8th past life and why I quit DDO(again)

[Shear-buckler]

Yeah, that is called life. You get more when you pay for something. What a novel concept. If I pay $500 for a car it is likely not going to be as nice as if I pay $30,000 for it. Still, nobody is forcing me to do either.

Also, I never use AI because is is just a Xerox machine that I can find the same information it would give me.

In life people randomly get sick and die, so SSG should intentionally design the game to randomly delete accounts. "Its called life".

Do you see how incredibly dumb that kind of argument is now?

Anyways, I dont care about "such is life". I care about new player attraction and new player retention. The current system does not come close to maximing new player attraction and new player retention for reasonable target audiences.

 

[Shear-buckler]

Lay off the AI people.

It should be mandatory and automatic for all forum posts. That way the forums could actually be constructive.

 

[Buddha5440]

In life people randomly get sick and die, so SSG should intentionally design the game to randomly delete accounts. "Its called life".

Do you see how incredibly dumb your argument is now?

Anyways, I dont care about "such is life". I care about new player attraction and new player retention. The current system does not come close to maximing new player attraction and new player retention for reasonable target audiences.

Have you stopped taking your meds? You are telling me I have said things that I have not said.

 

[Buddha5440]

That code is great, as long as people are playing at that time. I cannot count the number of new people I have helped through the game when the code was not around and they left before the code was ever offered. The fundamental problem with the free quest code is that it only helps the people are around at the time it is released and new players are the ones least likely to be around at that time. Most people don't stalk MMO's saying, "I am going to start playing this game sometime in the next 12 months, so I will start stalking their forums now so I can decide the best time to begin." If that were normal human behavior then sure, the quest code system would be tolerable. But as it stands, the quest code needs to be good for a year if they are only going to release it once a year. It expires way too fast leaving most new players without it and they don't last until the next time it comes around (since they would basically be required to more or less stop playing until it comes back around and by that time they will have lost interest in the game entirely).

So if a store has a sale and you miss it, it's the store's fault???

 

[Buddha5440]

It's amazingly easy to irritate some people.

 

[Shear-buckler]

It is amazingly hard to have a conversation with some people.

Oh well, you showed your hand. Hopefully Cordovan does the right thing.

 

[Tumideon]

Thats all fine and dandy until you start talking about better marketing and try to suggest spending thousands of dollars is cost enjoyment ratio in the favor of DDO.

needless to say I disagree.

That's fine, I'm not offended my friend. I'll be the first to admit that cost:enjoyment is a stupid qualitative remark but it's true for me at least, maybe it's delusional thinking like you said lol!

Not sure why better marketing is considered a bad thing though? I've never once seen an ad on keywords nor AdWords on any other MMO or video game's wiki or website. I've seen plenty of Raid Shadow Legends and WoW crap on the side bars of Fallout 4 wiki or gaming "journalist" websites - getting more eye's on DDO cannot hurt.

Take for instance the immense bag-fumbling to get folks from Stranger Things interested in the game. I'm sure the Venn diagram of people who watch ST on Netflix and people who game has a decently meaty cross-section, they come out with Vecna and now Demogorgon related content 3 times over the last 5 years, from a product marketing perspective targeting those folks to even come in with F2P accounts is an easy win.

 

[erethizon1]

So if a store has a sale and you miss it, it's the store's fault???

I run a business. My goal is to get customers. If I run my business in such a way that customers only want to buy from me when I am having a sale (because my prices are outrageous and unresonable all the rest of the time), it would be wise for me to make sure I run sales far more often.

Yes, it is the businesses' fault for having their default pricing being unreasonably high the vast majority of the time. We have threads about this constantly. It takes $40 to $80 to buy most games and have all the content. It takes several hundred dollars to buy this one. That is why the store code has to exist. Because the pricing is so unreasonable as a default that it isn't worth buying except when most of it is being given away for free. That is the store's fault.

 

[Shear-buckler]

Have you stopped taking your meds? You are telling me I have said things that I have not said.

In life, people also randomly get sick and die. By your previously stated logic, SSG should intentionally design the game to randomly delete player accounts because 'that’s just life.'

Applying real-world hardships to excuse bad game design doesn't make sense.

The current model might have been fine years ago, but today, there is a massive backlog of non-free expansions that holds a significant part of the popularly run content in the game. A lot of people who should reasonably be the target audience will be immediately turned away when they realize the 'free' game isolates them from the rest of the community unless they buy a mountain of old expansions.

Worse, every year brings a new paid expansion that makes the problem worse. If it is this bad now, how bad will it be five, six years down the line?

I care about new player attraction and retention. Defending a system that actively drives new players away because 'that's life' doesn't help the game survive.

 

[Frieling Slyhand]

I am also someone that doesn't think paywalls and pay to win exists in most games (they are common complaints people make that really just mean the game takes longer than they want it to), but DDO and LOTRO really do deny you access to the vast majority of the game from the beginning. You play happily until level 10 or so and then discover and almost every quest is locked. That is bad F2P design and is easily fixed by either making free code content free all the time or making quest packs cost 25 store points each, at least for content that is more than 5 or 10 years old. People really do leave when they discover there is nothing to do but repeat the same 5 quests because those are all that exist in their level range. That is the paywall.

Is the point of FTP so that people can play the full game and not pay anything? Or it is to give people an introduction so they can decide if they want to buy content? Again, you can buy content just by playing the game. I don't think most new players leave because of the cost--they leave because of the complexity of character building, the difficulty of game play, and the difficulty of way finding from quest to quest.

 

[erethizon1]

Is the point of FTP so that people can play the full game and not pay anything? Or it is to give people an introduction so they can decide if they want to buy content? Again, you can buy content just by playing the game. I don't think most new players leave because of the cost--they leave because of the complexity of character building, the difficulty of game play, and the difficulty of way finding from quest to quest.

The point of F2P games is to attract whales. Subscription games make less money because they take people that would be willling to spend thousands and only let them spend $15 or $20 a month. F2P games are full of people that are not paying anything, and those players have value because they make the game more popular and attract whales as a result.

DDO's revenue went up 5-fold when they went free to play. It is far, far better to keep someone around that never pay a penny than to squeeze them out and drop the size of your playerbase because you were trying to extract $5 from them that they were never willing to pay. There is a reason DDO has such a tiny playerbase and the absolute insistence that everyone pay something (by making being truly free an absolute nightmare) is a significant part of it. Free players exist to keep playing players happy by giving them people to talk to, play with, and be better than.

 

[Vua]

It should be mandatory and automatic for all forum posts. That way the forums could actually be constructive.

Give that line up already. I have no interest in filtering anything through AI. I get why someone who thinks every reply needs to be a wall of text would filter it through AI, but the rest of us don't need it for basic communication.

 

[Buddha5440]

It is amazingly hard to have a conversation with some people.

Oh well, you showed your hand. Hopefully Cordovan does the right thing.

So because you do not like what I say, I should be banned???I don't like what you say but I respect your right to say it. You seem to want to silence me.

 

[Buddha5440]

The point of F2P games is to attract whales. Subscription games make less money because they take people that would be willling to spend thousands and only let them spend $15 or $20 a month. F2P games are full of people that are not paying anything, and those players have value because they make the game more popular and attract whales as a result.

DDO's revenue went up 5-fold when they went free to play. It is far, far better to keep someone around that never pay a penny than to squeeze them out and drop the size of your playerbase because you were trying to extract $5 from them that they were never willing to pay. There is a reason DDO has such a tiny playerbase and the absolute insistence that everyone pay something (by making being truly free an absolute nightmare) is a significant part of it. Free players exist to keep playing players happy by giving them people to talk to, play with, and be better than.

Yet there are plenty of people who play this game completely for free. I love how you talk for people that you do not know.

 

[Vua]

So because you do not like what I say, I should be banned???I don't like what you say but I respect your right to say it. You seem to want to silence me.

He doesn't want to silence you, he wants to assimilate you into his all AI all the time scheme. I wonder if we'd get the laugh reaction back.

 

[The Narc2]

That's fine, I'm not offended my friend. I'll be the first to admit that cost:enjoyment is a stupid qualitative remark but it's true for me at least, maybe it's delusional thinking like you said lol!

Not sure why better marketing is considered a bad thing though? I've never once seen an ad on keywords nor AdWords on any other MMO or video game's wiki or website. I've seen plenty of Raid Shadow Legends and WoW crap on the side bars of Fallout 4 wiki or gaming "journalist" websites - getting more eye's on DDO cannot hurt.

Take for instance the immense bag-fumbling to get folks from Stranger Things interested in the game. I'm sure the Venn diagram of people who watch ST on Netflix and people who game has a decently meaty cross-section, they come out with Vecna and now Demogorgon related content 3 times over the last 5 years, from a product marketing perspective targeting those folks to even come in with F2P accounts is an easy win.

Agreed good marketing opportunites have been missed for sure, like every hardcore server(not the new weaksauce, carried by twinked vet cheesycore), or even when the Dungeons and Dragons movie came out would have been an excellent time to market.

But remember one thing marketing cost money(something SSG tries not to spend, eg. customer service) and you need to understand the point of the OP post in this thread, why does the xp go up for an 8th life when there are so many lives. When they finally changed it from 3 lives they should have just got rid of it altogether as in fact it inhibits players from joining the game. Both marketing and the right decision on past lives were not made/done because of greed.

Giving away past lives that paying whales, earned one way or another would only aggravate the whales and defibiitely at this point the game cant take that stress point. I am deducing that whale contribution to the game is likely over 90% of the revenue the game earns, I would consider your $2000 dollars a year a whale sized contribution, of course maybe I am delusional thinking that is whale sized.

 

[Buddha5440]

He doesn't want to silence you, he wants to assimilate you into his all AI all the time scheme. I wonder if we'd get the laugh reaction back.

I miss the laugh emoji.

 

[Vua]

I miss the laugh emoji.

Maybe we can get AI's take on it through the Master of Reactions next post?

 

[The Narc2]

It is amazingly hard to have a conversation with some people.

Oh well, you showed your hand. Hopefully Cordovan does the right thing.

I agree 100% and the dont need to silence him as he suggests, its just his approach is so inappropriate and not a proper form of argumentative debating.

to be clear what I mean;

you shouldnt be asking if someone ”off their meds” when posting, its a direct insult, and then you most certainly not be bragging two posts later about how ”amazingly easy it is to irritate people” to flame/troll.

I second your intonations in the post I quoted.


P.S. And normally I dont agree with you on anything, but this is definitely a “Timeout” Timmeh Moment!!

 

[Tumideon]

Agreed good marketing opportunites have been missed for sure, like every hardcore server(not the new weaksauce, carried by twinked vet cheesycore), or even when the Dungeons and Dragons movie came out would have been an excellent time to market.

But remember one thing marketing cost money(something SSG tries not to spend, eg. customer service) and you need to understand the point of the OP post in this thread, why does the xp go up for an 8th life when there are so many lives. When they finally changed it from 3 lives they should have just got rid of it altogether as in fact it inhibits players from joining the game. Both marketing and the right decision on past lives were not made/done because of greed.

Giving away past lives that paying whales, earned one way or another would only aggravate the whales and defibiitely at this point the game cant take that stress point. I am deducing that whale contribution to the game is likely over 90% of the revenue the game earns, I would consider your $2000 dollars a year a whale sized contribution, of course maybe I am delusional thinking that is whale sized.

Dang, yeah good point. Forgot about the DnD movie, BG3 as well, and a bunch of other things I'm sure.

This thread has certainly got derailed, but OP is right on that, the increased XP per life is the same stupid penalty that we used to have with death negative experience putting us in the black. Nothing like wiping thrice in Wiz King when the Sands Module (4?) came out and carrying a whole level's worth of negative experience.

I've been (lazily) looking for the Swedish holding corp's balance sheet to try to figure out what DDO makes/loses - internet keywords cannot be too expensive to bid on, I work in the defense sector and even our marketing doesn't breaching 5K/month. I'm sure there are whales spending AT LEAST that in a single month on AS and XP pots for their multi-boxes.

And yeah, all things are relative I suppose. 2K is definitely a lot, but no where near as much as I spend on other crap I really don't need for hobbies that I cannot do except for a few times a year during Hat Creek or Mammoth, I saw a stream where a dude rolled dice until he hit level 10 or something like that, had to have been at least a couple grand in DDO points for all of that AS.