Beckett Massive Online Article

[Jacoby]

"If you had the freedom to change/improve or delete/add something to the game, what would that be and why?
New Player - I'm not too far into it to really say anything needs improving... except for lag issues from time to time. Oh wait Druids... it need some Druids. Oh and maybe half races... you know, Half Elf, stuff like that.

Veteran Player - More classes, races and customization. Being able to be “whatever you want” in DDO is one of its key strengths, so adding more core options would be good.

Switch Player – So far in the game, the one thing that I miss is the crafting that you get in WoW. I would add more crafting to the game. Let wizards make scrolls, or clerics make healing potions. Now to be honest I have yet to make a “green steel” weapon, but I have started to collect some of the items needed. The next thing I would add is, letting wizards/sorcerers have familiars and letting clerics have domains. I would not delete anything; just add more quests.

DDO Executive Producer - Hey wait, I thought I did have that freedom! (laugh) OK, but we can’t do everything at once and some projects take a lot of time and resources. If we could do anything today with no limitations, I would love to add Dungeon Master tools to the game to empower our players to create new quests and areas of the game. It is a natural fit for Dungeons & Dragons and it would really unleash the creativity of our player community to get to expand the world and make it their own. In the long term, I envision opening up huge parts of our world of Eberron and filling it up with the best examples of the player-created content. Plus, I’d love to give DMs some powers to go into their content and mess with the players trying to beat their quests. That would be awesomely fun!"


This part of the article really hits the nail on the head for me. It has every element of improvement summed up to a "T". All that being said I know how Fernando Paiz can have what he wants. It's so easy and you have so much talent right here in the community even though you don't have a player available toolset. Have a DDO contest for all the "old" (no pun intended) Dungeon Masters to submitt their best modules with nice loot (maybee even cash) for the top three then implement them in game with the old DM's as play tester's, hell you could even make the prize a trip to your studio so that they could assist in the creation of the MOD. I designed MOD's in NwN and I'll tell you there's nothing more satisfying to me as a gamer than to have someone comment on your MOD!

Jacoby

[Soulken]

Me I am against having tools it caused problems in CoX, and 99.999999999% of mods in NWN were worse then trash.

[Jacoby]

Bah, actually there were some really good ones but then it's like anything it takes talent to write a book that sells. My idea would have MODs submitted for Dev selection and implementation. Only the best would make the final cut.

[Fenrisulven6]

"I am against having tools it caused problems in --"

You want tools.

Take a look at the Mechwarrior franchise. Thriving community gets knee-capped after MW4 because of legal technicalities. Parent company wont release any more mods, has no plans to develop a MW5, but will not release the source code. Community is kept alive by a group of player-devs, primarily at Mektek. And yes, the playerbase gave them hell over some of the new stuff they put out (just like here now) but the bottom line is that they kept the game alive for years and years.

You want tools that let the playerbase create their own content. And someone should be thinking about how the DDO community will legally exist without Turbine's servers or source codes. Because that day will come.

[Tammuz]

Queitly as its kept, before I found DDO to be a "normal" MMO -thats what I always expected it to be. More sandbox like, with the tools for a DM to essentially build a dungeon, with traps, enemies, etc where they wanted it to run a pseudo game over the internet.