Zhen is wearing out his fingerprints on his keyboard typing in excellent analyses of impediments to grouping and solutions in the latest server merge thread. 
  SSG doesn't give 2 shits about grouping, if they did, they could have a permanent 5% xp bonus, or even 2% bonus per player running.  That is zero dev time, zero effort, zero thinking, that would make grouping "a thing" in DDO.  Oh, they can sell you 50% xp, easy peasy, but give away 10% free to make the game better for everyone, oh no, that is not how it works.  The dev focus on DDO is all over the map, there is absolutely no direction, no overarching design philosophy, well if you consider "ad hok" a philosophy, then ok they have one.  But in all their crazy directions and decisions, grouping is definitely not a factor in any of them.

Asheras wrote on Jan 10^th, 2019 at 5:03pm:


Yes, he's absolutely spot on, no question. But how long did it take to remove the group death penalty if someone died.  When buddy bonuses are active more LFMs go up and that could be done without any work at all, the rest of the stuff you have listed all requires either major or minor reworks.  But they aren't even going for the low hanging fruit, it simply not a concern that merits traction by SSG...
  Personally, I think BB is an annoying and stupid mechanic that should be stripped from the game, just put BB into the first time hard and elite bonuses and be done with it.  SSG should never have created a bravery marshall...  but again, when your ship has no rudder, and all 5 captains are shouting orders... 

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/502389-Please-merge-the-servers-or-cre...

Flav wrote on Jan 11^th, 2019 at 11:59am:


Agreed, but this seems to be the DDO way, wait till the flesh under the bandaid is rotted and then put on a different bandaid on the rotted flesh when the old one sloughs off...  They should simply close the 2 lowest pop servers, offer free transfers and some guild compensation to jumpstart their guild ships.  Keep the market place instance and guild ships available for those worlds, but nothing else, so when players return they can do whatever  they need to do to transfer. When they log in, have a message that says this server has be closed here is a link on the forums for what to do...  They really should bite the bullet and merge down to one "server", regardless of the presumed pain, it would have massive benefits that far outweigh the problems.  We already know that they could institute an essentially endless amount of bank space if the fucking forum whiners were willing to loose the bank and backpack format.  Again, I point to that video of Sev outside of Denny's, this is "the guy", he is the dude.  We are expecting him to be the visionary and make those critical hard decisions....  uh huh...

Snu Snu wrote on Jan 11^th, 2019 at 7:22pm:


Prove it.

5 Foot Step wrote on Jan 14^th, 2019 at 6:32pm:


Well, I am basing this on the increase in lag of the default server.

Rose-tinted Goggles wrote on Jan 16^th, 2019 at 10:57am:


It's 2019.  Distributed computing anyone?  clusters anyone?  virtual machine?  Bueller!!  This is an instanced game, the entire concept of a stand alone hardware server disappeared at least 5 years ago.  If SSG had any chops they could simply merge maintain the "server identity" in common areas via the same instance tech they use now, only it would be Thelanis-1 and Khyber- and Kyhber-2 and you could choose where you go.  The quests and raids are already stand alone.  But the base tech is retarded, having things associated with a toon name is just the tip of the iceberg that is the disaster of the underlying code for DDO... But someone with talent could probably unravel it, or not... I'm not a coder so mostly full of shit.

Flav wrote on Jan 17^th, 2019 at 12:34pm:

Not talking about the client. Just because SSG fucked up the transfer to their cluster, doesn't mean it doesn't work.  In some ways it's clear that some lag problems are code related and no matter how much cpu allocation is devoted the problem with still be there, but issues with merging servers has nothing to do with some hardware limitation, other than the cost of taking more cpu and memory overhead from whatever cloud servers they currently hide in, costs more money per month.  The real problems is, in my opinion, and again I am out of my depth, is the non-scalable  dependencies written into the code, like toon name dependance, rather than account and some random hash thingie, AND the fact that things like guild ships would have to redone.  Honestly, I don't understand why they can't create a token for the guild leader with the current guild level of that guild to be used to instaboost that guild on the server they are transferred to...  in an instanced game it just can't be that hard to merge the common areas, the instances are already server independant..
*edit: I also don't think lack of multicore client threading should hamper a game as old and simplistic as DDO, most games still make poor use of threading, if I am not mistaken

Technomage wrote on Jan 17^th, 2019 at 2:05pm:


But additionally, the performance of single threaded operations comparing CPUs from 2006 to now is substantially more powerful.  Lack of threading capable code is not an issue for any aspect of DDO performance, or the ability to merge server populations, it's just a very bad code base, never properly designed to handle the current complexity...

Tspoon wrote on Jan 17^th, 2019 at 2:55pm:


The current complexity is directly resultant of Turbine's culture of "nothing that anyone did before is as important as what I'm going to do next".  None of us know how good or bad the code base was in 2006, but not even Kernighan & Ritchie could have created an environment that would survive Fernando and crew shitting all over it with half-finished "new systems" two or three times a year for over a decade.

Dark_Helmet wrote on Jan 29^th, 2019 at 11:05pm:



Ok, if you go that way I was playing with SUN Servers ( with Sparc and Ultra Sparc processors ) and HP Servers with HP-PA processors at that time.
( with their respective OSes ).

The point was that proper multi core, multi thread both at the processor and the OS level wasn't something common before the Pentium D and the relevant Windows ( W2K and XP ) after that it slowly drifted from the geeks and gamers to the general population, and now you have to search very hard to end up with a single core single thread computer. ( and you're going to pay it real cheap )

Wow... this thread went off the topic quickly (although it was tangentially relevant).

I went back and read that entire MOBO thread, and there were some valid points made.

I absolutely believe marketing is a blind spot for SSG... I only learned about DDO while cruising the internet and it was referred to obliquely in another article I was reading. I had to track it down myself. That's enough to give any competent marketing consultant fits, if they heard it.

Which means one of 4 things for SSG:

1) They don't want to market aggressively.
2) They don't know HOW to market aggressively.
3) They are in some way PROHIBITED (licensing issues, or WotC considering NWNO their D&D flagship cuz Perfect World have more money to burn on licensing) from marketing aggressively.
4) All of the above.

I would also agree that the new player experience is fucking awful. The hackneyed "shipwrecked on a beach" start and Korthos quests are just plain clunky and ugly. There's nothing about that experience to draw a new player in.

The fact you can't even choose where to start the game is stupid (I realize that a fixed starting point is a standard MMO concept to save time, but come on...). If that at least LOOKED cool, that'd be something. But nope. How many years since MotU and you still can't start a non-Iconic character in FR? Now Sharn is set to roll out, the DEFAULT start point for 90% of Eberron campaigns and it's set for what? Level 15 Heroic?

I call bullshit.

I recently rolled up a mule on a new account, and had to live the agony of the new player f2p experience: 1 AH item MAX, PP limited severely by level, and no way to open quests Elite, and the quests you could play were ugly, boring, low XP, Hella Lame dross from 2006. So now I can't group or run content even if I can keep up with a TR train zerging through carrying me. That's a bad way to capture interest and create retention.

I don't know that merging servers is the answer (or if it's even realistically possible), but removing some outdated and arbitrary barriers to entry (like when they ditched the Leveling Tokens) would be a definite step in the right direction.

Flav wrote on Jan 31^st, 2019 at 11:16am:

Indeed. The place really oughta be renamed "The Vault of Irrelevance".