Rothgar wrote on Dec 4^th, 2024 at 7:21pm:


OG Everquest, Tibia, and Ultima Online are all older than WoW, continue to receive content updates, attract new players, and make money. DDO is bleeding to death extracting what profits it gets from a small handful of whales that shrinks every month.

What's amazing is not that DDO is still going, a good MMO can have VERY long legs. What's amazing is its going DESPITE a decade+ of fucking bullshit.


For reference: a lot of the people you're talking to on here don't even play any more. I still have the client installed but aside from logging in for free shit I have not played the game in over a year. Its just too shitty.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 1^st, 2024 at 7:25pm:


I actually remember you due to this lol. Way back in the day I got hit by ye olde reincarnation cache yeetus and put in a ticket. I got you and you told me to pick three items from the list I had submitted.

Despite what you may have thought at that time, I still remember that transaction because it was one of the few times I felt like the CS from Turbine was genuinely willing to work with me as a customer.

Hopefully this hasn't already been asked, I've been busy and missed out on all the fun.

Pretty sure it was back in 14 (15 at the latest).  At the height of the duping sprees before they changed the banks at any rate.

I'd been duping like crazy with the bank/bag glitch with no problem.  It was before they decommissioned the anniversary cards and I was in the middle of duping stacks of those.  I was disconnected at some point, couldn't log on for awhile and when I finally could log back in, my toon was on the far end of the harbor, no where near where I was when I disconnected, and my card cruncher was gone.

I'm about 90% certain I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar and they took the jar away from me.  I didn't receive a ban, temp or long term, but the cruncher was gone and the team refused to give me a new one.

I don't know if I fell into the whale category, but man, I spent a lot of money on the game; which I suspect also allowed me to push the limits of what I could say on the forums.

The question is; did the amount of money a player spent play into how they were disciplined?  Were whales more likely to get away with minor offenses?  I know after pushing the boundaries too far it didn't matter, but it really seemed like I could get away with a bit more than people who might have been spending less than me and were getting hit with more severe punishments.

Back when the card duping was going strong, one of the guys in my old guild was handing out stacks of cards.  He'd hand out scales, boxes, etc if you asked.  He TR'ed damn near every day and spent so much time in front of banks and trainers that I'm surprised he got any playing time in.

He never got touched by bans or anything even though he was literally running around handing out goodies.

I always assumed he was connected and untouchable.

The Grandest of Fellows wrote on Dec 11^th, 2024 at 6:48pm:


I was never paid enough to know how or why certain things played out the way they did.

As Grand most recently proved you can get away with damn near anythign these days.

But it sounds like the GMs worked off of reports/tickets, no one actually watches in-game.

Did you have any insight into how much people spent at all? I've always been curious if the GMs can even see who the whales are.

Munkenmo wrote on Dec 12^th, 2024 at 5:58pm:


I don’t recall their server. I do recall their character name, but posting it here would be a huge Risk.

Strake wrote on Dec 12^th, 2024 at 3:53pm:


It was a lot for DDO. I want to say in the five-digit range. We didn’t have many players who we considered “whales,” at least back then. By contrast, during my post-Turbine/SSG tenure it was commonplace for players to have spent hundreds of thousands on WB’s mobile games.

Rothgar wrote on Dec 12^th, 2024 at 9:48pm:

Hundreds of thousands of DOLLARS? On a mobile game???

From what I hear its mostly Saudi princesses or other children of billionaires who don't give a single tin shit.

Would you receive false reports on players often? People trying to get each other banned by opening fake tickets, or sabotaging them in some way etc.?

I'm curious about it going the other way. I remember a little over ten years ago there was some drama with a very large guild that I was a part-time in. My mains were my more dickish guild but I'd raid with a college friend. This guild was all about 'community service' helping noobs, really pro-turbine, proud Paladin types in-game, on forums, the guild site, etc...

New members had to audition and after they were on board they were expected to grind out proper gear and past lives in a set amount of time, show they were serious about being getting good enough to be help to everyone in raids. set an example, blah blah blah  This was all handed down with a fairly condescending attitude that is so common among small group dynamics and people not used to being in charge, mostly harmless easy to make fun of, but they had a very large guild and ran tons of raids and helped players grind.

A big part of this especially on the guild site was hitting milestones and posting to let everyone know you hit milestones clean, by playing, running raids, and leveling fast using the leveling guides the guild spammed everywhere with its name on it. Play like X guild and be an end-game badass hahaha! that kind of stuff which was all run of the mill in the hey days of 2012-2015.

The Guild also loved to flex that they had friends among the devs and were impacting the game, putting out the best builds and most powerful characters and never cheating, and that members should never dupe and always turn cheaters in to the guild leaders so they could get their Turbine friends to shut it down.

Now the funny part, I'm raiding with them using a toons made with my buddy now and then keeping a low profile and playing my mains mostly off hours with my guild duping like hells, using every exploit I can whenever I can to make the most broken shit possible, also typical for the time. Occasionally I get a tell from higher ups in the paladin guild asking what I've been up to and when I expect to level this or that, hp checks (seriously lol) all sorts of 'help' they pass on to their low level members. I'm passing plenty of my duped stuff and gear on to my 'clean' toon on the down-low But otherwise I'm good I like playing with my mate and he is a clean player and not that bothered about minmax'ing and the rest so I adjusted when with him no biggie.

Then comes this one day of doom, after I've been raiding with these guys for a couple months all hell breaks lose. All the officers get bans and the guild site turns into a melodrama from hell. Turns out that one of the newer noob players who got into the guild and drank the cool-aid found out that most of the top players in the guild were using piles of duped Otto's to insta-level as well as being duping fiends. This guy had been playing 50-60 hours a week doing everything he'd been told to do and was constantly grinding desperate to keep up with the guilds expectations and not be 'an anchor' dragging the guild down during raids. The added spice was this guy had been ridden by the officers for not learning fast enough, playing subpar flavor builds, holding himself back, etc... As you might imagine when this guy found out he reported all of them.

Gets better, he reports them says nothing to anyone in the guild about it and nothing happens for a week, then apparently he reports them again and still nothing happens, see the officer's friends in Turbine are running interference for them. So this guy must have had enough because he sends in reports on them and even fedex's a letter to Turbine and boom all the bans come down the goodie too-shoes are embarrassed for a couple weeks and the game moves on.

The best part of the story is that not only did some of the officers have pals in Turbine, but those people at turbine told them who reported them for the cheating and how they had no choice but to hand out the bans. The guy get frozen out, tries to pretend that he didn't report anyone and on the guild site the whole vibe of the guild changes in like a day from "we play clean!" to "oh don't be such a child everyone knows we use features"  and the former Paladins flip the script and turned the guy who drank the kool-aid into the villain, he gets so much shit from various people he either transferred or just quit within a couple months. But for a couple weeks there you could occasionally hear him trying to defend himself in raids or see his toons running around in a starter guild. 

Personally I loved exploits, duping, and any kind of fun trick back in the day, and I never judged people for doing it, shit is expensive. But fuck I did find it funny when those super clean officers all had to eat shit in public, and I loved that the fucking naive wannabe had it all blow up in his face. Like I said it wasn't like it was my main guild hahaha. 

That guild mostly collapsed in the following year and its whole profile and schtick about playing clean and being of service to the community vanished, the guild is still around but all the big names moved onto other guilds and I still see them around now and then.

But to my point, I found it fascinating that not only were some high profile players protected by people at Turbine, gms I'd assume, but much more interesting was that apparently those connections were good enough that the officers were told who it was that reported them. But later on I've had a notion that maybe then didn't have friends at Turbine but rather they were people at Turbine.

Any thoughts?