the same product, but at this point DDO's main product seems to be epeen polish, rather than a fun experience. That requires a ton of short peens to feel superior to. As the short peens leave and the polishers only have each other, I think many of the current polish buyers will look for bigger and more rewarding audiences. Remember, Asheron's Call had 1000 true fans.
I don't even want new features, though, I'd be happy if they left the features alone and simply worked on new quests. To me, and I realize my play style is probably quite different from yours, the changes in the past 2 years have been far more negative than positive. I would enjoy the game more if it had been in maintenance mode for the last 2 years. Less power creep, less gap between old and new players, fewer ingredients and systems to track, alts more viable, less grind, and fewer systems to cause lag.