Is Reaper Mode going to kill the Game?

[Silverfox]

Keep in mind, the article regarding Whales is specifically referring to mobile gaming (Candy Crush, et al.). While it may translate to computer MMOs, it also may not.

2% 5% 10% 20% it doesn't matter the same principle applies to DDO and any business for that matter.

I used to play with a guy that had no problem at all buying stacks of Otto boxes every time they are released in excess of 30 at a time that is $1k in a single transaction what 3 to 6 times a year? He also purchases stacks of Astral shards the same way stacks and stacks of 2k shards, I could go on and on about his purchases. It was sickening to me but hey with a $20 million dollar a year bottom line anyone can do the math and quickly see who any business is going to cater to. The magic of this is there are less players to support and therefore less people they need to listen to.

If the player base is 50k players and 5k of them are ' whales ' giving the company 80% of the $20 million in revenue that SSG brings down yearly that would mean the average whale in this game spends less than 4k a year. This is just a bunch of numbers but it applies to DDO just like any other business.

There are hundreds of articles and videos to support this just google the 80/20 rule of business.

This is from a 2020 article about EG7 and Daybreak SSG whatever you want to call it.

https://massivelyop.com/2020/12/02/everything-we-just-learned-about-daybreak-thanks-to-eg7/

Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online are no slouches either. In the middle of the pack for players and revenue are the Standing Stone titles. In fact, by subs alone, LOTRO’s near the top of Daybreak’s pile, and by monthly active players, it’s the studio’s third-biggest playerbase, with 108,000 monthly actives, 41,000 of whom subscribe for annual bookings of almost $10M. DDO is smaller, with 46,000 MAUs, half of whom sub for nearly $7M bookings in the last year.

DDO could’ve been a lot more than it ended up to be. I’m glad to see it’s at least keeping up with what I consider to be the lowest of still-alive low bars (EQ2).


Barely 1/8th of PS2’s members sub? Yikes. It has more than four times the users of DDO and makes 1m more a year?

https://massivelyop.com/2023/05/18/eg7-q1-2023-eg7-pulled-in-a-record-54m-last-quarter-and-daybreak-is-a-huge-chunk-of-it/

 

[Oliphant]

We have hardcore so a few people can still find a challenge because they personally so gud? The overwhelming reason we really have hardcore is it is free of the power creep. People will pay for a flatter version of DDO. We need reaper 10 for the power creep. I like reaper, just think the power spread in the game is ridiculous and onboarding is the absolute worst part about DDO. Heroic R1 mostly not the issue.

 

[cocopufff]

The bigger issue is long-term power creep that comes in the form of huge amounts of content to buy/grind for gear sets and insane amount of grind in the form of Reaper EXP / past lives.
The game wants to create a sense of progression so it makes an insanely long treadmill, but then because it's so long, new players face a huge gap and end up feeling useless in groups with experienced ones who, not only have better builds/skills, but have literally just way more raw power from Reaper EXP + past lives + gear.
But I get the feeling if the game gave more catchup mechanics to new players. players who grinded all that out the hard way would rebel. And the devs are afraid to take away some of the monetization barriers because the game already isn't the most profitable thing in the world.

 

[Aragadi]

While your experience has been significantly different than mine and many of the players I play with I fully understand your position. I hadn't spent money or played the game in years before reaper came out. Initially I had no use for reaper but once I began playing reaper there was no going back. I paid to transfer my characters over 10 all of which have many past lives to a new server just so I could find a guild that runs higher reaper raids.

When 2% of players generate a majority of a game’s revenue, which is why game developers and marketers are eager to catch these whales. Things are likely to remain the same.

Ying posted this

https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/is-reaper-mode-going-to-kill-the-game.1952/page-6#post-21569

Whales are 2% of players but account for nearly 50% of revenue.

Again this is anecdotal. I have bought ottos boxes, collectors editions of expansions, bonus points bundles, paid VIP, etc... When MOTU came out I bought the highest tier of the expansion and the highest tier of the bonus point bundle that you could purchase with it. At one point I was spending something like $50 a week on sp potions alone just to play a character the way I wanted to play it. I used to buy basically everything I WANTED from this game. That is until I fell out of love with it.

The only expansion I have purchased since Reaper came out was the base edition of Isle of Dread. I have subbed for one month at a time for several hardcore seasons, but considering I delete the characters as soon as I transfer over anything I care about to my home server, I never put any other resources into those endeavors.

It may well be that more people spent more money on Reaper in the short term. I don't have enough information to make a judgment call on it, but I don't think you do either. I know very wealthy players who no longer spend money on the game because they don't play it anymore.

I don't believe we have enough data to determine how much money Reaper earned vs how much it lost in the long run. I do know this though, most companies don't sell highly valued assets while they are raking in the $$$. Reaper was introduced in 2017, DDO was sold what 3 years later?

 

[Mand O'Lin]

2% 5% 10% 20% it doesn't matter the same principle applies to DDO and any business for that matter.

I used to play with a guy that had no problem at all buying stacks of Otto boxes every time they are released in excess of 30 at a time that is $1k in a single transaction what 3 to 6 times a year? He also purchases stacks of Astral shards the same way stacks and stacks of 2k shards, I could go on and on about his purchases. It was sickening to me but hey with a $20 million dollar a year bottom line anyone can do the math and quickly see who any business is going to cater to. The magic of this is there are less players to support and therefore less people they need to listen to.

If the player base is 50k players and 5k of them are ' whales ' giving the company 80% of the $20 million in revenue that SSG brings down yearly that would mean the average whale in this game spends less than 4k a year. This is just a bunch of numbers but it applies to DDO just like any other business.

There are hundreds of articles and videos to support this just google the 80/20 rule of business.

This is from a 2020 article about EG7 and Daybreak SSG whatever you want to call it.

https://massivelyop.com/2020/12/02/everything-we-just-learned-about-daybreak-thanks-to-eg7/

Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online are no slouches either. In the middle of the pack for players and revenue are the Standing Stone titles. In fact, by subs alone, LOTRO’s near the top of Daybreak’s pile, and by monthly active players, it’s the studio’s third-biggest playerbase, with 108,000 monthly actives, 41,000 of whom subscribe for annual bookings of almost $10M. DDO is smaller, with 46,000 MAUs, half of whom sub for nearly $7M bookings in the last year.

DDO could’ve been a lot more than it ended up to be. I’m glad to see it’s at least keeping up with what I consider to be the lowest of still-alive low bars (EQ2).


Barely 1/8th of PS2’s members sub? Yikes. It has more than four times the users of DDO and makes 1m more a year?

https://massivelyop.com/2023/05/18/eg7-q1-2023-eg7-pulled-in-a-record-54m-last-quarter-and-daybreak-is-a-huge-chunk-of-it/

Well done video!

The 80/20 rule does not apply to all businesses, but I can certainly see how it applies to most.

 

[Oliphant]

The whales will swim away too if you let 80% of the customers go.

 

[Br4d]

Along about 2015 I was spending $800-$1000 a year on DDO. This was because I wanted to have several characters as 36 point endgame ready toons. I wanted a tank, a healer and a ranged DPS capable of playing at productive endgame levels. My spending wasn't likely to continue forever at this level but it had done so for 2013-2015 as I ramped up multiple characters.

Then something abruptly changed. I think it was the raise of the level cap to 30 from 28 but it might also have been something else I have forgotten over the years. I just stopped leveling anybody but my main and my spending went through the floor. I'm going to guess that I have spent something like $1000, maybe $1500 tops on DDO since 2015.

I do not know what DDO's revenue stream has looked like over the years since 2015 but there is probably $5K or more that I would have spent that is not included in that stream.

 

[Ratman]

Reaper mode has got to be the worst idea ever for introducing new players to DDO. It is easier than Casual mode for the vast majority of reaper point farmers, many of whom have obviously piked along for someone else's reaper zerg for the 1st 10 reaper points and have no core play skills or experience in many dungeons. It makes traps inconsequential, it encourages people to not back each other up, and it often leaves new players completely abandoned by whoever put up the LFM.

Should it really award Elite Favor given how much easier it is than actual Elite? Given how many "bugs"(intentional nerfs to core class features) are still to be addressed such as non functional Pets/Summons and non functioning Enhancement Trees I sense reaper mode is Laudanum for a particularly uncreative approach to multi-gaming and inherently destructive to proper grouping.

Reaper mode should be an XP mode assigning NO ELITE favor, unlocked by a previous Elite playthrough of a dungeon on that life OR only unlocked on a 1st run by a separate Monthly Premium Subscription($10-$25) that includes discounts or bundles on XP items such as Pots, XP/Destiny/Fate tomes and significant (300-500%) bonus reaper XP for the 1st 10 reaper points. VIP Bundles could include 1 to 4 months of Reaper Subscriptions. It most certainly should NOT be an included feature of VIP nor should people be earning Free DDO points for such an easy mode of play. It would make a lot more sense to charge for what is obviously an exploited feature to gain easy xp than to paywall so much content under level 15.

Proper Elite Grouping would be a welcome improvement to the current state of the game

Well I respect that there are concerns over new players and even gameplay, but I’ve worked for near 9 years to get what I have in Reaper which isn’t even close to max, and it is not a “casual cakewalk.” Yes, it gets easier because you’ve worked for and been rewarded for your many, many (many!!) hours of grinding, TR’s etc… but you can’t just breeze through r10 because of RXP. You die easily. Very easily.., in high reaper. Tactics are important and that takes time to learn. A full party is always going to be more capable than a soloer, and we shouldn’t dismiss how much effort has gone into getting to that level of gameplay by stripping the most dedicated players of accomplishment.

 

[PraetorPlato]

Without reaper, I think there's a very different issue: there's maybe 3 raids (skellies, LOB, thth) in the game that are a real challenge for a party full of well-geared first life characters on elite. I don't think there's any quests. Removing reaper would require completely overhauling the game by nerfing players into the ground, which eems counterproductive

 

[Thulsadoom]

Reaper mode has been around for what, 4 years? 5 years, maybe?

The game hasn't died yet.

Longer than five

 

[Oliphant]

Longer than five

I've seen so many people leave DDO during the time I've seen so many sarcastically say "game no more Doomed(TM) than yesterday". The game has been doomed for many many people actually. They don't even have a mentality that servers should handle more than a few hundred people at this point, like its outside the overton window. Getting rid of reaper at this point would just make it worse but its sad they'd rather peddle convenience block overrides and boxes rather than have a robust server and a strategy to gain new players.

 

[DDO Gaming]

Maybe some people are still here because of Reaper, maybe. At the very least you I suppose. The status of my guild however tells a different story. At one point we had over 50 active members logging on every single day. Not the biggest guild I know, but still, that's 50 people. Today there are
2...
two...
TWO...
active players left in our guild. There are currently 5 accounts that have been logged in in the last 6 months. Mine, my second account, our guild account, One of my friends who still plays, and the guild leader who logs in once a week to keep leadership status of the guild. Our numbers didn't start significantly dropping until reaper was introduced to the game. You have your anecdotal evidence, others have their own.

Or maybe you don't know how to run a guild. Hard truths can sometimes be difficult to face. Reaper should encourage GROUP-BUILDING (the precise reason for creating guildships)

 

[DDO Gaming]

I've seen so many people leave DDO during the time I've seen so many sarcastically say "game no more Doomed(TM) than yesterday". The game has been doomed for many many people actually. They don't even have a mentality that servers should handle more than a few hundred people at this point, like its outside the overton window. Getting rid of reaper at this point would just make it worse but its sad they'd rather peddle convenience block overrides and boxes rather than have a robust server and a strategy to gain new players.

player numbers have been reasonably consistent (peaking during covid2020). ddoaudit.com/trends is your friend

 

[Mand O'Lin]

Or maybe you don't know how to run a guild. Hard truths can sometimes be difficult to face. Reaper should encourage GROUP-BUILDING (the precise reason for creating guildships)

I created my guild to have ready access to guild buffs without being forced to deal with the politics of a traditional guild.

 

[Kathwynn]

DOOM! SMH DDO is going to be here for a long time still. I have no doubt about that.

 

[Oliphant]

player numbers have been reasonably consistent (peaking during covid2020). ddoaudit.com/trends is your friend

Don't want to be curmudgeon but my pet peeve is a great tool that could easily empower me but intentionally or just haphazardly omits the easy features that would actually make it work. It only goes back to 2020? Are the missing they data or just not making it available? The Permanent Server (green line) is obviously trending down and this is just recent history. Of all times, the last few years are the only times I've even seen a recruitment strategy in play (the awesome free DDO quest codes). The times before that are times where I remember the years and years of "game no more Doomed(TM) than yesterday" talk while hordes and hordes of people left.

 

[Silverfox]

Don't want to be curmudgeon but my pet peeve is a great tool that could easily empower me but intentionally or just haphazardly omits the easy features that would actually make it work. It only goes back to 2020? Are the missing they data or just not making it available? The Permanent Server (green line) is obviously trending down and this is just recent history. Of all times, the last few years are the only times I've even seen a recruitment strategy in play (the awesome free DDO quest codes). The times before that are times where I remember the years and years of "game no more Doomed(TM) than yesterday" talk while hordes and hordes of people left.

Hard to have data before this tool was developed.

https://forums-old.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/518856-DDO-Audit?highlight=

 

[Memnir]

Is Reaper Mode going to kill the Game?​

No.

 

[Liy]

You can't respond because you don't have an argument based on experience that addresses what new or returning players experience. What is false about what I have experienced the last 5 weeks as a returning player who started 2 days before launch? With increased SP, Hit Points, Saving throws, damage dealing and free spell points how is R1 a challenging experience for a seasoned Reaper leveled player? What experience do you have with being a new or returning player in the current R1 grouping environment?

This game IS dying. Look at the top posts in the recently archived OLD forum. Issues such as No Room for Cosmetics, let alone functioning items, for people with Maxed storage and banking slots is turning many established players off of purchasing the premium $140 packs with all the frills. Who is supposed to take their place? Why does the game even have a free to play mode to begin with? All it does is let frustrated long term players open up 5 accounts for the 15 free 80 slots of storage. f2p accounts should be limited to 1 per player. Dungeon R1 is challenging to NO ONE that plays it with sufficient reaper points and yet awards free favor and ddo points. This is a problem for the long term viability of the game as there is very little appropriate grouping for new or returning players thus nothing to motivate them to pay actual cash for what is being offered.

I took a 5 year break from the game and only returned last year. Let me tell you, the play difference between elite and Reaper is monumental to begin with and yes, new players trying to do reaper runs would be miserable. If you think anyone thinks differently you are insane. Your initial post completely contradicts itself in saying that reaper is so hard and then immediately turning around and saying that elite is harder than reaper - perhaps that is why rabidfox had no response to your post.
The first month I was back to the game, I spent 90% of my time basically relearning all the basic gameplay mechanics and learning new changes. I had 0 reaper points and virtually 0 past lives because I never did the whole TR thing when I played years ago. After getting used to the differences in the gameplay from one difficultly to another, I love reaper dungeons. I think you are getting a little too worked up over this whole dungeon difficulty. If you don't like it, don't play it. Stick to what makes you happy and what you enjoy. If you find yourself on a server that has 90% reaper only LFM's - find yourself a different server.

 

[Aragadi]

Or maybe you don't know how to run a guild. Hard truths can sometimes be difficult to face. Reaper should encourage GROUP-BUILDING (the precise reason for creating guildships)

I'm not the owner of the guild, as stated in the post you quoted, where I mention that the guild leader only logs in once a week to keep leadership. but either way, the guild was successful from launch until after Reaper came out. The core of the guild was 10-12 people all from a small college town where we met and played tabletop together and invited people we met along the way in our DDO journeys. Several of us were in the same raiding guild in EverQuest (one of which was the guild leader there) before we came to DDO. I would say the 20ish years of being involved in organized guild activities speaks more to our competence than the lack of interest we had in Reaper. You are entitled to your opinion though.

Reaper only encourages group building if people actually want to do it. some do, but most of the people I played this game with didn't. I a willing to stomach it just to continue playing the game, but I don't like it. I am certainly not going to go out of my way to try to convince people to partake in it. If running a guild in Reaper era DDO means convincing people that don't want to deal with it that they should, well, you are very right, I would make a terrible guild leader, because I am just not going to do that. Before Reaper, we were very successful at organizing our guild raids and keeping everyone happy and involved.

I would say I am a bit of an outlier case of players playing this game. I absolutely despise Reaper. That being said, I have close to 100 Reaper points. I know that is not really a lot compared to the people that actually like the mode, but I was willing enough to keep playing unlike many of the people that were in my guild. That being said, I have NEVER joined an R10 PUG, put up an LFM for a reaper quest, or farmed reaper points. My Reaper xp came from TRing on R1, and farming quests that had items I wanted to wear. My friends for the most part think I am crazy for continuing to invest time in the game.