Ways to bring more players back to DDO

[christiancodyak]

Would just like to hear some input from those of us still going strong with DDO, I had some ideas with friends on ways to possibly update based on complaints I've heard.
- Small but consistent complaint in today's gaming age, graphics remastering, also with the possibility of a VR plugin. It's possible on Oculus Rift, but complicated to set up and maintain.
- Second bigger one I have put quite a bit of thought into is an alternate game line where players can choose "Dragon" over "Dungeon" when they log into the server to play as our normal NPC monsters in quests and slayer areas. Similar to ranks in Hardcore the further you get with kills and experience, the higher level monsters you can unlock and play in quests, eventually leading to players that are skilled as certain monsters playing as the raid bosses and trash mobs in raids with the hero's from "Dungeon" mode. By adding this aspect it would be similar to the quick battle / PVP games that are taking over a lot of the platforms that help promote games. Achievements as lives of monsters could be purchased in Dungeon mode similar to Hardcore achievements.
- New classes Ideas, Psionics ... Don't shoot me for this, I swear it's not my idea; Gunners.

[Uska]

Reduce power creep by 75% bring back more quests the require grouping and I’ll come back

[Sam1313]

Just a few things would bring me back full time.
1.UN-NERF Arcane Archer Ranger
2.Figure out a way to level faster. <<<----I've spent the last year playing other games and have enjoyed them. Not because they are like Dungeons & Dragons but because they are well balanced. And you can level in a decent amount of time without making it a lifestyle or a 2nd Job.
I can log into a game on xboxOne and group up with other players and go up 7 levels in half an hour. You leave those types of games feeling like you have accomplished something and powerful. I log into ddo tonight and spend 6 hours to go up 1 level. Yuck. I leave this game feeling like I just wasted 6 hours of my life for nothing.

[Fnordian]

I log into ddo tonight and spend 6 hours to go up 1 level. Yuck. I leave this game feeling like I just wasted 6 hours of my life for nothing.

Ah yes, but you go up five ranks! And each rank is just a level in disguise.

[Paladin_of_Power]

SSG could send a survey out to customers Who have left to find out what they want and include some options of what SSG things might bring them back. one thing I recommend is some sort of a short term discount or some free ddo points linked to their account .

[janave]

A combination or even selection of these would probably do it for me, since I enjoy playing, however I dont appreciate the mental clinic experiment on top... yup not even for free, definitely not for the money.

- Massive grind reduction per character 30%+
- Make melee Rogues do significantly better than Xbow variants.
- Stealth/aggro fix (yes, even if it means a walk to the boss... spawn champion friends to boss if we arrive with <{stealthgame_sanit_kill_count} )
- Sorcerer enhancement update / modernization ( crop some item power, and destiny power if needed for balance, the class itself needs some selling point on top of casting speed... most things that makes Sorcs work comes outside of Sorcs.. O___o )
- Some new utility/buff/tactic spells for mages
- Bow pass
- Decent instances that
:dont rely on one special system-defying gotcha to add challenge
:have multiple path to completion
:have at least one (mostly) non-combat path
:have actual encounter design, monster placement and diversity (instead of brushed up groups), where AoE spam is not the only answer
:grant rewards that outlive more than 2-3 updates

- Bonus: instead of releasing overbuffed "feature of the update" classes, consider adjusting up/downwards multiple builds by small %. This helps more than spiking out with 200-300% overpowered stuff every time an update drops.

Of course none of these will happen as long as players pay premium for new pastlife feats, to zerg the highway style instances 2.7% faster, to get the next rewards in 80-100 runs asap...

[Blase]

From the perspective of an off again/on again premium player (As I was about five years ago before I found a static group and really dug into the game)


Balance the **** quests. I don't care if you have to hire someone to go line by line through the monsters, the jumps in difficulty are one of the things that drove me off time and again. If you want the game to be truly hard on hard, and truly elite on elite, that is fine. But when some quests at level six has kobolds with 150 HP and another series of quests has them with 600 HP, on the same difficulty, you've made a terrible mistake. And it happens time and again. You can tell the older content versus the newer content just by the HP of the monsters. Fix it. Set your baseline and stick with it, and balance all the quests against it.

Balance the loot. Random loot is random loot, which is mostly what new players will be using, as they aren't going to have forty past lives worth of gear banked, however when they get a named loot item out of a chest, and it's laughably worse than the same type of item found in the same chest from random loot, you have a problem. I cheered when you rebalanced the Sharn Syndicate chain's loot. It was a breath of fresh air and desperately needed, but it seems like you didn't get enough positive feedback, or some other factor kept you from continuing that project. There are Cannith Crafting calculators galore - have some poor schmuck go through the list of named loot from one on up, and if doesn't meet cannith crafted loot, fix it so it does. This gives players a reason to run quests beyond the xp, and goals beyond xp are good. Hell, I'm sure someone here on the forums has probably already done it.

Fix the grind. To ~truly~ "Finish" the game, you need 102 past lives, 42 heroic for triple completionist on the class side, 39 heroic for triple racials, and 21 epic for triple iconic, which luckily cover almost half your epic reincarnations, although you'll need to have done another 27 along the way. I'd like to congratulate DDO on having the most diverse and occasionally baffling character system that I've found in an MMO. You've found a way to keep us on the hamster wheel. Which is great for business and great for us, but for the love of life, drop the multi-life xp penalty. It doesn't serve a purpose anymore. Once a new player manages to get twenty and assuming you've implemented my other two suggestions, manages to get to thirty, unless they are truly dedicated, they are done. They ~might~ epic res. Maybe. If twenty to thirty didn't suck too badly for them. But most of them aren't going to throw down for another 1-20 sprint where it takes ~more~ xp than it did the first time.

Fix the adventure packs. They are confusing and frustrating for a new player to understand. You have fifty of them. Fifty. 50. Make sure the quest is clear on what package they belong to, and speaking of that : Take the starter pack, and in addition to the catacombs, add STK, Dragon Blood, and Sharn Syndicate to it. Now you have a package that covers the Market Place. Do the same thing for each of the Houses/The Twelve. Keep it simple. Each pack gives them the quests and lower level gold hireling. $9.99 a pop. Hell give em a +1 tome for each one too, between the market/houses/twelve, they'll end up with a +1 tome on each, which for a new player would feel pretty good.

<Hot Edit Action>

None of this **** really matters to me as a player. I was VIP, now I'm season pass, ultimate collectors editions on everything, max level cannith crafter etc. But six or seven years ago, when I would jump into the game once every six months and play till level six, seven, or even eleven, it would have mattered a lot. I freely admit the only reason DDO has received the thousand + dollars they have from me, is because I just happened to log in one day after a seven-month absence, start up a new character, and joined a LFM that turned out to be a freshly tr'd static group who were messing around waiting for someone. Had I not met them, I doubt I'd have ever invested so much time and money into the game.

[Goalt]

I was thinking of making a thread just like this one! How coincidental.

Anyways, yes, SSG's got to start making DDO more appealing to newer players, otherwise the game is going to die (or be shut down by Warner Bros... wonder how THAT'S going to look). If not new players, then at least entice the old players (like 10 years ago old) to come back; they know the game exists. The sad thing is, they haven't. Not in the slightest.
[I]37:56, those players https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-YnAIKYbVE

WoW's done it with WoW Classic. Nintendo's doing it with their new mobile Mario Kart Tour App (which has an appeal for a larger audience, the smartphone users). Heck, even Bethesda's creating hype with their (albeit very much later) Elder Scrolls 6. And DDO did do this for a time, with their massive shift to a free-to-play, pay-to-stay model that revolutionized MMOs as we know them today.


So what went wrong then? Why is DDO the way it is now, almost lightless and just flickering?
The problem was that DDO, like most now-dead MMORPGs, did not change. Instead of taking the opportunity to expand their game into something new and promising, something that would be viable for the future, DDO instead said, "Let's just sit back and let the money roll in." It worked for a bit... maybe a few months, maybe a year. But like all new things, the novelty of it all wore off. DDO was just back to being that ordinary game on the internet, degrading over time as existing players left due to changes they did not like.

Note: If you've only got a cookie to last you up the mountain to the other side, why, just why would you break it in half and throw it away?

It's analogous to Disney. That is, if Disney had decided to use the same graphics they did in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in, say, Frozen or Coco and recycled the same old animations for every one of their characters. Do you think Disney would be where it is now if that were the case, a billion dollar industry that makes billions today? No, of course not.

DDO's core problem is that, they just don't innovate, at all. It's just the same old **** over and over again, the same old drab, blurry colors, the same old waxy, uncut mobs, the same old stupid mechanics, just under different names/guises. So let's break it all down, shall we?

1. The Graphics
You want to know the single reason why new players aren't playing your game, SSG? It's cause your graphics are trash. Plain facts laid out, they're just trash. From the mudane, mud-colored walls(?) to the blended green grass, to the generic enemy colors For goodness, sake's, you've had well over a DECADE to refine your techniques, yet everything's still the same. Look, uh... we aren't playing Runescape 2.0 or some long-forgotten DOS game... we're playing DDO! "Dungeons"? The last time I thought of a dungeon, it didn't look like a blurry mess of painted colors with a mob of untextured monsters that look (from a distance) half-ready to meld in with the each other.



Look at their teeth! It looks like somebody sewed them on!


DDO doesn't even typify a dungeon feel with this type of "art", at least not in the visual sense. Everything. Looks. Waxy. It is completely outclassed in terms of visuals by just about any other game out there worth competing with! (except for WoW... but hey, that's why they released Classic, right? And even then, at least WoW can make things like this...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJr3dXZfcg. Meanwhile, DDO's stuck on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5oQbufNgY4). When you look at it, there can be no doubt at all that this is one of the reasons for DDO's continual downspiral. Fix it.

One more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEBJQU1Y_E

2. The Animations
Oh boy, this one's a crowd pleaser.

Similar to how DDO's visuals have got problems, so do their animations. A. Lot. Remember how I told you what would have happened if Disney had decided to recycle all of their old animations in their newest movies today? Well, DDO was pretty much an experiment on that to see what would happen. Instead of creating new animations to compliment newer mobs or even just older ones, DDO decided to keep everything the same, god da*mnit! I'm specifically referring to the enemies. Why do all of the trolls (and ogres) in DDO use the same attack animations, even their lunge-attacks?

Why do kobolds and troglodytes always attack in the same 4 to 5 animations of swing up, swing right, swing left, and "cleave"? Why do ghouls and wights attack the same, and why are ALL human/elven/dwarven npcs identical in this aspect?



A little known fact is that most races share at least one non-related species with which they are genetically encoded to fight the same as.


Do I have to even get into the sounds problem of this dilemma? What will new players think 15 hours in when all they hear is "Eh-aw!" for the fifteenth time in 2 minutes? Repetition this early in the game is not good, it draws the mind away when considered with all of these other factors. If you're going to rehash something that many times, at least modify it a little!

3. Anti-Newbie Mechanics



[I]What the new player, i.e. your game's life support line, thinks when he sees all of... that.

That being, a full 3/4 of the game is inaccessible the minute a new players enters the game. The worst part about it is, SSG makes this clear. They put up fancy signs saying "Get Now!" in the character creation menu. They put a tooltip saying "There are lots of great things in the DDO store!" the minute one opens it. Hell, they even go as far as to say to the player who's reached level 17 and is wondering how to get to Eveningstar faster that he or she can buy a pass to get to Eveningstar faster!

The game is loaded with these pay-triggers, which to the new player who never had the intent of buying anything, are quite annoying. Have you ever known you weren't going to do something, and yet had that same, persistently annoying person "reminding" you to do it? Yeah, that's SSG's "advertising campaign" in a nutshell - the telemarketing number that you always block. And if you go onto the DDO forums asking for advice in-game on how to play the game free? Chances are, you'll have people chucking you the number one advice - "Go buy points, it's not that bad, it doesn't cost that much, etc. etc..". As if DDO needed an extended advertising team.

The system described above would have worked if DDO was in its so-called "Golden Age" because guess what you have in times of prosperity? CUSTOMERS. Guess what you have in times of despair? A few lone wanderers just here to check out the game - why are you throwing tons of advertising at them? To make a good impression?



This is what DDO needs. This is what it's not going to get if it continues the way it is doing now.


Aside from first-time impressions, DDO also loves making everything cost money. And giving things to players who have paid money. Again, this isn't going to work because most of the new people who join this game are in it for the experience, not the game itself. They will leave if they find it unsatisfactory! And there's nothing more unsatisfying than a giant paywall behind an already sub-par game (for the reasons already stated, outdated graphics and repetitive animations!)

My suggestion to attract new players which this game desperately needs to keep alive? Well for one, let's make some of the more useless packs F R E E. Yeah... it's not a new concept, people. Turbine did it in 2009 to great success. Some of these (absolutely useless) packs, or even just packs, can be released to public or made cheaper. Yes, I'm thinking of Sharn Syndicate and Temple of Elemental Evil! (the latter should have its price reduced to around 325 or so) That will entice new players to stay and actually get things, because not every gosh darn pack is worth 500+ points in the shop.

Perhaps a system could be created where new players get a discount on ALL packs for a limited time in-game, maybe for a month or so. Then prices revert back to normal. Maybe a gift of an adventure pack of your choice (from a list) could be given to old players who return back after a long time of not playing, say 5 years or so! Exploits? Do you really think I'm going to grind up my 40 past lives again on ANOTHER account just to get some packs permanently? Again, this is all being done to attract new players and keep the game from dying. Get a move on, SSG.

Stop releasing worthless new "updates" like the Hardcore Server and a new adventure pack, which in the long run provide nothing for the game, and start building up your player base again.

You complain of a shortage of staff? Use those funds from the recently released Sharn Expansion to hire more! You think Blizzard became the way it is now keeping its hundred or so original staff? Parent company holding you back? Well, get a representative up there to convince them that you can turn this game around! Success on the offshoot means profit for the parent.

This isn't a rant where I talk about a bunch of random issues without actually addressing a single one of them. No, this is a call to action. Do something about your dying game SSG unless you want it to end up like Asheron's Call.



G E T . M O V I N G .







What do you say, developers? Do you actually want to try to increase the servers' populations and fix the issues of a decade ago? Or do you just want them to sit stagnant, never growing but always shrinking?

[ShifterThePirate]

Just face the fact this game is over 10 years old and there is no huge company behind it like Blizzard/Activision. There is just no way to get big amounts of players to return to DDO with all the new games releasing. Maybe there will come a few players to check it out but the chance they stay is small if you keep dividing the player base with new servers and modes like you suggest with 'dragon' and 'dungeon' mode. And don't even start about VR... It's not even worth putting dev time into that.

[Tlorrd]

Step 1: Merge servers ... HC has shown how much fun random folks from every server has when the server population is huge (relatively speaking) and there are groups galore with folks on at all time periods.

Step 2: First master step 1.

[math92]

they can start with updating ddo on steam...the ddo page on steam havent been updated in years...i dont think it would take too long to copy pasta what you posting here to ddo on steam... when ppl look at games on steam and dont see any new post recently they think the game is dead or whatever...i would start there...but i dont care really

[krimsonrane]

WOW used to have 12 million subscribers. over time they lost most of them due to the same pay to play/win micro robberies. Recently they released classic WOW without so many money grabs and the resurgence of players has been reported as phenomenal.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

The question really is whether it makes sense to try to please all those people who want modern graphics & animations. What I mean with that is simply the question : What kind of mindset is there in people who prefer graphics over stories ?

Of course, with Neverwinter there's another (A)D&D MMO product out there. That's probably where most more graphically oriented players went to. Plus Eberron isn't "the" cliché Fantasy setting ... ( I love it *because* of that ... )



In my opinion, making the game available to other languages (again) is far more important.
I'm just baffled how many MMOs in this world just fail to include the Spanish language ... And apparingly there is even more drive in the industry to even prefer the Chinese language over that ...

[TedSandyman]

Just a few things would bring me back full time.
1.UN-NERF Arcane Archer Ranger
2.Figure out a way to level faster. <<<----I've spent the last year playing other games and have enjoyed them. Not because they are like Dungeons & Dragons but because they are well balanced. And you can level in a decent amount of time without making it a lifestyle or a 2nd Job.
I can log into a game on xboxOne and group up with other players and go up 7 levels in half an hour. You leave those types of games feeling like you have accomplished something and powerful. I log into ddo tonight and spend 6 hours to go up 1 level. Yuck. I leave this game feeling like I just wasted 6 hours of my life for nothing.

Worst ideas ever.

[SirValentine]

Reduce power creep by 75% bring back more quests the require grouping and I’ll come back

Sounds good to me.

Figure out a way to level faster.

They've already done that so many times over, I really feel they need to go the opposite direction.


When it took months to level from 1 to 20, we had a massive population. Now, it takes a couple days to go from 1 to 30, and the servers are ghost towns. The leveling speed is ridiculously fast now, compared to the old days, and it has obviously not brought in more players.

The problem was that DDO, like most now-dead MMORPGs, did not change.

Again, this is the opposite of what actually happened. DDO had made way too many changes, in the wrong direction, which has driven many players away.

Maybe there will come a few players to check it out but the chance they stay is small if you keep dividing the player base with new servers and modes

Yes.

Step 1: Merge servers

Yes.

[SiliconScout]

...
They've already done that so many times over, I really feel they need to go the opposite direction.

When it took months to level from 1 to 20, we had a massive population. Now, it takes a couple days to go from 1 to 30, and the servers are ghost towns. The leveling speed is ridiculously fast now, compared to the old days, and it has obviously not brought in more players.

You do recall that back when it took months to level, leveling sigil days I am thinking was when this was the case, PL's weren't even a thing. Then they became a thing and it was HARD to gain them, each stacked just once and it added power but not enough to really matter in most cases.

Today there

• 14 Class Past lives
• 13 Racial Past Lives
• 7 Iconic Past Lives
• 16 Epic Past Lives

OH oh and we can x3 all of them up so 150 past lives Total each adding the same tiny bit of power but even it were as little as 1% per that would be essentially a 150% difference in power.

Now granted you don't need all the PL's by any stretch for any build but also grant me that they add more than 1% power in general as well. In the end there is probably a 30% to 50% power increase between having the lives and not. The HC server has driven this point home brutally.

Past lives used to be more bragging rights and a small increase in power but today they are what the game is balanced against and thus a requirement. Allowing people to gain some or all of those past lives would be a positive change IF you are honestly looking to keep new players. When they look at the mountain expected of them to climb they walk because their option is to either climb that mountain with both hands tied behind their back OR pay for a helicopter ride to the top.

For most neither is an attractive option so they leave.

[Kaboom2112]

Why do people pretend SSG hasn't given up on new players? it's all about milking the whales.

[MistaMagic]

Stop the negative Posts

[Chai]

Bring the people who left back, and they bring new players with them.

To do that youd need to fix the reasons why they left...

[HungarianRhapsody]

Reduce power creep by 75% bring back more quests the require grouping and I’ll come back

If grouping is encouraged, that’s awesome.

Mid grouping is required, I’ll have to leave the game. I don’t get to group because of my play times and restrictions on how I get to play (I may have to afk for 20 minutes in the middle of a quest). If people want to group, id love to see the things that keep people from grouping fixed. Requiring people to group is a recipe for disaster. And it’s going to be even worse during times like this when many of the servers are a ghost town during a decent portion of the day.

Group with other players at your level? There are only 3 other level 9 players on the server right now. Good luck.