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Dungeons & Dragons Online: Server Merge Announced
Szark
News ManagerMember Posts: 4,420
Turbine has announced that several of their Dungeons and Dragons Online servers will be merged to allow players greater ease in finding groups, and improve the games back end infrastructure.
We have some very important news for our players regarding Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach (DDO).
Dungeons & Dragons® has always been about having a good time with a party of your friends. With DDO, we bring that experience to life online for the first time, and appreciate all the time you, the players, spend inside Stormreach fulfilling the promise of D&D®.
Over the last few months we have seen an increase in the number of players asking us to make it easier to find groups. Since grouping is such a core part of the DDO experience we looked at a variety of ways to make the grouping process easier for players of all levels. Various options were considered, but the best way to make a change that improves the situation for everyone is to concentrate active players on a smaller number of servers.
To this end we have developed a plan to merge the game's servers which will greatly improve player experience across the board while also improving the performance of the game by upgrading to a stronger infrastructure on the back end.
We want to thank you for all of your patience as we implement these changes to the game.
;)
Read the full announcement here.
Comments
Just release the IP to another developer so we can get a real D&D mmo.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
Why do we always see this ridiculous spin on server merges? Everyone knows what it really means, subsciptions aren't enough to support the servers so they're closing down. Well I guess the marketing people need something to do.
Now where the heck are those soothsayers with their predictions?
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=The best bash.org quote ever=
Curt teh Juggler: our graduation ceremony was today, and right when some gamer nerd got his diploma, someone in the audience played the zelda "get item" music and he did the zelda spin-hold-out-item stance
Curt teh Juggler: it was quite possibly the most amazing thing ever.
On the other hand, I might be tempted to try it after the merge if they offer a free "please come back" week or two.
Saw this coming from beta....
It's sad really... DDO suffered from 2 key design flaws:
1) They tried to make an online quest generator into an MMORPG rather than adding quests to an MMORPG.
2) They didn't add anything to the game that would make it an "MMO" it's just a big online dungeon generator with pre-created 'dungeons' that players can do over and over and over again. I don't even like calling them 'quests' because no matter how many times you do them you can keep doing them over and over. There's nothing 'persistent' about the world... at all. Sure there are a couple 1 shot quests but nothing like a regular MMORPG here.
The other real problem is a development flaw:
The dungeons are not created equal... and never have been. There are certain key dungeons in the game which drop certain items which players desire far above any other item in the game. As a result those dungeons tend to get 'done to death' which bores the hell out of most players very quickly. How many complaints have been made over time that 'we do the same dungeon again and again'? Yeah, it's their own fault... but it's also the fault of the developer for placing ALL desireable content into those few dungeons rather than 'spreading the wealth'.
It's also the developer's fault for making DDO a "monty haul" game (to steal a phrase from my AD&D past). You are NOBODY in DDO without magic items... it's really rather sad. In most AD&D Campaigns with a GOOD GM. Magic Items are RARE... in the best ones I've played they're so rare that you'd be lucky to get your mits on a +1 sword before you hit level 9 or 10 let alone some of the crazy crap you get in DDO.
It's not a BAD game.. .it's just... badly implemented....
No world to explore, just 'dungeons'. No player market worth mentioning, it's all npc price controlled..... no housing... no pets.... no point other than 'get to the next level'. DDO had so much potential coming out the gate... it's sad to see those of us who were in the Beta proved right. It's just not a game that has any real longevity to it. And Turbine STILL doesn't get it..... what amazes me is everything they did WRONG in DDO they turned around and did RIGHT in LOTRO.... LOTR isn't perfect but wow... what a difference these two titles are. LOTRO is engaging, engrossing, has equally good quests and a very good plot line if you choose to follow it. Whereas DDO is just.... empty feeling.
Hard to believe the same company makes both these titles... then again it was hard to believe the same company made AC1 and AC2 as well.... Owell... it's a good thing for Turbine that LOTRO is a success so far. Hopefully they'll learn from that and start modifying DDO To be what it should have been. DDO just isn't a game that's worth a monthly fee as it stands now. If it were like NWN where you buy it and then can play it whenever you feel like... it'd be much much better. But with a monthly fee? Just not worth it.
Server merges aren't going to save the game. Only Turbine can save the game... by either keeping it on life support with profits from LOTRO or by slowly adding in vital parts to any MMORPG that are what make the MMORPG's worth a monthly fee.... they need to give DDO "life" so to speak. Right now it's just dungeons... there's no world to grab you or hold your interest. The dungeons are cool... the first time... but after that it's just repetition. And since there's no real point to getting 'max level' the repetition factor gets old for players fast.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
Having own and played both (LOTRO is clearly the better of the two but I really prefer the DDO settings more so didn't stick with either but really thinking of going back to DDO) it's hard to believe that LOTRO and DDO both came from the same company and were being developed around the same time.
I think the best thing to do in order to save DDO and make it great is as quickly as possible to revamp the whole game so it's more like LOTRO in world structure at least and SLOW down the combat as it moves way to fast for a D&D game. The speed of combat that you have in games like Everquest 1 & 2 is best I think. Drop a LOT of the instancing (or at least make it so more then one group can enter an instance and make them larger if posible).
Wow! Their subscriptions must have really taken a hit when the cops hauled off those child starving, cat pee wearing obsessive crazy people?
I predicted this would happen, even before DDO launched. The game was never an MMO. It was only a failure.
HAHA Good call!
I also think that if they had picked Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance as their game's setting it would of been vastly more popular. I never heard of Eberron(sp?) til they announced that is the setting for DDO.
That's the best suggestion i've heard.
Being a fan of the D&D system i was mad when the game came out and i saw how they implemented it.
edit: aye, The World of Greyhawk, still evokes memories of High Adventure. I had the giant wall map of the world taped to my wall and sometimes just looking at the placenames would throw me into daydreams of adventuring along the Sword Coast and stuff. ahh good times.