https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460451-Producer-s-Letter-5-21-15#post5...

Greetings!

It’s been extremely busy and fun for us here on the DDO team this year and we feel the time is right to provide an update on some of our plans over the next few months.

We’ve made some excellent strides to reduce lag and improve stability, and we are continuing to work towards these goals. One of the larger projects that we are working on is a transfer of our game servers and other hardware to a new data center. The new facility will provide both Dungeons and Dragons Online and our friends over at The Lord of the Rings Online with more stability, greater CPU power, and a better networking capability. This will complement our ongoing efforts to reduce lag. It’s a big project and as the year progresses we will be working toward a date where we will migrate to the new datacenter.

Update 26 is coming in June, and it will focus mainly on a new class; the Warlock! Warlocks make pacts with powerful otherworldly patrons and channel that eldritch power into powerful blasts and arcane spells. The Warlock can choose a pact with Fiends, Archfey, or even a Great Old One. The Warlock will also have three enhancement trees; the Tainted Scholar, the Souleater, and the Enlightened Spirit.

Update 27 will follow in July. It includes an all-new adventure pack that returns to Shavarath, showcasing the Archons’ side of its endless war. With your help the Gatekeepers have gathered enough Mysterious Remnants to continue their research. They’ve tracked the Remnants back to Shavarath, the Plane of Battle. You need to travel there to recruit the help of the Archons in unravelling this mystery. The Archons, however, will only aid those who are worthy, and you find yourself embroiled not only in their tests, but in their eternal struggle with the Devils and the Demons. This adventure pack will include three new dungeons and a new raid, and as usual will be free to VIPs.

We've also been hearing your feedback that you'd like an improved experience when using the DDO Store, and we're happy to say that we'll be introducing a new store in the near future! We expect the updated DDO Store to offer a streamlined experience when making purchases and many other improvements. We're planning to start rolling out the new DDO Store to players later this summer. You will still be able to purchase Turbine Points with a credit/debit card, PayPal, and a wide selection of alternate payment methods. We'll have more to say about the DDO Store as we get closer to its launch.

We'll have more updates this year as well, of course. Players will be able to increase their character level to 30. We’ll have more adventure packs for you. We’ll have an Epic and extended version of our popular Shroud raid and a new adventure pack that relates to the Vale of Twilight. Players will be able to use an updated and epic version of Greensteel to craft more powerful gear. We are excited to bring this content to you!

Thank you for being a part of the Dungeons & Dragons Online community, and we love hearing your feedback. It's been a pleasure to talk to everyone here, and we hope to see you in-game for a long time to come.

Robert “Severlin” Ciccolini

Here is hoping the new infrastructure changes help with the lag.

Seems they won't have shavarath ready in time, so they're gonna fuck with the update schedule.

Makes me wonder which month epic vale is gonna hit.  Should have been September I think.  Maybe October now, or they'll skip that update entirely and 28 will hit in December.

Mr Reilly wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 3:50pm:


If U27 is in July, why would you think U28 not be for another 5 months in December?

Oh, you gotta love these letters.

This one cracked me up:

madman wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 3:44pm:


Yes Severance_Pay, the players cried out in unison, "Please spend time developing a new DDO store!  And they doth rejoice at the new shiny..."

I love how they position this as delivering what the players want.
Some players complained about the reliability of the store.  I don't recall seeing any ask for an "enhanced store experience".


Is this the first time he has revealed his name?
Interesting Google results for that.....
He likes his social media.


Regarding the release of updates.
I'm not a fan of the heartbeat scheduling, delivering updates every 3 months.  It's a nice goal for upper mgmt, but it means you get unfinished shit published as product.  And of course, once it's shipped, the care factor becomes zero as they move their focus onto the next release.
With Severance focusing on his pet Warlock and other resources tackling lag issues, how many were left working on Amrath?  2 or 3 max - how good is all that new Amrath content going to be?
I suggest you set your expectations fairly low - it will be incomplete, untested, and based on TOEE - uninspiring.

Good news on the data centre change - if you take Severance's word, it could be interpreted as a good sign - you don't upgrade if you're planning to go into maintenance mode.
However, maybe this is a little bit of spin.  I would read that with a grain of salt.  I doubt they're doing it to improve the player's experience which they only have contempt for - more likely Severance is sick of all hours call outs to address server issues.

He doesn't mention when he is planning to go to LOTRO?

All in all, I give Severance_Pay's Prod Letter and E-.

madman wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 3:45pm:


LOL they learned from update 25 and 25.5 when they did it a few weeks later.
They give us shitty updates with half the stuff a normal one would have to meet there quota of doing so many updates a year.
Did you really expect something different done with Severance-Pay in charge of ddo?
At this rate of updates we might hit update 50 in 2016. Then if Severance-Pay is still in charge he can claim to be the only producer to do 20+ solid updates in 1 year.

DropBear wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 9:01pm:


No need to head over to LOTRO, they'll be in the same office.

Ah Pook wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 11:38pm:


There was a time when that worked.  I think it was a 2 week window back in '12.

DropBear wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 9:01pm:

Standard for the past 2 years.

GH was well produced, it's saving grace being the unbound loot. They don't seem to realise the importance of top loot that can be traded.

What im saying is: warlock is just cover story, so they can tell that they have put something down in time. And did not need a lot of work:S

DropBear wrote on May 21^st, 2015 at 9:01pm:



Try googling La Cicciolina the results are more interesting. just be careful, some will definitely be NSFW and will contain 

As for the data center move... It was bound to happen...

There's two cases :

- Either what he wrote is the truth and they are moving to a better one...
  The issue they have with the PNAP one they are in is the routers in the PNAP domain... they just can't handle all the traffic and saturate from time to time. ( but that's not the only source of lag... there's also lots of back-end generated lag lately... that is when G-Land is not belly up. [ I just hope they'll just replace the whole server when they are doing the move ] )

- Either what he wrote is the usual Turbine, and they are moving to a new coloc to reduce costs as the games are old and IC is a failure.
  just expect more lag ( less connectivity ) and more server downtimes.

pick the one you think will be the right one... I'm too lazy to make a poll out of that, especially as everybody will choose cheese, beer, boobs or donuts over any of the above choice.

Flav wrote on May 22^nd, 2015 at 3:08am:

That's easy to check.

I'll write it.