f13.net

For some reason I'm tempted to give this another try - Anyone know if it has gotten any better since release? Or is it even possible to find people to group with?

I heard they put in solo content, and are working on some arena style PVP. My guild wouldn't play it, but if I leave DAOC in the next two months I may give it a try considering i'm waiting on Warhammer.

I don't think they make a perfume strong enough to disguise this turd. If you really want to play a fake mmo, then you should play guild wars. At least it has no monthly fee attached.

I do not believe any amount of patching will ever make DDO a fun game.

Pretty much sums it up. The engine would be fun for doing group modules or some PvP, but no way in hell would I pay a monthly fee for it.

I still play on and off when the mood strikes me and have not had any problems finding people to group with.  Between the marking yourself looking for a group, seeing groups looking for more that you can request to join, and hitting the hot spot inns, it's not hard at all.  Course, i mostly play a cleric which means i also get random tells to join groups quite often.  Solo difficulty dungeons seem to be a waste of time.

The mail system makes twinking your alts easier, but i hadn't tried the new PVP, auction house or raiding content (was in beta).  The Drow is an extra character slot that's unlockable by getting 400 fame/favor points, from doing quests.  Im about 60% of the way there with my lvl 6 cleric.  You can also earn other rewards by acheiving levels of favor with the various factions in the city (such as an additional inventory tab, magic item than summons food, long term buff spells, etc)

While I like the voice chat dungeon crawls, I will say most players seem to be alts so they tend to know quests and run through them high speed for loot rewards, but you can filter those group out avoiding the "popular" quests and advertising your group right.

I like it b/c most quests are doable in 30 mins to an hour for long ones, and some of the quests are enjoyable.  Don't like the tendency to repeat quests purely for exp points.  It a pretty common attitude to find people want to farm quests on Hard and Elite settings.  I'd rather tackle a CR appropriate level quest i'd never done before on Normal difficulty

In short, as with most mmorpg's most of the problems are the players :)

Xilren
PS Course, if you hated the click to attack combat that hasn't changed.  I will say the differences between playing a cleric in DDO vs NWN2 are so large it really shows how the same ruleset can be implemented in wildly different ways.

Are they using the same engine for LOTR's? Or am I going into  :nda: territory?

There's a free ten day trial out, so not a bad time to try it. 

Gave it a go myself and thought it was ok, but I'm not going to pay money for a game where grouping is required most of the time. 

I'm pretty sure they've been upgrading the same basic engine since AC2.

I'm playing once a week with a regular group.  It's quite fun to do that way.  When I have to miss a week, it's not too tough to find a group to get caught back up with my regular group.  PUGs are quite easy to find and relatively painless.

I may try this.  I did do the free trial thingy, but never actually logged in.  I wonder if I can redo it, or if Cal can hook me up with a quicky trial.  This may be up my alley, especially for my psuedo casualiness.  I hope Turbine comes up with some form of station pass over the next year or two, I could see bouncing between their games from time to time.

You can still get a new trial account if you want to try it again.

http://trial.ddo.com/

Heh, well I never actually tried it, but will this time.  I will report back and promise to be gentle!

Actually this may work for me and my friends, who seem to have limited time to play lately.  I know everyone is anxious to hear my opinion!

Cal - question, the voice chat seems to be a bit borked in game.

Everyone seems really quiet and sounds like they are 12 years old.

b/c of old codecs and the Gamespy "network"


are there any outdoor zones yet?  and how far can you solo?  I played at launch, bought the box and got turned off

Yes - there are outdoor zones.

You could likely solo to level 3 or 4. But it's a lot quicker to group. Finding groups isn't that bad.

OK - the patching process... It took me 3 hours of patching to get to the current release from the box. That is just crazy. Talk about a good way to turn away potential customers. Could you put a complete patched version online for people to download?

I enjoyed DDO but frankly I just have a limited ammount of time and money to spend on MMOG's and it just was not quite enough to bump my one of my two current ones.

The engine was fun and they did a good job implementing a lot of the abilities I hope they do well.

This might be what you want DDO download (http://trial.ddo.com/download). 

(Note, haven't tried this so it may be the same as the cd install version and still require just as much patching.  Hope not;  installing any MMORPG from CD after it's been live for months is always a long process....)

Xilren

My buddy did the trail download when I convinced him to play with me based on my patch times, I think his was still like 2 hours.

Also, it takes like 30 seconds to 2 minutes sometimes for the servers to populate with a connection status on the login program.

(It also is doing something strange and won't let me shutdown my computer until I close out of the launcher.)

this is probably the ideal game for me now, but at launch it really had a lot of turnover.  I didn't feel a lot of community.  Particularly where people do PUG's and walk on.  Really felt like we were running down Walmart aisles and then back to the Inn. 

Is there anything to encourage people wanting to maintain a group after the few mins in an instance?  Do they have guilds?  I like some parts of it, but Puzzle Pirates is strong alternative without more persistence.  Just sayin.

Guilds are there.

I've run a few instances in a row with a few groups.

Some of the darker dungeons are pretty nifty.

Note for LOTR's/future dungeons - make some REALLY REALLY dark and put in player held torches...

They do have guilds, but the main use for guilds is to help build parties before you fill out the remaining spots with pickup members.

The real use of guilds is for group control, which shouldn't be surprising since DnD Online was designed around the circle-of-friends group model.  It's a weird mechanic which effectively turns guildies into 'PCs' and pickups into henchmen and hirelings.  Knowing the party leader is a guildie means everyone in that guild doesn't have to take any crap when the pickup member turns into a smacktard. 

Question regarding ALL Turbine games and patching.

Why don't you use those fancy front ends to patch the actual game? It still will launch the game then show you a progress bar. The only patches you'll get through the front end are FOR the front end.

I challenge anyone to beat Guildwar's patching system.

Dynamic lighting is hard.  Also, people bitch a lot when you make things too dark.  See: Doom 3.

Don't make it BB to Permafrost dark. Just DARK.

Guild War's system bites. It won't download *all* the content it needs, only what it decides it thinks you need at that time. I.e. it might download 50 MBs at the start but then when you travel to another area it might decide you need another 50 MBs. I just want to leave the game on the login screen and have it download *everything* overnight for me but it won't do that.

Initial observation time!

Was complicated at first figuring things out; probably due to the engine used and whatnot.  Took me a couple hours of play before I finally got all the windows how I want them.  I lowered resolution down to 1600x1200, but there is no fucking font size option (that I could find) so settled for 1280 by 1024, which is pretty nice.  Quests seem shiny so far, and feels D@Dish.

Like:  Shiny graphics and easy customizing of GUI.  I really like the whole rank/level bit.  Basically there are 5 ranks to every level, and every rank allows you to customize your character with special abilities, which you can rework after gaining another rank. 

Dislike:  People randomly trying to group, initial chat interface, GUI seems a bit held back due to design.  I can sell 1 item at a time, every item is a square in my bag, repair 1 item at a time, etc. 

All in all I am not quiet sure how I feel; if I picked this up as a monthly sub I want my RL friends to be able to play, but due to learning curve I am not sure how doable this is. 

Yes - but you can be enjoying the game within 10 minutes of buying it

The abysmal GUI and the lack of decent response time to actions killed this game for me just before I realized it did not fit my style of solo play.

Added punctuation.  :evil:

Are you sure about that?  Just last week, the shops allowed me to sell a bunch of stuff at once.  You can also stack items of like type if they stack (no stacks of armor..which is the same as most games).  The repair stuff also allows you to do everything at once. 

I am probably just doing something wrong.  AC1 has sucked me back in, so not sure how much longer I will bother with DDO. 

Stacking works half the time, you might need to double click on items so they appear at the bottom of the bar - then you can sell them all at once.

is there an endgame yet?  do they have PvP?  what are people doing who run through all the quests and ding 10/10?  rerolling or is there more?

The level cap is now 12, and there are a bunch of new areas.  Also you can get special stuff via faction, and curently you can unlock the Drow race by getting a certain amound of faction.   Also there is PvP now, and its tracked or some such thing.  I am actually looking forward to playing it tonight, just working on recovering from a hangover.

I think there is a dragon. And a beholder. I'm positive there is a beholder.

How does pvp works here? If I remember the beta correctly this game is just a big visual chat lobby (Guess you can't fight there in the city hubs) where you get a group and enter instanced dungeons.
Where are you supposed to meet people to pvp against?
Or are you supposed to "Create a PvP instance" and invite other players to bash each others in there, a la Quake Deathmatch?

yes, are there PvP servers, BG's or just arena combat?

Haven't tried it yet but....

And yes, there is some raiding content where raid = 2 groups of 6.

Xilren

The idea of bar brawling is cool.

So their idea of PvP is just meaningless arena fighting?
Wonder why EQ2 announced PvP was coming with their second expansion (Kingdom of Sky) when they actually introduced Arena fighting in their first (Desert of Flames).

If that's PvP, I hereby declare that Pong is the best PvP game ever.

Well.....Pong actually is the best PvP game ever.

Playing Co-op Double Dragon and beating the piss out of each other while also fending off the actual bad guys is the best PVP ever.

Not when you're short on quarters.

Arena fighting is the entire basis of Guild Wars, and lack of Arena fighting was the longest running consistent whine of the daoc community.

Do not underestimate the popularity of pointless arena fighting in a pvp based game.

The popularity of arena fighting in a shit game that no one plays is of course harder to predict.

I'm gonna give this another shot too. Playing nwn2 makes me want to look at this game up close again.

I don't understimate arenas, I just think they are a joke in Massive Online Worlds. Calling them fights, I am ok with it. Battles too.
PvP.. meh.. . Although technically correct, I think it's not what people have in mind when the acronym is used. I could be wrong but as far as I can remember no one used to call "PvP" Quake Deathmactch back in the days (or Intellivision NASL® Soccer challeneges fought all night long over dorm undisputed ruling). To me instanced fights between players, as in Counterstrike or Guild Wars (yes beside the territorial gain, that sounds to me more CS Clanbase than MMO PvP), are not that much PvP :(
Especially when they don't serve any purpose gameplay-wise (as in D&D Online apparently).

That said, to me Guild Wars is a strategic-slow motion version of Conterstrike with a turf war system coded in the software.
Or moreso a Lineage 2 inspired minigame, like a java free web-version of L2.

Hey, what server are any of you DDO players on anyways?

Good memories there, although in the end the stupid unstoppable elbow attack ruined it all.