Archive for the 'Dungeons & Dragons Online' Category

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Misery’s Peak

Posted by Ethic on April 15, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 12 Comments

Last night was Day 2 (or Week 2?) of Massively’s Nights of Eberron. Last week was fun but perhaps a bit disorganized.

During the week off, I took my Cleric out back and had him shot, to be replaced with a Ranger. I spent some time getting him back up to level 2 so he would be ready to go. Even still, I had a lot of things to learn. For example, how to use a quiver. It’s not obvious. It kind of works like a bag. You equip it and then you open it and put your arrows in it. However, not all quivers are alike. The two varieties I could find for sale at a vendor are called “narrow” and “wide”. They both can hold 1,200 arrows (that’s a big quiver!). The “wide” quiver can hold 6 types of arrows, with a maximum of 200 each type. The narrow can hold 3 types of arrows, with a maximum of 400 each. Since I only had 2 types of arrows I opted for the “narrow” quiver so I could hold 400 of the arrows I’m using right now.

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DDO and Super Rewards, Part 3

Posted by Ethic on April 14, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 4 Comments

Ravious has hit his quota of DDO posts so I’ve been forced to do the final update on the “Saga of Super Rewards”.

Marketroid posted a “final” update on the story here. The important part may be this:

Based on your feedback, we’re stepping away from the ‘Offer’ category for now. We’ll keep exploring alternate ways for players who want points to get them. We’ll also continue to innovate in pricing and accessibility because that’s who we are. As of today, the Offer Wall is coming down. We’ll collect all the feedback we’ve received over the last few days and will use it to guide future decisions.

Follow the link above to read the rest. In my opinion this should have never gotten off the ground floor but at they did a pretty decent job of responding to the player base (and finally responding to the security complaints). And hey, at least they didn’t charge folks 21 times for the last month. Bazinga!

- Ethic

DDO – Kobold Genocide

Posted by Ravious on April 14, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 9 Comments

In defiance, I played Dungeons and Dragons Online last night.  The Docks and Marketplace seemed oddly calm given the storm of chaos that blew through alternate worlds earlier in the day.  A little shing-shing to get the dust off of my dual khopeshes, and I was ready to roll.  One nice thing about Dungeons and Dragons Online is it promotes a very arcade-like wholesale slaughter of mook mobs.  This is where kobolds come in.  There is nothing mookier than the little reptile-weasel humanoids.  Their existence practically begs for a gibbing.

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DDO and Super Rewards, Part 2

Posted by Ravious on April 13, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 5 Comments

Via the Boss Man in Comment 1:

The latest: “We’re currently investigating the reports of privacy concerns with our new Offer Wall. That feedback has been escalated to our partners for deeper investigation. Until that investigation is complete we’ve taken the Super Rewards option out of the Offer Wall. We’ll let you know when we have more information!”

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2893059&postcount=116

Patience sent out a decent post on the DDO forum (thanks Ethic) regarding the shadiness of the whole thing.  It sounds like they have some really strict guidelines, which just weren’t fully in effect at launch.  (But, what is ever is fully in effect at an MMO launch, lololol… /sad)  Anyway, it is good that Turbine quickly responded, and I hope against hope that the filters will be enough to make it a decent option.  Forum posts are reporting that most offers require more real purchases, such as Netflix or buying shoes online.  Still, please be aware that the email linked to your Turbine account still seems to pass through the internet unencrypted.

DDO and Super Rewards

Posted by Ravious on April 13, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 17 Comments

Yesterday Turbine dropped an unexpected announcement on the Dungeons and Dragons Online players.  They have made a deal with the company Super Rewards to provide another way for players to receive the cash shop points for Dungeons and Dragons Online.  It’s quite simple really.  Head on over to the Offer Wall to find current promotions along with the amount of Turbine Points a player would gain from doing the task.  It is great Turbine is finding another way to enjoy the game where points can be bought, earned in game, and now given via the Offer Wall.  The positives mostly end there.

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DDO: Static Style

Posted by Ethic on April 8, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 32 Comments

Last night was the first night of the Massively DDO static night, officially called “Massively’s Nights of Eberron”. I’ve always said that I’d love to play DDO in a static group so I rolled up a Cleric the night before and then logged in last night. I expected maybe 15 or 20 people to show up. I’d guess it was closer to 50, including some famous folks like Psychochild and Green Armadillo. Syp would have been there but instead he was off doing something important like “welcoming a new baby into the world”. Yeah, whatever dude. Seriously though, congratulations!

The first thing that confused me is that we all were on Korthos but some of us had snow and some had sun. We had to all get to the sunny version which meant we had to sail to Stormreach and then back to Korthos. At this point we tried to form groups of 5 to do some quests. I invited one person and we stood around waiting for others to express interest. Eventually we got a group of 4 together, 1 Cleric and 3 Rogues. Off we went with voice chat enabled.

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Three Truths…

Posted by Cyndre on December 5, 2009 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 8 Comments

Three truths have become false this week:

1) I hold a very principled stance firmly against the Micro Transaction based MMO business model.   It is the root of all MMO evil et. cetera…

2) I have played DDO, and it sucks.  It was crappy in Beta and it never improved.   Poor implementation of some decent concepts, coupled with extensive poor choices for the balance of the design, resulted in an overall dry and uninspired game with little good to write about and quite a bit bad.   DDO is doomed to fail, and will never recover.   Period.  De Facto and all that…

3) I have become so disillusioned with MMOs in general, and the diku model in particular, that I am doomed to watch reruns of Two and a Half Men and Mash for the rest of my life.   Until I die.  Old and bored…

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Dungeon Love

Posted by Ravious on December 3, 2009 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 15 Comments

I am addicted to Dungeons and Dragons Online.  There, I said it.  Even with Siege of Mirkwood just having launched, I want to play more quick hits of Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Last night I chose to spend the 20 minutes I had to murder a tribe of kobolds rather than log in to Lord of the Rings Online for a skirmish or so.  For me, that’s the beauty of Dungeons and Dragons Online: quick flavorful bites of MMO play.

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The Breakups

Posted by Ravious on December 1, 2009 in Dungeons & Dragons Online, General and World of Warcraft. 16 Comments

I unsubscribed to Dungeon and Dragons Online today.  I really only subscribed to get the 1000 points, which was all I needed to buy the 32 point build.  Now I have a dual-wielding khopesh paladin, and all is well.  They will still get my money in non-monthly ways.  The breakup was easy.  Logged in to the master account.  Do you want to unsubscribe?  Are you sure?  Done.  If you want to help us with an exit survey, that’d be swell. I almost had to search to find that last sentence it was so inconspicuous. The relationship we had wasn’t working, but the breakup was clean enough to tell me we could still go have a beer once in awhile.

The so-called number 1 MMO was a different story. She started crying, showing me cute and “memorable” pictures of stuff we might have shared.  I had to scroll through her sob story of how she might change for me, and then she begged for help.  All I could say while wishing my friend would call now telling me my Aunt died was “it’s not you, it’s me.”  By the time I got away I was embarrassed for her.  Would I have to go through this every time I wanted to hang out with her?

Like Dan Savage, I seek to employ the campsite rule outside of… well, campsites.  I want to constructively tell the devs why I am leaving because it can only benefit everybody.  But, when I am being paintballed with marketing cowdung my constructive thoughts go right out the window.  On the other hand, when it is clear the company respects my time and money, I will actively seek out the feedback link.

–Ravious
put a leash on her, turkish

Shareholder Subscription

Posted by Ravious on November 23, 2009 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 10 Comments

I’ve talked before about how subscriptions can be seen as a form of investing.  There are plenty of people that keep parking-lot subscriptions to games like World of Warcraft, where the monthly rent is paid but the car is never moved.  I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Online lately, and while I am not ready to give my full impressions (favorable as they may be), I did want to discuss an interesting point to their business model.  Continue reading ‘Shareholder Subscription’