8 Sep to 10 Oct.  SSG retards too stupid to come up with a better plan, so they recycle the old shit.

This is odd. Didn't they say, they can't do daily gold rolls anymore? I know players wanted those.

noamineo wrote on Sep 1^st, 2023 at 2:20pm:


BG3 is pretty rough to compete with. I'd be playing DDO but honestly I don't see myself touching the XPAC till this winter.

Starfield, + POE league is pretty fun, + GW2 Expansion, + Warhammer 3 update, and I've got plenty of other stuff I enjoy playing.

Edrein wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2023 at 12:00am:


NWN with the right coding skills combo and the Linux client could handle about 100 person in a single play world, with
memory between reboots ( parse that as your character records and nventory gets saved server side at logoff and if there's a scheduled restart so that you wll get back all your stuff  )
The most difficult part was finding a ( cheap ) way to host the server and the bandwdth requirement.

NWN2 sucked ass just trying to build areas... At least at first, and since they didn't deliver all the promised stuff ( Linux client, Database hookup, and more ) I stopped bothering after completing the single player quests.

noamineo wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2023 at 9:10pm:


DDO isn't an MMO. You play in a small group of six players in a quest.

In raids that increases to 12.

Outside of seeing players in hub zones, you can play the entire game singleplayer effectively.

DDO is a MMO lite.

I don't know if ya'll remember Gauntlet but that was 4 player and really fun for its time.
You still might find a console in a movie theatre or retro gaming center.

DDO is in the same genre of "4 player dungeon crawl" and you've always been able to play these types of games solo.

MMOs just add "in-universe" lobbies which are "towns" or public spaces and then they have "instanced content" as a kind of controlled sub-game. This is in contrast to World events which are done---the best---by Guild Wars 2. I highly recommend everyone play their "Heart of Thorns" expansion to see how amazingly zone-wide 100+ player progression can be done in both a cinematic, and engaging way. You've got multiple bosses and bases that have to be progressed simultaneously and the zones are fucking vertical.

The advantage of "instanced content" is that:
1) It is easier to balance around 4-6 expected players, rather than 10-100 expected players.
2) It is easier to create difficulty without excluding people: since you can tune the difficulty to the party.
3) From a technology perspective it is easier to code and deal with player interactions: we all know how shit the lag is in games like Elder Scrolls Online. Mass PVP has always had problems here.
4) It allows for easy solo progression.
5) Human beings operate best in small teams and it allows the monkey side of the brain to work best. At work, if you have more than 6 people in a meeting then good fucking luck getting your idea out there unless you are the leader.

Honestly. I dislike raid content because I think that it is---in general---an excuse for people to get covetous about social power. There's all the "raid leader" or "guild leader" ego bullshit. I know that this is part of what makes it fun though; however, that's why raids are "special" because developers know that there's only so much interest in stretching the comfy 4-man session into a 12 or even 20 man session. Guild wars 2 open world events are strangely lonely. It's like visiting New York City. No one talks to each other on the street because there are just too many people. More people can be less social. Facebook beat MySpace because it allowed for better Silo-ing of people. Discord beat Facebook because it allows for even better Silo-ing. You have to give people the control to participate and not participate on their own free will---and then give community leaders the ability to easily control all aspects of participation. MMOs should just copy the functionality of discord, or integrate it directly in some capacity.

Speaking of "loneliness" in an MMO I think communication is still an under-developed aspect of play. We've all been in a R1 heroic zerg where you can do all of Gianthold without anyone saying a word. On the one hand this can be fun and efficient... ...on the other... ...it can be soul sucking. You might as well be playing solo. There's no need to interact, everyone knows what to do---not just the quests have been solved but the social interactions have been solved.

Games have to constantly lean into new content that challenges players to relate to each other in new ways in order to create that fun dynamic of overcoming a new challenge. "On every mountaintop is a higher mountain top." Part of the failure of the modern MMO is that players have solved so much of the social dimension of play. Sociality is part of the content itself in an MMO. This is why raids are challenging---they stretch basic human relations in a group setting: it is hard to get 12 monkeys to co-ordinate on anything. That said, raiding can be tiring.

I'd love if DDO looked at some of its basic social mechanics: make buffs better, give players more ways to emote in chat that are tied to their race or class (e.x., "heal me" button that is particular to a particular race, or "deal more damage!" that is particular to a particular race"), reduce solo-healing to a huge degree---and for god's sakes mix up the xp rewarded by quests so that we aren't running the same shit over and over again.

Flav wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2023 at 12:46pm:


I appreciate that I always manage to summon you from the depths.

Don't get me wrong, that statement wasn't ragging on the game. And I managed to see some of those mythical servers, but in general the game wasn't really meant for long-standing multiplayer play.

Hardcore_Girl wrote on Sep 3^rd, 2023 at 7:53pm:


You'd think this would be enough to get them off their asses and release some real VIP benefit upgrades.

But apparently not.

One has to wonder: exactly what the hell do these people DO all day long?

Justanotherlurker wrote on Sep 4^th, 2023 at 6:12am:

More like an excuse.

Check that.

More like a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.

Edrein wrote on Sep 3^rd, 2023 at 5:27pm:


It was thought as a computer version of the Pen & Paper AD&D, definitely not as a long standing multiplayer game.

Standing Stone Games wrote on Sep 4^th, 2023 at 9:58am:


As sad and stupid as this is, I actually kind of hope its true. The response to the stupid "battlepass" system was so overwhelmingly negative. You basically only had "people who thought it was trash" and "people who treat SSG like a charity and were going to sub anyway".

So if SSG is going to use a man's death as an excuse to shelve a clearly failed design, I'm ok with that.

Rubbinns wrote on Sep 4^th, 2023 at 11:10am:


At first I didn't believe you until I went back and looked, I'll be damned.

The funny part is; up until that last month or so, Severlin had mentioned there was an universal tree coming with it as well.

So it got dropped last minute, kind of curious as to what the tree would have been.

noamineo wrote on Sep 5^th, 2023 at 4:22pm:

The didn't even fucking know the hardcore server was still running.  They just found out today.