Weaponalpha
Well-known member
By making MORE of them! Need many more races, classes, archetypes... Need enough races to fill out racial tree for free!
What could be done to make "Past Lives" more interesting?
- Thread starter Drachmor
- Start date
Griglok (Karatemack)
Leader- The Casual Obsession (Khyber)
There is nothing magical about the number 3. Consolidate all of the current PL benefits to a single PL feat. You run every race/class/iconic/destiny in the game once and then that character has gained all the PLs they can gain... until the next class/race/iconic/destiny comes out anyway.
eartheyes
outerspacetruth
as someone that has every past life on my main toon(and spent a lot of time earning these, under the guise that this would be rewarded with small, incremental, permanent buffs) this would be pretty upsetting. i would imagine many long time players would be extremely displeased and the game would probably lose a substantial amount of the actual people that play and sustain the it.
JustHavingFunBro
Well-known member
The TR system creates no more lag than the game remembering what you have in your inventory or what you spent your APs/feats, etc on.
Weaponalpha
Well-known member
The Holy Trinity would beg to differ... There should be no cap for completionist. 4x, 5x, 6x... each stacking with ever more power! Every multiple of 3 your toon gets even bigger! There will be Titans among us!
Elminster
Sage of Shadowdale
Imagine if SSG, instead of blaming every little mechanic in the game for the lag, buys another server solely dedicated to DDO.
Imagine how much that would prfoundly decrease lag.
And if SSG points to the ole' "spaghetti code" excuse, agine modern MMO's with x10,000,000 complexity running flawlessly.
This is probably not right.
When DDO was developed the DB's were created to contain the information that a character was composed of. The original devs probably left space in the arrays for whatever the planned level cap was at the time the game was first engineered. They certainly did not leave a lot of extra space in the arrays for various additions that were not part of the plan, like extended enhancements, epic destinies, reaper points, etc.
Since then each systemic addition to the characters was likely layered on as a supplementary DB that was tagged to the character and populated as needed. The overall footprint of a 2024 character is likely several times larger than the original DB's that defined a character. The storage space of each character has likely been redefined several times as arrays were expanded and in some cases supplemented. There's a reason that items in storage do not lose their level characteristic in the first 120 or so spaces of storage but tend to do so after that limit.
Basically every addition to the game system has likely increased the transactional overhead each character creates as they move around the world, interact with other characters and login and out.
erethizon1
Well-known member
Yes, at a minimum I want there to be enough races that someone with a 2 racial AP tome could fill up whatever racial tree requires the least amount of AP.
erethizon1
Well-known member
Unfortunately, then there would not be enough to do. Running out of past lives means no reason to play the game (for me anyway).
I do agree with your point about there being nothing special about 3. I'd much prefer that each past life be able to be acquired 5 times.
DreamingReality
Active member
So, returning to the OP topic, I started with PnP, so I actually have a DDO notebook with everything I have done and want to do in it.
Griglok (Karatemack)
Leader- The Casual Obsession (Khyber)
How many alts do you have with all of the PLs? Couldn't you make another alt instead of quit the game?
Also, there are still plenty of reasons to TR your main (even once it has all the PLs). Trying new builds is fun. Are you at max RXP? If not, then that's another great reason to TR (reset 1st time bonuses). We get new classes/archetypes/races every year/other year. New reasons to TR again!
Svirfneblin
Well-known member
Jack, Chrissy and Janet disagree.
Blunt Hackett
Well-known member
I remember when old Cannith crafting and old enhancements would very obviously bog down the game with lag. Those were fixed by basically renovating the systems entirely so they are what they are today (minus some other changes).
How exactly would you do this with past lives in a way that's fair to those who have them, and is this really a thing in the first place? Those two examples had obvious lag. If anything feels like those systems felt, it is the Reincarnation Cache. I admittedly can't say I know whether or not having every PL feat creates a similar experience. What I do know is there are far more characters maxing out their reincarnation caches than there are characters with loads of past life feats.
I'm not sure what the solution to that would be though. If there were a revision of the TR cache, it seems it would be prone to a CS nightmare if it weren't perfect when it went live.
How exactly would you do this with past lives in a way that's fair to those who have them, and is this really a thing in the first place? Those two examples had obvious lag. If anything feels like those systems felt, it is the Reincarnation Cache. I admittedly can't say I know whether or not having every PL feat creates a similar experience. What I do know is there are far more characters maxing out their reincarnation caches than there are characters with loads of past life feats.
I'm not sure what the solution to that would be though. If there were a revision of the TR cache, it seems it would be prone to a CS nightmare if it weren't perfect when it went live.
erethizon1
Well-known member
I have zero alts. I am only one person in real life and only one person in video games. I have no interest in playing alts in any game which is why I don't like games where it is easy to cap a character (WoW ruined MMO's in my opinion, by making leveling way too easy). The "end game" is not when you get to the level cap. The level cap is the end of the game where you leave and never return.
This game is well done when it comes to past lives. You can rush through them and be capped if that is what you like, or you can take your time each life running every quest and make sure you never quite finish. In my case I am on my 56th time through the game, have over 100 past lives, 130 reaper points, and make sure to get at least 6800 favor even if all I am doing is getting a single racial past life. Sure, I could TR at level 20 with 3000 or less favor, but instead I end up doing a racial TR at level 32 because I stuck around to play all the quests even though I have no epic past lives left to get.
Would I leave DDO if they removed past lives? Of course I would. I'm not playing DDO simply because it is D&D. I am playing it because it is D&D with nearly infinite character progression (as long as I don't move to fast). I'm happy every time they add more lives because getting all of them was never the goal. The goal is to continue to progress my character and so having more options for how to do that is always appreciated.
Mand O'Lin
Singer of Songs Drinker of Drinks
Griglok (Karatemack)
Leader- The Casual Obsession (Khyber)
The way you enjoy DDO is valid, and I think it's important for each of us to acknowledge that others enjoy DDO differently than we do. Given that some like endless grind and some would love it if alt-play were more viable and others still simply wish there were less PL grind; I think it's reasonable to look for a happy balance somewhere. The suggestion to reduce all PL passives to a single feat still leaves a lot of grind in DDO in terms of TR grind (there are still plenty of other grinds in the game as well) and I believe that if this change were implemented that more players would look forward to future grinds that get added to the game in the form of new classes/races/archetypes or even a legendary tr system.
You could prove me wrong, but I suspect we're going to have to agree to disagree about whether or not there is too much grind and whether or not anything should be done about it.
Made my morning as I sip my coffee. Thanks!
Sanjo-do-gara
Member
mayby its like with SSD drive, u get 7000mb/s or moar transferr...but if i do copy one folder with per thousand small file inside....this 7000mb/s is drop do some kilobyte per sec, copy folder with textures ~50 mb for Dolphin get half hour....this is **** rly