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thinking about grabbing DDO
Stryfe1987
Member Posts: 76
I'm a mmo gamer, ive played em all, and am looking for number one. anyone wanna give me some info on this?
Comments
briht is right on the money.
Think of DDO as an online D&D sim, rather than as a standard MMORPG. If that doesn't interest you, then your question is answered.
The dynamics of this game hinge on those things you mentioned but the tools to build and maintain those friendships are sorely lacking. We have here (IMO) the single most advanced LFG system ever seen in an MMO but yet the /friends tool is better on some Diku-Muds. And the guild tools are non-existent.
I am really enjoying DDO but have yet to make any real friends and haven't found a guild that exists in anything but name only - and much of it, I believe, is because of the state of the systems I've mentioned.
I hope they bring more in the next 30-60 days to get these much needed systems up to speed.
Keep your money. The price of the game is already down to 35...another couple months of player exodus and it'll be 20 bucks.
Personally, I think dropping the price down is their attempt at getting new people to join up...
If they are at the game store and see 4 different games to play and DDO is $10 to $20 less, they might be tempted to play it.
Agreed. But look carefully ... its the fact that Turbine (and the retail stores) feel the need to grab customers in this way that is telling, and should be concerning to you if you're a fan of DDO.
The WoW client is still selling at 50 bucks, and we're a year and a half after release. Why? Because people want to play that game, and the box will move off the shelf at that price.
In comparison, when I bought the MxO client, it was a penny. That's right ... $0.01. No one was playing the game, and the store wanted the box off the shelf.
One month out and the DDO box is already 10 bucks less than it was at release in an attempt to lure gamers into trying the game? That's not a good sign. Particularly for a game that was allegedly designed for a niche market (i.e., low population) to start with.
Agreed. But look carefully ... its the fact that Turbine (and the retail stores) feel the need to grab customers in this way that is telling, and should be concerning to you if you're a fan of DDO.
The WoW client is still selling at 50 bucks, and we're a year and a half after release. Why? Because people want to play that game, and the box will move off the shelf at that price.
In comparison, when I bought the MxO client, it was a penny. That's right ... $0.01. No one was playing the game, and the store wanted the box off the shelf.
One month out and the DDO box is already 10 bucks less than it was at release in an attempt to lure gamers into trying the game? That's not a good sign. Particularly for a game that was allegedly designed for a niche market (i.e., low population) to start with.
Early release = Going into Bankruptcy
The WoW client is still selling at 50 bucks, and we're a year and a half after release. Why? Because people want to play that game, and the box will move off the shelf at that price.
No. WoW client is still selling at 50 bucks because Blizzard is money sucking corporation.
The WoW client is still selling at 50 bucks, and we're a year and a half after release. Why? Because people want to play that game, and the box will move off the shelf at that price.
No. WoW client is still selling at 50 bucks because Blizzard is money sucking corporation.
Blizzard, Turbine, SOE, Mythic ... they're all in business to make money. Gaming isn't a charity.
That having been said, if no one was buying the WoW client at 50 bucks, Blizzard would lower the price. The fact that they haven't had to lower the price says a great deal about the popularity of the game. It says nothing about the quality of the game ... popularity and quality are two different things.
The fact that the distributer has had to lower the DDO client to 40 bucks after only one month of release says that the game isn't popular enough to sustain product movement at the 50 buck priceline. This is most likely not what the investors behind the development of DDO were counting on, and given Turbine's track record of yanking titles would concern me if I were a fan of the game.
It also says that the distributer (which I believe is Atari) is watching this title very closely ... monthly instead of quarterly. Maybe even weekly. First month sales obviously didn't hit targets, and Atari moved aggresively to try to get sales up. Time will tell if the tactic worked.
I'm guessing it won't. The external buzz about DDO is not good, and the debacle that was the release of the first module didn't make the buzz any better.
Debacle? Don't overstate the problem. They had a database issue that they had to rollback less than 30 minutes of playtime to fix (wands/throwing weapons). They had some hours of downtime, true... but for the first major update, that was hardly out of line.
In fact, you have to consider it "industry standard".
IMO DDO sucks.
find something else.
brgds Nicolai
"Industry standard" is going too far the other way. You're understating the issue.
Granted, there have been worse. AO's launch was bad, WWII Online's was worse, and the launch of the Shadows of Luclin expansion was pretty bad as well.
What makes the DDO module launch extremely bad was the depth, yet pure simplicity, of the issue. Throw a weapon, get back 50, sell 49, lather, rinse, repeat. Then once the exploit was discovered and the servers brought down, it took a 9.75 hours to find and fix something that should've been found during testing. The reality is that this was a problem that a chimp with Down's Syndrome could've found within a hour of the start of testing.
It smacks of poor planning. The fact that they'd never even considered the possibility of having a public test server until very recently does as well.
Working under the gun during a live event is no fun. Sometimes you can back it out, sometimes the political fallout is too great and you can't. They couldn't, and I sympathize with that. But it's not like this was an insidious issue that you had to do just the right thing at just the right time to make happen. It's not like it was dependant on some user-specific thing (like variances in OS) that they couldn't have forseen. All a tester had to do to find the bug was throw a throwing weapon.
If DDO had been Turbine's first attempt at a MMO game, I'd be much more inclined to cut them some slack. But they've done this before.
A 9.75 hour unexpected downtime is never ... ever ... industry standard. I don't care what industry we're talking about.
All of which derails my original point. If the box is down 10 bucks after a month, there are issues. I don't think the issue is unrealistic projections from the vendor ... they were happily proclaiming that the pre-sale numbers were above what they had hoped for. I think the gaming community has spoken with it's feet on this one. A lot of those pre-sales either never made the retail purchase, or made the retail purchase then never made it past the free month. The game has already dropped to 103 on Amazon's top selling PC games. For reference, Baldur's Gate II is 65.
DDO's server numbers were declining before the free month for founders ended. People were reporting that they were having trouble finding a group on most servers ... a serious issue for a game that has forced grouping.
The game will live for a while. How long depends on how much profit is acceptable by the vendor. But it's not going to be a major player in the already crowded MMO marketplace.
Bringing Chaos to your locale.
<tongue_in_cheek>
Server numbers on SWG down after the NGE ... Server numbers on DDO down after first month.
Raph Koster leaving SOE .... Ken Troop leaving Turbine.
Tiggs leaving the SWG team under interesting circumstances ... Jason Quimby leaving the DDO team for Maxis.
The stars seem to be lining up.
</tongue_in_cheek>
A. Sell numbers doesn't mean anything. Even if you take a brick and write on it "Blizzard" and "Warcraft" it would sell like hot buns. "Warcraft" is a powerful brand.
B. You really think Atari would shutdown DDO after a month? Sorry to disappoint you, but no, they won't. DDO suffers for childhood illness like every MMORPG in his first year. Anarchy Online had a terrible launch. Five years later AO still alive and kicking, and has 8.0 rating on this site. You are nothing but a typical MMORPG doomsayer.
A. And Dungeons and Dragons isn't a powerful brand?
Sell numbers mean everything. If they didn't, the game would be on MSN Games ... free to download and free to play. But it's really all relative to the business projections of the company(s) who have a financial stake. See below.
B. I'm guessing that DDO's success will depend largely on the projections made by the suits at Atari and Turbine. Those projections are dollars, and dollars come from subscriptions. If they were budgeting for subscription numbers similar to the numbers Funcom has with AO, then the game may have a nice run.
If, OTOH, they were looking to be something more along the line of a CoX, then they may decide to do what EA did with E&B and cut their losses early. No, not at one month ... that sort of an implosion would be legendary. I'd be willing to wager that they're not going to let DDO's bad press affect the launch of Lord of the Rings Online, and shutting down the servers like they did with AC2 would be bad press.
If the numbers stay low, and anectdotal evidence is that the game is selling poorly, there may well be server consolidations by summer. People were complaining about not being able to find groups due to low server volumes before the Founder's free month was up, which is poison for a game that has forced grouping. Worse for a game that was fresh and hot, and after tapping in to the European and Japanese markets the numbers didn't really change.
You certainly don't see Turbine rushing to open new servers to accommodate the influx of new players, do you?
DDO may not see it's one year anniversary IF Turbine was budgeting their money for resources by expecting anything higher than AO's numbers.
That's not doomsaying. That's just business.
No, you are DDO doomsayer. Every MMORPG has a few. AO had many doomsayers. They all claimed AO won't survive a year, but five years later AO still alive.
From Amazon, Anarchy Online review, 2001
As a long-time EverQuest player who habitually criticized the stability of it, I can say that Anarchy Online makes EQ look like one of the Seven Wonders of the software and network engineering world. After an arduous and multi-hour installation and patch process (2 of the 4 patches are over 10MB each), Anarchy Online is so plagued with instability, connectivity lossage, and garden-variety bugs that it is virtually unplayable. Connecting into the game takes on the average around 10-15 attempts, and once in, the average time you can actually "play" in the super-laggy zones is about 3 minutes, at which time you are dumped back to the login screens to start all over again. Zoning within the game is a 50-50 (and worsening) proposition; I was just recently stuck in a small shop with 15 other people for 20 minutes, unable to zone out. If you are lucky enough to zone, it's likely you'll be dumped back to the login screen. Even within the game, silly bugs such as mobs hitting through walls, graphics glitches, rogue pets, missing inventory items, and getting trapped behind objects still crop up in great abundance.
To be fair, the gameplay is inventive and creative, and attempts to solve the agonizing long hours of camping for items EQ players know so well. Quests, or "missions" are created for you (or your team) on the fly, and you go to a quest zone made especially for you, and you know the reward in advance so you can work for specific items you need. However, to add insult to injury, these quests are real-time based instead of game-time based, so with 80% of your "play" time centered around trying to actually play, it's nearly impossible to ever finish a quest in the allotted time. Out of 6 attempted 1-hour quests I only had time to finish one; I have since attempted two 10-hour quests and have not been able to make any headway on them either simply due to to connectivity problems (i.e. the quests themselves are not unreasonably hard, and you can even pick the difficulty yourself relative to your level).
I really hope Funcom gets it together and fixes the problems, but it seems that most current players chatting on the boards feel betrayed and are quite angry with Funcom for releasing what is at best a beta-quality product for 50-some-odd-dollars plus paying 6 months of online time in advance ("lock in now for the lowest rate!"). Even if AO solves its substantial technical problems, I would never again purchase a product from Funcom.
I have been trying to play for the last five days and the servers are constantly crashing. Nothing in the game works properly. You cannot get missions. Doors usually don't work. Most things you try to do are broken. Tech support is non-existant. No one responds to any problems at all. You can send email and be entirely ignored. You will be playing the game and suddenly it will crash. When it crashes it will screw up your data so that you cannot get missions ever again. Without missions there is very little to do except wander around an empty world.
I would give these guys a few weeks, if not months, to get the bugs out of this game before buying it. I paid $55 for the game, and then $35 for a game subscription so I could play online. THat is over eighty dollars. And I have yet to be able to play the game. It doesn't matter what you want to do in-game... You will probably discover it is broken and you can't do it. If it isn't broken right now then it will be soon...
Hopefully they can fix all the problems but right now I recommend waiting... Do anything else but don't PAY to be frustrated by this so-called game!
I would give these guys a few weeks, if not months, to get the bugs out of this game before buying it. I paid $55 for the game, and then $35 for a game subscription so I could play online. THat is over eighty dollars. And I have yet to be able to play the game. It doesn't matter what you want to do in-game... You will probably discover it is broken and you can't do it. If it isn't broken right now then it will be soon...
Hopefully they can fix all the problems but right now I recommend waiting... Do anything else but don't PAY to be frustrated by this so-called game!
This game is buggier than a roach motel. Horrible crashes and lag and most of the features do not work. Everytime funcom tries to patch the game they make it worse. The bad thing is they keep on telling everyone it is playable when it clearly is not.There are alot of people who want to cancel their account but funcom won't let anyone cancel them. Funcom seems to be a group of [copy cat] artists disguised as game programmers
This game is not fun. Character creation is a joke (bad joke), the views are terrible. The games makes me want to go back and play UO some more. I wish I bought the Diablo Expansion Pack instead. What a [bad game]! For the.. [monthly] charge they should of had their stuff together. I can not express how disappointed I am with this game. I was so looking forward to playing a cool game. Guess I will have to try something else.... Hope I can return it... Anyone want to buy a used copy -..!
Looks familiar, doesn't it?
Wow ... that sure was an awful lot of bandwidth you used to say nothing. Obviously you read the bottom line of my post and responded to it with an argument. No salient point ... just being argumentative for the sake of arguing.
I'll debate points with folks who make points, but I won't argue. Arguing on the Internet is like a donkey race ... the winner's still a jackass.
Once you calm down and want to speak for yourself about DDO instead of quoting some third party on Amazon about a game that has nothing to do with DDO and/or Turbine, get in touch. Until then, feel free to thrash about in which ever manner you see fit.
Too bad it takes more than a couple hundred die-hards to keep the servers paid for.
I'm not a hardcore raider. I'm not a "casual" either. But I'm not touching this game for the same reason I'm not touching Auto Assault.
Voice chat.
I as a gamer believe that I simply give up too much in the immersion and roleplay department with voice. I don't see the point in talking with the people I game with, and it crosses a line I don't want crossed.
And that's DDO's big mistake in my opinion. In my experience, its not the casuals and mature players who depend on voice. Its the immature 1337s and raiders who won't play without it. In fact, and Nick Yee at Daedelus has some data to support this, its a dealbreaker for the type of player DDO seems to want.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE