Please provide some more baseline power for new toons, catch up mechanic.

[Oliphant]

The biggest design problem in DDO the last few years imo is balancing the deep progression systems that are fun and keep us all invested against the accumulating debt of power spread between players and the issues that can cause with new players.

Our biggest design problem outside of technical is actually an accumulated wealth of DDO! There has been so much time for the vets to get awesome accumulation of power and knowledge, so many past lives and reaper tree points accumulated, that we could add some baseline power and upgrade this whole game so its instantly engaging and exciting for new players without much disturbance, a large denominator.

Immediately giving the new player an embodiment of cool and awesome abilities beyond anything you can do in real life is a classic recipe. The problem is immediately giving a player power is where do you go from there? Well, that's no sweat for DDO, with its rich history and deep past life options. We have a huge power spread to keep them interested!

The main objection to this idea for me would be "game is already too easy", but we have 10 reaper diffs and there are plenty of ideas for something like "Take it to R11". I think reaper is working well, except for the gatekeeping factor when some folks aren't even enjoying R1, the common leveling diff at this point.

The next objection to more baseline power I can relate to is desire for people to "progress naturally", with "how we progressed back in the day" as the model. My feeling in 2023 its unrealistic that people have the same experience as people starting in 2006 or 2011 or 2018 or whatever. To keep it simple, that experience should go faster nowadays. If people take 15 years to get to the point where people are now that took them 15 years... well that would take 15 years just to get where we are now. Sounds like empty word circle to say that but it actually is the crux of the analysis. People joining DDO nowadays should get mixing it up in all kinds of cool pockets that never existed for years when I started, but it should be a matter of months not a decade. Giving people some more baseline power will not only give them that constant boost, it will empower them to level faster, to have an easier time making progress.

The last potential objection is loss of revenue for giving away power. However, I think people have so much they can spend and they will spend on goodwill if there is still stuff to buy. With the ability to make a new alt with more power, with a boost to existing alts, I would definitely be more interested in investing time and money in more alt progression.

I personally like the idea of some free past lives each toon could pick, basically everyone gets some free past lives, and maybe make past lives be like filigrees we could unslot and pass around BtA. I guess for those two ideas to mix you'd have to make the free past lives "inherent" or something so not tradeable to avoid free BtA past lives you can pass around. I think strarting with past lives would really hook people into the idea of accumulating power with past lives and the power providing more access to R1 will get people into the RP progression concepts. Making people create a backstory, a history of prior lives, provides more investment in these characters. Vets that can fully progress their past lives with some free past lives left over, could somehow cash them in for something unique, like bundle of reaper fragments, unique cosmetics or something. Or you could even choose to burn your free past lives for cosmetics if you want to prove you're a true challenge warrior.

But it doesn't really matter how the devs do it, just something to help new characters feel more powerful and catch up would be nice.

Thank you for reading my scroll,
Consider the environment before you quote reply this entire post

 

[Titus Ovid]

Rather than eating other toons, I like the idea of turning the past lives into something removable and tradable like filigrees. I'd rather encourage options for alts, option to give some of my OP toons' power to less powerful toons. Toons eating toons seems to go in the other direction, deleting toons, fewer toons.

Mine is more a cleaning up and don't waste approach instead of shifting power.

I am just not fond of the concept that a powerful toon, that can farm things more easily can hand down that power to another toon that would never get it done that easily. It is yet another big advantage of high power toons over low power ones.

Cheers,
Titus.

 

[Oliphant]

Treating PLs like filigrees would give incentive to buss the power from higher power toons to lower power toons, flattening it out. They could just move them back but then they'd have to fund the game with kits. People can already buy Otto Boxes at the end of the day. Its too hard to spin up alts. I think if folks could balance out some power, they would spin up more alts.

 

[Cyran]

This would be my way of teaching new players about different gear effects and helping them get started with decent gear while also helping them learn about gearing.

Cannith Crafting actually allow you to make decent gear. All my leveling gear use to be Cannith Crafting. Now a days it fey/sharn with some Cannith Crafting thrown in but can still make decent gear with the crafting system. For various reason even through the devs made it possible for experience players to craft gear for new players with unbounds shards it not done that much mainly because helping new players grind fey for example is easier now a days.

What if they made a NPC that can craft unbound shard for players at the cost of the ingredients and give new players enough ingredients to craft enough gear for the lower levels. The NPC can also explain what the different effects do and make recommendations to players base on there class etc. Basically making a tutorial that does 3 things, teach about gear effects, Cannith crafting and the player get a decent gear set to get started with.

Obviously a lot of details would need to be worked out but that the general idea.

 

[Oliphant]

Mine is more a cleaning up and don't waste approach instead of shifting power.

I'd be happy if they did both, unlocked PLs like filigrees, and allowed toons to eat other toons... if they non-good aligned ?‍?

 

[Baconator]

The biggest design problem in DDO the last few years imo is balancing the deep progression systems that are fun and keep us all invested against the accumulating debt of power spread between players and the issues that can cause with new players.
warrior.

But it doesn't really matter how the devs do it, just something to help new characters feel more powerful and catch up would be nice.

Thank you for reading my scroll,
Consider the environment before you quote reply this entire post

NO

 

[Purr]

Could we maybe offer a +5 heart of wood for completion of an early saga, such as WW or something, once per account for low level toons of new players to respec?

 

[paddymaxson]

I'm of the mind that racial completionist (and all the other bonuses from obtaining it) should only take at most 2 lives of each race. One of each race if I'm being honest.

I'm only 5 lives from racial completionist and if I'm being totally bloody honest it's a crappy slog that when explained to a new player is enough to turn anyone off.

I think even if you're exceptionally used to DDO and have your quiver and many other leg-ups you're still looking at ~15 hours of play time to do each 1-20 (My current timing is 4 real life days as per life as I can't play DDO all day every day) It shouldn't take 800+ hours(or 200+ consecutive days of playing as much DDO as you can every day) before even doing any iconic, epic or additional heroic reincarnations to be done doing heroic past lives imo.

I've near done it, and many of those lives were MUCH slower. I would not begrudge new players attaining this with much less time put into it. I got so sick of doing it recently that I've given up again for a while.

Not to mention that if you are new and playing with your veteran friends prepare to have a miserable time getting 1shotted on reaper 1 skull while your friends blow through quests.

DDO is desperate for a catch up mechanic. I saw mention of binning reaper trees and having the highest "reaper level" in the party trickle down to the rest of the part which is a great idea, but it doesn't resolve the fact that even someone who has a 36 point build has 14 fewer AP, 38 fewer ability bonuses, considerably lower innate skills bonuses and all the other bonuses that each heroic PL gives.

In terms of power disparity, completionism was a mistake. I was satisfied with my fighter having 3 fighter past lives once, now I can only stomach DDO for long enough to take a chunk off the grind required to even consider endgame.

Honestly if you have the patience to have done triple completionist and then some then you have an iron will, but I seriously doubt any new player would!

Edit: and all of the above is before GEAR (the most useful of which is locked behind expansions, even for 1-20) and before epic levels, though getting a decent number of epic past lives is a relatively less awful time sink.

 

[Boondocks Mike]

The gap in power between ancient and new players is extreme and it is a problem.

I do not think artificially inflating new player power is actually a solution as it completely undermines how the game works.

 

[Oliphant]

I'm of the mind that racial completionist (and all the other bonuses from obtaining it) should only take at most 2 lives of each race. One of each race if I'm being honest.

Wish they would frontload the racial AP rewards.

 

[Oliphant]

The gap in power between ancient and new players is extreme and it is a problem.

I do not think artificially inflating new player power is actually a solution as it completely undermines how the game works.

Are there any solutions? Why does it completely undermine how the game works to get a little more power given all the difficulty modes and the headroom for them to progress?

 

[rabidfox]

You could hand someone a total completionist with 156 reaper points and they still wouldn't know how to build it nor gear it (nor what spells to uses what mobs/etc.) and they'll have a hard time. At the same time, you can toss people with extreme knowledge of the game on 1st lifers with RNG drops and they'll tear thru content and pull off impressive stuff. There's lots of gaps in this game and people often say "I need X past lives or Y reaper points and I'll be as good as the person I was with in a LFM" but the big gap likely wasn't X or Y, it's just the easiest assumption to make.

A big part of helping new players (that want to progress vs just having fun, if you just want fun only then do whatever you enjoy) is teaching them builds, gearing, quest mechanics, etc. etc. There's plenty of people who swear they've got "good gear" but it's very meh. They've come from other games where stacking works differently or where raid gear = better; while in DDO raid gear = potentially better if tetris allows but wearing all raid gear = likely very bad tetris.

 

[DBZ]

Baptism by fire they will learn fast

All it takes is practice

 

[Boondocks Mike]

Are there any solutions? Why does it completely undermine how the game works to get a little more power given all the difficulty modes and the headroom for them to progress?

If the point of this game is to blitz to the "end" and complete content at that point this game is objectively bad and has been dead and trash for a long time, perhaps always. Say what you will about WoW, but its endgame raiding experience puts this game to shame in spectacular fashion and is generally very good in its own right. There are very few raids in DDO that compete in quality and most of the player base avoids, cheeses, or has no incentive to run them.

If the point of the game is to experience a variety of environments and challenges while having a lot of small incentives to continue beyond the first time through, then this game is objectively valuable and deserves to continue to exist despite any flaws in the real world execution of that concept. I think this is actually the point of this game and people just lose sight of that because of the meta culture surrounding "completionism" which will be some peoples objective in every game they play even if it's not actually the point of the game itself. New players are not required to play elite, r1, r10. If the game itself and the community are sufficiently appealing they will stay regardless of "how far behind" they are.

What is the mechanical implementation of a catch up mechanic that increases new player power? On your first life your damage/healing output is multiplied by 1.5 and your health is multiplied by 1.5? So the second you TR for +1 to whatever you instantly become massively weaker and now feel lied to because you were fed false expectations consistently up to that point. First life characters would be even more popular for being parked raiding characters, especially on builds that focus on output rather than DCs. Why is that fair? Why is that good? How does that make the game better? Obviously this is on specific example of an implementation of your suggestion but I think the issues it highlights are fundamental to the idea itself, not a given method of implementation.



I agree that there is an issue that should probably be addressed regarding the absolutely massive power disparity between some players, but that would require a fundamental redesign/rebalance of accumulated power systems. An artificial "fix" is not a solution and is just more damaging.

 

[cocopufff]

DDO has painted itself into a corner.

When I last played, neither Racial, Iconic, nor epic past lives were a thing. Past life completionism was still a buff, but a manageable one. Nowhere near the massive monstrosity it is now.

In order to keep players hooked, they kept extending the treadmill longer and longer, but at this point, the rewards you get for it are kind of ridiculous.

But if they start removing rewards, the players who slogged through the grind will outrage. If they don't make the difference so stupidly stark, new players will see the grind, get discouraged, and leave.

The best thing they could do for the long-term health of the game is limit it in some way. Perhaps make it so you can only grab a certain amount of past-life feats at once (and maybe make them more powerful) so that having them all becomes more about completionism and build variety than strictly power. I also think that, hot take, the racial AP should be drastically easier to achieve--taking perhaps 5 past lives total to achieve rather than the whopping 42 it takes now.) But again, I think a lot of long-term players would justifiably feel slanted at that approach.

 

[Oliphant]

I'm not proposing extra power just for first life, they would have to have a mechanic where either everyone gets a constant boost or they give a boost to those that have less than a certain number of PLs or RPs, enough to hit that amount. Definitely not proposing that you lose the power when you reincarnate.

The feeling for a long time that DDO has painted itself into a corner with all the PLs and RPs is why this occurred to me. The bottom line: With great power spread eventually comes great head room, and we have arrived to that point. The issue is not so much catching people up significantly right away, its getting them out of molasses mode sooner so they mix it up with other players sooner.

People say people can learn the game and knowledge is key. What actually often happens is people become highly specialized for the newb-traps, become resident newbie experts and get full of ideas that actually slow them down accepting advice later.

 

[Phoenicis]

The feeling for a long time that DDO has painted itself into a corner with all the PLs and RPs is why this occurred to me. The bottom line: With great power spread eventually comes great head room, and we have arrived to that point. The issue is not so much catching people up significantly right away, its getting them out of molasses mode sooner so they mix it up with other players sooner.

I duo with my wife.

We run elite from start on first life characters every HC season.

I'm not sure how much more power you want to give new players. . .

 

[DBZ]

You are veterans and a duo not a new player

HC is just a server they all have the same starting point

 

[Oliphant]

I've stated previously several times the issue is not "environment too hard", its the power spread among players. I even stipulated I think any power given should not be provided to a new HC toon on HC, only when they transfer to live.

 

[Eltronin]

The gap in power between ancient and new players is extreme and it is a problem.

I do not think artificially inflating new player power is actually a solution as it completely undermines how the game works.

This is not a problem. DDO is not a PvP game New players start out with little to no power as it should be as they are brand new to the game. As they play and learn/aquire gear they improve. No reason to give new players more power. What needs to happen are brand new introductory quests (or its own server) where new players can make a toon and learn how to play. After experimenting, they can then more over to the live servers.