Ah, a lot of thoughts here. Let me try to take this piece by piece, while also offering some additional background here that may help clarify my intents.
One of the personal development philosophies I've held to over the years is a sentence: "Play with an open hand." I've long believed that great development is always a collaboration and the best way to collaborate is to be open about what's going on and why. That way everyone is making decisions based on the same information, rather than making decisions based on guesswork or personal backgrounds.
It's also helpful for anyone who wants to get into development themselves, because I know a lot of us always want to make games in addition to play them. That's especially true here, as I'm sure many of us do tabletop roleplaying. That means there's Game Masters in these parts. Game Masters sometimes have to make design decisions for their own groups and campaigns. Talking about development helps everyone understand it better, because otherwise it's a black box back here.
With that in mind, I should explain my role on the team: It's Product Management. That's a fancy way of saying that yes, I am the store lady. Pricing, sales, and marketing are within my role's area of responsibility, sure, but my role does not end there. I'm not just "the store lady."
My role also spills over into "the experience of using & playing the product that's being made." It's also my responsibility to help the team format how you experience the whole game from top to bottom. To understand that, I spend a lot of time analyzing the psychology of play at large as well as reviewing the play data from both LOTRO and DDO. I did three main things in college: learned how to be a psychological researcher, made alternate reality games for fun on the internet, and played a lot of MMOs. Only one of them was the reason I was in college in the first place, lol.
But, I made alternate reality games because they folded together my three core passions as an artist: roleplaying & acting, illusion design, and mass shared storytelling. I don't think a lot of people always realize that the design of stage illusions actually has a lot of cross-over with game development. Both are practices of creating experiences for others to immerse themselves in and both sometimes rely on the same core tools to achieve that goal.
I'm also not the only magician to express that sentiment or have that interest. I've briefly crossed paths before with another illusion designer who's work I respect - Curtis Hickman. He also likes games for some weird reason. Couldn't have the foggiest idea why. <she says loudly while waiting for someone to recognize Curtis's last name and go "Wait a minute...">
But that's how my background informs my approach to my job. I don't always come at things because of business reasons, or marketing reasons, or even genre reasons; I sometimes come at them from the direction of experience design.
So why pick TV as an inspiration?
I think that may be where some of us are looking in different directions. I hear all of you on TV being a dumb idea and perhaps not the best fit for the game, but why is it dumb? Is it dumb because of the type of storytelling they do, and we don't feel as though that would fit here? Is it dumb because you'd rather play everything on your own schedule, like getting a whole season from Netflix? I know I saw that latter comparison being made a few times, and it's definitely a fair one. Convenience matters. Either way, it's important to me to know why something is dumb, which is why I'm asking.
But the reason TV was the inspiration was not for the above reasons. The reason I had my eye on was the period of storytelling. Typical, long format tabletop games meet weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. TV shows do weekly storytelling. That's the connection: How do you keep it interesting and engaging on a recurring cadence? How should it potentially be split up? What feels both fair and fun? Can quests/dungeons even do that in DDO? I'm actually bringing it back to how the MMO can best represent the tabletop experience while still taking advantages of abilities we have in our medium.
So, sorry to throw any water on dreams of Guest GMs Chandler & Joey. This isn't about the hype of prestige television or something like that, it's well more boring but still important questions to ask from time to time.
What about the prices? Are they going up?
The other part of this is seeing if this feels better for people to buy into, because it's lower price point and it breaks up the cost of the adventure pack. The individual prices of each quest are the cost of the pack divided up. If you buy the "bundle" of them up front, then there's a 10% discount, so the "pack version" is a lower price while the individual quests are at the normal pack price.
Separating the dungeons also means separating the guest passes, so each of these quests can also operate on a guest pass that just goes into one, but there is also a guest pass for the full pack, like normal. And, of course, VIPs still get access to these quests as they normally do, there's no change there.
So what about the name?
We discussed the feedback from this thread this week and we're landing on a new name: Quest Bundle. We don't want to cause confusion with Adventure Packs, but we also don't want this to be understood as a "connected series of quests." The overall theme of the Tavern Tales Quest Bundle is that they are separate one-off stories that could be told in a tavern.
We're also going to be making it very clear in the description of the bundle that each of these quests can be purchased separately and purchasing the bundle is pre-purchasing access. When all of the quests are out, the pre-order text will go away and the group will be called a "Quest Bundle." At that point, it will function exactly as an adventure pack, except it has the 10% discount for buying the bundle together.
But what about THE LOOT?
Sadly I'm store lady and not loot lady. The loot rates are outside of my sphere of work so I can't provide answers there. The best I can say is that each of the dungeons is designed to stand alone, so each does have separate loot. I did see that question got asked, so I wanted to at least answer that.
Will the store filter out the quests? How will the store display them?
Yeah, the store will be set to filter offers based on what you own, so if you buy the Quest Bundle then the individual purchases will be filtered out. You can always bring them back by using the filter toggle in the upper-right hand of the store.
To also keep things tidy, the quests will be available in a separate category, together. That way when you look at the category, you see all of the options along with a quick explanation of how it works. They will also share search tags, so searching for the wider pack will also return the individual quests in search results, and vice-versa. We want to set it up so the filters don't keep things too separate, but there will be at least one area where this will happen: the quest pack page. As the quests are at different levels, yeah, they will be split up there.
