Not me, but the likes of Salias and others are now released from Turdbin's iron grip to give us some inside info.

Let it flow boys and girls.

http://lotrocommunity.com/forum/topic/3465-lotro-pvpersare-they-really-that-bad/?page=1

There you go. It's pretty good read and provides good insight why both Lotro and DDO got fucked.

Wipe wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 3:37pm:

http://lotrocommunity.com/forum/topic/3465-lotro-pvpersare-they-really-that-bad/?page=1 There you go. It's pretty good read and provides good insight why both Lotro and DDO got fucked.

"But this is a good point to mention that WB didn't acquire Turbine for the sake of LOTRO. They wanted Turbine's technical expertise in supporting online games. LOTRO itself was just a fringe benefit.

Thus WB crammed dozens of new staff into the Needham building while keeping LOTRO bare bones, disconnected Turbine's NetOps from Turbine (and christened it WB Net), and, when I came back, had LOTRO QA testing the Batman online shooter.

But in a sense WB's disinterest in LOTRO and sheer wealth has probably spared LOTRO from being shut down. They don't care enough to kill it where a smaller company might have by now."

"A cynic might suggest that the Paizs had flat lined DDO already and when Ascherons Call's concurrency numbers are beating DDO on a nightly basis, you can only go up from there.

LOTRO was certainly ailing when they made the call to go f2p. We all assumed it would happen eventually but not so soon. In March or thereabouts in '10 an email went out from Crowley stating that LOTRO's US subs were down to around 85k (the only time specific sub numbers were ever mentioned even in-house while I was there) and could we maybe ask our friends to try the game?"

",,,in my experience, the devs tended to pick and choose what suited them on the forums-not hard since everyone on there has a different opinion or gripe and to them it's absolutely the most important thing ever. Good example was PvMP stars.

Shortly after I got to Turbine Jen removed them from the UI. Being a star hugger I charged over and asked for an explanation.

Jen: 'Players complained about all the star hugging.'

Me: 'Who?'

Jen: 'On the forums...'

So I went and checked the PvMP forums and found a single thread, at the top of the page, complaining about them (the OP incidentally was a champ...not a class known for being able to show off stars).

I realized that she had gone to the forums fishing for some easy change she could make that could be said to be addressing 'player concerns'. And that wouldn't be the last time by a long shot that I, as an active and socially connected player, would be told by a dev who didn't play LOTRO themselves 'what players want'.

So...yeah whenever I hear Turbine claiming it changed this or that based on 'feed back', I tend to roll my eyes."

"... bad news was usually couched in disingenuous terms designed to save company face. Public appearances were a major thing with the company and we were very good at maintaining an image of continued success.

Even within the industry I found that most considered LOTRO a major success and had no hint that we were in trouble. But keeping up appearances became just ingrained, inside the walls and out.

Mersky in marketing was constantly sending out company wide emails highlighting the latest nice things Ten Ton Hammer had to say about us, this online award or that...even as we, the QA and Devs, knew very well we weren't putting out the best product we could have been."

"DDO

I can say that nobody on LOTRO, especially the older hands in QA, was surprised DDO was a lame duck. As for the DDO team...Turbine was surprisingly ptovincial; there was a sense of a real rivalry between the LOTRO and DDO teams, probably because of the slender resources we were all vying for.

LOTRO tended to view DDO as a flop that was wasting resources better spent on LOTRO. DDO felt they were held back by LOTRO hogging resources.

As an aside, the Turbine/Codemasters relationship was downright acidic. We couldn't stand their often confrontational attitude and they felt we were (to put it bluntly) Yanks douching up Tolkien's vision."

"DDO was a bomb."

" Now I'm not a money guy, I don't know any more about the account books at Turbine than you do at this point. But 105 million a year would suggest LOTRO has well over 500k players paying 15 a month on average. Where are they? Now I get that some players might be 'whales'.

At Meteor Games a big chunk of our monthly revenue came from rich kids-the sons of Kuwaiti oil barons and the like-who would drop thousands of dollars a month just on Island Paradise. But LOTRO would need a lot of rich Kuwaitis running around in Bree to generate that much revenue for a game that is planning server mergers (and has practically no players on many of these servers to merge anyway).

Were that figure even remotely accurate-and it isn't-WB's acquisition of Turbine was the deal of the century. Funny though about all those layoffs...contraction is rarely a sign of great success."

"t was always a little hazy to me (I should hit up some old Turbine hands on that one) but the gist of what I heard was that the DDO team felt that WOTC was at best disinterested in DDO and provided marginal assistance in the lead-up to development (I do distinctly remember the QA director commenting that 'they really wanted nothing to do with us').

Not permitting the Forgotten Realms setting for the game was seen as undercutting the game right out of the gate. Maybe there were legal reasons for that restriction? I don't know. But for an old-timey D&D player myself (meeting Zeb Cook on ESO was a starstruck nerd moment for me), the lack of an FR setting turned me off on DDO certainly.

Also, let me say that the actual lawsuit was with Atari, not WOTC, so that should be clarified. All of that kind of blended together to me as an outsider (as a LOTRO person)."

"Based on comments from friends at the company since RoR LOTRO has been under the gun for a long time. As I mentioned elsewhere I was told over a year ago that LOTRO would be lucky to see another twelve months [counting from March 2015]and yet it remains.

But at this point the LOTRO team has been so gutted that it is hard to see how any more cuts could be made short of just pulling the plug.

When they do finally kill it I wouldn't expect much in the way of a warning: nobody is going to drop money on micro transactions for a game slated to shut down in two or three months."

"I returned to LOTRO in the fall of 2011: the company I had been working for, Meteor, in LA, abruptly folded and I got call from my old lead saying they were planning big things for PvMP and would I come back to help? I was really nostalgic for Turbine after ZOS and Meteor so said, sure-it was a big pay cut from what I'd been making since leaving the first time but that was fine.

But I found that WB's corporate influence, just barely nascent in the summer of 2010, had permeated the place. Basically all of the old headaches were still there but all the magic-the sense of family and genuine warmth you felt in Westwood-were gone. For the money offered it just wasn't worth it; I managed about four months and then put in my resignation. "

That's some harsh criticism coming in.

But, then, all normal corporate politics/drama.

     "Q: Aylwen, you said earlier that Turbine were running 3 mmos with similar staff levels of companies that only run 1 mmo. How did they manage to do that? Do you think Turbine stretched themselves too thin and should've just focused on one game?

Absolutely we stretched ourselves thin (and as previously mentioned not just with the MMOs) and I often wondered what could have been achieved if we had focused all of our energies on a single game. Needless to say, which game that should have been depended on which game one was working on! But it was almost as if it never occurred to anyone that we really shouldn't have been able to do what we did.

Three MMOs, a console project, downloader that would let you start playing before the installation was complete, LOTRO China...from a small company in a building sandwiched between a car dealership and Frugal Fanny's discount clothing...make it so!

Whatever may be said for the quality of LOTRO's development team (mixed to say the least) and leadership (or lack thereof), Turbine was blessed with some incredible talent, particularly on the technical side of things. Our NetOps guys worked wonders and by the time WB came along they had encountered every problem you could possibly experience and developed strategies to deal with them. It was hard earned wisdom that paid dividends constantly.

Once again I have to say that while as a LOTROer it was incredibly frustrating to see the quality of LOTRO diminish in large measure because we didn't have enough of the right people at the controls, on bar Turbine was an incredible operation. Note how I always say 'we' in referring to Turbine: for a long time the words 'Turbine family' weren't just an HR slogan: they really meant something."

" If a carpenter pisses off another carpenter in North Carolina and then moves to California there's little chance that will come back to haunt him.

Not so much in the game industry. And there's a very strong culture of secrecy there that becomes ingrained, especially amongst the rank and file. Forget that you're making video games that are often as not derivative rehashes of twenty other games; this is serious business!

And forget that a year from now your game will probably be pushing up daisies in the GameStop budget bin anyway. This same culture extends to marketing and community relations: never tell the truth, never admit a mistake, silence criticism, contort the facts even if it means blatantly insulting the intelligence of your customers. Release bogus screenshots of your upcoming product, happily collect the pre-orders, release a buggy unfinished product, and then sell everything you didn't get done on time as 'DLC'. But now I'm digressing a bit!

The take-it-as-you-can-get-it nature of the industry means that frequently people aren't necessarily working on the games they would ideally want to. "

"Q: You've mentioned lotro china a few times. Why was it canceled? And how different was it going to be from the western lotro?

Ah LOTRO China aka perrma-beta. They-CDC-were awful to deal with. Basically they didn't have to pay us as long as the game remained in beta. And so-surprise, surprise-every six months or so they'd come up with something they weren't happy with and needed to be fixed before they would end beta.

So for example, LOTRO had too much blood (seriously)...then too many undead (ancestor worship and all that-in fairness WoW had to address that as well)...then the lack of open world PvMP was unacceptable. So, hurting for cash, we dutifully spent a few months creating a system of rotating open world zones that would be opened for PvMP.

But in the end it was all for naught-they never paid us and all we got for our troubles were the castaway players when they shut down. Our negotiators who went over there came back with horror stories of their business practices and treatment of employees. So when the Chinese company Perfect World entered the competition to buy LOTRO it was a pretty unsettling development. "

"Whatever else may be said about Blizzard, their 'don't ship it until it's ready' philosophy has always been a cornerstone of their success in my opinion.

In the MMO business everybody was constantly trying to complete with WoW, copying their ideas, their look, even their fonts...but nobody seemed to step back and analyze how Blizzard was in a position to pull off WoW in the first place. It was like, 'here's some money guys, make us one of those wow things all the kids are playing-I want my yacht!'.

And there is a big disconnect between the executive branches of many of these companies and the development arms. Certainly the rank and file are often blissfully unaware of fires in the kitchen up until the pink slips hit their desks.

And sometimes there are good reasons for deadlines-they aren't just arbitrarily imposed by producers to make life hard for the widget makers. In fact one of the dirty secrets of the industry is worker productivity, or rather the lack thereof.

One hears about 'crunch time' constantly: the stories of poor developers being worked mercilessly around the clock, slave-driven away from their families by their heartless corporate overlords.

The truth is somewhat cloudier. Crunch is not an inevitable fact of game development. Ask a producer what it's like trying to get full productivity out of game developers and if they are feeling honest the term 'herding kittens' might approximate their response. At one company-not Turbine-we had an artist spend two weeks trying to get a bear death animation just right...ya can't make this stuff up!

In fact Turbine's crunch times were relatively mild: a benefit of being in the MMO business for years is having experienced producers who can look at the resources on hand and accordingly set milestones and triage features realistically.

In the case of Moria the product was rough at ship not because of poor productivity but rather inexperience in some quarters and a ship date that just asked too much out of the team. The following layoffs were explained to us as being a consequence of Moria's poor sales.

I didn't really buy that and I suspect that the staff reductions had been perculating for some time, perhaps to pretty up the account books as we geared up to shop ourselves around. But such is just speculation."

"I wish I had more to say about AÇ-by my day it had already faded into the background, maintained by a dev or two and a QA guy (they lost a guy with the Moria layoffs, I remember).

I couldn't have even located their nook in Westwood. As I mentioned at one point I was somewhat envious of the forgotten nature of their work, they seemed to be free to tinker with AC with no inference from Marketing or anyone else. I believe the hitherto lost AC2 code was found on Andy Gillis' old machine. His happening to have that build saved an entire game from oblivion."

"One time at Westwood I was out by an employee door having a smoke and a fellow walked up to ask where the visitor's entrance was as he was there for an interview (I don't recall which media outlet he was with). On a whim I said I'd bring him through the building to the secretary's desk and took him through the QA section, kitchen, dev pit, and so forth (Westwood was a bit of a maze).

He was obviously surprised by what he saw and commented that he had no idea how small we were. I always thought that if our fans knew what a shoestring operation we really were they'd have respected us more, not less, for what we did accomplish."

platfarmchink wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 2:44pm:

Not me, but the likes of Salias and others are now released from Turdbin's iron grip to give us some inside info. Let it flow boys and girls.

I genuinely loved my time at Turbine/SSG and am proud to have helped carry the torch with them for the tiniest bit. The people I saw working on DDO and LOTRO and everywhere in between were passionate, dedicated, and great fun to be around. I'm excited for the future of DDO and still play it several hours a day. Monk changes 2016 baby, monk changes 2016.

    "Q: Do you think Turbine regret jumping into bed with WB or was it do or die?

   

It was basically do or die and it was either WB or Perfect World and nobody was too keen on the latter. There was a line of thought that PW's interest was used to leverage WB to make the deal but that was certainly above my pay grade.

When Jim Crowley gathered us for a company meeting at a hotel conference room down the road (Westwood being a little small for such affairs) on a late wintery afternoon to announce the WB deal we applauded heartily. It was the end of a long period of gloom and uncertainty and a happy moment.

I think we in the rank and file were a bit naive about what becoming a subsidiary would really entail but at least Turbine-and LOTRO-would go on.

But there are many of us who were there for those Westwood days who wish we could go back. Life does go on though and we have our memories."

"I heard a great story from some friends I had working in Hunt Valley about Sid Meier. When he was designing a game, an extremely basic mock-up would be thrown together, nothing but basic functionality and MS-paint type assets. People would sit down with it and if it wasn't fun it would go right back to the drawing board.

Too often on LOTRO whether or not a system was actually fun didn't seem to matter. Or it was like an afterthought.

To be a good designer takes more than a computer science degree or some d&d campaigns under your belt; simply playing a lot of video games isn't enough qualification.

The best developers I have personally met-and they are a rare breed-are natural entertainers. It's like comedy. Watching Seinfeld or working at the Apollo does not a comedian make. It's an innate character trait. Most devs don't have it and that's fine. But if they don't they need to have the self-confidence to reach out to their QA and their colleagues to cover the difference.

But I've found that many are afraid to do that, as if they'd be revealing that, no they really don't know what the hell they are doing. Screw QA, screw the players...they aren't devs, they aren't the professionals, they aren't qualified to judge game design. They just aren't playing it right! This may sound somewhat unfair-certainly snarky-but it's a fact of life. The degree of peevishness and passive aggressiveness, the fragile egos, one encounters in the game industry is tedious indeed."

"I would comment that Turbine was not particularly open about it's tech even in-house. One of the things that amazed me at ZOS was QA's having access to all the same tools as the developers. We were in fact encouraged to play with them, build quest chains, mobs, skills, and everything else. And it was a great idea, too, as not only could QA precisely identify how something was broken, often we could actually fix the bugs ourselves and save the devs the time. Moreover any QA brought over to devside could be expected to already know the tools, saving weeks of training time. I imagine that paid ZOS a lot of dividends in the home stretch.

But such was unthinkable at Turbine. To have any influence as a QAer you really needed to forge personal friendships with the developers and even then you were fighting an uphill battle, regardless of how fully you had demonstrated your knowledge of the game. But on the same token a lot of QA are trying to work their way to devside and so quite often their priorities can be compromised in their quest for patrons.

I will say I was very loyal to my department; a good QAer has to be honest or else he/she isn't much use as QA. But honesty isn't always likely to get you on everyone's Christmas card list. Yet a QAer who really believes in their profession is a real gem for any company."

"Some devs are just awful about fixing bugs. Some are bad about reporting check-ins. Others are simply overworked. And in a company where QA isn't generally allowed access to the dev tools the bugs can pile up and snowball into so much work that it becomes impossible to fix them all. As I said earlier, ZOS allowing QA access to the dev toolkit paid big dividends.

Turbine ought perhaps to have considered doing the same.

Thanks for the insight

"Q:So Turbine knew about the lag all the time and yet CS always blamed players computers or ISP for it on the official forums. Were they ordered to cover up or did they do it on their own initiative?

We absolutely knew about the lag and server performance issues. This is a case in point that underscores my above observations about honest and clear communication. What kind of message are you sending your customers when at one moment you tell players that Mylotro is being discontinued to improve overall game performance and then the next that their rigs and providers are to blame for lag?

It's worth taking a moment to reiterate that Customer Service and OCR, the Community Relations team, while sharing overlapping spheres as front facing departments, are distinct entities.

Neither were directly tied into the development process and both could at times be left out of the loop, with awkward consequences. CS in particular was often forgotten in the decision-making process and left to hold the bag.

The call to hold off on fixing Hechgam, as I mentioned earlier, condemned our CS guys to deal with the player fallout. And when they were forced to discontinue manually advancing the instance for players (they just didn't have the staff to spend all night addressing every plea for aid) they caught hell for that too.

Another great example is multi boxing in the Moors. The policy was basically, they pay for all those accounts, let them play.

But for the sake of a tiny minority of boxers and their subs, CS had to deal with literally thousands of irate complaints, each one a ticket that took up their time and slowed down their ability to respond to other tickets just that much.

Moreover neither the devs or the producers ever thought to give CS a head's up on upcoming instances and potential problems. So a CS guy might find themselves having to respond to issues they knew nothing about, unsure on what was by design, what was a bug, and if there was a work around.

Now our CS team was a good outfit, with some excellent people, but often through no fault of their own was the focus of player dissatisfaction.  But the point is, more often then should have been the case, CS was forced to translate at times hazy or even contradictory policies and issues as best it could.

OCR, under Meg 'Patience' Rodberg, who was a warm and justly popular person with our fans, acted as the human face of the company. Her role, and she was great for it, was to make the players feel like they were extended members of the Turbine family.

But she too wasn't always kept in the loop and also had to interpret policies that may have been cloudy or (again) contradictory.

Sapience...wasn't as well suited to that role. No sense in trying to deny that. I give him a lot of respect for his charitable endeavors (I myself ponied up 400 bucks for his first children's hospital drive, best money I've spent in ages) and in person he was a likeable guy. But during his tenure the whole tone of OCR's posture changed.

No description is required here, the Sapience era is painfully well documented. OCR seemed to be the Spin Machine, enforced with the liberal application of the ban hammer. Not exactly guaranteed to improve 'community relations'. "

"Of course the real trick is in interpreting what you are reading on the forums. If one plays the game it becomes much easier to sort the wheat from the chaff.

And there really is something to the argument that the forums can represent a skewed picture. You may well not hear from the 95 people who think their runekeeper is just fine but the 5 who don't might go to the forum with their grievances.

The RK dev, being too busy in his off time playing DOTA or Minecraft for LOTRO, goes to the forums for ideas and what does he find there?

But on the same token it really pays for the players to conduct themselves with maturity and grace. It drove me nuts to see players crapping all over Turbine in their posts, especially the PvMPers, as if insulting the developer was the key to getting positive results.

Devs are human beings like everyone else and don't like to be told they suck because the player's experience is not what they think it should be. I can say from experience that one gets a hell of at lot further with honey than vinager when it comes to developers.

I mean, what is a dev supposed to do with a 'this game sucks now I quit' thread? But in the end my own philosophy is that a developer needs to get in there and get personally invested in what he or she is working on. It's hard to picture a guy like Gary Grisby saying, 'playing wargames...in my spare time? Who has time for that? I'll just read the forums...' "

"Q: Also adding in the move to the laggy Turbine servers, because no one believed that latency would become an issue once you're going trans-atlantic.

I'd be playing on Live at Turbine, with our data shack barely a state away, and still be lagging out!

"Q: Do you have any idea if Turbine really, genuinely gave out video cards to "winners" during those stress tests?

Good question. I really couldn't say but I highly doubt they gave out many. Hell decent video cards of any kind were in short supply in my day.

This is probably how the card was awarded:

QA Director: Hey, Mike, your 3D card still working?

QA Guy: Sorta, sometimes.

QA Director: Great. Yank it out, they need it for a contest.

QA Guy: ..."

" Something I have found to be exceptional to the game industry is the almost complete lack of internal criticism. Everyone is scared of offending anyone else (well, except QA, they're open season: I haven't met a veteran QA yet who doesn't have at least one story of being treated with blatant disrespect, it just comes with the territory). Basically the thought process is, 'if I tell so-and-so his work is derivative tripe, how might that hurt me down the road?'. All in all the atmosphere isn't one likely to produce a lot of frankness.

But the other thing I'd add to my meandering goes back to one of my favorite bits from Patton, where Codman comments to Patton that sometimes his men can't tell when he is acting, to which Patton replies, 'It's not important for them to know. It's only important for me to know'. I think big problems really start when companies start believing their own spin. No question there was a fair bit of that in play at Turbine, at least below the executive level."

"Q: how did you guys pull together 12 competent players to test raids in tier 2 challenge mode? Did you pull in devs? Did you hire testers (did they know how to play their class)?


QA had a 6 member team dedicated to instance testing and they were pretty competent at their classes. I remember 12-mans being tested with an additional 6 from QA (for example I'd play hunter, Sarah would play her burg, Mark his champ, Scott on his guard, and so forth, the four of us named all played on Live, and the remaining two would be those considered capable with the needed classes).

So an all-QA testing session wasn't Keystone Kops or anything. But not comparable to a veteran raiding kin on Live, more like a fairly decent group with a few pugged slots.

At other times the instance QA team would play with 6 devs. And the devs were generally baddies. However a lot of the actual polish feedback would come from the test servers."

"I felt that to a degree I would just be confirming what a lot of people already surmised. LOTRO's community is a pretty intellectual bunch. I think some are in willing denial but obviously few of them frequent this forum.

Sparce content, recycled content, decisions that alienated many long term fans, increasingly blatant monetization (I despised the ubiquitous Turbine coin icon and the endless gratuitous references to the 'store'...just the name LOTRO Store perfectly sums up the degree of artistry in their approach), repeated layoffs, a CM out to crush any murmer of discontent...none of these things generally typify a well-helmed ship at full steam.

One can-and I always will-point to what was accomplished with so little. I'm proud to have had the opportunity to contribute in some way to LOTRO. And the sad thing is, even at our SoM sub numbers the game was still profitable.

Then LOTRO was essentially put on the corner to get pimped until the last cent could be wrung out of it, just another resource to be exploited. But the beauty of the game does at least stand as a legacy of the old Turbine magic.

"After Mirkwood the design decisions were increasingly like grasping into thin air, the cooks tossing random ingredients into a pot hoping for the best. The current state of LOTRO is the aggregate of all those decisions: a game with no distinct personality or sense of design continuity, a hodge-podge of borrowed, half-realized, and abandoned systems. Basically, bloody awful. But if there are still people having fun with it, I'm glad, it would be sad to see the plug finally pulled regardless."

"So many of such changes were driven by the belief that one needed to make the game 'more accessible', convienience and all that.  Arguably, they were trying to attract a type of gamer who was just never going to stick with LOTRO anyway. 

If taking the time to ride to a certain town to do your crafting (or to a certain dungeon for a raid) was too much to ask of the player, how much more was expecting them to grind out 75, 85 to 100 levels?  As a player myself I think the only meangingul aggregate effect of the changes for accessibility were to create a sense of triviality about the whole business that has obviously turned many off."

"One thing I'd like to underscore generally (not that Danchir is saying as much) is that I was never aware personally of any deliberate attempts to mislead players (no rooms of Mr. Burns and Co. cackling about players being rubes). Mostly, when new features were discussed but didn't materialize (and long time players can doubtless recall for themselves examples, such the 'LI revamp' that has floated up about once a year since SoM) it was a case of logistical concerns intervening. And departmental communications were not always great (such being a common enough woe in any company). To say a word in defense of the front facing guys, at times they just weren't kept up to speed with development priorities. Patience became a target in the community for her 'no advantage' comments vis F2P but as far as she was told, that was the policy."

This is probably the best thread on the site, thanks for filtering these gems yobai.

"Speaking for myself, no.  I wish I hadn't gone back the second time.  The reason being, having had the experience of Turbine of the Westwood days, when it really was like a family and had that old school atmosphere, it just wasn't the same at Needham.  It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that Turbine had gone totally corporate (at least as of RoI) but it definitely wasn't what it used to be.  And the obviousness of where LOTRO sat in the general scheme of things was hard to accept, given that LOTRO was why I went to Turbine in the first place.



Speaking to a guy or gal interested in QA, the industry, or just in being a part of LOTRO, I would say: go for it.  There are still some good people at Turbine, its name yet carries some prestige, and if you like LOTRO it's as good a place to start as anywhere, particularly if you are already in New England.  The QA director is a decent guy, you'll get some good QA experience at Turbine (QA isn't what it used to be either thanks to attrition but it's still decent by industry standards), and the occasional WB swag isn't bad.  Job security, however, is obviously a bit of a concern as is cost of living.  I made it for a few years on the pittance I was paid at the time but easy, it was not."

"One thing I would point out to would-be Turbinites as a positive is the company's history of shipping titles. If you are looking at a career in the industry, in QA or wherever, having shipped titles on your résumé is big. As I mentioned at an earlier point, one can spend years in the business and through happenstance have no shipped products to one's credit. "

" One can-and many do-take away the lesson that failure is acceptable. A low bar is a safe bet for all hands. Take the diminishing quality of LOTRO (I'd say 'diminishing' is being subjective but the marketplace has spoken by mostly leaving.)

This is the result of a chain of ill-conceived design decisions piled one on top of the other, a landslide of crap that finally drowned Middle Earth like the great flood in the lore.

Nobody was ever fired for that directly, in fact I highly doubt anyone within the company even openly suggested that the gaping wounds in LOTRO were all self-inflicted.

Some have suggested I'm a big meanie for attacking the direction of development, just a disgruntled QA peon being vindictive and unfair. I'd say I'm a LOTRO player who's been playing games since before some of the younger devs were born and can tell the difference between shit and sugar. It is what it is.

But there are lessons there that a would-be designer could recognize and put to good use moving forward. That's the fork in the road. You've seen how a good game can go bad and why; such knowledge is a valuable asset.

Most don't start out thinking, I'm going to run this title into the ground, screw the players, I'm getting my cheddar regardless. Some of the bad ideas on LOTRO were based on reasonable enough assumptions. It can really pay off to see some of the potential pitfalls and learn from them as you say: not on my watch.

As for LOTRO, the absolute bottom line lesson: understand your core audience and work for and with them, design for the players you have, not those you don't."

"I've described at length how we over stretched ourselves with secondary projects and expenses but it still amazes me to think back on that time.

Put simply, Turbine ran itself into the ground. All of the spin in the world (and Turbine's spin machine is first rate) can't hide from discerning eyes the facts of the matter. DDO was a bomb, LOTRO withered on the vine as we played around with console dev kits, and we ultimately accepted vassal status to WB from a position of weakness and desperation.

From what I heard from friends higher up the food chain than myself, WB wasn't entirely happy with what they found once their own people got their teeth into our account books.

As it was WB acquired us for a song, damn near at cost, with conditional future payments being presented as part of the lump sum in the press. The whole thing was a shame and set against that backdrop individual design decisions within LOTRO take on a certain insignificance.

But I find absolutely nothing exceptional in the Turbine story in this respect. The themes if not the same scenarios have been played out in dozens of companies. Look at the incredible collapse of old Infinity Ward mere months after MW2 was one of the biggest entertainment successes of all time. Whether one is talking about an infantry company or a game company, everything stands or falls based on leadership.

That isn't to say that the leadership in a Turbine scenario is bad per se, rather that its priorities may be far removed from what the customers would like to see.

Oh I wouldn't say Turbine's leadership was good. In fact it was conspicuously lacking in many areas. But the priority for the Crowley regime was finding a buyer for the company.

It that much at least it succeeded. The investors got some return on their investment, the execs no doubt rode out with a tidy sum."

"A few months after the news WB sent out an advance party to commence indoctrination.  We were summoned to a meeting room and shown a 10 or 15 minute WB promo video and welcomed into the 'WB family'. 

The duo who addressed us seemed utterly out of place in our battered, dark warehouse space and I don't doubt they were counting the seconds to the return flight to Burbank.  I hadn't lived in LA at that time and found them rather odd. 

But even more odd was learning we were then to go to paper time sheets.  I laughed out loud.  Paper time sheets?  It's the 21st Century and WB games was on paper time sheet recording.

At that moment I realized that that division was not as high speed as one might have hoped.

As for the exact figures, we were told at the time (this is going back 5 years now almost to the day) and the upfront was as I recall less than 100 million. My friends and I were privately stunned.  As I said, it felt like we were being bought out at cost."

"The marketing team was very good at presenting an image of success to the world. And mostly the media accepted everything at face value. At the time I was somewhat perplexed by the strategy.

How do all these obscure gaming awards, articles on gaming sites, and media interviews sell LOTRO to a wider audience? Surely anyone who followed Massively or Ten Ton would have long since become aware of LOTRO.

But it was really about the image. The real measures of success were the sub numbers and we were a private company and under no obligation to reveal them even if we'd wanted to. 'Best MMO', 'Best Community', 'Best Expansion'...all those strongly suggest success in a vacuum of hard data.

As for bringing in new subs...well, that wasn't really their forte. Just look at the awful splash screens. As the grandson of the guy who designed the Wonder Bread package, I wouldn't describe our marketing team as a stable of ad wizards."

"Exploits can be a tricky one to assign the blame for. Some absolutely should have been caught.


The QA process can tend to see exploits go unnoticed. When tackling a system like LOTRO with so many moving parts QA processes tend to be very methodical.

Test plans outline how an instance is supposed to work-at stage 1 the boss does x, at stage 2, z-and in following them testers can become tunnel visioned on what they expect to see.

Although the sterotypical description of QA implies that testers are there to find problems, in practice their role is to ensure functionality.

Exploit finding requires an entirely freeform approach: one has to think like a player (I found a few big IA bugs-by no means all-simply because I knew how I as a player would approach that system).

But as good as LOTRO QA was, such [finding exploits] was not the department's strong suit. The department had a system that was great at processing huge amounts of delivered material with exceptional efficiency but not so good at predicting unintended behaviors.

Part of it can also be a simple lack of time to spend hours monkey testing around on an instance trying to break it. And there's the whole dev-QA relationship.

I think a good QA should simply take as a given that the dev effed up and you just have to figure out how. But I don't think a lot of guys saw it that way; they looked up to and trusted the competence of the developers, a faith that served neither dev or QA well.

On the other hand, the player's objectives are clear and free of procedural or physcological impediments: find the easiest and most lucrative manner in which to complete the instance.

Part of it is human nature: the potential rewards for the player in finding exploits are much greater than the QA guys working off the test plan.

For the QA guys, an exploit bug is ultimately just another number in the data base; for the player a found exploit can mean LOTRO riches. This doesn't mean the QA guys won't do due diligence but rather that the player has more incentive (the extra underlying desire that can give the brain that extra juice) to really concentrate on breaking the instance.

If he or she is an experienced player they know the game as well if not far better than the average QAer. These factors tend to make players far better MMO exploit finders than QA as a rule.

The importance of an exploit in house tended to scale to the ease of the exploit, how widespread its use was, and how impact-full the exploit was on the wider game.

So the skirm flag bug, based on the potential impact on the game, was a big deal. A less significant exploit that just meant the instance could be completed quicker without massive rewards accruing would be considered less important.

As for blame, there wasn't a whole lot of it thrown around, at least openly. After all, if a dev said, how could QA miss this exploit, the QA could reasonably respond, how could you put the damn thing in there to begin with?"

"One thing that really surprised me going to Turbine as a player first was the lack of interest in the game economy.

As a player I had assumed that this was something MMO companies would assign a lot of importance to. After all, it's a facet of the game that impacts virtually all players on a daily basis and can strongly influence player behavior.

But in fact, and except in the most general of terms and usually in relation to train wrecks ala the skirm flag bug, the game economy was a complete non-issue. Obviously this isn't an easy area to track-one can't ask Bungo Chubbs at the Michel Delving AH how the markets have been trending compared to last week on Arkenstone and compared to Landy-but I imagined someone would at least have established some rough targets to work from.

Again, this is far easier said then done and verges on dev keeping track of who hates who in the Ettenmoors but as gold was a massive incentive to exploit (and really the biggest negative from exploiting as otherwise it doesn't make much difference in the big picture) I always wanted to see price ceilings. How high or low you could reasonably set a price ceiling on AH transactions would in turn be based on mean averages for player wealth."

"Shutting down the game for a hotfix is really a decision where one is balancing the known impact of the issue versus the not inconsiderable logistical burden of the process.

And after the experience of the Moria winter, where the game was constantly being brought down and in so doing was costing us subscriptions left and right (when even the CEO basically says, this downtime BS needs to stop, there's a problem) there was a reluctance to turn off the switches if we could possibly avoid it.

After all, let's say an exploit comes in and we assemble a war room, stop the presses, and bring down the game...what if a week later another issue comes in?

Generally speaking it made more sense, at least in the short term, to hold off until a proper patch that included multiple fixes could be arranged. But unquestionably the 'let it ride' approach was frustrating and in the aggregate probably cost us more player confidence then multiple down times would have."

"

One might step back and wonder if the level-based system a game like LOTRO uses all but guarantees a problematic end game.

It essentially works out like a pyramid: in the beginning, rolling your toon, you have a ton of content at your disposal, multiple paths to level (in Eriador you can pick and choose your way with some freedom until almost 50). But as the game progresses through multiple expansions, that content begins to taper down to a narrow path until finally 95% of all the content that the game has to offer is now obsolete in the rear view mirror.

Assuming a brisk pace, in a month you've burned through hundreds of dollars in expansions representing years of development just to end up standing in an AH in Gondor wondering what you're supposed to do next. All the unscaled instances that came before are pointless now and since scaling means generic rewards, you'll naturally just pick the easiest and spam it via IF from said AH.

Any new IC is almost like throwing out bread at a soup kitchen: they're just going to be hungry again tomorrow. And pity the new player faced with that 100 level grind just to reach that AH...9/10 will give up by level 30 having spent zero money and having had no chance to really connect to the game.

The prized 'casual' player who decides 100 levels sure doesn't seem like a casual investment."

" Q: Aylwen, do you think a LotRO 2 could ever happen? Or a better game engine for what we have now? Were either mooted in your time there?

It never came up during my time; there would have been a dozen reasons why we couldn't have done it but the experience of AC2 alone (a kind of lingering trauma for Turbine) would have been enough to put people off.

I can't really imagine a LOTRO2 in any recognizable form ever seeing the light of day. A Moors only game would be viable and interesting (and reasonably cheap) but LOTRO herself...I think we're just left with our memories."

Those were the best parts of his/her posts sifted out of 59 pages of BB forum dreck.

" Infinite Crisis

Since IC was after my time, I'll relate a (slightly redacted) explanation I got from a friend at the company related to why a mutual friend-a 10 year Turbine vet-was laid off last fall.

"So, infinite crisis was costing 4mil a month to make. And they dumped all their marketing budget into a 'twitch' campaign....which is a new sorta web thing where you can watch people play games.....and unless you are Korean and playing starcraft, no one gives two fucks about. It resulted in Infinite Crisis peak concurrency being....less than 1,000 people. Hell most people had no inkling the thing even came out.

So, hemorrhaging money, total failure, we gotta make it look like we are doing something to fix the faucet of losses. So, they shifted ______ to a lead on infinite crisis....and laid him off. See, we're saving money!"

There was no way IC could have succeeded. The necessary experience, expertise, and tech wasn't there. The MOBA market is dominated by DOTA.

And when you task Monolith (the Batman guys) with making a LOTR MOBA and then have Turbine make the DC heroes one, you're just going to end up with two failures."

Very interesting. That was great.

Alright, stole all your hard work and reposted in another site, full credit to you m8, this was a massive undertaking on your part.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 6:34pm:

"But such was unthinkable at Turbine. To have any influence as a QAer you really needed to forge personal friendships with the developers and even then you were fighting an uphill battle, regardless of how fully you had demonstrated your knowledge of the game. But on the same token a lot of QA are trying to work their way to devside and so quite often their priorities can be compromised in their quest for patrons. I will say I was very loyal to my department; a good QAer has to be honest or else he/she isn't much use as QA. But honesty isn't always likely to get you on everyone's Christmas card list. Yet a QAer who really believes in their profession is a real gem for any company."

I've seen this kind of thing in too many companies.  I was in a small ISP in the 90s and the people in the NOC were completely disparaging of the people who worked tech support.  I tried to explain to my team that these people were only trying to help our customers, and that their efforts kept problems from being escalated to our group, but it was a long and difficult battle to try to bring about an attitude change.  It's too easy to fall into the mindset that "our group" is superior to "their group" and to dismiss anything that comes from that "inferior" group as being insignificant. Too often, that isn't the case.

The reality is that it's often the people who are closest to the customers who can provide the best ideas about how to better support those customers. A strict focus on the technology is often not the best way to provide the best service.

NP.  It was a good read but over almost 60 pages, so I just posted the more DDO-related/generic turbine stuff.

there is a bit more LOTRO stuff that only LOTRO players would find relevant or understand.

funny how much of the forum theorizing is so close to the mark.

Frank wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 11:24pm:

The reality is that it's often the people who are closest to the customers who can provide the best ideas about how to better support those customers. A strict focus on the technology is often not the best way to provide the best service.

so true.  seen this on the business side at several companies as well.  devs in one silo, testers and end users in another.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 7:44pm:

As for the exact figures, we were told at the time (this is going back 5 years now almost to the day) and the upfront was as I recall less than 100 million. My friends and I were privately stunned.  As I said, it felt like we were being bought out at cost."

so if WB bought all of Turban and its titles for less than $100 million, what did SS pay Turban for DDO?  $10million?  $5?

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 11:33pm:

so if WB bought all of Turban and its titles for less than $100 million, what did SS pay Turban for DDO?  $10million?  $5?

They're the ones who think it's worth the most. So prolly 500 mil. Maybe 2 bil.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 8:08pm:

Those were the best parts of his/her posts sifted out of 59 pages of BB forum dreck.

Nice read.

[smiley=thumb.gif]

The thing about the game economy worries me most. Like other companies higher actual economists to do analysts of their in-game economies, because a healthy in-game economy is a HUGE part of an MMO. Turbine's complete lack of fucks is disturbing.

Lhynn wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 7:32pm:

This is probably the best thread on the site, thanks for filtering these gems yobai.

You're new here, eh? ;D

Strake wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2016 at 12:58pm:

You're new here, eh? ;D

Indeed.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 6:34pm:

"I would comment that Turbine was not particularly open about it's tech even in-house. One of the things that amazed me at ZOS was QA's having access to all the same tools as the developers. We were in fact encouraged to play with them, build quest chains, mobs, skills, and everything else. And it was a great idea, too, as not only could QA precisely identify how something was broken, often we could actually fix the bugs ourselves and save the devs the time. Moreover any QA brought over to devside could be expected to already know the tools, saving weeks of training time. I imagine that paid ZOS a lot of dividends in the home stretch. But such was unthinkable at Turbine.

That's fucking mind-boggling.  Good QA is hard.  It's like film editing - tedious, unpleasant, under-rated and unappreciated work with a serious impact.  If you find somebody who actually enjoys doing that, you have to give them every possible advantage.  If your developers treat your QA like some sort of adversary, you're fucked from the start.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 7:26pm:

"...a game with no distinct personality or sense of design continuity, a hodge-podge of borrowed, half-realized, and abandoned systems."

And they're not even talking about DDO!

Attaboy for Yobai.

Thank you for your service.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 11:33pm:

so if WB bought all of Turban and its titles for less than $100 million, what did SS pay Turban for DDO?  $10million?  $5?

This wouldnt surprise me. WB sold WCW for a total of $4.2 to WWE just because Barry Diller didn't want Ted Turner's redneck stuff on cable channels that he managed.

you forgot something stupid


Barkabout wrote on Dec 24^th, 2016 at 3:15pm:

This wouldnt surprise me. WB sold WCW for a total of $4.2 million to WWE just because Barry Diller didn't want Ted Turner's redneck stuff on cable channels that he managed.

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 11:33pm:

so if WB bought all of Turban and its titles for less than $100 million, what did SS pay Turban for DDO?  $10million?  $5?

The company now vs then is probably much different in terms of assets and revenue and expense.  Also the previous was an acquisition of a company.  Assets and liabilities.  This is just and asset sale of two specific assets. It would be hard to gauge. Most software company asset purchases are heavily based on a multiple of EBITDA.   Unless you have their last 3 years financials you would just be pulling numbers out of your ass.  There's no way to know.

Asheras wrote on Dec 25^th, 2016 at 12:44am:

you would just be pulling numbers out of your ass.  There's no way to know.

That pretty much sums up 99,9% of posts here.

DDONoob wrote on Dec 25^th, 2016 at 3:56am:

That pretty much sums up 99,9% of posts here.

That number smells like ass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NbkEPROQN8

Thanks for posting this Yobai.

Like you said (sadly) a lot of the hypotheses posted in the forums was frighteningly close to the mark.

This thread validated a lot of my suspicions and even gave me some sympathy for the staff in general.

I'd like to learn more about why DDO was a "lame duck" and a "bomb" and why WotC wouldn't license Forgotten Realms or answer their phone calls (I suspect Perfect World and Never winter had something to do with this, but that's mere speculation on my part).

Chances are nothing is going to change on the Dev front now, taking over themselves means no one is going to force them to look at their mistakes.

wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 11:53am:

Chances are nothing is going to change on the Dev front now, taking over themselves means no one is going to force them to look at their mistakes.

As if there was EVER someone who forced them to look at their mistakes.  ::)

wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 11:53am:

Chances are nothing is going to change on the Dev front now, taking over themselves means no one is going to force them to look at their mistakes.

I have no personal knowledge of the people at SSG, but it has not been my experience that people who leave a corporation and start their own entrepreneurial venture are less diligent or motivated. 

Quite the opposite.  Speaking from my own experience, when I started my software business branching off from a large corporation with my team from that corporation, we were all worked longer hours, with more dedication and cared more about the product.  Because it was ours.  There was a sense of ownership that didn't exist when we worked for E Corp as a clock puncher.  Part of that may have been the stock options and profit sharing.  There was a sense that everyone would win if the company won.  I have heard the same sort of mentality from others who have gone through the same transition.

That said, I don't know how SSG is organized and if the rank and file have "skin in the game".  I'm not saying my experience is relevant or accurate.  I'm sure a lot of this stuff has to do with individual personalities and priorities and work ethics.  But I've just never heard of a group of people starting their own business so they can just slack off even more.

You're looking at it as though they 'started their own business' as opposed to the more likely option that they were forced to accept  the DDO and LoTR properties as a proforma severance package, rather than being laid off when WB rolled up the games. Sure they will work hard, but if it's the later case (which I have seen before) the low totem pole staff will be working harder at looking for new jobs knowing that the ship is now being steered by the people who brought the games into the duldrums that undercut them in the first place to the extent that WB was ready to pull the plug.

Just sayin. 

Yobai wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2016 at 5:15pm:

"A cynic might suggest that the Paizs had flat lined DDO already and when Ascherons Call's concurrency numbers are beating DDO on a nightly basis, you can only go up from there. LOTRO was certainly ailing when they made the call to go f2p. We all assumed it would happen eventually but not so soon. In March or thereabouts in '10 an email went out from Crowley stating that LOTRO's US subs were down to around 85k (the only time specific sub numbers were ever mentioned even in-house while I was there) and could we maybe ask our friends to try the game?"

So, LoTRO only had 85K subs back in 2010, with DDO usually having about 25% the player base. 20K of so DDO players in 2010 has probably dropped at least another 70%.

I would be shocked if DDO currently had more then a couple thousand subs and around 10K total players.

The fucking delusional ass wipes on the mobo's that constantly claim there are tens of thousands of people playing DDO are fucking brainless.

Turd_Ferguson wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 3:50pm:

I would be shocked if DDO currently had more then a couple thousand subs and around 10K total players.

Depends on how you define "players", I suppose. Once a month? Week?

But, I agree that it's probably <20k total unless you count super casual occasional players.

A couple of years ago I was semi-regularly logging on to each server and counting players logged on. It was usually averaging around 600 people per server. So, <5k total even at peak times. I haven't checked in a while. But, casual check on Khyber recently says it's still in that neighborhood.

Asheras wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 1:48pm:

I have no personal knowledge of the people at SSG, but it has not been my experience that people who leave a corporation and start their own entrepreneurial venture are less diligent or motivated.

How many of those entrepreneurial ventures were based on supporting a legacy product, and one that has no real future?

If Devs play it right reaper could bring a lot of people back.

They are unconstrained by corporate ownership, so we'll see what they do

The olde' turn and burn. 

harharharhar wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 7:34pm:

If Devs play it right reaper could bring a lot of people back. They are unconstrained by corporate ownership, so we'll see what they do

I could see it delaying the exit of one class of player, but I don't see it bringing any class back. People who already left don't come back for "more of the same, but harder", any more than they come back for "new items". They might come back for something substantially different, like an expansion, but not for a "more" version of what was there. If they left the emotional capital is very low and there is nothing for "more" to leverage. Twice zero is still zero.

I do think it could be good for getting the attention of very good players who are bored now and thinking of leaving, so it's certainly not a worthless change, but it's not The Great White Hope.

Also, what percentage of the player base would even care about reaper? Those that do probably care lots, but they are a minority. And furthermore they are a minority that recent management has considered "safe" and not worth significant resources to please.

Meursault wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 8:56pm:

I could see it delaying the exit of one class of player, but I don't see it bringing any class back. People who already left don't come back for "more of the same, but harder", any more than they come back for "new items". They might come back for something substantially different, like an expansion, but not for a "more" version of what was there. If they left the emotional capital is very low and there is nothing for "more" to leverage. Twice zero is still zero. I do think it could be good for getting the attention of very good players who are bored now and thinking of leaving, so it's certainly not a worthless change, but it's not The Great White Hope. Also, what percentage of the player base would even care about reaper? Those that do probably care lots, but they are a minority. And furthermore they are a minority that recent management has considered "safe" and not worth significant resources to please.

QFT

Reaper will be a Epeen exercise for the most part. The loot will be little more than bragging rights.  Fun for some of us, but hardly a revenue driver in the end. To be honest I see it as a danger to the games longevity in that it feeds into the Devs short-cut philosophy of rehashing content instead of making new stuff.

harharharhar wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 7:34pm:

If Devs play it right reaper could bring a lot of people back.

I'll believe that when I see it.

I don't give two shits about Reaper Difficulty.

I want more content. A new race or two and some new classes would also be nice.

There has always been steady decline. 40 Cove instances, 20 - 30 people in channels, thousands pages of items on ah, shitton of lfms anyone ? Heck people would even invite you by tells.
Even after Motu, epic GH and even Shadowfell were good days. And our toons were far far from those demigods we have now.

And we thought that population and activity around MoD release was bad ? Was it maybe 25k ?

I see dramatic decrease after Sev_Pay has become the producer. Every single change, every single fucking new mechanics and especially those "class passes" just made the game worse. Boring. Too bloody easy. No reason to group. Grind for the sake of itself for the past lives we stopped needing long time ago. People just leave boring game.

The essence of the game was awesome combat, cooperation and character buildings. Cuz sure as hell there's not that much content to do after you have played for a year or two.

New people ? What new people. There are zero advertisement for the game. Even if they try the game, all you can see is everybody solo boring ass heroics on elite.
No reason to group at all again.
Everything is just zerg fest without any thought because the game has become so dumbed down, almost trivial for anyone that has been playing for some time.

Was a good run though. I doubt hordes of people would come back due to Reaper. It's like that newsfeeded quote by Rest.

Rapist will be a fucking failure like everything that Turdbin does.

This is going to be only for retarded ppl with cheese builds to brag about it.

Require team play and strategy? yeah right....

harharharhar wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 7:34pm:

If Devs play it right

This phrase just seems weird to me. I know these words make sense, but they don't seem to make any sense when put together.

Wipe wrote on Jan 6^th, 2017 at 2:44am:

There has always been steady decline. 40 Cove instances, 20 - 30 people in channels, thousands pages of items on ah, shitton of lfms anyone ? Heck people would even invite you by tells. Even after Motu, epic GH and even Shadowfell were good days. And our toons were far far from those demigods we have now. And we thought that population and activity around MoD release was bad ? Was it maybe 25k ? I see dramatic decrease after Sev_Pay has become the producer. Every single change, every single fucking new mechanics and especially those "class passes" just made the game worse. Boring. Too bloody easy. No reason to group. Grind for the sake of itself for the past lives we stopped needing long time ago. People just leave boring game. The essence of the game was awesome combat, cooperation and character buildings. Cuz sure as hell there's not that much content to do after you have played for a year or two. New people ? What new people. There are zero advertisement for the game. Even if they try the game, all you can see is everybody solo boring ass heroics on elite. No reason to group at all again. Everything is just zerg fest without any thought because the game has become so dumbed down, almost trivial for anyone that has been playing for some time. Was a good run though. I doubt hordes of people would come back due to Reaper. It's like that newsfeeded quote by Rest.

The only "new" people I see are people who return to the game after an extended absence.  I've seen quite a few pop up after months or years gone and return to play for one reason or another.

I can't remember the last genuinely new player I have seen.

harharharhar wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 7:34pm:

If Devs play it right reaper could bring a lot of people back. They are unconstrained by corporate ownership, so we'll see what they do

Holy fuck! Have you even been playing this game for the last few years? The fucking incompetent people at Turdbin/Severance Stocks Games have done nothing to bring in new players since Shadowfail, and that was a pathetic excuse of a fucking expansion.

Reaper will be a steaming pile of horse shit that is played by a small group of players for a little while then abandoned like so many other parts of the game. The only thing it will accomplish is to stretch the population like a pair of yoga pants on a fucking morbidly obese black woman.

I don't see reaper mode as the savior either.  It really only appeals to the raiding/end game crowd, which as always been a minority of the game population.  It won't attract new players.  It might bring back a few returning to give it a look, but that's not going to be a large group, nor a sustained new revenue source.

The addition of new content, specifically an expansion similar to MoTU, combined with some marketing campaign would be the key to actual new players.  I think they would be well served to address the beginning player experience in that regard as well.  Iconics are seen as the way to jump new players past the leveling process, but they are not a smooth process and the 1 level requirement is a problem. 

I also think they would do well to talk with WoTC to get some licensing of some more well known bosses.  The PnP population is familiar with Tiamat or Demogorgon, for example.  I know they are committed to Ravenloft, which has a following, but beyond that bringing in some "big name" villains to fight would have some outside appeal as well, I would think.  In that regard, the PnP module conversions do have some value. 

An expansion that added a dynamic new game element too, such as flying (in all quests, not just the few) or mounts, or player housing, or somethign would also attract more interest.  I think that they are beyond the point where jacking the level cap or introducing new races and classes moves the needle much with potential new customers.

Bottom line, it is tough to attract new blood to a 10 year old game in general.  It would take the type of development and marketing that hasn't been seen since 2009 or 2012.

It's a shame that when D&D is having a pretty solid surge in player numbers and draw that DDO just can't be bothered to see and try to capitalize.

Asheras wrote on Jan 6^th, 2017 at 10:57am:

The PnP population is familiar with Tiamat or Demogorgon, for example.

Takhisis is better known that Tiamat, even if it's the same dragon...

Orcus is a well known entity too... especially if you did the Bloodstone chain.

Flav wrote on Jan 6^th, 2017 at 11:46am:

Takhisis is better known that Tiamat, even if it's the same dragon...

Not anymore, I'd say. Tiamat got 2 packs focused on her, which NWO made something for as well.

Meursault wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 8:56pm:

I could see it delaying the exit of one class of player, but I don't see it bringing any class back.

this.

Turd_Ferguson wrote on Jan 6^th, 2017 at 10:28am:

The only thing it will accomplish is to stretch the population like a pair of yoga pants on a fucking morbidly obese black woman.

"Well I think we just learned a new rule!"

Grand wrote on Jan 5^th, 2017 at 9:14pm:

The loot will be little more than bragging rights.

Here's what the loot will actually be:
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/482254-Reaper-and-Champion-Lamannia-pass?p=5917094&viewfull=1#post5917094

Quote:

Each item with a Reaper bonus will have one of: - "Reaper Power" (Melee Power, Ranged Power, Spell Power) +3 - PRR +3 - MRR +3 - All Attributes +2 (These only appear on helmets and thus you can not stack multiple all attributes Reaper bonuses)

Far from being just "bragging rights" this loot and its stacking bonuses will be the new black.  Groups will run Reaper on 1 skull just for the chance of pulling an item with the Reaper bonus rather than running EE.

Add to this the promised increased drop rates for named loot and you'll never again see an EE Two-Toed run posted ever again.  It will only be Reaper, and pushing the skulls up to the level that the LFG poster can hope to run solo.

I will predict a new interest in running C&tC groups for better Silver Longbows. Delera's for a better Carnifex. Maybe, Relic of a Sov Host for pick and choose... though they might be classed as crafted and not get a bonus?

Cairnoir wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 4:54am:

I will predict a new interest in running C&tC groups for better Silver Longbows. Delera's for a better Carnifex. Maybe, Relic of a Sov Host for pick and choose... though they might be classed as crafted and not get a bonus?

in my understanding, deleras and relic are out. end rewards are probably not affected. crafted items are not affected. personally, first thing I am going to farm for is a +2 ability heroic pansophic circlet


Mythic Reaper heroic chrono set!

crunch wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 5:34am:

in my understanding, deleras and relic are out. end rewards are probably not affected. crafted items are not affected. personally, first thing I am going to farm for is a +2 ability heroic pansophic circlet Mythic Reaper heroic chrono set!

Goddamit I hate that quest. But yeah...

crunch wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 5:34am:

in my understanding, deleras and relic are out. end rewards are probably not affected. crafted items are not affected. personally, first thing I am going to farm for is a +2 ability heroic pansophic circlet Mythic Reaper heroic chrono set!

From my understanding the chrono stuff won't get mythic or reaper because they are upgradable to epic versions.   

Asheras wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 6:14am:

From my understanding the chrono stuff won't get mythic or reaper because they are upgradable to epic versions.

Well, my understanding is that any named item that you loot from a reaper chest can get mythic+reaper bonuses.

Anyway, let's just wait and see.

Stuff to test:
* opening an Advance to level 15 iconic gear box in a 10 skull reaper quest..

crunch wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 6:48am:

Well, my understanding is that any named item that you loot from a reaper chest can get mythic+reaper bonuses. Anyway, let's just wait and see. Stuff to test: * opening an Advance to level 15 iconic gear box in a 10 skull reaper quest..

I'm not sure what we need to wait and see about.  Coco  has already answered that specific question on the MoBo.

From Cocomajobo on MoBo:

Quote:

In addition to that, Mythic bonuses will now have a chance to drop on all named items (Caveat 1: Again, only those that are static and have no means of being upgraded. Caveat 2: The current preview will possibly have a couple of updates, around the Shadowfell era where the treasure tables are wonky, that are not yet implemented) even when not playing on Reaper difficulty.

And, in response to this question:

Quote:

Do the reaper bonuses on named items persist through upgrades? Example: upgrading a named item to its ML 20 epic version through the seal-shard-scoll system I'm guessing it's a 'No'...

Cocomajobo answers:


Quote:

This is a good question that I completely forgot to caveat: When I say that Reaper Bonuses (and Mythic for that matter) can now be found on all named items that drop as quest loot that (to my recollection while at home away from notes/documentation) specifically excludes named items that can be upgraded via crafting because that would have, as you suspected, caused the bonuses to be removed which is an undesirable headache. I will amend the original statement to reflect this.

He specifically referred to heroic items that can upgraded to an epic version, such as the chrono loot.  There is some question on things like the MoD loot which can have augment slots enhanced, but there doesn't seem to be any vagueness about S/S/S epicable items.

Asheras wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 8:48am:

He specifically referred to heroic items that can upgraded to an epic version, such as the chrono loot.  There is some question on things like the MoD loot which can have augment slots enhanced, but there doesn't seem to be any vagueness about S/S/S epicable items.

You're right. That's unfortunate. I was already hoping to wear heroic Helm of Frost with +2 attributes. My only hope is that they're gonna mess it up somehow...

crunch wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 10:36am:

You're right. That's unfortunate. I was already hoping to wear heroic Helm of Frost with +2 attributes. My only hope is that they're gonna mess it up somehow...

That would have been a nice pull, if it were posssible.  In scanning the 20 and under named helm list, there are very few low level decent ones that are worth getting.  A few nice options when you get into the newer named loot like Halcyonia and Pansophic (sp?)Circlet. 

DoRayEgon wrote on Jan 6^th, 2017 at 9:50am:

The only "new" people I see are people who return to the game after an extended absence.  I've seen quite a few pop up after months or years gone and return to play for one reason or another. I can't remember the last genuinely new player I have seen.

I rarely play these days, but played a few hours over the weekend and had a new player hit my lfm. Not a returning player, he was asking how favor worked and stuff like that. They aren't common, but with the current state of the game neither are crowds :(

I got a player so new he spent most of the quest dying, was a wizard without invisiblity, ddoor, displacement, jump, or any other remotely useful spell. It was cute, amazed that he was level 14, showing just how hard this game really is.

It is shocking when someone lvl 20+ only has 350 hps.  Saw someone with wings in their name with 460ish at lvl 28 even.

Toke wrote on Jan 10^th, 2017 at 8:12am:

It is shocking when someone lvl 20+ only has 350 hps.  Saw someone with wings in their name with 460ish at lvl 28 even.

F U
I was in Shadowdancer!  ;D

Lhynn wrote on Jan 9^th, 2017 at 7:50pm:

I got a player so new he spent most of the quest dying, was a wizard without invisiblity, ddoor, displacement, jump, or any other remotely useful spell. It was cute, amazed that he was level 14, showing just how hard this game really is.

That's true. The game is only easy if you understand all of the systems, know all of the quests, and understand the general nature of the bugs. To a truly new player, this game really is hard. Maybe not brutal, but not the cake walk it seems to experienced players.

That's why the power creep is so damaging. It doesn't make the game easier for the new player, at least, no where near the benefit the experienced player sees, but it forces SSG to make the game harder to keep experienced players engaged.

I doubt SSG will get it, though, and expect new players to get even rarer. If only we had some way to capture them and breed them in captivity  ::)

Ah Pook wrote on Jan 11^th, 2017 at 3:43am:

F U I was in Shadowdancer!  ;D

;D ;D ;D

There was a quote about QA having faith/trust in the Developers' code and thus not testing as well as they could.

I think much of that stems from people in QA eventually wanting to move into a DEV role.  For some reason, people think they just need to get their foot in the door at a software dev company and then someone will notice that they should be writing code instead of testing it.

When I was in QA at the two companies I worked for, I naturally assumed the devs code was crap and set out to break it.  It was like a puzzle to me.  "What did the dev not think about that a user would do?".   

Some hated me because they thought I was "critiquing" their code when I submitted bug reports.  Others were professional about it.

If it can happen, it will happen.  I seem to recall a book by MS called Code Complete.  There were discussions through the book about handling every possibility in digital combinations and error trapping for analog possibilities.  Since my programming is pretty basic in what I do, simply building truth tables to show holes in logic is adequate to open folks' eyes.  Unprofessional folks that can't take constructive criticism  tend to fly off the handle when shown things like this.

bob the builder wrote on Jan 11^th, 2017 at 8:57am:

There was a quote about QA having faith/trust in the Developers' code and thus not testing as well as they could. I think much of that stems from people in QA eventually wanting to move into a DEV role.  For some reason, people think they just need to get their foot in the door at a software dev company and then someone will notice that they should be writing code instead of testing it. When I was in QA at the two companies I worked for, I naturally assumed the devs code was crap and set out to break it.  It was like a puzzle to me.  "What did the dev not think about that a user would do?".    Some hated me because they thought I was "critiquing" their code when I submitted bug reports.  Others were professional about it.

I'm a developer and a manager of developers, and I can tell you a good QA guy is worth his weight in gold. QA is an art, you can't just give somebody a checklist and call it QA. Any developer who doesn't realize the QA guys are his guardian angels keeping his bugs from reaching customers is a worthless loser, so that's probably the prevalent attitude at Turdbin, lets hope SSG left that behind.

Meursault wrote on Jan 11^th, 2017 at 11:13am:

Any developer who doesn't realize the QA guys are his guardian angels keeping his bugs from reaching customers is a worthless loser, so that's probably the prevalent attitude at Turdbin, lets hope SSG left that behind.

Aren't they the same people?

Sim-Sala-Bim wrote on Jan 12^th, 2017 at 12:08am:

Aren't they the same people?

Completely new people, their 2017 resolutions changed them.

Lhynn wrote on Jan 12^th, 2017 at 2:40am:

Completely new people, their 2017 resolutions changed them.

They may have discovered this then:

http://i.imgur.com/rFhKWyI.png

Isn't that just WD-39?