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What yesterday's E3 announcement implies
Crash86
Member Posts: 125
Solo content. PvP. No raise in the level cap. What does this mean to the player that's been a staunch DDO supporter since beta?
It means that they matter less to Turbine than the player who either left the game or has never tried it.
From closed beta, Turbine has said loudly and proudly that DDO will require grouping. Whenever PvP was brought up on the beta boards, it was dismissed by Turbine as something they never needed. The game was to first launch with 20 levels, then 10 with an increase to 12 in the first month.
No level cap increase means that Turbine is more interested in the newer player than they are with the player who's been playing since Headstart and has several 10.4 characters. New players don't need 12 levels ... 10 will do them just fine. The game playing population has spoken with their feet ... and of the more common complaints, no solo content and no PvP content are right up there with "Not enough levels" and "No world to explore".
What Turbine seems to be saying, if you read between the lines of the announcement, is that if they can get more subscriptions with solo content and PvP they don't care if they lose the more dedicated folks who have been with them since Headstart. The announcement about solo content and PvP means that they have conceded that their grand experiment to be different has failed, and they're now trying to survivie by any means necessary. They're not telling the soloer and PKer to "Go play WoW" any longer.
It remains to be seen if the game will be there long enough for the new solo content to go live. The most dedicated to the game are now threatening to leave over no raise in the level cap. Frankly, I don't blame them for being upset. Turbine is using the money generated by the dedicated player who believed them when they said "Our game will be different" to build a game that is diametrically opposed to what they told that same player the game would be.
It also shoots great big holes in the whole "The game was designed for a niche market" fanboy theory. Turbine is obviously scrambling for every subscription they can get, and they now appear to be ready to do whatever it takes to get them. If a company sticks to it's guns and settles for a smaller playerbase, then that game is designed for a niche market. To change horses in midstream is to admit that you wanted a little more than 300,000 boxes sold and just a few thousand players across all servers per snapshot (remember, not all of those boxes turned in to subscriptions).
The fanboys will most likely start to either quietly leave the game or try to spin the announcement as best they can. Dane is the only one I see trying to spin it. Jabba hasn't posted in a week, and Lovesmaher has yet to chime in. Unfortunately, the spin doctors don't realize that their thrashing is only making their situation worse.
If the game survives, it will be nothing like what Turbine boasted it would be and everything like what they said it wouldn't be. Which means that while DDO itself may survive, the game the DDO elitists so desparately wanted is dead.
Comments
And all of this could have been avoided if they would have just stuck closer to the Dungeons and Dragons rules instead of the butcher job they tried to pass off as D&D.
Qui Chi
I don't think they have much concern at this point for subscription retension, their goal is to milk the box sales for as many numbers as they can get, to try and recoup some of their investment before they have to close up shop. They did much the same thing with the AC2 expansion, sold as many copies as they could reasonably expect, then announced the game would be closing down in a few months (still expecting to see a class action come out of that).
Same points noted, different conclusion. Whomever is correct, it doesn't bode well.
Well I think there is a position in the middle that is being overlooked. PvP was always on the table as far back as you want to read on the forums. The Devs were very clear about it not being in the game at launch. The pvp that will be implemented will probably be a dueling arena or maybe a battlegrounds area that focuses more on group pvp.
The solo content is supposed to come in the early levels from the announcement. The game will primarily be a group game so hopefully people don't expect to be soloing in DDO all the time. This is to make the noob experience much more user friendly.
I would have liked to see the lvl cap raised in July but by doing that it will be even harder to balance out pvp if that is coming in sooner rather then later.
PvP and crafting were both planned on being implemented into the game all the way back before pre alpha but were purposely not included at launch per the devs. I personally think they should have waited a bit longer to launch and have had both inlcuded but the devs are being consistent with what they have promised all along.
I dont agree here. increasing the level cap have nothing to do with quality of gameplay. Turbine is looking to improve the quality and giving players more quests. Quests are the real content of mmos. if you were to breeze through the content to reach to the cap as fast as you can. then you are missing out alot what the game have to offer. yeah i have seen this trend among power levelers. casual players wouldnt care about leveling, but care about the content is provided.
i remember i was with everquest 2. SOE didnt increase the level cap for nearly 10 months after launch, but during that time they have added 1000 more quests and two adventure packs. they put down alot of content for everyone during the 10 months between the first expansion.
Have played: CoH, DDO EQ2, FFXI, L2, HZ, SoR, and WW2 online
So who exactly is this game for now? I agree that they are totally ignoring the original fan base of this game. Which in my opinion is suicide for this game. The only thing it had going for it was a die hard fanbase. Turbine seems to have no direction what so ever.
Ok, so you would recommend leaving it the way it is? If they don't attract more players, there will be no game for you to play at all. Do the math. This is a business and they need to make money. That means giving the majority of potential customer what they want.
If you want a great D&D experience, just stick with paper and pencil. That is still the most fun and the best value.
I'm sure they'll implement the PvP in a good way. Maybe on a seperate server, or have it in areas that are setup for PvP play (like an arena someone mentioned earlier.)
And as for solo content being added... You don't have to do the solo content. You can still play the game just like you always did. Just avoid the solo dungeons if they bother you that much.
They're just trying to appeal to the masses. They're going to get chewed out by someone either way they go. But I think they're just adding options for many styles of gameplay for different people.
So that 300,000 units may, or may not, be 300,000 games sold to players. But, if prior MMO's are any indicator, the vast majority of box sales do NOT turn into subscribers. SWG sold over 1,500,000 copies in the 3 years it was on shelves before the NGE was released. In that time it only ever had 250,000 players.
NOTE: The below summary is purely theoretical, but based on in-game observations the numbers can't be far off:
If you break the math out on that that means that 16% of people who bought Galaxies became subscribers for any length of time. If only 16% of people who bought DDO are subscribers then, at best, it's got 50,000 subscribers right now (if those '300k units' are actually players and not store purchases. I would argue that DDO has less draw to the average MMO player than Galaxies did at launch. Which means that number is probably more likely down in the 20-40k range, my guess is they're about where E&B and EVE were at shortly after release: Roughly 30k players. Which jibes with the number of players you see on the servers.
So at 30k players? Yah I think Turbine is in panic mode. Even AC2 had more subscribers in it's first few months than that. Remember, to an MMORPG "box sales" really mean nothing. Unless the number is so phenomenal in and of itself that it negates the need for a subscription fee in the first place. And given that Turbine is over 30-40 million in debt from making DDO, the revenue from 300k box sales is negligable. Especially when you remember that they're also digging a debt hole with LOTR:O as well.... And if DDO flops on them it's entirely possible that LOTR:O will never make it to shelves because Turbine could collapse if DDO fails before they can get LOTR:O onto shelves.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
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I'm not quite sure who you're directing this at.
For my 2 copper, I've always been a proponent of a solo option for gameplay. To make a steadfast decision to ignore solo play was unwise, and then to follow it up with the infamous "Friends Don't Let Friends Solo" video was absurd. To now say that solo content is to be added 'only in the Harbor area' is a slippery slope. Should the game survive long enough, there will need to be solo content from top to bottom with only the raid encounters left out. Doing otherwise only means that you hold on to the solo player an extra week at most. Solo players burn through content, and content in DDO is already lacking.
PvP ... personally I can take it or leave it. Frankly, I find PvP more fun in a FPS game than a MMO game, but to each their own.
The point of my original post was that the elitist DDO player should be waking up right about now. Despite their fervent belief, Turbine was not making a game just for the elitist, just the way the elitist wanted it, and saying to hell with the subscription numbers as long as the elitist we've had since alpha is happy. Turbine had no intention of making a niche market game. Only the fanboys thought that, and hid behind the thought as a way to justify the low subscription numbers.
And to prove the point, the E3 announcement essentially said, "We're pulling out as many stops as we can to pay off our debt." I don't blame Turbine for doing it. If they had been smart, they'd have included these things in their original product. If they had, it's possible that DDO would not be in the shape it finds itself in now. However, the E3 announcement essentially bent over and ravaged the elitist Turbine apologist who has been jumping all over anyone with a dissenting view since closed beta (that I'm personally aware of ... I wasn't in alpha).
To their credit, very few of them are saying, "Thank you sir, may I have another."
EDIT - I agree 100% with the 'Pen and Paper' comment. If you want to play D&D, play D&D. Heck, I've DMed games using the Halo2 lobby in Xbox Live before (when everyone couldn't be in the same room due to distance). It wasn't as much fun as everyone being around the same table, but it was more fun than DDO.
AD&D Online has been around as long as there have been BBS's. What's sad is that an IRC chat room does it better than a 30mil+ game made by an MMO developer can.
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
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Still in: A couple Betas
There is no way of knowing how many boxes are sold to customers. they do know how many boxes are sold to retailers tho. since ddo have only been out for three months now, there is no way for ddo could get 1.5 million boxes by now. if ddo is around for three years then maybe they could approach one million.
for SWG having 1.5 million boxes and their population being 250,000. how many people do you think with in the three years have bought SWG, played it for one, two, or so months then quit? SWG could easily have a million people total playing SWG throughout three years.
retailers could have sold 150,000 ddo boxes worldwide. remember you got NA, europe and now Japan markets. 30,000 people would have quit with in a week in discuss then come here to complain about it like some people here do.
Have played: CoH, DDO EQ2, FFXI, L2, HZ, SoR, and WW2 online
There is no way of knowing how many boxes are sold to customers. they do know how many boxes are sold to retailers tho. since ddo have only been out for three months now, there is no way for ddo could get 1.5 million boxes by now. if ddo is around for three years then maybe they could approach one million.
for SWG having 1.5 million boxes and their population being 250,000. how many people do you think with in the three years have bought SWG, played it for one, two, or so months then quit? SWG could easily have a million people total playing SWG throughout three years.
retailers could have sold 150,000 ddo boxes worldwide. remember you got NA, europe and now Japan markets. 30,000 people would have quit with in a week in discuss then come here to complain about it like some people here do.
Somebody completely missed the point... and obviously hasn't ever taken a probability and statistics course...
Note: It's generally a bad idea to quote only part of a post when you don't understand the point being made: My full post stated that SWG only ever had 250,000 concurrent subscribers. That means that roughly 16% of the people who bought boxes became subscribing customers.
Then I extrapolated that data based upon DDO's announced "box sales" to determine what the probable current subscriber numbers are for that game. Granted it's a probability number determined on data not directly related but it's the best we can do since Turbine isn't speaking about their subscriber numbers (which is very telling in and of itself when combined with the fact that they're making radical changes to the game that they claimed they were dead set against during development).
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
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Still in: A couple Betas