DDO Servers merge

[Endie]

I just got an email from Turbine saying that they were merging 5 Dungeons and Dragons Online servers into 2:

---------------------------------------------------------
Server Merge
---------------------------------------------------------

Codemasters Online Gaming recently announced that we were due to
undertake a server merge on the current DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ONLINE(tm):
Stormreach(tm) service.  This will bring together a number of
communities onto our two new worlds, Keep and Devourer.

This will give every adventurer in Stormreach(tm) the opportunity to
make new friends and new groups, join new guilds and even make new
enemies!

These worlds will be constructed using data from the existing servers
Lyrandar, Aureon, Boldrei, Dorn and Onatar and will be merged in the
way outlined below:

Devourer - will be populated with all the players from Lyrandar,
Dorn and Onatar

Keeper - Will be populated with all the players from Boldrei and
Aureon

We have put together a list of Frequently Asked Questions that we
hope will answer any questions or concerns you may have.  This can
be found here.

http://www.ddo-europe.com/faq.php?type=Server+Merge

I'm not pretending to be the Woodcock (no, really, I'm not), but being able to shrink a population into 40% of the projected servers can't be a good thing?  And in my defence, I only subbed for two months at launch.  And it was better than Vanguard 

Before Telemedicority comes in under yet another alt and tells us why this is brilliant and completely according to plan, I suppose it's only fair to say that at least their system is designed so that a merge is possible, as opposed to a certain SOE product.

[eldaec]

Do DDO servers run with more than the typical dikumud 2-3k simultaeneous subs, or is DDO really broken?

[slog]

Europe?  Who cares.

[Endie]

Do DDO servers run with more than the typical dikumud 2-3k simultaeneous subs, or is DDO really broken?

Well, the stated intention of Turbine was to run DDO servers with deliberately small populations, so that people knew many of the people they shared a server with.  If so, then that just makes things worse.

And as regards "Europe, who cares", wtf?!?  I mean, is "slog" some cockney rhyming slang for "trog[lodyte]", or can you just not spell "troll"?

[schild]

Actually, I kinda agree with Slog. Europe's top selling game each year has what? 1/10th the number of sales of any of the top ten in America? It's not so much a snap at Europe so much as the lack of total gamers. You have Spain - who's primary concern is privacy. Italy, who's primary concern is being crazy (I've met a lot of italians in MMORPGs, and I don't know what's in the water). And outside of Magic the Gathering, circa 1996, I've never heard of a French Gamer. Most of the Brits and Germans I know play on American servers.  The PSP is an anomaly in that it's doing much better compared to the competition in Europe. But short of that, yea, Europe, who cares. It's really indicative of just about nothing other than "Yea, Europe still isn't a big player of any sort [in videogames]."

[Arthur_Parker]

Europe?  Who cares.

European DDO players, maybe.

[eldaec]

Europe?  Who cares.

European DDO players, maybe.

Or maybe not, given that they only need to two servers now ;)

[Endie]

Actually, I kinda agree with Slog. Europe's top selling game each year has what? 1/10th the number of sales of any of the top ten in America?

I'm intrigued by how you get the idea that Europe - total population Urals-to-Atlantic c. 475,000,000 - has 1/10th the sales of the US.  Even just trimming off the shitty bits like Byelorussia and sticking to the EU you still get a bigger population than the US.  It sounds unlikely that the Americans buy ten times the units.

Certainly, the figures I found in a quick check don't back that idea up for a second.  Try the wikipedia article here, for instance, regarding bestsellers.  The platforms with regional breakdowns, Nintendo's DS and Wii, see sales substantially higher in the EU than the US, pretty much across all titles.  The Sims 2 launch saw 50% of all sales made in Europe.

Just in case you meant MMOs, let's take the most recent benchmark title: Europe saw 1.1 million copies of the Burning Crusade sold by the end of day 1, while the US saw 1.2 million sold.  Your argument would reguire Europe to have sold only 120,000 copies: almost 1000% out.  I found a bunch of others, but why labour the point: the US may sell more of some games (GRAW, for one unsurprsing example, though only 2-to-1) while the Europeans buy more of others (Sims titles, Nintendo stuff (by a big margin)) but some smacktard saying "it's Europe, so what?" is just either idiotic chauvinism of the "what would I need a passport for, I have the Mall of America?" sort, or intentional trolling.

Edit: closed nested braces, added GRAW ref url.

[CmdrSlack]

Maybe it's just me, but perhaps the sentiment is more along the lines of, "well, DDO has crap subs, clearly WoW is what is getting the most players in Europe, DDO doing a server merge in Europe is rather meh because, well, it's not a real shocker."

That's certainly my reaction to it happening.

[schild]

Endie, Europe does very well with the ultra popular stuff, but the moment you dent that surface, it's just a festering pool of shit. Even Japan - who does _nowhere near_ the total of America has kept up with us on the Wii and I think maybe surpassed us on the DS (since they're all but ignoring the PSP). WoW is the most popular game in the world. DDO probably isn't in the top 200. There's a reason the vast majority of games on that list has no European numbers.

[Simond]

And that reason is most game publishers are idiots and treat Europe as a third-rate market.
Talk about a self-fullfilling prophecy.

[schild]

Self-fulfilling my ass. Europe has a couple publishers that put shit out that american publishers wouldn't touch. You've got a shitload of PS1 and 2 titles that never made it to America. And you know what, some of them are really fucking good. See, Europe doesn't get to complain, ever, because they don't even know what they already have (unless they're complaining about prices).

[Arthur_Parker]

Choices, choices.  Buying games or watching European TV (NOT WORK SAFE)

[jpark]

Maybe Vanguard, DnD online and EQ2 could all slug it out for a top honor of some sort.

[Strazos]

Arthur wins the thread, and 17% of the entire MMOG forum with that link.

[Tannhauser]

I know I'm gonna get a Bat Country Beatdown for this but I recently did the DDO trial and had a good time with it.

Hack and slashy while running like madmen thru the Waterworks was hella fun.  (Why does everyone have to run Mach Two in that game all the time anyway?)

Maybe someday if I kick my WoW addiction I'll go back, but with whats coming out this year it's not looking good.

[Strazos]

All I know is that rogues couldn't solo very well at all.

[slog]

I know I'm gonna get a Bat Country Beatdown for this but I recently did the DDO trial and had a good time with it.

Hack and slashy while running like madmen thru the Waterworks was hella fun.  (Why does everyone have to run Mach Two in that game all the time anyway?)

Maybe someday if I kick my WoW addiction I'll go back, but with whats coming out this year it's not looking good.

In the DDO beta, It was pretty apparant that the game would be fun for maybe a month or two and then get real boring.   Nothing wrong with enjoyinh a MMO that is only fun for a month or two.  Turbine makes decent "B" title MMO's on a relatively smaller budget, and they make money doing it. 

Whatever works...

[Endie]

Endie, Europe does very well with the ultra popular stuff, but the moment you dent that surface, it's just a festering pool of shit. Even Japan - who does _nowhere near_ the total of America has kept up with us on the Wii and I think maybe surpassed us on the DS (since they're all but ignoring the PSP). WoW is the most popular game in the world. DDO probably isn't in the top 200. There's a reason the vast majority of games on that list has no European numbers.

OK, I was still pretty sure that the idea that the US retail video games market is ten times that of Europe was nonsense.  So I checked NPD's figures for the US marketplace, and started work on giving regional breakdowns which showed that the idea was pretty whacko, before coming across this article, which gives a pretty clear call (albeit one about 3 years old, but the projected figures broadly tally with NPD's latest ones).

It says that in 2003 the western European market was only $1.2 billion lower than that of the US, in a total marketplace of $18.2 billion.  More than that, it was $3.7 billion higher than that of Japan.

Remember that the US market is the more mature one, too: Europe may well even have been growing faster over the intervening period...  It will also have helped that the dollar currently trades at 3.7 to the Pinata.  In any case, the US market would have had to multiply in size 4 or 5 times while the European one shrank by half in order to make the 10% thing viable.

[Sky]

Endie, Europe does very well with the ultra popular stuff, but the moment you dent that surface, it's just a festering pool of shit. Even Japan - who does _nowhere near_ the total of America has kept up with us on the Wii and I think maybe surpassed us on the DS (since they're all but ignoring the PSP). WoW is the most popular game in the world. DDO probably isn't in the top 200. There's a reason the vast majority of games on that list has no European numbers.

Maybe because Europeans don't like japatrash? Just because you think japagaming is hot, doesn't mean everyone likes it.

And conversely, a lot of that eurogame stuff US and especially asian gamers don't get into, is stuff I enjoy most. Stuff that rarely breaks out of europe and never catches on bigtime when it does: etherlords, gothic series, anno series. The bulk of the first spore team are scandinavian. It's just a different mindset, and there's a lot of great euro dev houses. I doubt Crytek does well in Japan.

[Sunbury]

I always wondered why they bothered with servers anyway (except for US vs Europe for hops).  Isn't that game hyper-instanced, like GW/CoH where each 'outside' town is instanced, and each tavern is instanced?   Or when 'outside' in a zone it isn't instanced?

[Xilren's Twin]

I know I'm gonna get a Bat Country Beatdown for this but I recently did the DDO trial and had a good time with it.

Hack and slashy while running like madmen thru the Waterworks was hella fun.  (Why does everyone have to run Mach Two in that game all the time anyway?)

I'd played it in beta and several months live; it's a decent game if the interface and fundamental differnce between it and say EQ/WoW don't drive you off.

People run mach two for two main reaaons.  Firstly, most gamers care nothing about the plot and only about the loot and exp (exp which only come from the completion of quests).  So, people tend to blitz to the end as fast as possible b/c they care about the destination, not the journey.  Not only that, but char advancement is pretty much all there is to do; for most of it's life the game had no economy (marketplace), no crafting, houses, big outdoor areas to explore, or other worldy type stuff, so all there was do is chew through the quests.  But, a bigger factor is by and large, people repeat quests a LOT in DDO.  That due to it being a) limited, and b) encouraged by the game (i.e. each quest has 3 difficulty settings and you get exp bonuses for completing each one).  Add in Alt chars and the biggest reason people blitz is b/c they've "already been there done that" many times before.  They know where each mob group, trap, secret door and chest is, which makes it rather disorienting if you've never even seen the quest before and the rest of the group is silently mowing through it with no communication and no mistakes.  Even now I could run the waterworks quests 1-4 in my sleep I did them so much, and had I unlocked my drow race and wanted to play an alt I would have been right back in there.  So, people find the quests with the highest chest indcidents/or chains with best end loot and run them repeatedly following the path of least resistance. 

I like DDO b/c it tried to break the mold, but it is definately a flawed game.

[MahrinSkel]

The problem is that there is no "european market" when it comes to games.  There are a dozen or more, all wanting different things, all demanding content that is localized for their particular language and culture.  Each one of those markets is only a fraction of the size of the US or Japanese market, and you can get the largest chunk of them (the UK, Ireland, and those who know english and don't demand localization) with your US version, so why bother?

Even when non-UK european companies make games, they either start in english, or they localize to english and don't bother with any of the others.  It's worth noting that WoW started out just as big in Europe as the US and was extensively localized, but as more and more non-localized stuff is added, it is falling off faster there than in the US.

--Dave

EDIT: In this, as in many other things, Eve is an exception, with very large contingents of europeans.  But in Eve, the "content" that counts is other people, and they've grouped themselves mostly by language.

[Tebonas]

Thats about right. Apart from products from native speaking software houses (Gothic comes to mind) I always buy either US or UK games and avoid localized versions at all costs.

Of course, that means according to Endies numbers I am part of the US market as is anybody else who buys from direct importers (which are not that few).

[Arthur_Parker]

EDIT: In this, as in many other things, Eve is an exception, with very large contingents of europeans.  But in Eve, the "content" that counts is other people, and they've grouped themselves mostly by language.

Eve also has more in-depth PVP and doesn't suffer from the server selection problem.  Also Europe just likes PVP more than the US, see DAoC (most successful mmorpg in Europe pre WoW), & WoW PVP to PVE European server numbers.  Most mmorpg's I have bought are US imports, it's pretty much required if you are in a large multinational guild.  Also if you buy a US version you generally have more players who speak English and get patches faster.  One of the main reasons I quit WoW (which is the only European based mmorpg I have bought) was because few people spoke English as a first language on my server.

Blizzard cut back on support costs by having German, English and French speaking servers at release in Europe and suggesting everyone spoke the official language in global channels (for ease of channel moderation).  If the game is good enough, localisation of the language isn't that important, most of Europe gets taught English in School, however not having an official English localised Finland server at the selection screen is retarded.

The following is not directed at anyone except Blizzard and mmorpg devs in general.  Again most of it comes down to the devs being stupid, publish your server names before release, make suggestions for which server you should play on before release and at the server selection screen based on your customers language preference.  If you actually want your players to be able to communicate, especially if your game requires grouping at some point do not pull a tower of babel on them and then whine about it, also patch Europe when you patch the US or within a week.  Europe has been around for a while, bitching about it being full of complicated funny speaking foreigners who are difficult to extract money from, gets very little sympathy from me.

Edit - spelling.  Engrish.

[Numtini]

Having played Eve for a short time and been very impressed by the community, I wonder if the European acceptance of PVP has something to do with the relative lack of jerks. I never got the "PVP griefer vibe" that I've gotten in American pvp games--even daoc had it to some extent. (I had the same feeling when I played the L2 Taiwan beta. Two weeks and two reds and was never PKd once.)

I think D&D would be a huge game if it was free to play, sold by the module, and single server. It was crying out to be Guild-Wars'd.

[slog]

Peoiple run Mach 2 in DDO because there is no penalty for not doing so.  Putting traps in fixed locations makes them worthless. 

[Kageru]

Traps are worthless in any case. In most games, and DDO in particular, they serve no purpose other than to be a total waste of time for everyone involved. This includes the rogue whose "role" is protecting the party from them. Sitting there and doing that stupid "spot" animation for five minutes, or running into a trap and more or less instantly dying on a failed save, just isn't remotely fun.

But yes, pre-generated dungeons with XP rewards only being awarded on completion is going to result in people "grinding" dungeons. Much the same happened in EQ when they released LDoN which had pre-generated dungeons giving points on completion.

[Ironwood]

There are mobs in WoW that throw landmines which can be disarmed.  That's a pretty cool use of disarm trap.

[Sky]

Firstly, most gamers care nothing about the plot and only about the loot and exp (exp which only come from the completion of quests).  So, people tend to blitz to the end as fast as possible b/c they care about the destination, not the journey. 

Another reason I don't group much in mmo. It seems to attract people who don't seem to be enjoying the journey, I'm all about the journey. Fuck the destination. A destination is death imo, an ending. I'm interested in life, in the doing and being.

Maybe it's an age/wisdom thing? I dunno. Git off mah lawn. 45exp to whoever can git off first.

[Nebu]

MMOs have cultivated a new generation of achievers.  Sadly, they are in such a rush to get to the finish line that they forget to have fun along the way. 

[CmdrSlack]

Getting off lawns needs to be rebalanced, 45xp is not a big enough reward!

[Nebu]

Getting off lawns needs to be rebalanced, 45xp is not a big enough reward!

Fortunately this is a double xp weekend.

[Sky]

*You have become better at shoveling++*

[Sky]

MMOs have cultivated a new generation of achievers.  Sadly, they are in such a rush to get to the finish line that they forget to have fun along the way. 

Now kids are continually getting on my lawn just to get the lawn-getting-off exp.